rowing for years on the midsummer pond*

On Being Neither Young Nor Old

Photo by Katerina Shkribey on Unsplash

My grandmother used to tell me that you could predict exactly how hot and muggy it was going to be by the state of berries on the vine: if they were soft, and oozing thick, dark juice in mid-August, the weather was going to be incendiary until September.

If they were still firm to the touch — perfect for eating out of hand, leaving dark purple streaks on your lips — the heat would be manageable for the rest of the summer. She learned this as a child spending a few weeks every August in Greens Farms, Connecticut, not far from where Susan and I live now, and likely restricted at the time. I never knew how she wound up there — she was born and raised in Brooklyn during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency — and when I finally asked my mother about it before she died, she told me A church group brought kids out of the city so they could breathe fresh air, and your grandmother was one of them.

These were the things that stuck for my grandmother: The 1919 Chicago White Sox throwing the Series. Seeing Gehrig and Ruth play, live; watching Gehrig say goodbye. Cheering Jackie Robinson. Laughing at my mother when she met Reggie Jackson at a cocktail party in the seventies and he said Hi I’m Reggie and my mother said Reggie who? Signing her last letter to me Your Baseball Gramma in August 1981, when I was a hotel lifeguard the summer before I left for college. The sudden loss of her only true love, a woman, after sixty years of hidden affection. Predicting the weather by the firmness of the fruit.

I knew my grandmother only as an older woman. She was stocky and solid, and although she walked two urban miles a day, every day, she seemed ancient to me, even though she was just 62 when I was born. I am now 63, and apart from a left hip that perpetually aches and blonde hair that is largely going gray, I don’t feel too much different than I did at forty, or thirty. I wonder if my grandmother felt the same way: that chronological age and the passage of time are constructs foisted upon us by external forces, and ultimately they mean nothing if we can manage to stay in decent health despite the gravitational pull of sorrow and season. When my mother-in-law was in her mid-eighties, she would regularly drive the ten miles from her house to ours and push-mow our acre of property while we shouted at her to stop. Then she’d request a vodka tonic, go home to her house and mow her own acre of property, have another vodka tonic, make herself dinner, and go to bed. At eighty-one, my aunt — my father’s sister — in 104 degree heat, rode a donkey from the harbor on Santorini up the steep incline and into the cliffside village of Oia while my cousins and I rode behind her. A year earlier, on a blind drive, she inadvertently slayed a massive male alligator that had crawled up and out of the intracoastal and made its way to her condominium’s golf course in Boca; the game warden had been trying to catch it for months with no luck, but my aunt, at eighty-years-old and wielding a Callaway driver with a senior shaft, nailed it right between the eyes without even seeing it. The pro-shop gave her a gift certificate.

My father was thirty-nine when I was born. Twenty-four years ago today, when I was thirty-nine, he died from injuries sustained in a car accident a week earlier. When I was thirty, I was a few years away from finally coming out as a lesbian to my extremely traditional and mostly loving family; some, like my father and stepmother, and most of my cousins, were fine with the fact of me, and some were not and never would be. When I was forty, Susan and I began to investigate the possibility of having a baby; I am ten years younger than she, so I would be the one to carry it. After the eighth vial of blood was siphoned from my arm, I discovered that I was in menopause — my mother had gone through it at thirty-eight — and could never carry a baby to term. I tried not to think too much about it because it broke my heart and privately paralyzed me. At the suggestion of my doctor, I asked my mother how old she was when she’d gone through it; she balked at the idea that I would even consider having a baby, but not because I was queer.

Your breasts will be enormous, she said. When I asked her why she never told me how young she’d been, she simply said I didn’t think it mattered.

At sixty-three, a year older than my grandmother was when I was born, I am now no longer middle-age; humans do not generally live to 126, although my aunt, the donkey/alligator aunt, made it to 102, dying during Covid (but not from Covid), and when my cousins laid her to rest next to her husband, parents, daughter, and across the way from her grandson and my father, they did so while watching it unfold on their screens from a distance of a thousand miles, and with only one local cousin in live attendance, watching from the inside of her car. But I am also not old, although the Millennial and Gen Z children of my neighbors and friends, who look at me like I have three heads when I talk about things like the 1977 New York City summertime blackout, or Ronald Reagan, or the devastation that was AIDS in the late 1980s when every third person on Commercial Street in Provincetown was in a wheelchair — they think I’m Methuselah. They roll their eyes; they call me irrelevant. I tell them to watch Soylent Green when they have a chance.

Last week, while teaching in Truro, I explained the concept of gatekeepers to a classroom full of Gen X and Millennial memoir students just beginning to experience the frustrations of creative rejection. Often, they receive no response to their work. Often, they receive what amounts to a form letter in which their non-fiction is incorrectly categorized as flash fiction, or poetry. They want to have some sense of what they’ve done that didn’t meet with the approval of the publication; they usually get nothing. This is not uncommon.

Who, I asked them to consider, are the people making the decision to pass along your submissions to the editors in charge of whether or not your work will even be considered for publication? Who is deciding whether or not your work goes into the A pile or the B pile? I told them about the time, a few years ago, that one of my essays was a finalist for a fairly visible award connected to a well-known literary journal. I was never contacted, and only found out when a Google alert let me know. The editor, when I asked them about it, wrote to me via direct message from a yoga retreat in Bali, Well we can’t let everyone know everything, can we.

I am currently reading The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts. In it, Birkerts writes about Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, in which the passage of time is wrapped around the lives of the narrator and her mother, but also the lives of the other women who live in the Bronx building where Gornick was raised, and where her mother, elderly by book’s end, still lives. There is a rhythm of rage and reconciliation, writes Birkerts, which governs the relationship between mother and daughter (and mother and the other female tenants) and the unfolding of the memoir. Birkerts refers to this rhythm, this push/pull, as an oscillation, which repeats itself as the narrator has to step deep into scene and then pull way back in order to comprehend what she has seen; he refers to this as experience tasted and experience digested.

As I write this, it is exactly twenty-four years since I lost my father, a week after he was in a car accident with his longtime companion, who were driving their housekeeper to her next gig on Long Island. Almost a quarter of a century has gone by since that morning of the crash when I was standing in the garden up to my knees in compost, and his dying exactly a week later. I have been told, repeatedly, that I am living with complex grief — a grief that does not let me move forward, and that stops time like a snapshot. My life — my loves, my joys, my daily frustrations — is coiled around it like a snake; it is always there. And honestly, I don’t know that there is anything wrong with that. Grief buried, hidden, and ignored takes root in the body and devastates the spirit, and does not let go. Metabolized, it becomes part of our day to day; it becomes texture, and sound, and color. It becomes part of the fabric of who we are at the cellular level.

The push/pull; the oscillation. We live our lives. We raise our children and we don’t, we get jobs and lose them, we suffer illness or addiction and go through recovery, or we don’t. We find partners; we lose partners. We bury our parents; our hair goes gray. We row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content, Donald Hall wrote in Affirmation. We paddle in circles year after year, the mundanity of everything we do getting lost amidst a few punctuation points — Gehrig and Ruth; illicit love; infertility news; standing in compost as a parent is in an accident one hundred miles away — until we are suddenly no longer in midlife.

Experience tasted and experience digested. When I was a child, my grandmother, in her mid-sixties, taught me how to predict the summer weather by the firmness of the August fruit; she learned it as a Brooklyn teenager born in 1901, visiting a part of Connecticut close to where I live now, where she was likely restricted from living. Maybe she knew that; maybe she didn’t. I don’t know that it would have mattered to her. Reaching back over the decades and the wars so she could share it with me, she loved it there for all its contradiction, loved the heat and the flavor, and the thick berry juice running down her chin that would tell her, and me, that it would remain hot until September.

Affirmation (Donald Hall)

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.