March Eighteenth, The Old Fool and the Caboose
a red caboose
I can't remember my mother's birthday.
On one hand this is not a big deal. We were never a huge birthday or holiday family. When my own comes around I often think of it as a Tuesday or a Thursday rather than as a birth-a-versary. Also, my mother has been dead now since 2015, almost-ten years without having to mark the day in anyway whatsoever. My husband says that he only ever remembers any ones' birthday at all because he set a reminder in his phone, or Facebook tells him.
So, on the one hand, its fine, no big deal and on the other hand, it scares the crap out of me.
Maybe its normal. Maybe it is the expectable neurological aftermath of several years of high dose chemotherapy. Maybe its menopause. Maybe it is turning 60. Maybe it is years of personal and collective trauma, and horror at the state of a baking, hoarding storming, genocidal, carceral world around me that seems increasingly committed to reductive moral binaries about all things.
Maybe there is so much more information to absorb that obsolete data points like a dead mother’s birthday get deleted in order free up more storage.
But I tell you, I am past a tipping point and the slow descent has begun. This is the moment where it is no longer possible to stay near the front of the pack, let alone lead one.
I am functioning far beyond my expectations technologically: Several different email addresses, group chats, Signal, Discord, a cluster of loosely thematic social media accounts, a website I administer, do business through and design by myself. The last I can enjoy surprisingly, like crafting or embroidery.
My kids are of course exasperated by the way I use my phone and laptop when they need me to get something done for them ( I am not at the stage where I ask them for technical help yet). But evidently my phone font is huge and hilarious, and I do everything the slowest way possible – using the drop-down menu because I’ve never been able to memorize any of the F-Control-Whatever short cuts. I hear that I have too many tabs and apps open on my phone. I share links, screenshots, and text in the most ridiculously laborious ways according to those who speak Smart Phone as their first language. I don’t really know of, understand, or use most of the updated time-saving features that exist on my phone, and even if I did, I don’t see what I’d need to use them.
I do my own administrative work. I keep my idiosyncratic and dyslexic accounts with a four-color pen on graph paper. I’ve always contended with dyscalculia so I’m working with what I’ve got.
At age sixty, my weaknesses grow weaker, and they are harder to compensate for. Time-telling, account-balancing and calendar-keeping were always a significant challenge for me but now they are spottier and more tentative than ever.
Generally, I drop more balls than I used to. I miss more emails. Many more people have cause to ask for a little more from me. I trip, stumble, and get my wires crossed more than I want to. I forget names, and pronouns and agree to many small simple obvious and easy requests which vanish from my thoughts a few minutes later if I am not reminded.
This sometimes hurts the feelings of people who want to be remembered, who deserve to have their identities affirmed, and makes other feel dropped or devalued when it actually reflects my operating just this side overwhelm more than it does my values or affections.
And listen. It ain’t all bad. There are absolutely parts of my thinking – my ability to flesh out symbols, weave constructs together, articulate nuances, observe larger cultural patterns that feel deeper, richer, more constellated than ever. I feel these parts of me shining out, lighting my way, and seemingly offering courage or comfort to others.
Simultaneously with all of this I am moving into many new roles and realities: teacher, younger-elder, cancer “survivor” (as opposed to cancer-haver – but I want a better word than survivor), empty-nester – which all bring their own disorientation and learning curve with them.
I forget to give the dog his allergy drops.
I can’t remember my mother’s birthday.
As I have more to offer in one area, I become more exposed, more fallible, more vulnerable everywhere else. This is hard to feel great about in a culture that holds up unforgivingess as positive virtue, that churns through cycles of idealization, resentment, and destruction of their idols and elders.
I repeat myself.
I tell stories I have told too many times before.
I forget words but am more likely to remember books and authors. I unwittingly misgender friends and family that I love and try not to burden them with my internal wince when I do.
I come from a time that has little to no online record, and that the dominant narrative seems to have forgotten entirely. The schemas, possibilities, structures, and oppressions of that era were uploaded into my hard drive in ways that make software updates run slow and glitchy in my machine. I am better at deep, and cumulative learning than I am at fast learning about new things.
This is a loss, a sorrow, a limitation that is new to me, and that I must come to terms with, to not be as “on top of it” as I am used to being. To fall behind.
There are new frames, language, schemas emerging that are so far from my first cultural language that no matter how inspiring I find them, I know I will never be fluent. My very first whiff of becoming old-fashioned, outdated, and dependent on the mercy and patience of younger people, with their fast thoughts, who cannot ever imagine their machinery slowing down.
I’ve chosen, many times, to proactively expose a vulnerability in public, hoping that it will offer comfort to someone else negotiating a similar dilemma. But this is a different beast. These are exposures that others will see before I do if I ever see them at all. These are involuntary reveals, my ass hanging out there, a small but growing hole in my pants that will require each person who sees it to decide whether to tell me about it or not.
And there will be times when I can do something about it and will absolutely want to know, and times when I cannot do anything about it, and being told will feel powerless, embarrassing, and unpleasant.
All this shorter: I am preparing to fall on my face more in public, and the growing numbers of older-elders in my life remind me that there are ways to be graceful, and to offer grace to myself and others through it all.
In the past year I have encountered a brilliant older teacher who did not understand that I might not be comfortable collaborating with a colleague who has actively defined themselves as anti-trans, and who possibly didn’t even understand that such lines in the sand have been or could be drawn.
I have also witnessed a thirty something year old demand that an elder-teacher nearing eighty make a specific political declaration of allegiance on their Facebook page that they likely do not, cannot manage themselves.
I watch such events carefully. This is what I am in for in the next couple of decades, depending on how long I live.
I suspect the task at this point is to keep moving deeper into my heart, to work on speaking more often from there, to cultivate some distrust in any thoughts of my own that feel certain or established, to practice receptivity at every possible opportunity.
I’ll need to assertively love myself as I lag and have patience for those who become impatient with me.
I remember the long, long trains that would pass through the town that I rode all over, shoeless, and helmetless on my three-speed bike. The noise of the engine, the impatience I felt as I waited for it to pass by, and the crossing gate to rise. My hard feet sinking into the road tar as I counted the cars speeding past. But then, at the end, the joyful little caboose, waving at the engineers on break as they waved back, bringing up the rear so happily.
I’m not an engine anymore, driving myself or others forward. I always loved the caboose the best.
My mother’s birthday: was it March eighth? Fifteenth? Eighteenth? When is St. Patrick’s Day? I text my younger brother – but it is a strange thing for an oldest daughter to ask. “When was Mom’s birthday again?” “The eighteenth” he replies.
At least it was on my list of options.
The contrarian Jungian Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig suggests that the only liberation that accompanies and rescues us from the cloying inflation of trying to pull of the role of Wise Elder – is to explore the gifts and humiliations of inhabiting the Old Fool.
The fool who asks any embarrassing question. Who says when they fail: “Of course I will fail! I am but a fool! The real surprise will be if I succeed, and I shall never know unless I try!”
The old fool at the family dinner who says the off-putting or out-dating thing, that makes people wince, but who, unashamed, is pleased to hear how others in the room think and feel. The one who is guided by their heart because they know that thinking too much can lead us astray and down dangerous pathways.
Perhaps it is time for this soon to be old fool to start moving toward the back of the train, to take up the rear vantage point, rather than lingering near the noisy tension of the engine.
The silly caboose. The Old Fool. Heart over Head.
The acceptance of my own human frailty even if it strains the patience of youngers (which is an expression of their human frailty even if they don’t know it yet and is also my limitation when I am impatient with my elders).
Breathing in grace, patience, and forgiveness, for myself and all living things.
