Fleeting Days

This is me in fifth grade. Mrs. Terry’s class at Dryden Elementary School. (Eh-Luh-Men-TARRY to all of us upstate NYers). The earrings were my favorite—dangley silver metal with stars, and I can remember how pretty I felt wearing them, how grown up. Although I’ve always kind of been age 40 at heart, now that I’m grown for real, I feel so tenderly toward my youth.

My husband saw this picture and said, “Aww, you look like a little realtor!”

At age ten, I was a serious and sensitive kid whose parents had divorced the previous year. I cried a lot. I loved the people I loved very deeply. I wanted to be an artist of some kind, though I don’t remember thinking much about the future. The future felt too far away, too vast, and time moved much slower then.

Time moves so quickly now that the days and months blur together. I write to find clarity, but the temporary clarity does not slow down the days. I think about the future all the time now—only six more years till our daughter goes to college and we somehow have to pay for it?!—and part of me also lives firmly in the past, analyzing it, questioning the choices that led me to where I am in my career as a writer and professor at a struggling public university with a morale problem. The jobs I’ve taken and the books I’ve written to get here occasionally feel like choices another person made. Definitely not the choices my serious fifth grade self would have expected, had she considered that one day she would be as old as her parents and pursuing the arts in a country increasingly skeptical of their importance.

I call myself middle-aged now, although my tween daughter helpfully informed me that, technically, I am “way past middle-aged,” since life expectancy for women in the U.S. is 79, and I’ll be turning 47 soon. My possible life paths are far narrower than they were when I was ten, and yet I don’t sense my mortality any more now. Death has always seemed a possibility; even as a fifth grader with star-filled earrings and floofy, 80s hair, I felt sure I might die young. A heart attack or war seemed equally likely. And as a teenager, I knew too many people in our small town who died in tragic circumstances to believe myself immortal.

What I feel most intensely in my forties is the fragility and beauty of life on the planet as a whole—how hard it can be, how puzzling. And how absolutely gorgeous it is to wake up every morning and be part of another fleeting day.