I have a bad habit, when people say they are over the hill, I like to pretend like they’re right. For laughs. But so often nobody is laughing but me. People are so weird.
The truth is I have an almost Pollyanna-esque bottomless well of belief in the capabilities of people to rise to their possibilities.
I always liked the story of the young child who asked a recent college graduate, “When you grew up, didn’t it feel weird for a few days?”
I think of that when I see the T-shirt that says, “Over WHAT hill? Where?? When?? I don’t remember any hill.”
We make transitions we don’t notice all the time. Years ago (O, years ago) I joked to my mother on my birthday, commenting on how we were celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of our first meeting.
She didn’t laugh. She looked at me, half-startled, and said, “Has it been that long?…..” Her eyes took me in as if for the first time. And she said, disappointed, unhappily surprised, “You’re an old man.”
We’d never share another birthday. And I will always remember making her aware of a transition she had never wanted to become aware of. Sometimes we don’t rise to our possibilities. We discover instead we’ve sunk to what we’ve become insensate toward. And some of us, like my unhappy mother, have it revealed to them.
I’m sorry to hear. Yeah, aging can be a heavy burden. <3
Just shy of 70, I’m still waiting to find out what I’ll be when I grow up.
Aging hasn’t been a burden for me. It was for my mother, but she kept her opinions private even as her frustration with declining ability became very visible. But MY aging, when she became aware of it, was a rock on her head from the blue. It didn’t matter where it had come from; it was here, it was on her, and crushed hopes and dreams she had for me that I never really knew were there. I wasn’t just an old man to her; I was suddenly past hope and expectations she never let herself acknowledge she had for me. And those were now painfully visible, broken bones sticking out of her flesh.
R.A. Lafferty said that the worst crime in the universe is killing a songbird. That day, I silenced an entire forest of them I never really explored. On that day, I became something heavier and worse than old.
Rogan: mothers have hopes that mimic ours. That which crushes ours, they try not to notice, hoping (more than we can) that new hope shall come along. We have to learn when there is no longer any sense in hoping. I have no idea what is best, as to when to let Mum know that I have stopped hoping for what she surely still (despite more than half a century) hopes shall come my way. I try not to kill her songbirds; but I equally cannot lie to her about their chances of survival. She seems to have understood the prudence of not asking.