Our trip to Greece began as a birthday present to myself and a college graduation gift to Ann. The extravagant idea popped into my head six months earlier as the realization of turning fifty set in and I felt for the first time the overtures of an ending.
Those were the days I stood before the bathroom mirror, examining new lines and sags around my eyes and mouth like a seismologist studying unstable tectonic plates. The days I dug through photo albums in search of images of my mother and grandmother at fifty, scrutinizing their faces and comparing them to my own.
Surely I’m above this sort of thing. I could not be one of those women who clings to the facades of youth. I didn’t understand why I was responding to the prospect of aging with such shallowness and dread, only that there had to be more to it than the etchings of time on my skin. Was I dabbling in the politics of vanity or did I obsess on my face to avoid my soul?
Furthermore, whatever room I happened to be in seemed unnaturally overheated. During the nights I wandered in long, sleepless corridors. At forty-nine my body was engaged in vague, mutinous behaviors.
… Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling “betrayals” of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning. And why, I asked myself, had I begun to think for the first time about my own mortality? Some days, the thought of dying gouged into my heart to the point I filled up with tears at the sight of the small, ordinary things I would miss.
Charlie Brown, in A Charlie Brown Christmas:
Pantophobia? Not quite. Pantometathesis (or whatever the Greek would be for Change of Everything)?
THAT'S IT!!!
Sue Monk Kidd again, about halfway through the book:
Journeying is the predominant means of developing one's self in this culture, not the habitation of place. It has been true of me. Always the seeker. Yet at this phase of my life, when I look at my house at the edge of a marsh, I want to learn how to be in it. I want to behave like a finder as much as a seeker. The irony is that I had to go on an elaborate journey to figure this out. So much of my growing older seems to be about paradoxes. The reconciliation of opposites. The bringing to balance.
For my fiftieth birthday, Sandy gave me a card with the moon on it. He handed it to me when I got home from Greece. It read: "I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." It's true, I wasn't. Yet the rest of the story is that it's just as possible not to be the same after seeing it over my backyard. At fifty, I want to be a finder of the commonplace moon.
I like that. The commonplace moon. The image glows softly against a glaring lifelong drive to be extraordinary, special, amazing. I wrote a poem in 1985 that remains the defining poem of my life, though the way it defines my life has changed over the years. The image comes from Crockett Johnsons's Harold and the Purple Crayon, one of my favorite childhood stories: Harold gets lost and searches for home, unable to find it until he draws a window around the moon and recognizes his own bedroom. In 1985 I had no idea what I was saying in this poem—
"A Moon in the Window"
There are long halls
with empty walls
and rooms without a moon
in the window,
and lovers go home in the evening
when the tide is out
and the sand is littered with jellyfish.
The birds cry “ma — ma —”
and I take you home
to show you the moon
and the jellyfish,
but I can’t cry, mama,
because I can’t find the tears,
and you’ll never know my fears
of long halls
with empty walls
and rooms without a moon in the window
Over the years I've come to see many things in this poem. The longing to be home. The need to find my home by making it. And now the desire to settle into the bed by the window with the moon it, the commonplace moon, the one that hangs over my own backyard. Sue Monk Kidd and Crockett Johnson both get it right for me. As Charlie Brown says, "That's it!"
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