Ageless

Early this morning, just before my daily run, I met a regular client in the parking lot of the community garden to hand off a bouquet with the season’s first dahlias. It would be a gift to a friend for her 40th birthday. In this year of distancing, I have done several such drop-offs.

Isolation during a global pandemic encourages my tendency toward rumination on just about everything, including the passage of time and a sense of lost time. When I turned 40 myself, I felt as if the world should seem different, but it didn’t then, and it didn’t when I turned 50. I took the day off work and spent the entire morning alone walking along the river, saw water mint growing wild, and bald eagles and kingfishers hunting. That weekend we had a party, and Bob made a birthday cake that looked like a beehive, with a recipe that took a lot of honey. A friend on the university faculty here, someone I’ve known half my life, who doesn’t seem to age, who is three years older than me, sat across the picnic table and said, “Welcome to the other side.”

I do remember very clearly being seven and thinking about the year 2000, when I would turn the unfathomable age of 36, but all that happened on that birthday was that I remembered thinking about it when I was seven.

The birthday that hit me psychologically was 56. Last year. No more claiming that you are young. You can be youthful, sure, but young people at the ticket box still ask you if you want the senior discount, and you realize with a jolt that you guess you do.

But maybe not every young person registers those past 40 or 50 as being “on the other side.” This past January—before lockdown and the long days and my disappointment in myself at not being able to fend off the tendency toward frenzy to fill those days—I had a strange, kind greeting from a young girl, and it might take me years to make sense of it.

That day I was in Tucson with my parents and hiked my favorite trail loop in the Santa Rita Mountains south of the city. Coming down the mountain, I passed a woman with her daughter and son. I noticed the girl, especially. She looked to be about 11, tall and strong, with a light brown ponytail down to her waist and short jeans that fell below her knees. She and her younger brother chased each other over the boulders that crossed the bright stream and watched the little fishes in the pools.

Several times I passed this group, or they passed me, since I stopped to eat or explore one of the little campsites, and they stopped to play. Back at the trailhead, I sat cross-legged on a wall above the parking lot to wait for Mom and Dad to pick me up. I saw the family group come off the trail and head to their car, then I turned to watch for my parents.

I thought of how they had spent their day, having lunch at the White House Picnic Area and feeding the Mexican jays, walking the paved nature trail. Identifying birds, hoping to see the elegant trogon, taking photos at the array of feeders by the gift shop.

In the midst of my daydreaming, someone called from below: “Miss? Miss?” Miss. That would not be me, unless it was coming from an exceptional restaurant server or a man of my father’s generation. But I looked down toward the parking lot. There was the ponytail girl, smiling.

“I think you’re beautiful,” she said.

Stunned, I managed to thank her and realized that, likewise, all afternoon I had admired her agility and happy playfulness, her lack of self-consciousness.

“I just wanted to tell you that.”

She ran back to her family’s car, where her mother was packing up. My first thought was to be impressed that such a young girl could have the confidence to engage a woman significantly older than her mother with this surreal message. And I was glad she had spoken in her own voice.

Then I tried to understand what had happened. Her words had come to me like flowers, like honey. All afternoon down the mountain I had vaguely felt a kinship with this girl, though we never made eye contact, and I became conscious of it only after she had spoken. I tried to remember people I had noticed when I was 10 or 11, people older than 35, maybe even 50 or older (unfathomable). Teachers, maybe. English teachers. Art teachers, maybe. But I did not have this girl’s confidence. Nothing like it. Do I have it now? I am still thinking about what happened, dwelling on it, believing there is a lesson in it for me. In a year or two I hope to go back up the mountain.