56

It rained. And that was just fine.

The movie was ridiculously long and obscure and, frankly, dull. And that was just fine.

I’d intended to take the day off work and play in the garden. But it rained. So I didn’t. And that was just fine.

No fancy dinner — movie popcorn and afterwards a cheeseburger at the dive bar I’ve gone to since I’ve been old enough to go to dive bars. And that was lovely.

Back home, we read a New Yorker article aloud about an overdue earthquake and tsunami expected to hit the Pacific Northwest. While that isn’t fine, the reading of the article was lovely.

We went to bed and curled up and fell asleep. So very fine.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, the second day of the hearings outlined the overripe, flabby nature of our democracy. Not fine. Not fine. A lifetime of not fine.

I was born into the Vietnam war — my father avoided the draft because of my existence, hearing my parents tears in the kitchen late at night with the news of another friend’s death came through the curly cue cord of the Ma Bell yellow phone. Summer memories a swirl of swimming lessons while the Watergate hearings droned in the background and my mother read a book about a soccer team that resorted to cannibalism while stuck in the Andes. The growing up years of waiting for nuclear war. Waiting. Sure it would happen. The endlessness of Reagan. I was a late teen — no context that this would ever end: Oliver North Jessie Helms Jerry Falwell. I started having sex in the midst of AIDS. Terrified to put anything in anywhere with the possibility it could come out poxed. Watching the emaciated, painful deaths of beautifully alive men.

Through all of that, there were birthdays. They don’t stop, do they? That annual chance to pause, reflect, remember where you were last year, and — I wished — to be celebrated. When I’d finally hear the Fatboy Slim song “Celebrate You Baby” there was an embarrassed recognition of how badly I wanted an adoring man to boom-box that outside my bedroom window.

What I recall: 19 in Lyons, a chocolate cake I bought myself in a patisserie and shared it with a friend in a small park that smelled of France—piss, exhaust, and butter. 24 in Seattle, camping by a creek, an oddly fitting dress gifted by a man who was trying. 30, on the verge of leaving Seattle, a puppy - a surprise, a sweetness, a friend. The early years of motherhood, gifted drooping bouquets and finger paintings, making my own cakes. 40 at a friends’ farm with women of different decades, a marvelous meal, yoga, chilly skinny dipping.

The low point of all — even worse than 13 when my parents gave me luggage (the official end of childhood) and another kid had her party the same night and everyone went to hers instead of mind — was 50. The person I wanted to adore me declared he didn’t know how to do gifts, he wasn’t comfortable with them. Instead, he had a necklace made for himself. Paid hundreds of dollars for an artist to make it and, as though the gods knew, it was delivered on my birthday. I’d asked for a clothesline. I’d asked for a small dinner party, and gave him the list of invitees - even suggested an easy-to-cater option. He did none of this. He admired the necklace in the mirror, its weight against his skin. A dear friend traveled all the way from New York to celebrate with me and watched this unfold, fuming inside, later sharing how much she wanted to pummel him.

It was a wound. Gaping. Weeping. For months and years.

But it’s healed. Yesterday was the proof. It has healed such that the bad movie was lovely. The dive bar cheeseburger was perfect. Reading on the sofa late into the night divine. Not a shred of cynicism in those statements. They were all beautiful.

The news coming down the transom is as wicked and troubling as it was when I was a kid. Vietnam is Ukraine. Watergate is January 6. AIDS is Covid. It ebbs and flows and is ugly and unsettling. But what you earn through enough years in the pool is that these are waves. I gather that which can be done here and now toward me, cupping the water in my hands and knowing that at 56 I have something to offer that is needed in this world. Perhaps it’s called equanimity. It’s a pleasure of the What Is. It’s the acceptance that all is change, all will end, and now and is generally pretty alright.

And right now is just fine. No boom box needed. The bass is always there.