On reflection and perspective
I’ll take the middle view, thank you
I’ve been thinking lately about the people we become as we get older. Do we really ever change our perspective? Or do we simply start to understand ourselves as the person we’ve always been?
It’s about 6:00 a.m. and still dark in the bedroom. The dog spent Thanksgiving night at the kennel down the road, and this morning I’m able to stretch out my legs fully under the covers, searching for cool spots on the sheets. Our bedroom is more crowded with stuff than usual. The turntable that we disconnected from the TV cabinet, to make space for a bar, is now resting on top of our clothes armoire. And the red upholstered chair is squeezed in by the closet, its companion hassock tucked in the corner of the bathroom.
“Will you take a look at this,” says my spouse Janyce, opening up the bathroom door. She is pointing to a tuft of gray hair standing up straight at the top of her head near the part. She resembles Cameron Diaz in the movie Something about Mary. I practically choke on my coffee. When she climbs back onto the bed, we’re both laughing and gasping as we try to keep the two mugs of coffee from sliding around on the tray and toppling over.
“Remember when we used to wake up laughing every morning?” says Janyce, grabbing her cup.
“I do remember,” I say. “We need to get back to that, it feels good.”
Janyce is up early to catch the commuter train for work and I’m planning to spend my day off cleaning up the holiday aftermath. I pull the comforter up to my chin and watch the sunrise gradually lighting up the bark of the trees in the woods.
The day after Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year, second only to the day after Christmas. I’ll typically put on a jazz soundtrack to play over the hum of the dishwasher and the washing machine. My goal is to be relaxed and contemplative, letting Chet Baker’s horn playing determine the cadence of the day. The repetitive task of cleaning each piece of silver and putting away all the serving bowls and wine glasses will take me all day.
“Your dad had a good time, I think,” I say, calling out to Janyce who has since left the room. I can hear her moving around in the kitchen. I get up from bed and walk through our living room, passing by the banquet style tables, the one in the middle still draped in Yia Yia’s embroidered tablecloth.
“You’ll drop me off at the station, right?” says Janyce. She is bent over, putting things into her backpack on the floor when I turn the corner into the kitchen. Every countertop and table is filled with bowls and glasses, and all the platters we own are encrusted with bits of gravy and cranberry sauce smears. I grab a pomegranate from the bowl of fruit close to me and start to pick away at the yellow supermarket label stuck onto its side.
“I think everyone had a good time,” I say. “I noticed your dad down at the far end of the table telling stories.”
“Everything was great,” says Janyce, cracking and rolling a boiled egg into a paper napkin.
We’ve got nine minutes to get in the car and drive to the station. “I’m just glad the conversation remained unheated when we were all drinking and talking well into the evening,” I think to myself.
Thanksgiving is one of those times when people often disagree over conversation at the table. Unlike several people in my friend and family group, I’m never energized by a spirited debate between two opposite viewpoints, especially if it starts to become contentious. In fact, I would much rather change the subject or slip away when it happens.
I’ve been thinking lately about the people we become as we get older. Do we really ever change our perspective? Or do we simply start to understand ourselves as the person we’ve always been?
Anne Helen Peterson, a journalist who writes about culture for BuzzFeed News, wrote an illuminating long form piece recently about gun laws. She says that some of the more polarizing issues in this country are vehemently debated between people who view the issues “not just from a different moral stance, but from a different ideological and logical one.” Their intractable position is one that they hold as a result of the context from where and how they grew up, and who they understand themselves to be.
This rings true to me, because I don’t think I’m much different than the person I was at age sixteen. Not my basic ideology, anyway. I used to walk around in high school with a book of Shelley’s collected works of poetry and my friends were an unlikely mix of the cool kids and the kids that didn’t fit in. Like a lot of teens, I was searching for my own perspective. But even as time went by and I got older, I couldn’t seem to settle on one definitive way that felt right, nor did I have a burning righteous need to take a stand on anything. Instead, I was always defaulting in my mind to someplace in the middle.
I have a Facebook friend whose profile pic is of a uterus with a fallopian tube giving the finger. Being a woman in this country, I can totally appreciate the anger in that, and I smile knowingly when I see it. I also feel compelled to join others when they are out en masse to march about women’s rights or climate science. I definitely lean left in my politics. But the older I get, the more I realize that I don’t have an activist bone in my body. The sixteen-year-old in me still wonders too much about the nuances, the paradoxes, and the shades of grey. Like the artists, poets, and writers I have admired my whole life, I would rather quietly contemplate things as they really are, in all their messy, complicated reality rather than angrily voice how I think they should be.
It used to bother me a lot through the years: my middle-of-the-road, middle-class, middle-management, wishy-washy point of view. In my thirties, when I first came out, I tried wearing huarache sandals, going to tea dances in P-town, and taking part in the pride parade in Boston. I innocently thought these were distinctly lesbian things to wear and do, until it finally dawned on me that I don’t identify as lesbian. I’m somewhere (no surprise) right in the middle of the sexuality continuum and now prefer to describe my identity as what it is— fluid, not easily defined, and, in a word, just queer.
Janyce’s mom tells a story about Janyce when she was a small child. She says that one time, after a few minutes of leaving her alone in a room, her mom noticed that she couldn’t hear the sounds of playing anymore, and the room was quiet. When she walked in to see what was up, there was Janyce, sitting quietly by the window, petting a bumblebee that she held in her hand. That image, to me, sums up Janyce’s perspective today as well— fearless, but with a gentleness towards people and other living creatures and a curious love for nature.
I’m struck by how our values seemingly hold true throughout the course of our life, but I’m also wondering about those times when it seems like a person actually does change their perspective drastically. I’m remembering a powerful movie Janyce and I watched over the summer about a man adopted by a skinhead cult when he was a child. He eventually came to denounce the hateful life he once led and underwent the painful process of removing all the tattoos from his face over a period of years. But I wonder still, did he ever really change his ideology? Or did he just return back to the person he always knew that he was. Once again, I hold the two sides in my mind. I’ve finally made peace with the idea, now in middle age, that there is nothing wrong with my point of view.
We’ve parked the car at the train station with a few minutes to spare. The platform is nearly empty with only a few people milling about in coats with their suitcases close by, and one woman, standing next to her Jehovah’s Witness placard is hoping to catch the eye of at least one other person so she can complete her mission for the day.
“I wonder what makes that woman want to stand out in the cold with those books rather than feed the homeless?” says Janyce, unbuckling her seatbelt as the train slowly pulls in to the station and people start gathering around the center car.
“Perhaps it has something to do with her perspective,” I say.