When I Grow Old, at 80

(a bit of foolishness for the end times)

When I grow old, at 80, I won’t wear purple.

I’ll wear nothing to bed, or breakfast, with a mate who looks into my eyes thinking, “wow did I luck out” … after all these years of men who thought I was Everest.

Maybe they’ve been a roustabout, a lounge singer, a kindergarten teacher, and then studied physics and discovered a new moon.

Me.

Maybe they’ll wear a tool belt and will fix everything that needs fixing, and I can finally be a queen for the rest of my days.

When I grow old, at 80…

I will stop minding my tongue.  

I will give everyone who deserves it a piece of my mind. They’ll think, “Why didn’t I think of that” and eventually think they thought it up themselves. I won’t mind, because, well, why bother.

I will run for office and hire someone to do the scutwork. I will be stout and look like a battleship and be opinionated usefully, and get the government to do something about everything I care about. Then, thank God, I will get beaten by an upstart so I can go back to my garden full of thyme.

When I grow old, at 80…

I will have finished the book, the show, the play, the blog, the podcast, the duties of the will and mind and, like God, call them all good.

I will finally get an honorary advanced degree for all the goddam work I’ve done for this world.

I will not have anything just in case, no shed, no shop, no pressure canners for when there aren’t any more stores. I will just have a thousand pints of whiskey to pay for anything I need.

When I grow old, at 80…

I will laugh and laugh at all the folly, and cry too, sobs for the suffering in these end times. But I won’t be sad. I will know the seasons of empire and know that spring will come again.

I’ll be done with this cape of grief and stop trying to clean up the mess of the world, the endless clutter of bad ideas gone bad and worse. I’ll get my gold watch and sell it if I need the money.

When I grow old, at 80…

it will finally all make sense, and I will stop trying to figure it out. I will breathe out a big sigh, the biggest sigh, the sigh of a lifetime, and breathe easy for the rest of my days.

I will pick unread books off my shelves and read to my heart’s content without wondering if there is something else I should be doing. I will have historians and philosophers on speed dial. And they will be delighted I called.

When I grow old, at 80…

I will invite everyone to my memorial, the day before I die, where I cry that I have to leave all this, all this love and tangle, this glorious sliver of the long story that I will never know how it ends.

And then, because I deserve it and so does everyone else, I will be absorbed into a love beyond love, and join the ancestors, who will be a rowdy bunch of goofballs and I will live in the house of my Lord forever.

But that will be later. Much later.

Because I’m almost 80 now.