“How does it feel to have a 24-year-old child?” my sister asked me a couple of weeks ago on the occasion of my daughter’s birthday. “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I’m amazed; I never envisioned it.” But then I never envisioned myself at this age either.
I admit I’ve never spent much time thinking about the future; I’m not one for planning ahead. Staggering student loans and the lack of a retirement fund attest to that. I used to feel guilty about it. Now I’m thinking it doesn’t matter. It’s 2012.
2012; the end of one world age cycle and the start of another wrote the Mayans some 5000 years ago, predicting a great planetary shift that would bring about a quantum leap of consciousness. A time of brotherhood, they promised. An era of harmony, balance and light. Sound too good to be true?
I’m counting on it. Open to any new beginning these days, I cannot wait for the next adventure, cosmically and personally. I am ready for change.
To expedite it, and without any other idea for the immediate future, I head for the basement to see if I can’t sort through the stuff that has stubbornly hung on from lives in Elkins Park, Paris, Recife, Key West, Philadelphia, Washington and New York. It’s been almost 20 years in this house alone. There are things boxed and unboxed, stacked and scattered across the unfinished basement’s cold, concrete floor. A lot of things. It is overwhelming.
“Just make three piles,” I tell myself, gearing up for the job. “Toss Goodwill and Keep.”
There are the costumes; the dayglow boas and carnival masks, silver-striped Indian bloomers and yards of white netting ideal for head wraps, all of which were quite smashing under the black lights we set up for our regular dance nights. There are the fossil fish my Ex wholesaled with the geodes, and the painted ceramic animals I shipped back from Brazil to sell, but which never managed to leave the house. Toss, Goodwill or Keep?
There are the photos of Les Halles, Paris, circa 1973, pictures of the demolition site that would become the Pompidou Center. I am there, young, looking through the rubble for treasures of another time. In back of me, a wall of graffiti reads, Une Seule Solution, La Révolution. Fitting, even then.
Mildewed manila files, stuck together in green jackets, hold catalogs from the jewelry business, radio scripts, programs from the performance art pieces my family never understood, press releases on alternative therapies to sewing machines, and copies of letters I wrote to the school board on the outrage of sugar snacks in the cafeteria and other such grievances.
There’s the child’s chair with its orange toucans bought in Key West when my daughter’s preferred playground was the city cemetery, and a carton of beanie babies that was to make us rich. There is the illustrated book she made for me; I, in the character of an angry cat; and a work of art by a one-of-a-kind Appalachian artist, a friend whom I loved, dead of AIDS in 1988. The painting was too brutally despairing to hang up. Toss, Goodwill or Keep?
It’s hard. Harder than it should be. Is it that I might forget? The past, I remind myself, will weigh you down if you insist on carrying it with you.
Clearly, it’s time to let it go. The future is now, for the Mayans and for me. And when that planetary shift kicks in, full force, I don’t want there to be any resistance on my part. Nor stuff to hold up the works. I want to be ready when that energy moves. Ready, light, buoyant and free.
A soaring and transformative 2012 to all!
Sixties Chick 