Cobblestones

After 56 years of life, I decided to go back to school and declare a second degree. People keep asking “why?” No, let’s ask them why. Here’s my why question.  Who thinks at 56 my usefulness to the world is so diminished that all I can do is plan retirement or load the dishwasher? I’m getting tired of suggestions about how I could fill my already busy days if I’m “bored” (never been bored in my whole life) as if the things I’m passionate about have zero value and need to be replaced with some domestic task to wrench me out of my inertia. My brain still works in fits and starts even when my body hurts in ways I would never have imagined a few years ago.

I got A’s this quarter. That was not a surprise. What I was surprised about was the obstacles were not academic. There was a day when I had trotted across all those cobblestone paths until I did not think I could make it back to the car. A woman stopped to ask me if I was lost because I just stood looking at this beautiful building as the morning light shifted the brickwork into a fireworks display. Nobody else stops to look but I know the designers did that magic on purpose. She, a woman nearly my age, thought it meant I was maybe impaired because I was drinking in the details of my surroundings. Hubbin, who drove me to the campus most days, would say cutting awful things along the lines of “you’re just going to quit” and then drive me there again and say how much he liked having someone to share the journey with.

It is surprising which friends have been supportive and which friends’ eyes glaze over if I even say what I’m doing. It’s surprising which friends don’t even know what I’m doing.

Sometimes I would just sit alone somewhere and wonder what the hell I was going to do to get through it all because I was just so damn tired. Then wonderful things came out of my brain, stuff I had to share with people who are going to judge me, and it was okay.

I read a lot of compositions by millennials and zoomers, my new body of peers, filled with heart-wrenching details about how their flawed parents made their young lives hell so they were declaring creative writing majors to get even. That really messed with my already overworked empathy chip. You have to be kind. You also have to resist the urge to get involved, to try to “fix it” when people are oversharing. Part of me has spent decades in service to others and thinks I’m supposed to do something when somebody has a problem. It is flattering to be deemed trustworthy. Part of me also resents the idea that I’m not “dangerous” and can be pigeon-holed so easily. It’s not like I’m going to commit major crimes or spray paint my name on the sides of train cars but but but…

I read a story the other night about a guy who wrecked his car in the town where my MIA friend Delphyna lives, and because he had a warrant, he ran from the cops. He left his mother in the car. HE LEFT HIS MOTHER IN THE CAR. People were speculating about whether she was somehow vulnerable and elderly or just a really terrible parent. They didn’t consider that he was just a douchebag terrible son but easily suggested that SHE must somehow be so damaged that she got left behind in the car like garbage. It could not be the other way around. This is how we are still treating women, mothers no less, as if once you’ve passed a certain number of years there is no value to you except and scullery maid or scapegoat for the failings of others around you. Oh, I have some “why” questions to ask.