Old Age Day by Day March 17, 2010

I've lived in the town I'm in now at three different points in my life. And many buildings and streets look virtually the same. I sometimes feel I bump into my other selves around town. There is the student who lived in a dorm, then a coop, then married and lived in different apartments. There is the woman with two toddlers living as a single mom, then living with the man she later married. Then there is the person who lived six blocks away, and walks by her old house, her old apartments, the dorm, the coop. I sometimes feel like those other selves have more in common with people their age than me now. In fact, I feel certain of it. When I sit in a park I see myself forty, thirty twenty years ago and wonder. Who was she?

Our oldest son and his wife live in a nearby town where my first husband and I lived after he was born, and where his sister was born. It's also a place I taught college for years when our youngest was in elementary and junior high. So I drive by the hospital where our older daughter was born and for a second it's nighttime and I am hoping I'll make it to the hospital (she was born 29 minutes after we rushed through the doors). I breeze by the campus where friends still work and am back at a staff meeting restless in my chair, I glance at the JC Penney's where I worked one Christmas season and feel my tired feet.

How our lives spin around, circling certain spots on earth, hovering, the moving on. And in every place we leave a part of ourselves, rooted, living out our alternate lives, moving and breathing, and once in a great while I can recognize for a second, the young confused student, the girl in love who is mourning a boyfriend's leaving, the tears of the lost woman looking for a path, the laughter of the one who danced to Joy of Cooking, the woman coping with the dying of her father, the one seeing her children fly the nest one by one. They did the best they could with the skills and knowledge they had, and I bless them all. When I cross paths with them now, I feel nothing but tenderness.