Who's Counting? Age is Just a Number. Literally.

I had the strangest interaction with my Agephobia (yes, it's a condition) this week. Some days I forget I have it. In certain moments I feel ageless or even young, and sometimes I'm just distracted enough by shiny things like debt calculations or meetings with internet marketers at least a decade my junior that it slips my mind -- my spiny, ceaseless age-panic.

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm consumed with thoughts of time, or more accurately, with thoughts of how little I fear I have left of it. I wonder endlessly about the origin of this obsession. Could it be my harried urban lifestyle? My checkered, thrill-seeking past? Is it because our friends are having second babies? Or perhaps it's because I spend so little time doing what I want to be doing that each precious second is fried up like onion skin in hot oil and made dehydrated and lifeless. In my rear view mirror I can see a billion dead seconds I'll never have the time to rehydrate.

I wasn't thinking about all this on a recent business trip with a colleague. We were unwrapping turkey sandwiches in a Jersey train station's bar and I was thinking about whether it was inappropriate to have a Midori sour in front of her. It was one of those blessed ageless moments.

'I'm not in the office' I thought. 'I'm free.'
I could have been retired or just out of college.

I didn't order the drink but it would've helped to be lubed for the next part of the conversation. Eventually we came around to age, what we'd like to be doing after the inevitable demise of the company we work for, and what is next for both of us. She said she'd like to go back to school, work in health and help people. I encouraged her to think about it, saying hey, she's only thirty-six, it's still doable to go to class at night, now's the time. I went on to describe the immeasurable sense of empowerment I get from attending classes, how they feel like a weapon against inertia...
and, blah
blah
blah
blahhhhh....
Her eyes were on the liquor selection lining the mirrored bar. I noticed she had gone internal, wasn't making eye contact and seemed to, well, not care. It was fine, I thought, she wasn't ready to really think about next steps. We were silent for a moment.

And then she said, quietly, almost so I couldn't hear,
"I'm forty."
"What?" I asked.
"I'm forty."
"What are you talking about? You're thirty-six, we're two years apart, and we've been two years apart for the nine years I've worked for the company."
"You don't understand. I'm forty. I'm just realizing it."
"Wait, wait, wait" I said. "How can this be? How can you just be realizing you're forty?"
"Well" she said softly "I was born in 1969. I guess I stopped counting. I stopped counting at thirty-six."

I thought I detected a shiny horizon of tears forming on the edge of her lower lids. She looked shell shocked.

"You're the first person in four years to ask about my age" she said. "Do you think about your age much?"
"Every second of every moment in every hour of every day" I replied.

I tried to imagine waking up halfway through forty. Maybe it'd be better to have it land on your head like an anvil and stun you into accepting it. Maybe it was better to realize it at a Jersey train station bar, over a cello-wrapped turkey sandwich, with someone you only know professionally. She seemed as shocked that I spent all my time thinking about aging as I was that she never did. And suddenly I felt self-consciously young and foolish; idiotically worried about things I have plenty of time to sort out. What if I had somehow stopped counting and one day woke up years older, wondering how on earth I'd forgotten to mark four years of my life?

"Huh", she chuckled. "My husband's gonna love this. Guess it makes him forty four."
"What now?" I asked.
"Well, I'm wondering if I should have a birthday."

Just for that night I didn't pull at the pair of vertical ski-shaped wrinkles cutting their way into the space between my eyebrows.

I Hold These Truths to be (Pretty) Self-Evident

Salt Creek, Death Valley, California
December, 2009
Photo: Cox

'Fa-la-la-la-la, another end-of-year wrap-up.'

I'm not going to hide it. I've been avoiding this post. We're two, me and this bedeviled blog, and the occasion seems to merit a generic birthday candle photo, top-ten list or resolution of epic proportions ("Fifty Pounds in Fifty Days!"). At the very least I should post a group of folkloric-themed lessons born of the year's experiences. Yes, I've been anticipating this moment for weeks: the convergence of MCY's second anniversary with our decade's close and the end of my monumentally shadowy year.

I had hoped to rustle up some mustard seeds to bury alongside 2009, but the truth is that I dug really deep this year, all the way down to what I thought was the bottom of the well, and well, I found no truth. In fact, I found no bottom. So, in 2010 I'm going to have to keep mining.

It's three days past this blog's birthday, a day into the New Year, and I'm halfway through a Wendy's Chicken Club and a champagne flute full of Sauvignon Blanc. I'm writing by the light of my weeping, dehydrated Christmas tree's tiny colored bulbs. Everything new could be old again. I could be Alice and the Rabbit having tea with yesterday's OneKate. The point is, time is irrelevant. The New Year is whenever I say it is. I've heaved this beloved blog over the 2009 finish line so that it can land smack dab in 2010, diapered and dapper as a fledgling bunch of font instead of the haggard old man it would have been if I'd left it lingering in last year's time zone. Today is going to be its birthday.

I walked along the trail pictured above in Death Valley three weeks ago. It's the trail one finds at the end of the trail near the park's only body of water, a thin stream called Salt Creek. The trail has no end. I followed it until I became too conscious of being alone and when I stopped I christened it "My Road". If only I could have known this path existed in all the years I wanted to walk one just like it. I found it on a naked, solitary desert salt flat. At least now I can conjure a line when I need one. After I got back to camp, I wrote the thoughts below. I think I came closer to finding a grain of truth in that chilly evening's musings than I was able to touch in my whole, heavy year of reaching for one. Now, onward.

12/I Don't Know/09
Death Valley
Furnace Creek Campground, Site 83

I don't like to find things from home tucked into this notebook -- horoscopes, letterhead with my notes on it: "to do", "to get", and the like. I'm tucking them into a back page somewhere to be discovered later. I'm writing by headlamp (pause). Excuse me, I had to tend the fire. I'm the fire-keeper here. I'm by myself. There's no one else to tend the fire. I'm horrible at it, actually. Earlier I burned my finger, thinking (well, not thinking) that a stone wouldn't be hot. I moved it to accommodate a log. Still, my fire's been burning for a least an hour and I consider that progress.

What did I see today? Did I think? Yes, I thought about what I saw. I thought about thinking. I thought about the long shadows on the cool dunes. I thought about my husband. I had periods of intensely missing him. Then I felt empty. Not in the way I always do at home--empty of direction in a panic-stricken way. I felt empty of care. Empty of judgment and opinion. Empty of need to decide. Anything. Pleased to be. Pleased to watch bodies tiny as pinpricks climb smooth, sculpted dunes while I did whiskey shooters in the sun. Pleased to drive long, empty stretches of road that looked as good in my rearview as they did out my windshield, thinking of nothing but how strange it is that salt flats look wet in the low sun. Pleased at how easy it was to let go.

Pleased to be west. Pleased to see red walls and washes, cairns and drainage. Pleased to move. To be cold in a tent at 3:00 a.m. To be alone and not feel scared. To be alone, feel scared and get past it. To run along a trail for fear of rattlesnakes. To realize the sound that I fear is rattlesnakes is really my Prana Yoga pants rubbing between my thighs. To hear the small voices of everyone I know come poking through and to ignore them. To truly understand that silence is a sound. To believe for a moment that rocks make noise.

To understand that I've learned a lot and to be okay not saying what any of it is. To feel centered, apart, calm, at peace, apathetic, relaxed, awestruck, alone, indignant, joyous, bemused, and grateful to the benevolent provider...and to not even care that I just wrote that sentence or what it means.