No Time Like the Present

Let me tell you about seventy. It's a time approaching the outer reaches of the imagination, nesting between your hard working middle years and the coming depredations of old age. You are visited by a gathering party of imperfections, eyesight dimming, conversation punctuated by the what? what? of hearing loss. You wake up with a stiffness in the thoracic spine, a dicey corner where the backbone meets the neck. To get past this stiffness, you are required to do a series of stretches, one that you're partial to because it makes you feel like a Balinese dancer which you most assuredly are not. Nouns, especially proper nouns, have deserted the sinking ship of your brain. In your more philosophical moments, you explore the deep meaning of this, the way the mind retains verbs, the act of weeding the garden, but does not always recognize the word trowel. Verbs seem to be primal, how you move, what you do, a window into your animal nature. Nouns are the window dressing that you can do without or look up on Google.

Nonetheless, you have somehow succeeded in writing a novel entitled Otherwise. This book dives headlong into the murky swamp of your past, dragging it kicking and screaming into the unsuspecting present. You visit fictionalized versions of your Upper West Side Jewish family, the airless narrow passageways you navigated growing up in the well-dressed sliver between Central Park and Riverside Drive, the biggest small town in America. You watch in amazement as tsunamis of sixties sexual exploration, political upheaval and spiritual searching wash up on the shore. You see your protagonist, Lily Ginzburg, make a life for herself using the materials at hand, an unmarried aunt "part ragpicker, part chorus girl," an Irish Catholic spiritual director who urges her to invite God to lunch, and her Italian-American husband, who in his being demonstrates daily that a great world exists outside of her own limited experience.

You had to arrive at seventy to articulate these themes, to reach out and touch Otherness. Despite forgetting the names of people you meet on the street in Stockbridge, you seem to have an enhanced memory of the sense of things from the past. You can feel the claustrophobic space of a self-service elevator where a teenage boy assaults a little girl. You can smell the stale air of the Amtrak train where Lily first meets Charlie. You can taste the Christmas Eve arancini and see in your mind's eye Charlie's slow motion  fall from the ladder he had climbed to decorate the sukkah. You can explore your inner vision, even while your eyesight is weakening.

The line between life and art is becoming blurry as well. Here you are in the glory of your grandmahood sending out your novel. The familiar cloud of uncertainty, the sense that your life was dripping down the drain, that you had failed to make something of yourself, has suddenly cleared. It occurs to you that you always wanted to be an archaeologist. You always wanted to dig and dig, interpret and interpret. And now, here you are at seventy somehow enjoying the opportunity to make meaning out of your own life, an antidote to the mayhem all around you. But you cannot make meaning if you keep the past tied up in ribbons of nostalgia. You have to unwrap it, examine it, play with it, shape it and give it language. You have to make art. You could not have done this when you were younger. You did not have the courage. Now, it seems, there is nothing to lose and only awareness to gain.

This piece was originally published in The Berkshire Edge.