March 9, 2007
Friday 

Sail on, Silvergirl.
Sail on by.
Your time has come to shine,
All your dreams are on their way.
See how they shine!
                — Paul Simon, b. 1941
American singer-songwriter, from “Bridge Over Troubled Water”

Today is my birthday. I am 60 years old.

Let me say that again. I am 60.

Recently I did some character-development work from What If?, a book of exercises for fiction writers that I find most useful. “Who Are You? Somebody!” asks the writer to list what he or she cared about at various ages. (That would be answers for the writer. You can’t invent and explore other people until you know yourself.) Since I had this milestone birthday coming up, I decided to go back to each decade-ending year.

In 1957, at ten years old, I was in fourth grade and wanted, more than anything else, a Perfect Attendance Certificate. I didn’t get one, despite my having trudged to school every single day to a teacher who seemed not to like me very much. I also wanted to be in Brownies. The troop was sponsored by the Catholic parish whose school I attended, so all the members were girls I knew. Membership vs. non-membership was a social indicator, an in-crowd vs. out-crowd thing. I was in the out crowd because my mother didn’t like the idea of my selling cookies door-to-door. I also wanted a two-wheel bicycle, but I didn’t have one of those either, again because of maternal concerns about danger and a reluctance to acquire two bicycles, one for me and one for my sister. I cared about fitting in and having friends. I can’t say I was very successful at either.

In 1967 I was a sophomore at the local community college. I was helping establish its first literary magazine under the direction of a gifted teacher poet, and I went on my first trip to New York City art museums. Sometimes my head felt like it was exploding with ideas. I was writing, exchanging work with my beloved friend Michael who was having his own creative explosion at Fordham. Most of what I wrote was dreck, but there is a poem that has survived. I had some small measure of independence, driving around town in my turquoise Corvair. I cared about poetry and fiction and expanding my mind.

By 1977, however, I was drifting. I was thirty years old, in the eighth year of a lackluster teaching career and the second year of an ill-conceived marriage that had five more years to go before it sputtered and collapsed. I’d visited my university campus for a conference and discovered that the building I’d lived in my senior year, then a house for upperclassmen women, had been turned into apartments for senior citizens, giving me an illustration for “irony” that I used for many years. After school the day of my birthday (it was a Wednesday) I went to John Wanamaker at the Harrisburg East Mall and bought the complete line of Clinique skin care products and a pair of Levi 501 jeans. I’d never used “serious” skin care products before. The above-noted irony seemed to suggest it might be time. I have no idea why I bought the jeans, nor why I remember that. And I can’t really say what it was I cared about.

But 1987, when I turned 40 — now here’s where my life begins to take the shape it has now. I’d been married to Ron for three-and-a-half years and Lynn was eighteen months old. I’d returned to teaching after a year at home with her, and my work there was changing. After almost twenty years of not writing, I was doing creative work again. I cared about being a good mother, being a good teacher, and writing a novel about a woman who buried four children in August of 1885, their headstones strung out in a line in the Protestant cemetery I visited when I attended retreats at the neighboring Catholic facility in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. I cared about family, work, developing my writing, and deepening my spirituality.

When I turned 50 in 1997, the career that had taken off was beginning to burn out like a rocket. Or rather like a meteor that had been hit by a stealth rocket designed to knock it off course. I’d returned to school after a year-long sabbatical charged with ideas. I was writing more and better and the new techniques and new authors I was discovering were changing the way I approached my teaching. Change is threatening for some people, though, especially people whose place in the power structure depends on things staying the same. I cared about being an even better mother (she was headed toward the Wonder Years of adolescence), an even better teacher, and developing as a writer. With a lot of help from my friends, I was headed into what has become a decade of change.

And here I am at 60. 60! At left you see my grandmothers at my parents’ wedding in 1946. My paternal grandmother on the left has just turned 54. She would live only two more years. Mammam on the right is 68. Neither of them had an education nor ever held a job. Babcia had traveled only to get from the old country to America. Mammam, born here of Irish immigrants, went to Florida a few times to see some cousins who’d retired there, but otherwise stayed in the small coal town where she was born. By the time this picture was taken, both were considered old women whose lives were lived through their children’s. This is not to criticize them, but merely to say who they were. Indeed, it was their way of life that built the prosperity and paved the way for the culture I inhabit.

And there I am below, in a picture taken today. I’m not my grandmothers’ 60, I’m not my mother’s 60. I’m my own 60, sailing into the best ten years of my life. And what do I care about now? I still want to be a good mother, even as that role changes. I want to keep growing as a writer and as a woman of faith. And now more than ever, I care about the other people in my life, my family, my friends, the people in my writers’ group, the classmates with whom I share a history. I have no problems that can’t be solved by prayer or conversation with a friend or by giving it to a fictional character and working it out on paper.

All my dreams are on their way. Thank you for sailing right behind.

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