I have not blogged in a long longity long time, she stated, dutifully.
Captain Obvious.
Zack and I happened upon a documentary called "Young @ Heart" on PBS the other night. You can read about the whole thing here. I wept through most of it. At one point I was sobbing. The moment when this beautiful old woman began singing, "It's been seven hours and fifteen days...since you took your love away..." and I was done for.
My sweet husband was baffled by my tears and snotting about and hand to my heart gasping. I kept repeating, "This is blowing my mind. Is it blowing your mind?"
Zack looked at me with a bemused expression,
"It's not blowing my mind. I'm enjoying it, to be sure, it's interesting, but it's not blowing me away."
"Well, it's blowing me away."
After the show was over Zack asked me why I thought I was reacting so strongly to it.
"I don't know. I'm still trying to process it enough to put it into words."
A little bit later I made the attempt.
"I kept thinking about this time when I was eleven or so and mom and all of us kids were in a Taco Bell eating lunch. At a table for two next to the window were a little elderly couple quietly eating their lunch. I didn't take much notice of them but my mom did. In retrospect I realise she was watching them quite intently.
While we were still eating the couple got up and shuffled and tottered to the door and there the old man tried gallantly, albeit desperately, to open the door for his wife. As he struggled against the weight of the door tears began streaming down his face and his wife was patting him on the back saying, "There, there, darling, there, there...". My mom got up and helped him open the door and the couple thanked her and, while wiping away tears from his face he said to my mom, "I used to be so strong."
My mom sat back down at our table with tears in her own eyes and such a far away expression.
I'm just starting to grasp the concept that I will never be the "old" version of me. I'll just be me with a bit more wisdom and what not. I've often said that it's the mirror that changes, not me. I've never become the "30 year old" version of myself.
Does this make sense?"
(That was something like what I said. I can't possibly remember everything that was said. Obviously. I mean, I have been able to recall quite well conversations that were rather monosyllabic in nature like, "Can you pick up some milk?" "Yes." "Great, thanks." I think you know what I mean.)
Zack and I had quite an interesting conversation about oldness and elderlyish things. I quite like that by the time my kids are my age it will be quite normal for Grandma's and Grandpa's to have tattoos and peircings. You know? Most of the people I know have some form of body art. I remember Phoenix asking, "Mommy, what happened to so and so's mommy? She hasn't got a ring in her nose!" Every mommy he knew had a nose ring it seemed!
I'm sure it's been said somewhere before but, why is it, right when people become the most interesting, they get written off and shoved into a corner and deemed "old"?
I wonder how I will handle that label when it applies to me. When it might seem like an injustice when I most likely will FEEL so young and yet my body will have betrayed me.
Don't be surprised if you find I have joined the Young @ Heart chorus when I am old and lovely. I'll do a rousing rendition of "Paranoid Android".
In other news I am...overstimulated? Stressed? Overwhelmed?
My little hunting camper turned studio, Loretta, has basically been finished and is ready for recording but I haven't had the time to add the finishing touches. I.e. cushions and curtains and rugs. Oh my. And it's been cold. Ugh.
Hawke is teething and is sprouting what must be, by the way he's been acting, the largest, most toothy teethies ever known to mankind. He's fractious and frictious and perfectly incapable of getting comfortable whatsoever. In fact, as I type this at 2am, he is next to me, hooting and humming and squirming and fussing.
I am behind on everything.
Time with my husband.
Time with the boys.
Laundry.
Cleaning.
Grocery Shopping.
Emails.
Friendships.
Family.
Exercise.
Weight loss.
Sleep.
Time for myself.
And don't even get me started on studio stuff. Zack is taking this year to shoot only personal work and I have been nose deep in casting and production stuff and OneLight emails and DVD shipments and finances and planning and conceptualizing and...
I am tired.
Right now, I'm looking forward to being old. To the time when life will seem slower and I'll most likely look back on this time with fondness and "remember whens?". Even now I feel the second hand has sped up with late for a tea party white rabbit tendencies and I am chasing after it trying to give it a sedative.
"Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life." ~Charles Dickens