Is this aging? Is it some moral failure of my own to not appreciate the present moment? Why always the ache of endless possibilities?
Sunday morning. I’m in bed, two cups of coffee finished, the reading lamp on and my book tossed to the side. My spouse Janyce left over a half hour ago for the morning neighborhood loop with the dog and I hear her opening the garage door and entering the kitchen. It is already 8:39 and I’m paralyzed by choices that I refuse to make.
“Incoming!” says Janyce as my dog Swirls comes running into the bedroom bounding up on the bed. Her fur is cold and she smells like the start of winter.
I have half of a midterm paper to finish and I’m feeling resentful after working on it most of Saturday. I already decided that a grade of B- is acceptable. I don’t care about the subject matter, or the class, and I’m not even sure about my motivations for taking it anymore. I also have forty or so pages left to savor in my novel and I could easily sink back down and read for the entire morning. Earlier, on a chilly trek through the living room on my way back from the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand, I noticed both bird feeder cylinders were empty. They were swinging against the backdrop of leafless branches and frost-tinged backyard grass, glints of morning sun hitting just the tips. Sparkling pinprick crystals.
It’s a beautiful morning and the choices are now piling up. Janyce has mentioned washing the floors again. We talked on Friday about filling the days with workouts, and long hikes in the Upton State forest with the dog, but this was when everything was three-day weekend possible. We also discussed grabbing an afternoon specialty cocoa and taking it with us to the nail salon, leaning back together, side-by side in the leather chairs, bouncing and jostling, while pressing the massage buttons, our feet soaking in the rushing warm water. I had a brief thought about making us french toast this morning, with the stereo blasting out jazzy Christmas instrumentals, the glaring over-lit tree in the corner—all while lazily looking out the glass slider, (which needs cleaning) and watching the jubilant acrobatic squirrels as they scramble over the summer patio furniture that is waiting to be hauled down to the basement and housed for the winter.
Now it’s late morning and time is slipping past us. Swirls lets out a small groan and a long sigh as if she can hear my mind churning and is already weary of my mental machinations. She moves her snout from the window pane to the comforter, the tip of her nose burrowing in a fold.
“What do yo want to do today?” I say to Janyce as she walks into the bedroom fully dressed, cheerfully sauntering by the foot of the bed, seemingly invigorated by the sun and chimney smoke outside.
“Breakfast!” she says.
I’m still wrapped in the blankets, my head propped against the pile of kilim pillows resting against the headboard, their scratchy side turned away. I’m well past chapter nine in my book, but I turn back to reread the subscript words that open the chapter. They are the same ones that Frank Bascombe reads in the middle of the night at 2:46 in the morning. I habitually wake close to that time every night as well.
Once one has glimpsed the limits of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the dream of endless possibilities we once thought were ours—comfort, idleness, taking things lightly.
I can’t say that I have truly ever grasped the limits of my existence. Frank is 74 and I’m only 57. But I can say I have felt something akin to a shadowy dreadful foreboding, like a tendril of smoke curling around my brain in the deep of night, an edgy tightening in my chest while I peer into the darkness at the far other end of the room, squinting to see the digital time display on the sunlamp. In those moments I ponder my next move. Do I turn over and try to sleep again? Do what Janyce likes to advise… “Just lie still,” she will say in a half sleep herself. But I want no part of lying still. There’s my problem. I will lie still when I’m dead, I think. Instead, I turn on the reading lamp and join Frank and his son on their mostly mundane (although sometimes magical) drive through South Dakota, a place I’m in no rush to put on the bucket list of future travel options.
Is this aging? Is it some moral failure of my own to not appreciate the present moment? Why always the ache of endless possibilities?
A friend of mine left me some thoughts in Messenger some time ago. She has hard choices to make right now. Much more difficult than my “what should I focus on for the day” decisions. I sent her a few words of my own hard-won wisdom over the years. But I know that her decisions are better navigated alone.
Nina Lindsay REPAIR The rain showers won’t stop returning, as if someone needs to make a decision. Haggard doves and delivery vans prowl around morning’s scene of general disaster. At the café we don’t really pay attention, we are reading the East Bay Living section, the comics, the reviews, the April travel ads. Every now and then one person looks up, and down. We all think we are in the same lifeboat. And we don’t delude ourselves lightly— we go about it with the same care you take with newborns, with pastries, with the Christmas present you unwrapped once, in the middle of the night, underneath the tree, knowing too much to sleep, a longer distance ahead, love oddly steadier for the disappointment, and hope only slightly blemished.
Now I smell the orange scent of Janyce’s floor cleaner. We’ve since had breakfast, and I have spent the past hour idling away back in the bedroom while she finished washing the floors.
“Is it possible to love a mop?” she says, whistling as she walks past me in the bedroom. My lower back is starting to ache from too much lounging, the dog is lying on her side, breathing deeply. I look up from the computer and it’s close to noon.
Time to get a move on, I think. The sky has now since clouded over, and the nail salon is only open until 5pm. I reach for my phone to make us late afternoon appointments. My first decision of the day.