I do hope that, at eighty-eight, should I actually reach such an age, that I am as sound of health and mind as my grandmother is.
She is a Talbot's clotheshorse, she has unshakable beliefs on manners and conduct. She talks endlessly on any given subject and is a master of those run-on sentences that never allow the listener an opening for an interjection. She adores her grandchildren. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she has the sort of faith that is
instrinsic to her being - other people
have faith, she
is faith, and it's a strikingly beautiful thing. She is opinionated yet compassionate to a degree that's wholly remarkable and never seems the least bit forced. She is a genuine thing.
She and my grandfather are proudly liberal and deeply disturbed by the actions of "the shrub", as they refer to him. (Last summer, she referred to him as Bushy-wushy, though.)
Despite the singular uniqueness that I adore about her, she is difficult to take. My mother has never taken her well, nor has my father (her son). There is a Thanksgiving incident that illustrates it all quite well, that I'd just as soon forget.
I take her quite well in small doses, but I am a biased and adored grandchild. I also remember visiting her in a hospital on a Sunday morning a few years ago (she was there for something minor) and watching her rocking in a chair by the window, humming to herself as she looked out before she'd noticed me. I think that was when I first thought that aging was not necessarily the bad thing so many people seem to think it is, that the lucky ones who have lived life well finally find themselves slowing down. That maybe one day I'd no longer be searching all the time, no longer so restless and longing. That maybe I'd be happy just to have a chair to sit in, and sun through a window, and a tune to hum as my mind skimmed back and forth over years of life and touches and meaning and nothing and found comfortable stasis in right now.
I may be afraid of dying, but I am no longer afraid of getting old.
------
I am packing, and it is frustrating. I am determined to bring as little as possible, but I am afraid of forgetting something essential.
And it's raining and I'm reading. God, I am loving X-Files fic.
This one is amazing. Long and subtle and visual and oh so right. It reads like falling in love, but it's really about admitting to it. Somehow there doesn't seem to be a difference. I've read it at least eight times since I found it two nights ago and it gets better each time.
Oh that I could write like that. Majoring in English would feel less intangible, that's for sure.
What are you going to do, that's what everybody asks. It was all right to say I didn't know in high school, even a year ago. Now I feel behind, the way I do with everything else in my life. How to explain that I don't imagine the future by career or work, but by place and feeling? No, I don't know what I'll be doing in two years. Yes, I know where I'll be, in New Mexico, on finely shaped rock and earth, beneath blue sky and endless sun. I will feel the wide open future running through my blood. I will feel terror and freedom and embrace both.
Emerson says that travel is a mistaken longing, that the self is inescapable no matter how the landscape changes. I think he's right. But I think also that the self is a malleable thing, and that landscape can be a damn strong pair of hands.
