Still Here

For kids whose age is in the single digits, birthdays are a silly time for eating cake and trying blindfolded to pin the tail on the donkey. On mine this past week, my about to be four Nepali "granddaughter" got on her mother's mobile phone to sing "Happy Birthday" and find out what flavor ice cream I was eating. The truth is, since I wasn't turning four that day-- or even seven, I celebrated with champagne instead of ice cream, so I had to tell a little white lie about Dulce de leche. I usually don't give a fib, but how can anyone tell an innocent child whose birthday is just a week away, for people climbing the steeper end of double digits, birthdays are a chilly time for eating crow and trying, now that life has blindsided them, to pin their dented hopes on anything that looks like the jaws of life. 

Once you find out cake clogs your arteries, birthdays do get tricky. On the one hand, they celebrate the fact that you are here. You gotta love them. Parents pouring money through ice cream, clowns and takeaways definitely tweet the happy message that their kid has come out to play. Kids seem to intuit the gift of their being here from all the gift wrapped hoopla that surrounds them, so they just can't wait. "I'm 3 and three quarters!"  Birthdays feel good when you're shiny new and not yet shopworn.

At my age-- ten with a humungous value added tax, birthdays celebrate the truth that you are still here. That means old, our youth culture's dreaded old, BUT, (get the big but) it also means getting closer to winning Survivor!  Looking back over the wars I had to fight, the shortages I had to compensate for, and the mess I made struggling to find my way, my still being in the game seems miraculous indeed. It's an achievement for which a birthday can be the perfect award. 

For getting me this far, for its supporting role, I thanked my body with a spa massage. For rescuing me from myself, for its starring role, I thanked my mind---or spirit or soul if you prefer, with the joy of visiting the Charles M Schulz Museum to spend an hour reading all the old Peanuts cartoon strips. You know, the ones in which Charlie Brown asks the principal if there's more to life than getting the answers right, Lucy Van Pelt reserves the right to be crabby, and Sally announces she's going to try to be a better person...well, maybe starting the day after tomorrow. For making all this possible-- producing me, my life and a very happy birthday, I thanked all the deities in my universe by toasting them, then putting a separate glass of champagne on my shrine. (One of the truths I learned getting this far is you can't keep "friends" if you take them for granted.)

Coming upon a birthday is also like happening upon one of those black and white maps in front of elevator banks, the ones with the arrow and bold print that says: "You are here."  The most miserable birthday I ever had was my 30th because that particular moment on the time line made me keenly aware I was no longer a bright, shiny penny, squeaky clean with promise. I had a past. Life had been a relentless litterbug leaving very obvious trail, a warning tale of crazy patterns certain to shape the years ahead. I stayed in bed in fetal position, afraid, very afraid. When, in spite of myself, I made it to 40, I went out and bought festive red. Red reminded me of the cape toreadors brazenly wave at the charging bulls. It.seemed a perfect declaration of triumph: life may have gored me and tried again, but I was still here. I ate the birthday cake without caring about the fat on my thighs.

I am now a former ice cream eating birthday girl who is antique and vintage, a doyenne and cicerone --and boy, you should see all the cards I got about this old age thing. So, about this old age thing since no one dares talk about it... My past has become way larger than my future can possibly be, weighty enough to tip all scales and drag me down. Its map is enormous, almost encyclopedic. My hard drive RAM is so crammed, I can no longer find stuff; I have become forgetful, a faulty operating system. Last October I sent a childhood friend her birthday card as I have been doing for maybe close to 50 years, pleased at myself for remembering. Until that is, I found out I forgot her birthday was in November.

All the memories, mistakes and tiny triumphs piled up like cairn stones should be my burden, my weighty cross to bear, but at this point they feel like my bounty, gold that can be mined. The last Trungpa Rinpoche liked to say it's only our shit that will save us in the end because it's only our shit that can turn into the fertilizer that makes our richness grow. I think, once I decided to make changes, I grew up fast because I had so much of it.

The pattern of my life at 30, at 40 and beyond was zigzag. I kept moving: geographically, culturally, work-wise. I couldn't have explained why back then, but not long ago Mingyur Rinpoche said in a teaching, when you suddenly shake your leg or move your arm or just take a deep breath, you are responding to a signal that something is not quite what it should be. At some consciousness level, you are aware that something needs improvement, could be made better, is not satisfactory. And by shaking your leg or moving your arm, you also signal that you know what needs to be done. Deep down in our heart of hearts, we all know what perfection is.

The bad news is we don't know how to reach it. I tried who knows how many ways, from Bergdorf Goodman to Bhutan.  We all deal with our sense of dissatisfaction, our feeling that something is a bit off, in our own karmic way, beating our own idiosyncratic path from year to year. Between my body massage and my mind's outing at the museum, I had a leisurely lunch with a no longer young man--he's at that point where I wore red-- I've known since he was born. He told me about his plans for this new year, now that there weren't many threads left from last year to sew into it. He was going to have this lunch, make that contact, finish this script, run that race, maybe move to Denver. 

I sipped my wine and bit my tongue because I'd heard all this before, except maybe Denver because it had been L.A., San Francisco, Atlanta... I'd hear it more than once before. When he finished I didn't really know what to say. Age may take away your eyesight but that gets replaced with so much hindsight, you get fabulous foresight. Age turns you into an unwitting fortune teller. Except we live in a time when nobody wants to hear bad news or negative reviews. You can't be Lucy who keeps pulling the football out, even if what you want to pull away is delusion. 

I casually moved the salt cellar to one side of the table and the pepper mill to the other. "That's where you are now," I said, pointing to the salt, "and the pepper is where I am. Having crossed over, I know what lies in between. I could be a guide but you want to do it on your own. I hear what you're saying. There's not much I can say except the Buddha's definition of Samsara and the textbook definition of insanity perfectly match: doing the same thing over and over again expecting the next time to get a different result. I hope by the time you get over here where I am, you can see that."

High up here on the age ladder, looking back at life below is like looking out the airplane window as it starts to descend. All the lights string together in sparkling jewelry patterns to enlighten the darkness; all those cars inching along a roadway could be ants on a trail; and the box houses lined up one after the other on street after street look eerily like cemetery markers. Whatever is going on down there that seems so overwhelming, so urgent and upending is just nothing from this view, nothing and nowhere at all, and you wish you could scream: "Hey, the disappearing boyfriend, the nasty boss, the cancelled trip, the ten extra pounds, none of it counts for anything, except perhaps making your life a real page-turner."

I think that's supposed to be the Buddhist view here on Earth, the jaws of life.

Anyway, it wasn't much in the big gilded age scheme of things, but I had a remarkably happy birthday. The people at the spa spontaneously sprung open a bottle of champagne, the people at the museum spontaneously gave me a huge book as a gift. I got to eat a great thin crust wood cooked Margherita pizza and give my best to a person I love. Calls, cards and emails came from around the globe, even from an almost four-year-old. The day ended with a Skype video chat between me and Mongolia. I poured my own champagne and made the deities a toast to say thank you for making my day magical. It hasn't always or usually even been pleasant. So I thanked them again for whisking me away from the burden life had been to the joy it feels like now. I celebrated the map arrow and bold letters of my timeline no longer saying: "You are still here."






~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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