Soon, very soon…
When I’m sixty four. Will you still need me. Will you still feed me.
We grew up listening to these words like they were distant shore never to be landed. Well, we arrive, and quite possibly on false footing as we will soon be sixty-five, then sixty-six, and on and on and on.
“What do you do to keep yourself busy,” I ask a childhood friend already on the other side, comfortable living in safe harbor, hoping his words of encouragement will welcome me ashore.
“I don’t have a problem finding things to do,” he says quietly, a man who never tried to interject when others, like me, pressed to talk. “And remember, I didn’t leave something I liked.”
Another friend shares an article — surprising portrait of a seventy-three year old woman careening down mountain side on two wheels. Living life in full. Not waiting. Not worrying. Being. At speed
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is to appreciate where you are,” she reports at the end of her story about time cycling up and down in the woods. “I would love to be sixty-five again.”
Today. The message for when I jump on my own bike, not to climb some Selkirk summit , but to top Summit Avenue in Brookline, where Mary once trained as a world class rower, where The November Project embraces six am training runs. Legs pumping. Wind whistling. This ride. This moment. Now.
A way to live. To be. Here.
Embracing our recent weekend with Jack Kerouac’s monumental manuscript On the Road.
Feeling Emilia Jones sing Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now in CODA’s final scene.
Loving waking to the sound of robin call — eyes open to sun rise not alarm bell, living the natural circadian rhythms born of a more predictable pandemic life.
It’s April in Boston, where daffodils bloom to marathon throng. Where ocean temps chill, and flowering trees warm. The promise of summer as real as Opening Day and soon, very soon, Fenway’s welcome of the man who wrote the words.
Sunday mornings go for a ride. Doing the garden. Digging the weeds. Who could ask for more.
We don’t ask for more. We stop to take on this very shore. This day, and all it offers.
