I hit my head last week walking the dog. I tripped in the dark on a piece of upheaved sidewalk that was in the shadow of a tree. I was looking in people's windows ,watching them cook dinner, sit around the kitchen table with family. I love that. All the insides look so warm and homey at night with the yellow light shining out into the dark. It's really surprising how many people leave their curtains open! I feel like I need to explain that this accident was not specifically age related. I feel like there’s a subtext to anything that happens to me now that I'm in my sixties. Did I temporarily loose consciousness? Did my osteoporotic bones collapse under me? “Oh, no! I didn’t trip because I don’t see well enough! I just wasn’t watching where I was going!” Did I forget where I was going? If I’m that absent minded, am I ok being alone? I need to not...
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The good news is that I've realized that most of the tragedies in my life could be covered in a half hour sit-com. There's maybe one Lifetime movie for a slow week in February, but definitely no black and white documentaries or movies starring Sally Field as me looking back at epic times. This is how I wish I felt about snow! I'm not sure if this is the result of edited thinking on my part--"Oh, I really wasn't that weird"--which you could make an argument for, or just the realization that so many other lives around the world have been so much harder. What I do realize now is how much of what looked like courage was mainly a lack of awareness of possibility. As one friend of mine, a policeman, told me once, "You don't think anything bad is going to happen to you because nothing bad has happened to you so far." Old age takes courage. Partly because there are so many possibilities for things to go wrong when you're old. I forgot some...