A Million Years with You (43 page)

 

At my stage in life, almost everybody is a younger person. When I read “Out the Window,” I remembered how I felt when almost everyone was older than me, and later when only half the people were older than me. Then came the time when I was older than them, which is why I was smitten by the article. Hall too was older than them, but unlike me, he had thought about aging, and I took him very seriously because he and I were similar. Both of us were writers, both of us had gone to the same college at the same time, both of us wound up in New Hampshire on land once owned by our respective families, both of us remembered our grandparents with much affection, and both of us had always respected old people, with my own respect strongly reinforced by the value placed on all elders by the Bushmen and on some elders by the Dodoth.

But deep in my heart I was bothered by aging. Although I'd always liked old faces and didn't mind having one, although I'd looked forward to gaining the wisdom which I believed great age would bring, I hadn't been as confident as I'd thought. I'd worried about turning thirty, for instance. When I was twenty-five or twenty-six, thirty seemed like death's door. I spent the middle 1960s in Nigeria and came home to hear hippies crying “Don't trust anyone over thirty!” I was then thirty-five, and already people were excluding me. That bothered me too.

Concerns about aging didn't stop there, though. To prepare myself for turning fifty, I began saying I was fifty when I was forty-eight. Thus when it happened, I was used to the idea. I did the same at seventy-eight to prepare for turning eighty, but by then was somewhat disillusioned with aging because the promise of wisdom had failed me. After all that time, the only wisdom I had to offer was that if you want a long marriage, you must marry young and wait. Still, that's a step up from my youthful reasoning—I married Steve because he had a sense of humor and a motorcycle.

My joints get stiff if I don't keep moving, and when I got glaucoma I had to remember to put drops in my eyes, not just when I happened to think of it but every single night. I was glad enough to do it because I'd learned of a woman who went blind because she didn't, and yes, it controlled the glaucoma, but I wasn't ready for any of that.

Why couldn't I look squarely at aging? Revelation came from Donald Hall. “However alert we are,” he wrote, “however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.” Our antiquity is “alien,” he continues, “and old people are a separate form of life.”

Why hadn't I seen this? Didn't I know I'd be called a senior citizen? Didn't that remove me from the normal citizens? And what about the so-called compliment, “She's eighty years young”? The only thing that's young at eighty is a giant sequoia or a baobab tree. Do we ever hear the phrase “She's twenty years young”? No, because there's nothing wrong with being twenty. We are indeed a separate form of life, but I hadn't faced that squarely.

I thought about my heart. It had beaten continuously, day and night, year after year, with never a rest since I was a fetus. That seemed like a lot. So did the number eighty. Some people said I didn't look eighty. The remarks were well meant, I guess, but those who made them had a mindset. The number eighty set me apart, but until they knew the number, they hadn't seen me as apart. They seemed surprised that someone whom they thought was one of them was not. Some people said I should retire. Retire from what? As long as my eyesight lasts and I can move my fingers, I won't need to retire. But at eighty it's time to retire, people said, which I took to mean “You don't belong in our workforce.” Hall describes a chilling experience after eating a meal, when a nice man meaning only to be kind “wags his finger, smiles a grotesque smile, and raises his voice to ask, ‘Did we have a nice din-din?'” That's the perfect storm of alienation. Nothing so bad has happened to me, but I'm three years younger than Hall and I know it's in my future.

It can seem, as Hall suggests, that we aliens don't exist. He describes a family occasion when his grandchild's college roommate pulled up a chair and sat right in front of him, cutting him off from the gathering. To the roommate, Hall wasn't there. I knew about nonexistence from observing my daughter's when, for instance, the person behind the ticket counter at an airline would talk to me instead of to her although it was she who was trying to buy the ticket. She and her wheelchair weren't there. Standing on my feet with my face the proper distance from the floor, I was a person.

Then too, I'd experienced mild nonexistence for myself. For instance, when I was in my late fifties I took a stop-smoking class. Several other older women also took the class, but we couldn't open our mouths without the male instructor interrupting us and talking to other people. I asked him to stop doing that, and for a few minutes he was more careful. But because he hadn't realized what he was doing, and because we were old women who didn't matter anyway, he was soon interrupting us again.

One night I went to a crowded local bar where people were dancing to live music. I went because I happened to know two of the musicians, and didn't plan to stay long because I didn't like to leave my husband alone. I knew quite a few people in the bar, and one of them, a smiling young woman, asked me how I was doing in such a wild crowd. The average age of the crowd was probably forty and people were dancing in an orderly manner, so I didn't think the crowd seemed all that wild. But I understood her message. What was an old woman like me doing in a bar with live music and dancing? Such things happen often enough. The above are just two examples. However, such things can be shrugged off, as I learned from my daughter.

But not forever. One autumn night soon after I turned eighty, Willie J. Laws, a Texas-blues musician, was playing guitar in the barn that Ramsay and his friend Doug Frankenberger had made into a recording studio. With a drummer and a bass player, Willie J. was recording a song called “Too Much Blues” or maybe “Too Much Blues for Me.” Also present was a group of Willie J.'s fans, there to observe the recording.

I was overwhelmed by the quality of the music. The big door on the front of the barn was shut, but I opened a side door to look in. The musicians kept playing with their backs to me, but the fans heard the door and turned to look. As if a wind had opened it, they saw no one. Like a dry leaf, the old woman standing there was nothing.

It was my barn, and for a moment I wanted to focus them. “Record
this
, motherfuckers!” would have done it. But instead, I sat on a rock near the barn to listen and wondered if I really needed my existence. Either way, I could hear the music. And perhaps nonexistence was helpful. The musicians played parts of the music over and over. It wasn't a performance. Would they want a stranger listening?

But these thoughts were veneer. As has been said, all my life I've tried to ferret a silver lining from each and every cloud, and even as I wondered if I needed existence, somewhere inside I knew that things had changed for me.

 

Not long before that, I'd had a different experience. Because of my age, I sometimes forget things, and one moonlit night I forgot to bring in the bird feeder. When I looked out our kitchen window, I saw a large black bear bending down the pole of the bird feeder as I would bend a paperclip. I was awed by his strength, because the pole was a leftover pipe that Doug and Ramsay had used to renovate the barn. The bear crushed the feeder with his teeth and ate the seeds. Then he looked at the house. Then he came toward the house. Then he came to the window and started to climb in.

He wasn't aggressive—his facial expression was calm and pleasant—but our kitchen is small and my husband can't move quickly. A bear inside would not be good. I had a boat horn handy for just such an occasion, so I blew it at the bear. He looked at me.

While I sat outside the barn, listening to the music, I thought of that bear. Unlike the fans of Willie J., he saw me. No only did he see me, he looked right into my eyes. As far as he was concerned, I was very much there. He also knew what I was saying with the boat horn. He turned and walked gracefully into the woods.

 

After thinking about the bear, and how his eyes were brown like mine, I thought about the barn. The inside was changed but the outside wasn't. The wood was gray and weathered. I thought of the hay we put in it. We'd mow the tall grass in the fields and let it dry, then we'd rake it into windrows with a hay rake pulled by an ex-racehorse named Blue, then we'd pile it on a haywagon pulled by two huge workhorses named Bucky and Don, then we'd unload it in the barn with pitchforks. There were rules about the pitchforks. We must never leave them lying with the points up. Our gentle mom, whose idea of punishment was to send us to our rooms, said she'd beat us if we got stuck with a pitchfork.

Hall wrote the following about his barn: “Over eighty years, it has changed from a working barn to a barn for looking at.” My barn had changed from a hay barn to a barn for recording music. I had not yet read “Out the Window,” but the change in my barn stirred yet another thought in my elderly brain. Ramsay and Doug were musicians themselves, and while doing the renovation they listened to classical music loud enough to be heard over the drilling and hammering. About a week before they finished their work and about three weeks before they recorded Willie J., I had gone to the barn to see how the work was going. That day they were listening to Bach's Orchestral Suites. The big barn door was wide open, and admiring the music, I went inside, where I saw two hummingbirds flying around the ceiling.

I had seen no hummingbirds for weeks, as it was late in the year and those who lived near me had migrated. I assumed that these two were also migrating but had come from farther north. In the barn, they were wasting the calories they would need on their journey. I assumed that their instincts were telling them to escape by going upward, and that they couldn't find the open door, and I was worried.

Doug and Ramsay had noticed them too, so we tried to guide them out. We couldn't. We tied nets to long poles and tried to catch them. Again we couldn't. I put two large pieces of red cloth just outside the open door, knowing that hummingbirds like the color red, and yes, they flew down to look at the cloth but then flew back up to circle the ceiling. I put a red hummingbird feeder full of hummingbird sugar water next to the door. They looked at that too, and flew back to the ceiling.

Time passed. Nothing changed. Now and then they would fly out the door without our help, but they soon flew right back in. We grew more worried, and I called a friend, a well-known bird expert, who told me to put something red by the door. But I'd tried that already, so I called the Audubon Society. They too suggested something red. I called New Hampshire's department of nongame wildlife and also a local conservation center, but they had no better suggestions.

As the afternoon wore on our anxiety mounted, because by then the hummingbirds were tired. Sometimes they'd perch for a while on a beam, but then they would continue flying. Late in the afternoon, Doug and Ramsay finished their work and turned off the music. Instantly the hummingbirds flew out the door and up to the sky to continue their migration.

 

Obviously we'd seen something important, but what? I called some of the experts whom I had consulted, but they had no explanation. Then it came to us that the first few times the birds flew out the door, Doug had been changing the disks in the CD player so there was no music. It thus seemed clear that the music had captured them, but how? I fervently hoped that no one would stupidly suggest that they liked Bach. That wouldn't help. Doug knew about wavelengths and the physics of music and thought that the answer might lie in there somewhere, but so far, whatever happened is Gaia's secret. Maybe someone could fathom it, but maybe not. Gaia doesn't care if we fathom it.

When Willie J.'s music ended, I got up and left, just as the hummingbirds had done. In my case, though, no mystery was involved. I was old and tired and it was past my bedtime. Even so, walking home alone in the dark, considering my nonexistence and the fact that things had changed for me, I passed the place where I'd found the grass-covered corpse of the whitetail doe. Cougars might not exist for Fish and Game, but they did for me and they did for the doe—she'd been killed only a few days earlier. I might not exist for the people in the barn, but I'd exist for a cougar, so I walked a little faster and now and then I looked over my shoulder.

A few months later I read “Out the Window” and everything came together. The article dealt with the subject of aging, but when I read it, I remembered that a bird flying around inside a house is an omen of death. The belief was common in rural New England when my dad built the barn. And yes, down in some deep part of my mind, deaths were waiting to surface—the passing of those who made the hay, me in decline and nonexistent, and the hummingbirds who were at risk. They had wasted a day's worth of calories. Even if they hadn't, their journey would be difficult and dangerous. If they lived to reach their destination, that would be important.

If they came back in spring to raise their young, that would be more important. Ever since I was a child, hummingbirds have appeared in the spring. They know where I hang the hummingbird feeder, and if it isn't there and filled, they fly over to look in my office window. Those who keep coming are doing what hummingbirds have always done, just as they are meant to do. Birds descended from dinosaurs and dinosaurs also migrated. It's a time-honored tradition. The wings of hummingbirds when they hover make our symbol of infinity.

As has been said, while wandering down the road of life, it helps to look for something more meaningful than oneself, and I've never had to look far to find it, from the stars when I look up to the soil when I look down, where the microorganisms live that keep everything going. Our planet will be here until the sun burns out, and life forms will be on it—maybe not big ones like cougars and deer, but little ones will, like waterbears. We hominids aged when we lived in the trees and we're still doing it. If I seemed nonexistent to some, who cared? Certainly not Gaia.