Anyone else?

“Old age arrives like the first days of fall. One afternoon you look up, or smell something in the air, and know instinctively things have changed.”
Jonathan Carroll, The Marriage of Sticks
The Publisher Says, of this book I have never read but feel the need to now: Miranda marches into her high school reunion with the confidence of a professional at the top of her field. But inside she is lost, disenchanted with her career, and as alone as a person can possibly be. As a teenager in Crane’s View, she fell in love with unrepentant bad boy James Stillman, and though they never slept together, he thrilled her as no man has since. She returns to her hometown hoping to reconnect with him, but learns at the reunion that he was killed in a car crash years ago. In the weeks that follow, Miranda is haunted by visions of the past. First she sees James, alive and healthy, and more chilling hallucinations follow. Seeking distraction, she dives into an ill-advised love affair that turns darker than she could ever imagine. To find peace, Miranda must learn to walk the razor-thin line that separates this world from the one that follows.

I am glad someone else felt it and described it for me. Something changed when the pandemic hit and here I am: Old. Just...inarguably old. Funny thing is it's not as bad as I thought it would be. I'm tired in a different way, one that sleep really doesn't fix. I'm also really weary of drama and bullshit. I don't imagine I'll say this too many more times because either this realization rings you like a bell or you are thinking, "...do what now...?"

Honestly, it's okay to be old, to see "The End" without a lovely, comforting horizon-line between you and it. Things get old and wear out; one's body is a thing. One's soul isn't. (And no, religious nuts, I didn't find Jesus in my Special K with Red Berries.) I don't really expect anyone to get my post, but I felt my pandemic-battered heart lift at this quote swimming past me. The author's ~73. He wrote this book twenty-five years ago, give or take. I wonder if he looked at this quote some time in the past decade and thought, as I did, "yes yes yes!" with a little lift in his emotional altitude. It is *good* to be old. It feels a bit bodily crummy from time to time(as what does not?), but I never smoked and stopped doing drugs and drinking when the wear and tear did painful things to my body. I'm way better off than most in this part of their sixties.

So why write a post about it? the less tolerant or more judgmental are snorting about now.

Starting with "because it's my blog," and moving quickly to "there are a few hundred readers who, statistically, are likely to be older than the current US median age of 38.1 years who could use a word of happy futures ahead." It *is* happy to get old. It's a privilege denied to most ever born. Pandemics kill in their millions...ten million-plus in this one...and, if you're reading this, you ain't one of 'em. Neither am I. That is a great way to get old: not dying of a nasty plague.

Happy spring, happy May Day, joyful hugs for my living friends. Things have changed...that quote is very acutely true...but we're here to figure out what comes next. For me it's making an ever-bigger dent in my TBR and writing more thoughts and feelings about those reads. I hope I'll see all y'all there.