A Quick Birthday Update

I had a birthday yesterday, preceded by a weekend visit from dear friends, and there were numerous phone calls and indulgences celebrating me and my dubious accomplishment of still being here at the age of seventy-one, although we know very well there’s a great deal of dumb luck at play in this. In any case, I’ve learned a thing or two about life in these seventy-one years, but I still don’t fully get it. The hardest part, I think, is the dissonance and inequity of it all, and although one learns to pivot quickly from thoughts of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe in order to enjoy the day, it isn’t easy to be lighthearted, and it’s arrogant to think that my fortunate position somehow correlates with virtue. And yet, I do feel loved right now, and profoundly grateful, and I’ve never been impervious to the wonder and beauty around me, so I walk around in a state of enchantment and anxiety.

Whether it’s due to anxiety or genetics, I apparently have high blood pressure, and I have started taking medication for it. It’s one of those things that makes me feel slightly more advanced on the old people scale. I also have a chronic cough and had a pulmonary function test yesterday, sitting in a booth with a clip on my nose inhaling and exhaling into a plastic tube, which was a curious place to be on my birthday.

And I’m not telling you this to kvetch about my ailments, but rather to inform you that even in the waiting room of the pulmonary clinic, there was beauty.

First of all, I noticed a poster on the wall: “While you wait, enjoy reading poems from your community.”

I went to the link, scrolled around, and found a wonderful poem by my friend Perie Longo about grandchildren, soup, and the delightful moments of the in-between spaces along the pathway to our vanishing. She writes:

Some days you can’t help standing still

in a world that will let go of you, like it

or not. For now there’s a meal to serve.

Yes, I thought, this world will let go of us, but for now, there are meals to serve, thoughts to savor, and even here in the pulmonary clinic waiting room, sunlight slanting through the windows, giving everything an antique sort of golden-ness, sweet and ephemeral.