This is Getting Old (12 page)

I was glad when my sister and her two daughters moved in with me, but when she bought her own house two years later and they moved out, it seemed like the end of an era. I thought it was time for me to go, too.

In 2000, I rented out the house and set off to explore other possibilities. I lived in a wine barrel in a retreat center in the country, but it was too small; I rented a room in someone else's house, but it didn't feel like my community; I rented a beautiful flat by the beach, but it was a long haul to get to my job and my friends in Berkeley, and I was lonesome. After a few years, I decided to move back in.

I'm still here, still sharing the house with others.

It's hard work taking care of an old house, endlessly fixing and painting. It takes time, money, and energy. I'm in my mid-sixties. When I moved in, I was twenty-nine. I'm able to cope with it now, but for how much longer?

I think about my contemporaries, my friends and relatives: almost every one of them lives either alone or with a partner (unless they are temporarily living with me), except for a few who live in residential Zen communities. How odd that I'm the only one still living in shared housing, like a throwback. It's not a policy decision; I'm certainly not defying the bourgeois lifestyle. Life would be so much simpler if I sold the house and moved into a little apartment or a condo.

But here's the thing: I don't want to live alone. I need my own private space, but I like to hear the sounds of people I love knocking around the house. I like to smell their coffee in the morning (I don't drink coffee anymore), and I like to sit down to a meal together, not every evening, but often, and find out what's shaking.

What does an older single woman do if she doesn't want to live alone? I could sell my house and move into a cohousing
community with strangers. I could move into a Zen community, if I were willing to get up at 4:30 every morning and dedicate my days to a demanding practice schedule. I could join with friends to plan a community together, but when a group of us tried that years ago, nobody ever stepped forward to do the full-time work of finding the place and setting it up, and the group fell apart. If the community already existed, if my dearest friends lived in a homey, socially relevant, spiritually grounded community in the country close to Berkeley, with a good view of an unpolluted body of water, with shared vegetarian meals twice a week, and room for visiting grandchildren, I'd move right in. But I'm not holding my breath.

There's “retirement living.” My mother and stepfather lived happily in an apartment building for seniors for the last fifteen years of their lives. But they were older then than I am now, and I'm not ready for that yet.

Community exists through time, not just in space. By now the house itself has become a member of my extended family. When friends or relatives strain their backs, they let themselves into the yard through the gate and get into the hot tub. They celebrate birthdays and anniversaries in the back yard. My grown sons, my daughter-in-law, my granddaughter, my nieces and nephews come visiting. The house is a way station for friends in transition. It's become part of the commons, and I'm currently its steward. Others, through use, have gained a right of way. I don't quite feel I have the right to sell it, not yet. I keep it open as a place of possibility. The painted sun is still shining on the kitchen ceiling.

In recent years, like chickens coming home to roost, people who lived in the house before have returned. My sister recently cycled through a second time, and a young woman who lived here as a child turned up briefly. Now a niece lives in the house with me, and I'm waiting to see who else is coming.

I know the time is approaching when I'll quit being the housemother, and I don't mean by dying. I'll get too tired to figure
out what to do about the muddy basement, or I'll get too sad when someone I love moves out. A change is coming. Maybe someone will move in with me and promise never to leave, or someone will invite me to live with them. Maybe I'll divide the house into two apartments and rent or sell one of them to a friend. Maybe I'll be ready for a retirement community, or surprise myself by wanting solitude.

It's not going to be an easy transition. I'll need courage. But the commons is a living, breathing organism that stretches beyond the walls of my house. I'm part of it, and these days I have faith that the commons will take care of me in ways I can't foresee.

Getting Good at Staying Still

I
WAS HAVING
C
HEERIOS
and milk with my mother at the little table beside the window, in her retirement building in Chicago. Her sixth-floor apartment overlooked Lake Michigan, and it was one of my mother's greatest pleasures in life to sit in her favorite chair and watch the passing of ore boats and clouds. This was the first morning of my visit, and my mother turned her attention from her lake to her daughter, saying, “Your hair is so wild! Can't you do something to get it out of your face?”

“Why don't you ever tell me when you
like
my hair?” I said.

She tried to redeem herself that evening, lavishing compliments upon me when I put barrettes in my hair before we went downstairs to dinner. But the next morning, again, she looked at me over her bowl of cereal, with her head cocked, and I felt it coming.

“You looked so beautiful last night,” she said, trying to be diplomatic. “I could hardly take my eyes off you.” I knew that was just the prelude. “But this morning . . . can't you just brush it back?”

“Mom,” I said, “I'm sixty-three years old. I'm too old for you to be telling me how to wear my hair.” Apparently I wasn't too old to mind.

“I just want you to know how nice it looks when you brush it back.”

“I know how you like it, Mom.”

“No, you don't! That's why I'm telling you.”

I thought:
You've been talking to me about my hair for sixty years. Do you think I don't know what pleases you?
But I didn't say it out loud.

Anyway, I wasn't in an entirely blameless position myself. A couple of years before, when my mother's hair had been down to her shoulders and she sometimes wore it in pigtails, she asked me if I liked it that way. I said I didn't think it was “age appropriate.” (If she hadn't been my mother, I probably would have been charmed by her braids.) She pretended she thought that was a great witticism on my part, and a couple of times I heard her say to friends, “Susan thinks my braids are not ‘age appropriate'!” But it hurt her feelings. Not long after, she cut her hair short, so that it floated soft and white around her face. And did I mention to her the next time I saw her how nice her hair looked? No, not until she asked me outright whether I thought her new haircut was age appropriate.

My mother was a generous woman, and she loved her children and grandchildren with unconditional love—almost. As the Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi said to his students as he was trying to explain Buddha nature: “You're all perfect exactly as you are,
and
you could use a little improvement.”

I rented a car for my weeklong visit, so that I could take my mother places. She had given up driving a couple of years before, after she drove into a parked car for no particular reason. It was hard for her—not driving. And she couldn't walk far because of her bad back, so the bus stop two blocks away was beyond her reach. A van from the building took residents shopping, but walking around the enormous supermarket, even with a shopping cart to lean on, was hard work for her. And she hated not being able to choose when to go.

I did errands for her: I was glad to be able to take her to the eye doctor to get her cataracts looked at. Doctors' appointments were an emotional issue for her, and the older she got the more of them there were. In a phone conversation not long before my visit she had spoken to me enviously of a friend in her retirement building. “Janet's daughter drives her to
every
doctor's appointment. Oh, I
wish
one of you lived in Chicago!” My siblings and I tried to coordinate our visits with her doctors' appointments, but we all lived far away and couldn't be counted on on a regular basis. She went to most of them by taxi, and it was a long wait for a taxi.

One day that week I took her to an exhibit of Japanese prints at the Art Institute and pushed her through the galleries in the folding wheelchair she used for such excursions. Several times, when she wanted to look at a different picture than the one I was aiming for, she quite literally put her foot down, and suddenly the wheelchair wouldn't go, like a locked shopping cart. It was annoying until I looked at it from her point of view and realized it was her way of reclaiming a little control over her own experience.

I tried to be helpful in other ways as well. My mother's culinary needs were simple; the system in her building was that she ate her dinners downstairs in the community dining room and prepared her own breakfasts and lunches, which were minimal, in her tiny kitchen. So I cleaned out her refrigerator, bought cold cereals and little yogurts, and made a big pot of leek and potato soup and put some of it away in the freezer for future lunches.

Then there was her computer. I showed her a couple of things she always forgot between visits: how to change the margins in her word-processing program and how to send an e-mail. This was rewarding for me, because my mother was the only person in the world who considered me a computer expert.

I admired my mother's life. Chicago was her city; she had grown up there. She still had old friends outside of the building whom she saw now and then, and she had a rich life inside the
building. This time I visited the weekly poetry class she had been leading there for many years. One of the residents, a descendant of the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, brought several editions of his books to the class, and the assembled group, a mix of whites and African Americans, had a challenging discussion about writing in African American vernacular English. I was impressed. I could almost imagine myself in a group like this.

But I would have hated to be as cooped up as my mother was. Sometimes she didn't leave the building for days and she only knew the temperature outside by how the people who were walking their dogs along the lakefront were dressed. She spent hours at her post by the window, swiveling her chair through the 180-degree range of her view, looking out at the ducks on the lake through her binoculars. As a matter of fact, I think she preferred to
look
at the weather—whatever it was—from her comfortable chair than to be out in it. I got restless in the small apartment, in spite of my years of Buddhist practice, but my mother, having to stay put, was getting good at staying still.

The day before I went back to California, it was snowing when I woke up. I slipped out of the apartment while my mother was still asleep. I took the pedestrian tunnel under the outer drive and walked in the little park on the lakefront that was right across from her building. There was no one else there; mine were the first footprints in the fresh snow. I could have been in the country, with the little white peaks on top of the fence posts, and the lake beside me that had no end because the falling snow blocked out the smokestacks of Indiana, and the squirrels dropping things from the branches. I could have been in the country except for the roar of traffic behind me. I thought:
I'll visit her when it's spring, when the snow is gone and the sun is out, and I'll push her in her wheelchair through the park, so she'll be able to hear the birds and smell the willows
.

I turned to walk back and saw my mother's building, on the other side of the river of cars. I counted up six floors to pick out her window in the brick façade, and waved, just in case she'd gotten up and happened to be looking out.

That evening, my last, my mother had a party before dinner for a group of friends she called “the mothers of daughters.” All of the women had faraway daughters who visited them there—like me, from Berkeley, California. Before the party, I brushed my hair and clipped it back as neatly as I could.

Six women traveled by elevator to my mother's apartment for wine and those little goldfish-shaped crackers. I didn't have to take their coats when they arrived, because they had all come from inside the building, but I took two walkers and put them aside. My mother was happy to see them—she always said she liked to show off her children to her friends. They settled in a semicircle facing the big window. The day's light was fading to gray over the lake, and the snow was already dirty at the edge of the road below.

The only woman I hadn't met before said: “You look just like your mother!” Even in old age my mother was an attractive woman, but does any daughter want to be told she looks just like her mother? It wasn't so much that I minded if there was a resemblance, but I did want to look
younger
than my mother. In fact, whenever I had occasion to ride in the elevator of her building without her, I had a horror of being mistaken for one of the residents. I was almost sixty-five—officially old enough to live there.