Schedule It

One thing I am much worse at as I've gotten older is making appointments. I used to be vigilant about everything from semi-annual dental exams to having my tires rotated. I like to think this bi-product has to do with the conscientious mellowing with age I've been doing. Before all the meditation and Eckhart Tolle and Buddhist workshops, I was so Type A! The truth, though, is that somewhere along the way I got too busy to keep up with it all. If I only had a secretary - or better yet, a wife - to manage my calendar and make it all happen for me!

Recently, a friend - a few years older, wiser, in possession of both an assistant and a spouse - asked when I'd last had the oil changed in my car.

My answer was predictably vague, since I couldn’t, in fact, recall. “What about a pap smear?” was the next question, which one can only consider a very broad leap – oil change to pap smear? (Come to think of it, there are similarities…) And then: “When was your last mammogram?” and “Have you had a skin cancer screening lately?”

I'm not completely irresponsible - I just find these things so inconvenient. Besides, once you've lived more than a couple of decades, you've heard countless doctors and scientists and auto mechanics change their views on just how often all of this is necessary, anyway.

The pap smear I could be proud of: just last fall! The oil change: Not so smug. Last summer sometime? Mammogram: 2010, I think. And skin cancer screening: Two years ago March. Okay four, actually.

Aghast, my friend compelled me to schedule appointments - practically loomed over me to ensure I followed through. Not wanting to forget (which is another problem - I might think it's a good idea, but if I don't write it down or do it straightaway, it'll never happen), I took my car in immediately and arranged the other nuisances while waiting among tire stacks and the blaring of Fox News.

A week later, I had my mammogram, and by the time I got the (clean) results, it was time for the next checkup. My dermatologist, who lovingly refers to my little moles and freckles as "wisdom spots,"  scanned me thoroughly with her piercing bright light. I was delighted to hear nothing but "Good. Good. Fine" as she scrutinized. I was home free when all of a sudden she squinted. “Hmm. How long have you had that spot on the side of your face?” I turned my head and looked askance at the tiny, inconsequential dot in the mirror. 

"You mean this little thing?"

A biopsy revealed in just a few days that the little bastard was skin cancer. “It’s the least invasive type,” the cheerful nurse informed me. “And we’ve referred you to the best surgeon in Columbia.”

Which is just a really long way of pointing out there is something to be said for channeling your inner Type A twenty-something (if you're lucky enough to have one). Otherwise, listen to your older, married friends. It is possible, if you pay careful attention to them, to learn something valuable. Now I must go and change the light bulb that burned out three months ago. And find a 9-volt battery for one of my silent smoke detectors...

Dance It

When I was 27, making my second stab at college in a small mountain town in Colorado, I tried out for a play. I'd seen the call for auditions randomly taped to the glass door of Hesperus Hall: a modern dance version of "The Nutcracker." I hadn't been in a drama class since my junior year of high school eleven years before. I'd never even acted in a play - unless you count my stumbling turn as Sally in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," my fifth grade class's showcase in 1976.

I tried out for one of the rare speaking parts and was quickly cast as a silent dancing rat. If you have recently seen the Nutcracker, you'll recall a short battle scene between the rodents and the toy soldiers.  In our production, we wee mice took on the stodgy warriors with a rather clunky capoeira, that Brazilian martial art that combines elements of dance and attack. My part involved lots of yoga-ish stances and tumbling on the wooden stage (which may account for my shoulder problems all these years later). The rats, as we tend to do, lost badly.

What I remember most vividly about our seven-night run was the evening of our final show. We rats were backstage climbing into our gray tights and applying our makeup, when a grave discussion ensued over how the alcohol necessary for the cast party could possibly be procured. The only rat who knew my background gamely volunteered me for the job. A little sophomore glanced at me and asked, "You're 21?" to which I replied, "Actually, I'm 27." Her jaw dropped in disbelief. She looked me up and down, then smiled patronizingly and proclaimed, "Wow, that's so great! To be your age and still doing stuff like this!"

Where you at, Li'l Rat?

I have never forgotten that girl, the way she pitied me and all the other 27-year-olds slumped by osteoporosis over our walkers, as if she herself would never reach that age.

She's pushing 40 now - funny how the number difference shrinks with time, isn't it? But we had less in common than our ages. I'm pretty sure she grew up to be one of those whiners who says things like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I'm going to be 40, I feel so old..." Which means today, two decades later, if she and I were at, say, a Zumba marathon, it'd go like this: We'd throwdown all Step Up Revolution style and I'd be all, "Yeah. Bring it. Check my body roll. Uh-huh. Tha's right." And all she could do is stand there with her mouth hanging open in disbelief.

Beat It

As I alternately sit with it and run with it, I settle in to singledom. When I sit, I meditate - or try to. Mostly I squirm and think, "Stop thinking, just breathe in the bright white light of positivity; breathe out the black smoke of negativity..."

When I run, sometimes I go off the beaten track.Two weeks in a row, I'm out past my bedtime reading poetry, you dig? I somehow swung a feature gig at Drip, a tiny coffeehouse in 5 Points. There I was, in Al Black's Mind Gravy spotlight, surrounded by college students and supportive friends, plus one crazy man who kept proclaiming his love for me until finally getting thrown out. When the young'uns in the front row put down their iPhones while I read 30 minutes' worth of my stuff, I had a Sally Field moment in my head: "You like me! Right now, you like me!" Even you college kids! 

My man, Lawrence.

Which was really great since I have in fact never stopped thinking of myself as a college kid. I mean, when I'm not sweeping coarse gray hairs off the bathroom floor or rubbing Biofreeze into my arthritic shoulder. I feel I'm Sally Field and 27 in my head. (Yes. I was still an undergrad at 27.)

The "lonely old courage-teacher."

After the reading, my friend Cynthia - a professor of literature! - called me a modern day Beat. As an actual twenty-something, I'd hung out at North Beach's City Lights bookshop reading all the beatniks plus Charles Bukowski. I sort of worshipped Lawrence Ferlinghetti. So it felt damn spectacular to be referred to in this way.

And then, at the end of the open mic portion of the night, this kid in a baggy knit cap and draggy blue denim got up and recited - from memory - the only Allen Ginsberg poem I ever loved: "A Supermarket in California."

There we were - me, a generation removed from Kerouac, and this kid Ethan, a generation removed from me - sharing a Beat connection in a little city in South Carolina, about a million miles from where it began.

To listen to a reading of Ginsberg's poem that's nowhere near as good as Ethan's recitation, click here:
A Supermarket in California

Sit With It

I was worried I'd be bored without a boyfriend and I'll admit, the first few weeks were rough. I'd dash off to the gym right after work, burn a bunch of calories, get a big endorphin rush, hurry home to let my dog Bill out to rule his backyard, race upstairs to take a shower, and then pause to look at the clock. Six thirty? You've got to be kidding me...

What would I do until bedtime? I mean, you can only make a bowl of cereal last so long, and I don't have cable. What does an unwife unmother do on a school night? Besides have heart-thumping anxiety attacks while staring at her black-screened cell phone and its pitiful absence of text messages or voicemails?

This evolved quite rapidly into oh-no-what-have-I-done loneliness. Itchy with panic, I stared at that sluggish clock. Then I pulled out my bible, Liz Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, and revisited a very good point: "When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience."

Ah, yes. Sit with it.

So, I sat with it. For about 5 minutes.

Then I got online and searched for things to do. I went to more movies in two weeks than I had all year.  I checked out stacks of books and DVDs from the library. It took me three weeks to watch one season of mafioso in suburban NJ, one season of dysfunctional psychology in Brooklyn, two seasons of lesbian Los Angelenas, and all of "Seinfeld Season 5." (I couldn't finish any of the books except poet Richard Blanco's City of a Hundred Fires.)

Columbia's Museum of Art at night.

Finally, I did something worth talking about. I attended the gala members only opening of "Monet to Matisse" at the museum. I arrived early and made a mad dash for the food tables - if it had been a race, I'd have won the gold! For my first decent dinner on my own in a month, I unabashedly filled up two dainty plates with camembert and hot crab dip, baguette slices and baby asparagus, water crackers and petit fours. I met up with my friend Sherry and before long we were visiting with an elegant woman who'd gone to Europe "on a shoestring" back in 1966 (the year of my birth). Between her tales of misadventure in Amsterdam and my story about losing a flip-flop on a crowded bus in El Salvador, much merriment ensued.

I'd like to try "sitting with it" some time, I really would. For now though, I think I'm going to run with it.