Aging Anxiety
Monday July 17, 2006 07:33 PM
June 10, 2006
I am a twenty-six-year-old child-woman.
The same term was used to describe Janis Joplin, you know.
She was scarcely a year older than me when she died before her time.
I want to ask my peers: Do you ever wonder if you'll live to see thirty?"
I chase my tail in a comfortable but increasingly entrapping extended adolescence,
still decorating the walls of my childhood bedroom with images of rock 'n' roll heroes
(the teenage posters having long since graduated to tasteful black and white photographs in wooden frames).
But I unhappily watch them turn sixty and beyond, one after another.
A favorite singer has retained his boyish voice but not his boyish looks.
I watch him on the television and marvel at the crow's feet around his eyes that are absent from the liner notes of his 1970s records.
I pity him when I see his long, luxuriant brown locks turning grey and visibly thinning out.
How can I imagine a youthful sixty
when I can't see thirty?
I repeatedly implore the Lord:
"God, don't take me away until I find a husband!"
Before thirty or after sixty, mortality still awaits.
And then--my brother's laugh cuts through the slumbering house, a most welcome reassurance.
I do not need to fear tomorrow.
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