What Doesn't Change

I have recently been reflecting on being in my early fifties and confronting change once again when I had hoped life to be more settled, not knowing, really, any better than I did at the age of twenty-five or thirty-five, the best course to take. It seems that one just muddles through, no matter what the age. One of my Facebook friends recently posted a cartoon of two chickens celebrating a birthday.  The cartoon is one of Doug Savage's "Savage Chickens." Standing over a birthday cake with candles, the first chicken assures the second chicken: "You're not getting older, you're getting wiser."

The second chicken testily responds: "That's bull@*!#!"

In the next frame the first chicken chortles: "See? You're wiser already!'"

Whenever I think of the "wisdom that comes with age," I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat when she was in her eighties (she lived to be ninety-six). I guess I had asked my grandmother how it felt to be as old as she was. She was a very stoic woman, a faithful member of the Southern Baptist church, a non-smoker, non-drinker, a lifetime gardener, and for many years a middle-school English teacher.

When I was young, whenever we had a crisis at our house, which was located just across the country lane from my grandparents' house, Grandma Dugat was often the first person we turned to (though this statement fails to convey the complexities of family dynamics and secrets). When my sister Cynthia fainted in the bathroom one day, with the door locked, and she wouldn't respond when we called, my sister Nancy crawled through the window while my mother frantically directed me to call our grandmother. Calm came into the room with my grandmother.

But years later, when I asked my grandmother what it felt like to age, her answer surprised me: "Inside I still feel like I'm fifteen years old," my grandmother said. "And I look in the mirror and don't recognize the person there."

My grandmother had always been old to me. When she was the age I am now, two months short of fifty-three, I was almost five. My grandmother's seemingly unwavering view of the world, of her place in it and that of God's above it, had prepared me to expect a more weighty answer. And then--to say she still felt as if she were fifteen! I remembered what it was like to be fifteen--full of questions, bursting with hormones, head full of dreams--a vulnerable age. How could my grandmother, former middle-school teacher and Sunday School teacher, daily Bible reader, experienced gardener, woman of sorrows, feel like a vulnerable fifteen-year-old? Couldn't she at least feel like she was twenty-five or thirty? What hope did I have of becoming wiser as I aged if my own venerable grandmother still had a vulnerable fifteen-year-old peering out of her faded green eyes?

Now that I am on the cusp of old age, I understand, at least a little, my grandmother's answer. The accreted knowledge of age forms like layers of plaster of Paris, like those masks my children and I made years ago, taking strips of plaster of Paris, soaking them in water, then molding the strips to our faces and removing the resultant form when it began to harden. We all have a "mask" of experiences that help us determine what roles to take in a new stage of our lives, what choices might be appropriate. But, sometimes, the eyes staring out of that oh-so-carefully molded mask are those of a fifteen-year-old, who suspects that the choices are capricious, multitudinous, with unpredictable consequences.

Last week, as we curled against one another in bed, facing together another challenge in our 32-years of marriage, my husband murmured, "I keep thinking about how two-thirds of our lives is already over."

That fifteen-year-old in me gazed wildly into the darkness of the bedroom. "But I've only just begun to live!" she whispered.

photos above: my first-grade photo; my grandmother, picking butterbeans, in her eighties (click on the photo for a larger version)