That’s me in my new helmet sitting at The Monkey Cup, a nice little coffee bar on 7th Ave/ACP between 118th and 119th Streets. The new bike, an electric vehicle made by Cannondale, not the cretinous Elon’s Tesla, is over my right shoulder.
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My last post, “Still Disabled,” has caused some concern and commiseration from old friends and perfect strangers, who have thanked me, grudgingly, or cursed me, happily, for describing what they’re feeling as geezers for real or geriatrics in waiting. The tenor of this correspondence is distilled in the exclamation of a woman I went to graduate school with in the 1970s: “IT SUCKS!”
They’re right, it does, this visible decay of our bodies, which we measure not by looking in the mirror—for there we probably see the homegrown likeness of Dorian Gray—but by noticing what we can’t or don’t do anymore. If we’re not in pain (I’m lucky, I’m not), it’s the stiffness and the stillness of the mortal coils that bother us: we know that more and more places and things are beyond our physical reach. I know by now, for example, that the jump shot is a long shot.
Sometimes this knowledge yields resignation, sometimes rebellion (or plain denial), but in any case it does force us to consider the outer limits of our mental reach, and, often enough, to storm that barrier by taking piano lessons, or trying to learn Spanish, or taking better pictures, or imagining the world without us in it (but George Bailey need not apply.)
In my case this imagining takes the form of forgetting, not retrieving, the past, which amounts to—but doesn’t feel like—resignation, because there’s no system to it, no shrink and no map to guide me through the thickets of memory. I’m rummaging in the closet (in your case, the basement or the garage), looking for things to toss, not tidy, save, catalogue, or otherwise keep as a reminder of an order of events that no longer contains or defines me. And that aimless procedure has yielded some discoveries that place me in an abiding present, where I begin to feel, for the first time, that my future isn’t something to fear, that my life need not or will not end abruptly, violently, or painfully. Maybe it should be, or must be, but that doesn’t matter anymore because I can’t care about how it ends, only how it goes, and just for the time being.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things to do, or rather things I’m supposed to be doing. I got places to go, people to see . . . . And yes, I bought that electric bike, which, like any good tool or prosthesis, extends and amplifies my body’s capacities, so that their dwindling strength doesn’t (have to) feel like decline.
But still, I’m feeling graceful. Not that I’ve been near the dance floor, no, I mean grace in the very old-fashioned sense of knowing this stillness I feel isn’t merely inertia, nor an interval that requires patience, as if I’m waiting for something (like death) to happen. I mean that time itself seems, just now, to be expanding to the point where it doesn’t pass, it just moves, and not in any discernible direction. That abiding present is getting bigger.
I tried to say this in my reply to that comrade from grad school days:
Hey Terry, yeah, it does suck, but the weird thing at this end—as it were—is that I feel better, and I mean physically, than I have in years, and not in spite but because of the newfound frailties: I'm more acutely aware of what my body's parts are doing, and can do. It's as if I have come home to my parent's dilapidated old house and discovered not the cramped rooms and closed doors and cold silences of my childhood, but an archaeological site worth digging around in as an adult. I know that sounds kind of sappy, sentimental at least, but it feels true, for now. Maybe it's as simple as the end of alcohol in my bloodstream, where it had finally become a poisonous contaminant that threatened the whole organism. Maybe it's all in my mind's eye, the cracked lens that can't see the depletion of my body, only the miracle of its physical presence—something I didn't think possible at this chronological extremity. I don't know. I can assure you that I don't have any pain to speak of, just stiffness and lack of strength in my legs (where the nerve endings decayed or died). But now I've got the bike.
Reading your words here brings peace. Bless you.
This makes me happy.