Mean Time

And an Alphabet of Aging Out

I’ve been going through old journals and notebooks throwing out the trivial and transcribing what remains important to me, what jumps out from the pages written years ago. Fall of 2008 in London with my husband. The first day of autumn I was lingering in bed. Unwilling to dress, to venture outdoors. Sad and discouraged and something more complicated than either emotion. My husband and I had floated down the Thames from Westminster Station to Greenwich to visit the National Maritime Museum. We wanted to see the Royal Observatory, the home of Greenwich Mean Time, and to experience the prime meridian. The starting point for longitudinal measurement. Longitude an arbitrary decision. Latitude naturally fixed by the poles and the thick middle of the earth. Longitude the sectioning off of top and bottom could begin anywhere, and it did. In Greenwich, England the old hunting grounds of King Henry the VIII.

Greenwich Mean Time is the yearly average (or ‘mean’) of the time each day when the Sun crosses the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Imposed on the world by the most powerful empire at the time.

It was my first time traveling to London an old city where parks, roads, tunnels, bridges dissect neighborhoods in irregular ways. I rambled by row houses with similar everything: doors, door knockers, glossy wrought iron railings, and hand painted numbers. The kind of high-end anonymity people want when they are very powerful, very rich, or both. In Belgravia near where we stayed Margaret Thatcher lived melting away. Her mind supposedly a mush of memory.

Alzheimer’s doing what it does to human brains infamous or not.

In the British Museum I saw ancient Assyrian reliefs. Histories carved into story panels narrating the offering up of heads to a king. Tablets illustrating wars perpetual around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. I walked by plundered treasures from Egypt, Greece, the Middle East, the tombs and temples taken from complex cultures, the language, physiognomy, weight and wonder of worlds stolen long ago.

More than time had had its way with nations, just as disease does with once healthy minds.

I was shaken by what I learned in London back then and wrote in my journal that at fifty-six, thirty-eight years after aging out of foster care I was done with hope, especially hope of progress.

My own or my nation’s. Maybe even the progress of the human race.

I had doubt. Deep doubt. Doubt is valuable to me because you cannot buy doubt.

Questioning everything is what helped me to move forward after aging out, to get an education, to try to live as fully in the world as I was able to as a twenty something, then an eternally thirty-five-year-old adult and finally in the last third of life, to accept who I am and have always been at heart.

I have always searched for the center of things, the truest center, believing if I could find the core beginnings of myself, the origins of family, community, state or country, if I could better understand the world we share, I might be able to map meaningful growth, a way forward for myself and my loved ones.

I know now that to live a meaningful life I must accept change, not the cruel outwardly imposed kind of change, no, the kind of change which moves from within, come from open-hearted inquiry.

The kind of change which keeps us forever young.

Now as then back in London in 2008 listening to words of hope spoken during a financial collapse, walking by the ruins of civilizations plundered, now as then, I ponder another possibility.

Perhaps there is no center. Only a common middle. Perhaps time and space are as arbitrary as a longitudinal line, a brass strip, inlaid in a cobblestone walkway at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.

Perhaps aging out of life well is staying open and strong and curious about the future, even if, especially if that future is one you will not live to see. I want the future to exist for every child everywhere. I am fueled by that desire, it lives in me now like it did when I was a child myself, it lives in what I am willing to sacrifice and in what I am willing to give, it lives in what I will leave behind, and in what I know can never be stolen. Anyway. The way I make sense of the world is through language. Always have. I don’t remember learning to read or to say my ABC’s. An organizing principle.

An Alphabet for Aging Out

A is for androgyny. Climbing trees in the Missouri breeze strong and flexible, falling on my ass and standing up again.

B is for blood and borderlands. Where I was born and where I now live, near the border with Mexico.

C is for curiosity and Christy Jo my given name. For chin and for cheek, and for all the times I was expected to turn the other cheek.

D is for determination. The kind which keeps you going when you could give up.

E is for entropy the inevitable deterioration of any closed system.

F is for fist, frontal lobe, and furious love, fragile, fractured and feral. For friendship and family. The impulse to grab one another’s hand and run through a field at sundown. Fireflies aflutter.

G is for a grin as wide as the sky when you finally find your life’s work.

H is for heel, healthcare and for hope, and whatever hurt is left that I can no longer hide.

I is for identity and imagination, and all the ways they intertwine. I keep bird feathers on my dresser top and old ideas in my closet. Our imagined selves never really leave us. At 72 I dress like an 8-year-old at summer camp.

J is for jaw and justice and knowing your rights.

K is for knees, knuckles and unexpected kindness. For keepsakes hidden in sock drawers, and love notes stored in boxes under the bed.

L is for love, for lips, for lids, for lines and for loss. At night when I close my eyes in my liminal mind I draw a line around the world I love, an inclusive line. My heart on the line with every line I write. Searching for the lost parts of my own life, the eternally lost parts of my own childhood.

M is for mileage and missing what is left behind.

N is for nipple, nose, and the nape of my neck. For sticking my neck out, taking a risk to speak out and speak up.

O is for orifices, all of them and also for the other lives I might have lived. Stand-up comedian. Mid-wife. Pediatrician. Expatriate. Now, I invite in all of the people I might have been the confident mother, the carefree friend, the knowing lover. Past their prime and rolled into my last self. Where every possibility lives.

P is for perspective, for pointer finger, and point of view, the perspective from which a story is told. First, second, third, and the godly omniscient, alive in rivers, and streams, in navy blue skies and in my love’s hazel eyes.

Q is for quick, that small painful part of a toenail or fingernail torn or left hanging, annoying until it is clipped or cut, and the quivering pain goes away.

R is for rest stop, righteous anger and regret. The cold shadow of self-doubt I fell into in my youth. The lack of confidence in middle age. Thinking I was not enough. Believing what I was told. That I would never be enough. When I was always enough.

S is for shoulder, for suffering, and for shapeshifting. For all the ways a body can evolve to hold hurt and still feel happiness and joy, silly and sweet. Singing in the car, in a shower stall, and in the dark.

T is for thumb, thigh, tongue, and time. The time it takes to find one’s own voice while listening to others, while traveling, often feeling out of place, yet still, in time, able to hear one’s own voice amidst the tumult.

U is for uterus, also known as a womb. The space inside of me which almost fifty years ago nurtured a living breathing being for whom I have blind love.

V is for vulva and for vulnerable and for visionary, the penetrating power to see through, and beyond.

W is for wrist, waist, and the whirl of a fingerprint. For wounds which heal, wrinkles which never appear, and the wisdom to see relationship, the spaces between, to see, to learn and to write everything down.

X is for X-ray and extraordinary vision, capable of passing through solid material to capture images of otherwise unseen interior space.

Y is for yawn, an open-mouthed release of stress, the deep inhalation and exhalation of breath in yoga. For yes, for you, and for You go, girl.

Z is for zipped lips, for zingers and for zygote, a fertilized egg cell, a fusion of difference, the beginning but not the end. The first speck of possibility but not the last, come from a human body but not yet fully human.