I have a friend named Felix. He just celebrated his third
birthday. My little joke (which I may share with him someday) is that when he
is of age, I will dump my current boyfriend and replace him with Felix. Of
course, by the time the lad is 20, I'll be 67. I’m envisioning a sort of Harold and Maude arrangement, but with a
slightly happier ending.
Not
having had children of my own (but four on loan from my current love), it has
been easy for me to ignore the passing of the years. I have grow slightly
older, but now my niece, my nephews--who have they become? And my parents,
always younger parents than anyone else's, finally start to show their ages, in
body and attitude. I believe they shared a similar revelation recently when my
mother remarked, "How did you get to be as old as us?"
I
realized this morning that I might not live long enough to see Felix's
children, or even much of his life past his 30th birthday. Regular readers of
this irregular blog know that this year has been marked by personal losses, for
myself and some close friends. Mortality has firmly asserted itself in my
consciousness. A summer wedding helped to suspend the truth for a time, while
we celebrated one of life's peaks. Afterwards, I was struck by how much time
really has gone by to have gotten to that beautiful point.
One of
Shakespeare's Sonnets ends with this familiar couplet:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives
life to thee.
(Sonnet 18)
The Immortal Bard was onto something. After all, we feel
we know Shakespeare well through his writings, and that he does still live and
breathe in them, as does the Beloved (and/or the Dark Lady) to whom so many of
the Sonnets are addressed. A book is a Brigadoonish contraption that reawakens
every time we crack the spine. It's not a physical life certainly, but maybe
something better. It's the kind of everlasting that's even more compatible with
our basic design, as I see it.
Every day
I compare the importance of doing dishes to spending an hour working on my
novel, or revising some poems, using the Hundred Year measure to decide:
"In one-hundred years, what will matter?" I don't know if my
great-grandmother, Harriet Ingram Mace, was good about housekeeping. I do have
dozens of the beautiful doilies she crocheted, and marvel at their fine
stitches, charming patterns. A hundred years from now, my dishes, clean or
dirty, will probably be in a landfill. The meals they carried will be reduced
to compost. Writing is an art that can straddle the centuries. I can reach out
to Felix in his old age, and his grandchildren, and although our physical
bodies may be no more, our minds will still be able to connect through the
words I write today.
I have no
illusions about being a Shakespeare, or even the next Violet
"Peaches" Watkins. But for me, writing is what eases my basic
loneliness. It gives me a sense of purpose that nothing else ever has. It is my
art for better or worse, and I am an artist, with all the inner turmoil that
implies. As politics and religion fall consistently short of creating the
Utopian world (here and hereafter) they
promise, art gives us roses in the desert. Here is my rose for Felix, and
Russell, Dallas, Jaimee' and all the ones that have come after me. Imperfect,
slightly bent stem, a thorn or two, but a rose of words that will never fade.
