songs of experience

I turned 45 last month. January 20. For most of us runners, a birthday ending in 0 or 5 is cause for celebration (a new age group!) and, yes, I did burst onto the 45-49 scene with an indoor mile world record: 5:04, wahoo! But for me, 45 means more than realigned margins of victory. (Anyone can call themselves “world class” if they manipulate the classifications. i.e. I am ranked #1 in downhill ski racing … the classification being female racers between the age of 45-47 living in the odd-numbered houses on Winningham Road in Chapel Hill – see how it works?). Anyway, 45 means groovy things like clarity and peace and wisdom (at least some of the time – finally). 45 means no longer fretting over which path to choose in life. This is this. I am on my chosen path. I have crested my mountain (or my mole-hill?) and I intend to rest at the top for a while. I rather enjoy the view.

This morning I pondered what is 45 (halfway to 90, God willing) in my preparation for our seejanerun spring season. As I mentioned earlier, I assigned a six-word memoir poem for the first day of practice. A memoir is a written form of self-revelation, just as blogging is a way to reveal oneself. Who am I now, at 45? How am I different from 25 or 35?

When I remember 25, I start to get all sweaty in the armpits. I’d die if I had to go back to that time in my life. I am the only 80’s feminist I know who wanted children MORE than a career. Problem was, if you didn’t marry your college boyfriend you had to wait another 7-year cycle before any eligible men wanted to settle down. So, I waited – unwillingly and inelegantly (careening through several bad relationships with midnight drunken scenes and multiple heart fractures) until my first husband agreed to take on the project of me. I was a difficult case. He hung in there gamely, but my dysfunction outlasted his patience. What we did get right in our marriage was Sarah Jane and Rosie.

At 35, I was up to my nostrils in poopy diapers and what Wm. Blake calls “the same dull round.” For stay-at-home moms, the years go by so fast but the days take forever. I spied a young mother at the coffee shop this morning with a toddler in one arm and a fat library book in the other. That novel she’s reading will have to be on perpetual renewal because she won’t be able to finish it for at least 3 or 4 years. I stopped going to the library in my 30’s because it made me resent my kids.

But I go there all the time now. At 45, I can linger over books of poetry. I can ponder Keats’ knight-at-arms:

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

In trying to describe what it feels like to be officially middle-aged, I told my [current] husband, “I know I am happy and that my life has finally slowed down enough to enjoy because I hear the birds singing every morning.” I don’t remember caring about any damn birds at 25 … and at 35, their incessant tweet-tweeting outside my bedroom window was probably an annoyance in my sleep-deprived state… but at 45, I love those birds!

This may well be tomorrow’s 6-word memoir:

Alive
at forty-five
listen!
… morning birds.