JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

A gold star is heaven; it is a new box of crayons; it is hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream; it is a brand new Mustang bike with a banana seat and a sissy bar; it is the golden ticket inside the Wonka chocolate bar; it is a new picture of Bobby Sherman on your bedroom door; it is having a best friend.

A tender prayer for travellers is another favorite.

As I pass through the room, I stop to savor the inculpable nescience. I breathe deeply, taking mental snapshots of a smile, record a voice telling me “what this says,” and interpreting a masterpiece of crayon art. How I wish to have been able to have experienced such blamelessness.

Amba linked to me again, commenting on my birthday post with her earned wisdom

This is the last year I’ll have the luxury of saying, with astonishment, “I’m almost 60!” I remember my grandmother saying, “I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 16, and then I look in the mirror and say, ‘Who is that old lady?'” At this age, I discover, you can feel very old and very young from one day to the next. One day it’s, “Sex is so over. I’m old now, a watcher from the sidelines. It’s not that I don’t have any desire. It’s that I don’t have any hope.” The next day, envy for the sex-ridden is replaced by pity, if not contempt, as I view their driven, drunken antics from the self-possessed paradise I last inhabited when I was 12.

Through Amba, I discover Tamar and Ronni Bennett who wrote Feeling Old Redux in response.

As age has come upon me, I have lost most of the defensiveness I carried in younger years and I’m more willing to accept my flaws. That alone is a relief; a burden lifted. With the increased life skills I have accumulated – professional and personal – I am more confident. Another burden lifted. And now that death is no longer so far in the future as to be unimaginable, I have learned a lot more about amba’s “boundlessness of my inner dimension.”

My outer dimension has marched along in step with the inner. I’m chubbier than I was in my youth when I was hungry every waking moment of every day for decades to maintain the weight the age and beauty police demand. I’ve got little jowls now. There are bags forming under my eyes. My neck is beginning to show some crepe-iness. My hair is gray. And so what.

If I succumbed to a surgeon’s knife, I could not achieve these bits of inner growth and understanding that continue to arrive – with no effort on my part – because, I believe, desperately pursuing what frequently turns out to be a grotesque approximation of youth, necessarily changes one’s inner direction.

And besides, I’m curious to see what physical changes time, left to its own devices, will bestow on me.

Ann Althouse also responded to Amba’s post on aging

Since I was quite young, I’ve thought about aging by imagining myself saying something to my older self, offering some advice or encouragement, and, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve remembered the things I thought of saying to myself all those years ago, so the communication actually did occur: my young self sent a message to my older self. I’ve also contemplated the reverse: what would my older self say to me now?

Hmmm…sounds like Bob Vis’ comment on my original post! Amba responded with her set of letters!…

This series of conversations and new voices to me combined with Lisa Williams’ timely Buy Experienced Parts post gave me a wonderful birthday present indeed, a sense of confidence and anticipation in this process of aging:

I’m not really sure the guy’s wooden skis, with the navy blue stripe down the center, had really gotten better with age. But the marks of experience that showed on the wood, and the aura of countless miles through the snow, through the woods, that has to mean something, doesn’t it? It did to me. I could feel it, like a magnetic field.

And when I say that there is a class of thing that does get better with use, I think we have to include ourselves in that class. What if we didn’t? What if we thought of ourselves like the auto parts, that to say that a worn person, like a worn part, is better, is nothing but a joke?

If everyone believed that it would be a very grim world. And we do believe it in part, in our sad discarding of people who are worn and broken through age or other mishaps, and the part of the world where worn means bad, and not experienced, is a grim dystopia.

The parts of the world where we think worn = experienced = good yields things like, oh, Paul Newman.

Which one do you want to live in?

‘Cause it’s all in your head.

Other conversations continued: