I Just Turned 60, but I Still Feel 22
…I wouldn’t want to have landed on this planet a single moment earlier than I did.
A woman born in Lower Alabama in 1961 has little use for nostalgia. Go back to the “good old days”?…No, thank you very much.
The only trouble with being born in 1961 is that in 2021 you will turn 60, something I did last week. It’s very strange to persist in feeling 22…Sixty is the point at which people must admit they are no longer middle-aged.
Lately it’s been dawning on me that I would not want to have been born even one minute later than 1961, either. Last week I mentioned this new thought to a friend, and her response was immediate, as though she’d already had it herself: “Because we won’t have to live through the cataclysm?”
Exactly.
Well, no, not exactly. …
… On most days I am simply grateful for the 60 years I’ve had.
… One of the cards I got last week featured a vintage photograph of plump women in swimsuits who looked remarkably like me in my swimsuit. “At your age, swimming can be dangerous,” the card read. “Lifeguards don’t try as hard.”
I laughed so hard my belly jiggled, a feature of being 60 that troubles me only a little. This is just who I am now, a person who looks exactly like her late mother, despite far more exercise and a far healthier diet. Besides, I loved my mother, and I love seeing her again in every store window I pass.
I feel lucky to have gotten to 60 despite a genetic propensity for cancer; despite the lingering effects of Covid, which will apparently dog me for the rest of my life; despite having survived other infections — strep, pneumonia — that might have killed me if not for the pure luck of being born after the invention of antibiotics…I was lucky enough to have been born after the widespread availability of vaccines.
Sorrow in the face of aging would be a poor response to such good fortune.
Thanks to that immense, unwarranted luck, I have lived long enough to be surrounded by the truest possible friends.
I have lived long enough to have learned, too, that what is beautiful and joyful is almost always fleeting and must never be squandered. That rejection rarely bears any relationship to worth…That life is too short to wear uncomfortable shoes.
…
A lifelong friend, one who will also turn 60 this year, sent me an email on my birthday. Her message contained a passage from “The Flower,” a poem by George Herbert: “Grief melts away / Like snow in May, / As if there were no such cold thing. / Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness?”
Who would have thought, indeed? But given enough time, we do go on, somehow. Like the stems and branches of springtime, our shriveled hearts can recover greenness, too. “And now in age I bud again,” Herbert wrote, and so it is with us.
… fear and darkness do pass in time.
