Moving into the third month, I suddenly realized that this is a decade year. I turn fifty at the end of the year and so far all of my adult decade years have marked major life changes. For instance, when I turned forty, I left my job of 10 years and traveled for a year before going to graduate school and starting a new career (I have a book in my head called Crossing the Millennium, although that title has already been used). I had actually been on the path to that place for 20 years, though. Now everything is different, and I'm not sure what I'll do.
Sometime in my fourth decade (meaning 30-something) I was in a Toastmasters meeting, where the Table Topic was something about "What you want to be when you grow up". I said that I wanted to be a post-menopausal woman, which drew a laugh, until I made clear that I wasn't just talking about the cessation of menses, but about certain freedoms I associated with age, freedom from certain expectations placed upon young women in their fertile years. My inspiration was Ann Richards, then governor of Texas (before the Bush disaster), that silver-haired, silver-tongued conqueror of biting one-line colloquialisms.
I'm much closer to that goal now, thinking more than ever about what it really means. One of the things I think I can see now is that the powerful sense of freedom I admired in female role models is more likely if you've reached a position of power before achieving crone status. That means using the power of the fertile young woman, power usually acquired from men in a world that is largely still run by men, although that is changing. I was always too fiercely, stubbornly independent to be content with that, and have as a result not gotten very far.
So I stand on the threshold of a change of life, and can't see clearly to the other side. I sometimes think I have an aspiration to be homeless. That is not meant lightly; I in no way mean to make light of people caught in the vicissitudes of life against their will. Nor am I seriously considering giving up my comfortable life, although that choice could be made for me, as it is for so many. Yet I wish for those freedoms I once imagined, and more. I wish to be freed from all societal expectations, freed from my puritan work ethic, where everything I do, even in my "free" time, has to be towards some purpose, some productive end. I long for the freedom of the leisured class of another era, the 19th century flaneur (there was no such thing as "flaneuse") who was free to be a detached observer. I wish freedom from possessions of which I have accumulated so many, which then need to be sheltered and stored. I even wish to be free of the need for shelter for myself.
Sometimes a hint of these thoughts comes out in conversations with my son. He tells me not to worry, that he and his wife wouldn't leave me on the street. It's kind of him, but he misses my meaning. I don't wish to become dependent; I wish to be completely independent, or as nearly so as possible. There are some homeless people I see almost every day, and I find that I have a certain admiration for them, almost envy. One person, who I think is a woman but am not sure, has occupied tiny McGraw park for months, sleeping outside by choice every night of the winter, in every sort of weather. I don't know this persons story, but have never seen this person ask for anything, or exhibit other than a calm sense of fortitude. Then there is the elderly man whose face always looks pink, fresh scrubbed and shaven, who sleeps in the same doorway almost every night, even when it is bitter cold and the emergency shelters are open. I also think of the young woman I met in Norway who had run short of travel funds. She thought she could share with me the rental of a rorbu, a fisherman's dorm, for one price, but when the owner wanted to charge by person she decided to stay outdoors, even though the nights were quite cold. I saw her again a few days later after she had risen from her bed of moss, looking free, confident, and empowered.
I think of these things and of how thoroughly I have entrapped myself, what it would take to break free, and what is my willingness to do so. I go to work, participate in community involvements, prepare for family visits, and consider a trip my mother wants me to take with her, either to Australia or the Mediterranean. I don't know what this year will bring, but the closest I come to making an extreme leap on my own is to wonder where I would recharge my camera and laptop. I fear that this time the transition, which will certainly arrive in some form, may be much more extreme than that.
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