The Long Goodbye

The kids turn eighteen, they move out of the house, and you start saying the long good-bye. Which is to say, that you keep saying ‘goodbye’ to them, over and over, year after year. I suppose you keep saying ‘hello!’ too, but it’s the goodbye that stays in my mind. After five weeks of staying with us, our oldest granddaughter is leaving today to make her way back to her California home and then, a week later, to UC Berkeley to begin her freshman year in college.

She has done us an extraordinary favor coming to spend this time with us. When she was a baby, I used to take care of her one day or one afternoon a week, but when she turned one, her parents moved with her to the Midwest and we, eventually, moved to the Northwest. As a result, our visits with her and them have been regular but not frequent: that is, not frequent as in every week. We have watched her grow up largely from a distance, watched a bit here and a piece there, as is so common now as children not only move out, but leave for far away with the grandchildren in tow. I should be grateful, of course, that my children have at least stayed in the U.S. A friend’s three children each moved to a different continent. The difference of a time zone or two pales when you compare it with an entire continent away and even an international date line.

These five weeks have been filled with lots of activities (rock-climbing, kayaking, cooking—she learned to make ravioli and pie crust, for example), but also with lots of conversation, which is far and away the best part from my perspective. I was fearful, before she came, that she’d be expecting a kind of Disneyland vacation and, although I suppose it would be possible to provide it given the many possibilities of the Vancouver-Seattle nexus, we weren’t really planning to provide it. Fortunately, she seemed open to the possibilities of ‘meeting the grandparents.’ Ed and I do feel well met; and we think and feel that we have met her as she stands on this cusp between childhood and adulthood. Now we look forward to hearing from her as she progresses through Berkeley, even as we know that we are beginning that same long goodbye to her, as well as continuing the long goodbye to her dad.

Spending extended time with an eighteen-year-old inevitably makes you think about what it was like to be eighteen yourself. By that age, I was finishing my first year of college in Idaho, and I, too, was planning to go to UC Berkeley a year later (a goal I never reached, though). I am sure I was naïve, guileless, and unworldly, given that I had almost never left my small, Idaho hometown. And yet, looking back in my own memory, I don’t see the naivete, the guilelessness, the unwordliness that was doubtless there because I never knew about it; even in memory it has been as if varnished over with all that came later. A long goodbye to one’s self, as well, I guess. Turning eighteen looks less Janus-faced than I would have thought: not so much looking both backwards and forwards, but more a division between what went before and what will be a long process of becoming. Which serves to balance the parents' and grandparents' recognition of the beginning of that long goodbye.

Happiness

I noticed an article on the net a few days ago which reported “new” research indicating that older people are happier than younger ones. For me, this goes in the category of obvious research. Who would think that older people would be less happy than younger ones? I suppose it is possible that younger people might think this because it would (a) cheer them up to think there is someone more unhappy then they are; and (b) because they assume that old is, well, old as in broken, of no further use, and if that’s who you are, then you are obviously unhappy.

Not so, in my experience. It seems to me that being old is, for the most part, an enormous improvement upon being young, upon being younger. Not without its downsides, of course: that death is the next likely big step in your life, so to speak, is one of the main ones. And there are the physical changes, of course, which vary from old person to old person and from time to time. But for the most part, I’d say, there is much less unhappiness and bedrock anxiety than at any other part of my life, other than my first few years, maybe. World War II provided me with enough anxiety to limit my happy childhood to the part that I don’t much remember.

The reason, I think, that old people are happier than younger people is that fewer people are messing with them. Once your children move on and you stop dealing with the world of employment and your difficult relatives have either given up on you or moved more permanently on, there are fewer people in your life who are interested in messing with you.

What I mean by messing with me (or you in the case that it’s you that’s being messed with), is that people don’t get in the way of my projects. Nowadays, I am pretty much left alone to figure out my projects and to do them the way I want to. Not so when I was working for the corporation or the institution, or when I had children always happy to interfere with my projects (and with every right to do so, to a considerable extent, I think, but irritating nonetheless), or when I had parents and other older relatives who felt pretty free to tell me every step of the day what I ought to be doing.

Not that I am entirely left to my own devices, even when old. Only a few weeks ago, I set out to buy a string trimmer as a joint project with a neighbor. I thought I might need it but had never used one; she had used one and wasn’t sure whether she had enough current use to justify the purchase. So, we agreed to purchase jointly a string trimmer and given that the sale price that week was all of $23, I didn’t think that either of us would have much to lose. But then things got more complicated and the neighbor’s husband got involved and eventually he bought a string trimmer for their use and assured me that I was free to use it any time I wanted. But then they’ve been away for 3 weeks so although I wanted to use it, I didn’t know either where it was or how to use it. So, I was messed with in my project.

The border, like my neighbor’s spouse, probably doesn’t think it’s messing with me. The agents of the U.S. government and Homeland Security probably never think about the fact that I had a project that involved my living in Point Roberts and, with proper documentation, pretty freely moving between Point Roberts and the ROTUS, as well as lower British Columbia. But I did, and they have definitely messed with that project.

A good friend has lost her Nexus card for unknown/undisclosed/undisclosable reasons and she now carefully calculates when the traffic flow is likely to be low so that she can cross the border in something less than a half-hour. She says she crosses less now and, as a result, spends less money, buys less stuff. Not so terrible, she says. But I think that is because she is younger and hasn’t yet realized that your life can be very happy, or at least it can be as long as no one is messing with you.

Spoils for Our Elders

An acquaintance and fellow blogger down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, posted a story the other day about age, mortality and the shedding of belongings. It seems that an 80-year-old friend of the blogger had had a mild heart attack, and that this brush with mortality had loosened his hold on his belongings. A box of treasured opera CD’s arrived by mail to the blogger, a gift that seemed to offer some kind of continuity to the giver. The puzzling part was that the blogger himself is 85-years-old and had several years ago suffered some very serious cardiac problems. Now, the 85-year-old has even more of things he needs to get rid of, while the 80-year-old has somewhat fewer.

I think once one hits one’s 70’s, the awareness of how many things one has and the question of what is eventually going to happen to the more treasured of those things (not IF but WHEN one dies) presses more quite sharply. Because I’ve moved around so much, all my life, I have (happily, I think) ended up with nothing from my ancestral life other than a couple of photo albums, and my mother’s christening dress. When I lived in New England, I was amazed at all the houses that were chock full of ancestral belongings. What a weight of the past was there. And, I suppose, the refusal to have that ‘weight of the past’ is much of what the western U.S. has always stood for.

Earlier this year, I sent a box of doll furniture that I made in the 1970’s to a granddaughter, but other than that, I haven’t actually done anything to start this needed (or perhaps unneeded?) dispersal of treasured things. Treasured by me, of course, but not necessarily treasured by anyone who is on the recipient end. Mostly, at the moment, I’m focusing on the ‘finishing unfinished things’ part of the spectrum. Knitting includes unfinished pairs of sox, hats, shawls, sweaters; quilting includes blocks that haven’t yet been made into quilt tops, quilt tops that haven’t yet been made into finished quilts, and no end of pieces in various stages that would someday be an art quilt/wall quilt if I refined my ideas about them sufficiently to progress to that stage. Lots of embroidery work also sitting around in a nearly finished stage.

Only yesterday, though, I actually finished the quilting on a ‘cathedral windows’ quilt that I started 25 years ago. I began that quilt so long ago that I no longer even know how that traditional pattern is made. It’s a kind of origami folding technique: I look at the finished work and, except for the fact that I recognize the main fabric was from a dress that I once wore, I wouldn’t know that I was the one who had made it. So how treasured is that? Well, at least it is a brand-new quilt that is simultaneously and instantly a vintage quilt.

Perhaps the dispersing can be put off until the finishing is done. And then, well, maybe I could start shipping the treasured and finished objects around to friends who are older than I am. If everybody disperses upward, at least we will have avoided burdening the future with our past. But those centenarians are going to have to get much bigger houses in which to store everything.

Fame

A British weaver of extravagantly beautiful pieces (she weaves with monofilament that is thinner than hair; you can see her pieces here, but photography doesn’t really do justice to pieces so dependent upon ambient light) was visiting Point Roberts this weekend. In fact, visiting another weaver who lives here and is a friend of mine. The two weavers came round to my house this morning so that I could show off my abandoned house quilts . The British weaver was much taken with them and said I should be famous.

It’s always extremely nice for me when someone speaks well of my work and even nicer when they can tell me what they like about it, suggesting that there is some actual communication between creator and viewer. But, I’m glad not to be famous. Of course, it’s easy to say you’re glad not to be famous when you are not famous. You will have to take it on faith that I really am glad. When you are famous, in this culture, you get to spend your time on your fame. Journalists may interview you (and you get to worry about whether the published interview will make you sound self-important or your work look trivial). People who are responsible for programs of some sort will ask you to come and speak to a lot of people, most of whom will never have seen your work, and your slides or your power point presentation will fail to have sound or be visible or some such. People will want you to help them with their work, so they can be famous, too. And so on. What you get is a lot of time spent on talking about your work or preparing to talk about your work, but much less time getting to do it. I think the purpose of doing it is doing it. But I may be idiosyncratic in that respect.

I read a few days ago that Doris Lessing judged that receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature was the worst thing that ever happened to her. At 88, she is awash in interviewers, and fears that her actual writing career has ended because she will never again have enough solitary time to think about and write another book. Sounds about right. Sorry for your troubles, Ms. Lessing, but thanks for all the books that got to us when there was still time.

One advantage, of course, of taking up an artistic kind of career in later age is that you may very well have already had enough success (fame of a sort) in some other career that you don’t really need any more fame or even additional money; or, conversely, you may have come to terms with not being famous and along the way discovered some other and more rewarding pleasures, including the sheer joy of doing what you want without having to think about who will pay you for doing it.

Point Roberts has more than its share of people with artistic careers, but few of them here, like anywhere else, are making a living at it. But now and then you can see their work in one of the local galleries, especially The Blue Heron, or its cross-the-street neighbor gallery, The Maple Studio. Maybe there should be a Point Roberts Artists Association to advise the Community Association on artistic matters? It is an extremely odd thing about our culture that art of any sort (visual, written word, object) is very highly valued only as long as it can be made out to be extremely rare. That’s why artists do better after they die, I suppose: they don’t risk adding any more pieces to their oeuvre, thus diluting the value of the previous work.

On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of creative spirit out and about, and extraordinarily beautiful books, poems, music, quilts, paintings, sculptures, weavings, and other forms of art abound in most places, but most people never see it, and certainly never buy it. Such work is here in Point Roberts (well beyond the boundaries of my workshop), as it is in New York City and in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, too; work that goes unseen and unsung. Art is a commodity that is labor intensive and it is one-of-a-kind. For labor intensive work, we look to Asia; for one of a kind work, we look to the past. So, perhaps I will not be famous until I’m dead; at least it won’t eat into my time.

Horizontal Thinking

“The only thing I am certain of is that starting to write at this stage of my life seems presumptuous. It appears that we old folk, as the hour to pack our bags fast approaches, feel almost without exception that we have something important to say.”

--From The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson, by Paola Kaufmann, 2003.

So that’s what this writing is all about? Or maybe not, since I didn’t just start writing at this (late) stage in my life. Reading is more what it’s about than writing, I think. And reading seems to take on a different quality when you get to that aforementioned late stage of life. Maybe it’s only true of English majors (maybe it’s only true of me, how would I know?), but there seems a strange compulsion to re-read all the books that I once read and remember liking. It’s not so much that I remember the books themselves, and maybe that’s why one turns to reading them again: to see if one still likes them.

After I moved up here, I reread all of Dickens, Thackeray, George Moore, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and some of Trollope (the other 40 Trollope novels I read for the first time). I reread some Dostoyevsky, some Tolstoy, all of The Jewel in the Crown series, and who knows what else. I just finished reading Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, which I last read in 1960, just before I read Italo Svevo’s Confession’s of Zeno, thus linking the two books in my mind forever. Zeno is a man who can’t quit smoking no matter how hard he tries (as I recall), and Oblomov is a man who can’t bring himself to get out of bed, no matter how hard he tries, indeed, no matter how hard his friends try.

Fortunately, I quit smoking 30 years ago, so I probably can pass on re-reading Zeno, but I now find myself somewhat in the position of Oblomov, so the re-read may have been helpful. Oblomov is a world class chooser to do nothing because it’s all too much effort for the paltry rewards the world has to offer. He cannot see the point of all that striving. He may be like a man who retired very early. He may be like the Buddha.

Both Ed and I have noted that not having to be someplace in the morning tends to result in one staying in bed quite a lot longer. At first, we attributed this to the darkness of winter: why get up when it’s still dark? But then spring would come and we were still abed in the light, even if not necessarily asleep. Like Oblomov, I find I can do a world of thinking while horizontally positioned. Indeed, I can plan the entire remainder of the day, should I get up to actually have such a day. It comforts me to think that I don’t spend all this time in bed asleep. I am sure it comforted Ilya Oblomov, as well.

The thing about the book is that I remember it as only about Oblomov staying in bed, but that is not all there is to it. It’s not that he gets up eventually and becomes an industrious and productive human being, but that he finds a way of life that supports his staying in bed. And though he dies early of a stroke, his days up until that time are absolutely satisfying to him and to those around him. His friends have gone off to have another kind of life and they too are satisfied with their busy-ness. So, it seems that the book is more about ‘everybody has to find his own way,’ than it is about ‘everybody ought to stay busy to be happy.”

This morning, when I wandered out into the living room around 9:30 a.m. (90 minutes after the goal for arising), I said to Ed, ‘Ah, what is going to become of me? I considered just waiting and getting up tomorrow at 8 o’clock.” His reply: “I believe we are people who know the importance of a goal, how to set one, and how to decide when a goal might best be at least temporarily overridden." I think Oblomov would have drunk to that.