What Everything Costs

she said in a sobbing childlike way, "We could live quite well on my own fortune — it is too much — seven hundred a-year — I want so little — no new clothes — and I will learn what everything costs."

these are rich days
full of failure and deceit
the sort of days you learn from and take to heart

illness giving way
to rude health
and fretful hungers that die away with dawn

still the hammer blows
and chips of marble flying
we are not half done yet no matter what the tape

may try to compass
I have flown over
the mountains between us and they would have no end

for a little insect creature
climbing over every fold
it will have to be the airplane and the bus however

inappropriate
will it be false
on that account? we can only hope and labor knowing as we do

what work requires
what attention is
having learned long ago what everything costs

Dogged

One of the things I watch for at this age, of course, is the onset of old-man habits. I've noticed one coming on -- slow, dogged preparation. Today rather than hopping into the passenger seat of the car, and hauling my pack onto my lap, I opened the back door and set the pack on the back seat. My patience -- which you might also define as my determination to do things the easy way, regardless of how long it takes -- has been steadily increasing. If it takes that long, well, it just takes that long. I'm not to be hurried or flustered.

Which seems all to the good: it's a combination of a longer view (if my back's a little iffy I'd better coddle it; I have several massages scheduled this week) and of not giving a damn how I appear. "Dashing" is no longer in my repertoire, no matter how I sling my pack around. I'll settle for "comfortable." And if people have to wait five extra seconds for me, well, it won't kill them.

Now, those who know me might observe that I've always had a dogged and deliberate streak, and further that they've never known me to be all that sensitive to the opinions of others. But they wouldn't be quite right about that. Even those of of us who are, as a middle school teacher delicately said of my daughter, "internally motivated,"* have a list of proprietary characteristics we pride ourselves on, and one of mine was swooping in and out of vehicles. It does injure my pride a bit to be observed deliberately loading the car when all I'm doing is going to breakfast. But pride, as I think now, is there to be humbled.

*"Your daughter is internally motivated," observed the teacher. "God yes," I agreed. "She's as internally motivated as a mule."

Move

I've explored hundreds of of bodies with my hands, now. The bodies under my hands have gestated, given birth, recovered; breasts have filled and emptied. They have had strokes and recovered from them, or not recovered from them. They have nerve damage, diabetes, fibromyalgia, epilepsy, Reynaud's, HIV. Innumerable pulled backs, twisted knees, turned ankles.

What stands out to me, over and over, is how plastic the body is, how rapidly it changes. It wastes away alarmingly when confined to bed, and recovers tone incredibly fast when it becomes active again. People who move a lot are flexible, toned, and young: sedentary people are stiff, flaccid, and old. Blindfold me and give me sixty seconds to knead someone's shoulders, and I won't be able to tell you how old they are, but I'll be able to tell you with fair accuracy how much they move every day. People who do yoga, or varied physical work, have bodies that are twenty years younger than people who mostly sit. They move easily, relax readily. There aren't the glitches -- skips -- snags -- that you get in sedentary bodies.

I don't ask people much about how they eat, but of course people tell you things. I don't notice that eating properly makes a lot of difference, not compared to moving around. People who eat dreadfully can be in great shape, and people who eat well can be a mess. Fat doesn't make much difference either: people can have a hundred extra pounds of adipose tissue and have lovely, flexible, toned muscles, and a body that serves them well. The common equivalence drawn between skinny and healthy is not something my hands confirm. Some lean bodies feel healthy and some don't: some fat bodies feel healthy and some don't. But no sedentary bodies feel healthy.

I can tell if people are sick. I don't know how: or rather, I don't know how you'd pick up what I perceive on mechanical instruments. I'm pretty sure it could be done. The imagery in which my brain registers it is all of currents, flowing air or water: people feeling the same things I feel in ancient China thought of them as air, and called them "winds," in medieval Europe they thought of them as fluids, and called them "humors." Anyway, you lay your hands on someone and you feel them running through their body, whatever they are. Like you can take hold of a bit of plumbing and feel the water running through it. It can be rapid, sluggish, strong, weak; it can pulse regularly or irregularly. It can be warm or cold; it can be different colors. In someone who's sick with a virus it's sticky and erratic, dim and yellowish. Sort of staticky.

I've said it before, I'm sure I'll say it again: if you want to be young and healthy, move. Work out, or run, or swim, if you like those things. Or just wriggle and roll around. Improvised movement probably gives you more bang for the buck than repetitive movement. But whatever. Just move. Take five minutes to just inhabit your flesh and feel it breathing and pulsing, brewing and percolating. If you check in -- right now -- you'll find there's something it really really wants to do. The legs want to stretch, or the shoulders want to stretch, or the face wants to grimace. Just do that. It won't take a moment.

The Past, the House of Skype, Chinese Etymology, and the Hudson Valley

You turn increasingly to the past, as you age, because it's your own: as the witnesses drop away, it becomes more and more your private preserve. Fewer and fewer people can dispute your version of it. Or care to.

Of course, the more exclusively yours that country becomes, the lonelier it becomes. Nobody new can really go there with you, however polite and obliging they may be.

No. I'm not going to linger in the past. Not a winning game.

---

It is terribly frustrating, not being able to express myself in the spoken word. I hate it. I'm so stupid. I was on the phone with a stranger, discussing poems, and in fifteen minutes I couldn't express a single sophisticated thought. Approximations, little grunts of approval or disapproval, a tiny tiny repertoire of sentences and phrases. I drop to the level of a kindergartner. What is that?

A plague on the house of Skype. I hate them. Destroying the world in which I can communicate, in which I'm fluent, even.

Oh well. It was a nice moment. I'm glad I was here for it.

---

Chinese, of all languages, must teem with false etymologies. Every time you write a new word down, you have to guess at its etymology, by choosing among the hundreds of written characters that can represent those syllables. So you'll pick something plausible, and almost certainly wrong, and at once a new semantic history is grafted onto the word. I can't imagine how historical linguists try to do their stuff, with Chinese. Every literate Chinese for thirty centuries has been industriously laying false trails for them.

---

There comes a moment, when you've left New Haven, and you've been driving west a few hours -- driving through the rolling bumps of New England: little hillocks, which the natives inexplicably call "mountains," and which are every bit as claustrophobia-inducing as the buildings of the cities, because they're all about the same size, and you can never get up, never get your head above the water and get a look at the lay of the land -- there comes a moment when you come up to a ridge over the Hudson Valley, and you can see the great river spread out below you. A vista. And your heart leaps up, because suddenly, suddenly you think it might really be possible that somewhere there is still open country, wild land, places nobody owns or fences. Maybe Oregon is still there. Maybe you can go home.

Middle Age

For a while I was bothered by the invisibility of middle age. A large number of younger people stop seeing you: you're not a potential friend, rival or lover, in their minds, so you have no conceivable use. One glimpse of your white hair and you simply vanish from their field of vision. You're not there. For someone who liked flirting as much as I did, that was difficult, at first. But I don't mind it now. In fact it's useful: I can effortlessly avoid getting tangled up with narrow and selfish people. They don't even see me.

So far, at fifty, there are only three things that I really dislike about being middle-aged. One is the decline of my sight. I can't read fine print without reading glasses, any more. I can't read even normal print, for very long, without them. So I have to pack glasses around, lose them, buy them again. A bother.

Another is that I can't hear soft, deep voices very well any more. It's difficult also to follow conversations in noisy, crowded places. I particularly resent the cavern restaurants, so common now, that have deliberately ruined their acoustics so that there will be a cheerful roar of voices and a din of music. It is cheerful, but when it means you can't follow the conversation at your own table, you start to feel like a stranded dinosaur, with the cheery little mammals all chittering around you.

The thing I dislike most is that I can't think quite as well as I used to. It's subtle. But I used to be able to solve quadratic equations in my head, and I can't do that any more. I notice it playing Tetris: I'm not as quick at visualizing how shapes will rotate and fit together. It's not a huge change, but it's unmistakable. I don't (to drop into Computer jargon) have as many registers for storing temporary information. I can't hold two sums in memory while working out a third. I'm not as clever as I used to be. And I don't have the long-term memory capacity that I used to have, either. I don't think I'll ever again learn a language from a language family I don't already have a handle on. Not to read easily. I was defeated by Chinese and Tibetan, a while back. I'll never really learn Arabic, or Welsh, or Hausa, now. I don't think it's anything pathological: it's just ordinary wear and tear on the brain. It's the reason that mathematicians do their best work in their twenties. There aren't many mental activities that require that kind of memory capacity, or that much quickness and dexterity of mind, but I notice that I'm not quite as good at the ones that do.

But that's it. That's the whole, for me, of the discontents of middle age. I wouldn't be twenty again, for the world: I was so lonely and desperate, with no pharmacological weapons against depression and anxiety, no resources of meditation, and no idea of how to maintain my body's equanimity. I love knowing what to do when I get anxious. Knowing what to do when I have a sore shoulder or low back pain. Knowing what to do when cravings get out of hand. Knowing how to get company when I'm lonely. I am so much better now at the day to day business of being alive, of keeping my body and mind and spirit in running order. And I've learned enough hard lessons that I not only know what to do: I do it, mostly.

The nicest thing is that I'm not in the running for glory, any more. My name will never be known. As a child I acquired absurdly high expectations, no less burdensome for being vague. Someday I would have a name. I would be the acknowledged best at -- something. I lived under those baleful stars for years, panicking because my chances at greatness were slipping away. And if I was not great, then I was nothing. Worse than nothing, because I had squandered the gifts given to me, wasted my opportunities. My junior high school counselor used to ambush me in the halls (as I remember it: thinking back, I wonder if this can be true) and tell me, more in sorrow than in anger, that I was not living up to my potential. I was, apparently, a great disappointment to the world.

Actually, of course, the world had no particular interest in me, and friends and family would have been more pleased by emotional steadiness and generosity than by honors and distinction. But clear through my thirties I was haunted by glory, and horrified by my failure to live up to my supposed potential. It was not until I coasted into my forties that I realized I had been sold a bill of goods. I was not a genius. The legitimacy of the concept of potential was dubious, and the validity of techniques for measuring it were even more dubious. I was able to entertain a novel, exhilarating hypothesis: what if I was an ordinary person?

Well, then, my life didn't really look so bad. I had done some things wrong, and some right, like most people. I only had to figure out the ordinary things that ordinary people had to figure out. How to make a living, how to have a marriage and a family. How to accommodate my mild social and psychological disabilities. I did not have to figure out those things and figure out my path to glory.

The relief has been tremendous. I knew all along, I think, that I was no genius, and that I was not destined for greatness. There was a huge upheaval in my life. Things suddenly came into focus in a new way. What was wrong with working for IBM was not that I was betraying my genius: what was wrong was that I hated it. If I wanted to touch people it wasn't necessarily because I was a prophet of the age of Aquarius; it could simply be because I liked to touch people, and I could do work that let me do it. The love I felt welling up, all the time, didn't have to be yearning for revolution and universal brotherhood. It could be just love, loving this person, here, now.

The deficiencies that loomed so large, for a fledgling genius -- a certain wishy-washiness, a lack of confidence in my opinions, shyness with new people or in groups -- were actually quite minor for an ordinary human being, and possibly even endearing. I did indeed have to learn to make telephone calls, if I was to work as a massage therapist, but I didn't have to transform myself, by some übermenschlich triumph of will, into a forceful and confident person. I could be a shy person making phone calls. That was okay. Ordinary people are allowed to be shy and awkward sometimes.

So thank God for middle age. I'm glad to be here.