Being 80

Crone: week 2

Yesterday evening I was at an outdoor Chicken Barn concert.

Carol and Ed, old friends now in both senses of the word, host traveling folk rock musicians each month for an evening of music for local friends. Fifty or sixty people milled and lounged on the grass.

In the winter, we pack tightly in Ed’s wood shop where bicycles, art and his projects hanging on the walls or high above us on the rafters. The front row is so close to the bands that they no longer seem like performers from afar, but locals making music together. In the summer we are on a sloping, grassy hillside. The stage is an old flatbed bristling with guitars, keyboards, drum sets, saxophones, bases and microphones. We bring blankets, chairs and picnics or dishes for potlucks.

The first hour is greeting friends with huge smiles and hugs and news of travels or guests or reunions. Sometimes I feel a twinge of an outsider with no stories of children and grandchildren who gather with a dozen or two relatives at the lake, but this community is my best and beloved substitute.

Yesterday evening, two local bands played. One band sometimes plays at PrayerBody, the 5-rhythms dance church I attend faithfully each Sunday. The other band’s lead singer has been a friend since he and his sweetheart studied, 15 years ago or more, at the local organic farm school. I attended their wedding on their farm one summer day much like this Chicken Barn concert, with food, blankets, and camp chairs, but the performance was their vows. On keyboard was the son of my former therapist, affordable finally at 65 through Medicare, with whom I worked on my wild swings from manic to despair, trying to find something boring but stable she called balance. I’m in an improv class with his father. The lanky, long-haired basest is the son of a high school music teacher, now retired, who has produced dozens of world class professional musicians, including my therapist’s son.

A friend my age and I sat up front in camp chairs. I met him 40 years or so ago when he was a philanthropic advisor in New York. Now he’s ahead of me in his 80’s. We made happy little comments to one another through the evening, one time smiling that we were now the old ones in the scene.

The dream

The night before I had another vivid dream. I say another because I’ve had a series of dreams working through various facets of my role in the uprising against the shocking undoing of our social safety nets, environmental regulations and projects to heal the climate and bring jobs to impoverished areas.

In the dream I am in a house much like the one I grew up in. I’m part of a newly formed protest group. It’s feeling warm and convivial, but then some of the younger people start developing plans for a logo, a motto, and a website and it feels ever more frenetic, corporate and alien. I feel outside the warm belonging (my dreams are often about belonging to groups; see above about no children, grandchildren or family reunions). A portly gentleman about my age is beside me. We understand that we both are outside the new tenor of the group. We head upstairs, the staircase in that childhood home. We both feel a companionable, and somewhat wistful, sense of not belonging to the high energy group below.

Working the dream

I wake, write, have breakfast, and later reflect on my dream. Where was I headed on those stairs? An image of my childhood bedroom comes. It is my sanctuary. When my mother would be “provoked” with me (her word), she would say, “Go to your room” and, in delicious rebellion, I would go and have fun. She can march my body this way and that, but she doesn’t own my joy.

I’m there in my imagination, at my little desk where I tried to make doll clothes on a Christmas present toy sewing machine, and where I made workbooks for the kids next door so I could play school. My small closet behind me seems to be piled high with things to play with, dolls and paints and toys and I pull all of them out in a jumble, so I have many play options.

As I remember the dream, I name it my “closet of creativity”.

Let them be.

In my imagination I return to gazing on the young people excitedly building that organization and I think, “Let them be” and head back upstairs.

Stepping further back from this series of tableaux, it seems like a metaphor for my relationship with my old Doña Quixote personality, tilting windmills to save the beautiful Dulcinea who might represent “saving the beautiful world.” It is that time in my life, I think, when I let younger people have at it in their passionate activism, without ruing how the big work of my generation is now being toppled, nor wanting to jump in with youngers, giving my supposed good advice.

Let them be. Let them dream and build and push that same “saving the beautiful world” boulder up the hill to feel the glory of the summit, ojalá, however temporary in the long run. Let them be.

And let myself return to my room and closet of creativity, let myself be my odd duck personality, inciting others with some new idea. Let myself be an elder, not like a nosy neighbor who always has something to say, but there on the rim, being the self people count on to scout something new.

Let myself be an elder.

Today I confirm this. At 60, as I’ve said here, and elsewhere, I pried apart the old mythic formula of Maiden Mother and Crone and inserted Queen, two decades of glorious self-expression not limited by the duties of the tending years but not yet old. I was not ready to be a crone, or the cartoon version of crone as wizened, weakened and witchy.

At a few weeks into 80, I seem to be ready to let myself be as I am, rising up the stairs to return to my creativity, relaxing now out of the need to mix it up, remake the world into my image of beautiful. Let the world, as it is, be beautiful and terrible. Let myself be spacious and of use in ways yet to be revealed. Let my past R.I.P. And let my creativity again go to the edge of the possible and who knows what will come of it. I’m as unpredictable to myself as I am to others.

What a long, strange trip it has been.

Just a week ago I was telling bawdy, vulnerable and tragic stories at my big, beautiful birthday party. Today I let the world be as it is, and isn’t, and mostly far more complex than I’ll ever understand. Death hovers, as one friend is taken off life support and another bravely battles cancer. Tomorrow and onward life will show me more faces, and the great sea bass of my personality will probably still struggle against the hook of mortality.