My Birthday

I'm getting older.  In ten days, I'll head out with a few close friends to celebrate turning 50.  Here's the thing, since I was an angst-ridden teenager I've looked forward to turning 50, convinced that by then I'd have a clear vision of myself and the world, and therefore, have found peace with both.  As laudatory as it was for a 13 year old to believe that life goes on after 30, I find it hasn't worked out the way I'd hoped.

Instead, as I type this, my body is ridiculously covered with small, red, itchy pustules.  I have the chickenpox, generally considered a childhood disease; this in spite of the fact that recently x-rays and MRI revealed degenerative arthritis in my hips and spine, some of it severe; my eyesight has gotten to the point where I am now one of those older people in the aisle of the grocery story with a box in my hand moving it closer and farther, while moving my head up and down to line up my progressive lenses with the impossibly small type. ( As a side note, I did once see a snowy haired woman with an enormous magnifying glass in her hand roaming the same aisles.  This may be my future.);  and I seem to have misplaced my short-term memory (Actually, I know exactly where it is.  I parked it where many women do: no sleep-and-working-mother-land.  At I time when I didn't even realized I was bargaining, I made the barter, and it was done.)

Which brings me to my point.  In a month, my husband and I head out to hike the Appalachian Trail.

 He plans to do the whole thing; while I will walk the first month with him and then hop off to take care of my daughters.  I have decided to trust my physical therapist and not worry about whether my body can handle such an effort.  What I have decided to worry about instead is what to read while out there.  As I thought about it, this shifted into maybe I could memorize poems and passages that I love.  A woman who was well into the libation stage of a dinner party once amazed us all by reciting the opening pages of A Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish. The beauty of it is something I hope to never forget.  

Memorization is a patient person's game.  I am not patient.  I forget my address and phone number as soon as I move.  To be honest, at this point, I sometimes double check my current address before sending out an envelope to be sure I remembered it correctly.  But I think it's time.  There is, after all, still a way I hope to walk in the world as I turn 50.  I think maybe this long walk is the time to take a few of the things I love in the world and hold them more patiently.  This would be a good place to start.