I fully expect to be walking down the street and have an arm drop off. Or feel a little thump as my kidney implodes. Something abrupt and permanent. Because so far the aging thing is being very sneaky and slow. Something's got to give.
I've got to give my younger friends a lot of credit. When I was their age, I would have brushed off a parental age friend no matter how deeply immature they are from brain damage. I was never as open minded as they are. Their generation is more tolerant in general.
I was raised in an era when acceptance was being grown. When I was born, black people were just beginning to make leeway in the fight for their rights. Gay people were whispered about if they weren't in the closet completely. Woman had lit the match but not burned a bra yet. If you got preggers out of marriage, it was a tragedy. Divorce was not unusual but not usual either. You were brash and sassy if you said the word "orgasm" aloud. We never heard of "recycling trash" although in my childhood I was terrified of acid raining on my head and nuclear bombs destroying Callicoon, NY specifically. I see myself as a person who has lived several times in worlds that don't exist any more, all crammed into one person.
There was the life time when a disease killed so many young people around me until it was staved off by a handful of pills while friends stood on the edge of their death sentence, rescued at the last minute. That's the time in my life when my parents were still young enough to be parents like in the movies. I lived in the East Village and always felt wonderfully dreadfully alive. That is when I saw now famous rich people naked living in then poor people shitty apartments. High on life or down in the New York City gutter with no in between. It was going to last forever. But it didn't.
And there was another life time when I was sick and my life quit completely. Those are the years when we became permanently dependent on computers and cellphones and I became dependent on, well, everyone. At the end of that time, so many people in my family disappeared, taken by old age and illness that the majority of the people I associated as adults in my childhood were essentially erased. We moved to New England at the end of that one.
And this last one? I stand at the top of the hill ready to fall into the hole that my parent's generation left so empty, vacating it with the end of their existence this time in this world. Not feeling old. Just up to my eyeballs in debt from the other lives. Still looking for new stimulus, new people, new stories to tell. But with joints that are damaged from injuries that never would have bothered me before and a head full of screws. The body has shifted a little too but that's okay because I am not alone and my goals are still keeping me focused. I am less afraid, more accepting, grateful for the people left in my life.
We all just want to live without worry and sometimes there is a price. Practicality. Playing it safe. There is nothing wrong with it. It just isn't me and I doubt it ever will be. Every time I write a damned script or come up with another five minutes of an act I am opening myself up to a process that could end badly. And there is no room to let my body deteriorate. I need all of me in tact mentally and physically. There is pain that doesn't heal easily now if I don't.
So now when I take those steps out of my comfort zone, I am used to it because I have lived it those other times. And I know well that I could die any second because I've missed my demise so many times before. Physical exertion hurts more and, paradoxically, is necessary to insure that I can physically exert myself. Humiliation is not welcome but when the gambles I take creatively go out an ugly death, I know there is an end to the sensation eventually. People are going to cease to exist around me and never before have I felt so certain that there but for the grace of God go I. And the ticking clock tells me to work harder. Because as young or old as I feel, it is finite. A cat only has so many lives.
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