Confronting the repo man

Debit and credit.  I want them balanced, or as nearly as I can make them. As I get older, though, the debit column gets more substantial.  At 76, I begin to lose more things than I gain.  I find I’m being asked to relinquish aspects of myself.  I begin to realize that they’ve been on loan.  Things like dexterity.  Balance.  Reaction time.  Good vision.  And, of course, memory.  The loan officer comes to repossess them.  He comes brandishing a list of physical and mental powers that now, officially, belong to him.  They always did, of course, but I was under the mistaken illusion they were mine.  They never were.  I try to protest, but he simply goes about his business of taking things back.  “Just following orders,” he says.  “Nothing personal.”  It is, though.

I look at the debit column, and it’s worrying.  It’s getting longer.  I’m doing anything and everything to add to the credit column.  I want knowledge and experience coming in, not just flowing out.

As the white-bearded bent-over old man in the Goya etching declares, “Aun aprendo.”

“I still learn.” 

I went to a writer’s conference once where Molly Peacock was part of a panel.  The subject was writing outside of your genre.  Molly, a poet, was talking about writing prose.  “It made me anxious,” she said, “but fear makes you feel young.” 

So I’m going to live with the woman I love in a place I never would have chosen to live in my wildest dreams—southern Louisiana.  I’m anxious.  But, like the good Molly Peacock said, that worry is making me feel alive.  That’s the point, isn’t it? When the debt collector comes to repossess the things I took for granted when I was young—and he will come—I have something to add to the credit column. Whether it makes me anxious or not. I want to feel alive.