In a moment of rare quiet solitude this morning I was reading a New Yorker profile of Pedro Almódovar and when I got to the part where he talks about losses, and how he feels them differently now that he’s older, it made me reflect on the milestone I just passed, turning fifty. After a week of sheer joy with friends, basking in their love and partying as if I were twenty, it is time to start reflecting: those symbols, milestones, rituals, these heightened steps on the chaotic and haphazard and uncontrollable path of our lives. Turning thirty was a momentous time; I had made it a symbol and a hope, the day when I would start freeing myself from what was tying me down.
When I turned thirty I stopped feeling sorry for myself and my handicap (I turned deaf around my mid-twenties from a pool of bad genes) and decided to rescue an abysmal self-image (becoming a photographer better to hide) and I started opening my eyes. When I turned thirty I started rediscovering the world of sound and talk, and the social world I had been slowly leaving, digging my own hole out of fear and shame; I started consulting surgeons to find out if a minor birth defect that had come to define my life could be addressed (it could not, and so it is, and it stopped defining my life); I started taking charge, and even if I skipped and fell often as I ran, I went on running with eyes wide open and as I turn fifty I’m just finally learning to fly.
The wild rosebush in the driveway is still blooming in subfreezing temperatures, calling to me as I look out the kitchen window.
Eyes wide open I'm learning to fly and taking nothing for granted. The leaves crunch under my feet in the morning and are ringed by frost, shades of brown and white. The fog is lifting, and as I start to fly I want to take others by the hand, better to feel the air in my lungs. I am flying free and growing strong, and I am teaching my sons to do the same, take others by the hand as they soar - no time, no time to wait fifty years. It is grey and cold today, winter is settling, and we’re learning to fly together in the little bungalow, drab outside with all the colors inside.
There’s no stopping us, the sky is clear above the winter clouds and the image is coming into focus, and we’ll be flying high because these times demand it and the losses feel acute when you’re older but they’ve always been, dead by overdose at the age of nineteen he was, when last night he was playing the piano with me - wide-eyed thirteen-year-old.
It is not just about turning fifty and hoping for fifty-five more, seeing it all clearer and sharper now, it is about coming into focus, assessing the essential, art and ideas and actions hand in heart in hand.
I’m just starting.
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