FINDING OURSELVES IN TIME

Shortly after my 70^th birthday, I began my infrequent blog — https://thoughtsafterseventy.com or Mary’s Room With a View.   My mind has always brimmed with thoughts, each new one elbowing aside the one before it.  I needed a blog, like a hope chest, to drop them in, and, like a hope chest, with a plan that at some future date I would find those thoughts useful, perhaps for self-knowledge.   That metaphor makes me chuckle: Do any of my readers know what a Hope Chest is/was? Footnote: A Hope Chest serves as storage for a young woman, a place where she places linens, housewares, items she would want when she marries.  The underlying motif stands that all young women live on the hope of a married life in which they play the role of homemaker, so good to be prepared, to look ahead with hope.

Age seventy felt like the summit from which one enjoys a view of life lived.  Having climbed the steep grade of decades, I could look down and around, reflect on my ascent and offer a panorama to readers.  After all, my husband once jokingly told a friend, “I married Mary for her opinions.”  For my looks, my intelligence, even for my apple pies would be more welcomed.  In four weeks, I will reach eighty, an age of Acceptance.  Yes, I am opinionated.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her podcast Wiser Than Me, suggests that those of us over seventy should look back to our earliest memories, walking forward with them so we might value our life’s challenges and rewards.  Two crates of daily journals, and I rarely devote an hour for rereading.  Too busy with “what’s next?”  And if I did return my attention to the first two decades, I believe my journal entries would all long for the future:  How long until I’m sixteen so I can drive, seventeen so I can graduate high school, twenty for a university degree, employment, first marriage (a blind loop in the ascent.)  At some plateau, those thoughts started to turn from anticipation to reflection.  At ten the decade to twenty was distant, and oh if I could scramble up to it faster!  But at eighty?  The next decade? 

Why return to those old journals?  Who I was or am cannot be found there alone.  Yesterday evening, I stood in line for a beverage at Finnriver Cidery – a joyful venue bursting with families enjoying music, good food and cider.  Because my husband and I were early investors in the business, we are treated to complimentary ciders.  I gave my name to the young man pouring drinks.  Instantly I was embraced by a middle-aged woman standing behind me.  Quite surprised, I pivoted. Her eyes filled with tears as she held me:  “Mrs. Kollar and Uncle Al…” she exclaimed, her nickname for my husband informing me that this could only be Sherri T, a former student from 1973 when Allan taught art and I taught English at Bothell High School.

 “You were the hardest teacher I ever had,” she said with no tone of admonition.

Yet I found myself apologizing, “I must have been a bitch!”  Yes, there I confessed that and felt ashamed for swearing, while acknowledging that Sherri isn’t the first former student to say how challenged they were in my classes. 

Sherri would have none of my remorse.  “Oh no.  You were wonderful.  I would get my essays back with so many suggestions like moving a sentence from one place to another, or a question, ‘Have you thought about this, Sherri.?’ You wrote those messages to all of the kids, and it must have taken so much time.   When I had my children, I passed on everything I could remember that you taught me.  They all graduated college.  You don’t know how important you and Uncle Al were in my life.”

I broke from her embrace, insisting she remain while I hurried back to the table where I had left my husband.  He followed me back for the surprise reunion:  two rather wrinkled septuagenarians and a middle-aged woman chatting their way back fifty years. 

Eighty years old, and here I stand near the summit. Where can I find me?  Not in a crate of journals, but in the consciousness of all the people with whom I have shared the breath of the world.