I’m posting this because I accidentally unearthed and reread it, and for some reason it cheered me up. I wrote it because I’d had a birthday and was feeling really old; but see, now it’s four years later so I’m even –
Well, on second thought, never mind.
August 2006: An Essay On the Occasion of My (**)th Birthday
By Robin Ford Wallace
It’s August, and at Bob’s Little Acre things look grim.
Borers got the squash, weeds got the beets and I’m not sure what happened to the cucumbers. Rain knocked the phlox border down and drought kept it from getting back up.
Global warming decimated the impatiens and the dahlias were done in by Hurricane Rosie, AKA Roosevelt, the Holy Terrier, who bounces up and down on them like Hugh Hefner on a waterbed.
Japanese beetles made a skeleton of the plum tree and marched on to the roses, raping and pillaging with buggy abandon until I went berserk with the secateurs and took out their food supply. Now they don’t have any roses but neither do I.
In addition to the insects and the heat wave, this August has brought me a birthday that can be named only by euphemism. I don’t like calling myself “a woman of a certain age” but I think saying the actual number would give me a stroke.
Another euphemism for the age I’ve gotten to be is “mature” but I don’t think anybody would buy that one in my case. It may describe my thighs but it’s way off base as regards my financial status or personality.
My savings account is a sickly child that is constantly bullied by its greedy brother, the checking account, which beats it up and steals its money every month when the mortgage comes due.
And as for my personality, it never made it out of junior high school. It sits in the mud messily eating chocolate, and cries if anyone points out that it is fat. It’s afraid of snakes, tractor-trailer trucks, garbage cans, basements and the doctor. It thinks orzo looks like maggots and mayonnaise looks like snot.
Once, trying to appear sophisticated because it was in France, it ate an anchovy hors d’oeuvre, and forever afterward it vomits at the memory because as far as it is concerned the thing looked just like an olive being subsumed by a slug.
It has been cooking on electric and gas ranges for thirty years, but sometimes in department stores it lingers in the toy section, sick with desire for an Easy-Bake oven.
Anyway, though I may deny to the death that I am mature, there is now hard evidence that I am old, and I was looking forward to this birthday with the enthusiasm usually reserved for bird flu.
So August finds the garden looking like Sherman just marched through and midlife finds the gardener as complete and utter a train wreck as she was at 12, only fatter and deeper in debt. I never accomplished any of the big goals I set when I was young. I never developed self-confidence, an investment strategy, or breasts. I never even got an Easy-Bake Oven.
So. Am I depressed?
Nah. Whether from arrested development or incipient senility, I’m still as wildly unrealistic as ever, and I figure I can still pull my garden and my life out of the fire.
Take the beet patch, for example. It had grown up with weeds the size of Michael Jordan and I didn’t know how to reclaim it. Then, at my birthday party, an underemployed engineer turned our Everest-like front yard into a water park, using plastic sheeting and the garden hose to rig up a slip-n-slide.
The idea was, you sat or flopped belly-down on the plastic, then the water and the gravity sent you speeding helplessly down the hill, finally landing at the bottom as if you’d been shot from a canon. It amused the guests, and personally I found shooting down the hill coated with grass clippings a more effective way to deny my age than buying embarrassing clothes or having an affair with a lifeguard.
But the slip-n-slide also had a horticultural use. It dumped guests straight into my beet patch, and there is nothing like human bodies rolling at high speeds to kill weeds. Now all I have to do is till and plant, and I can still pull off a fine crop of late peas.
As for my life, there’s a sort of peace in accepting that some ambitions will never be realized. One Christmas my husband gave me a guitar, thus providing me with ten years of angst as I made and broke promises with myself to learn to play it.
When I finally signed up for lessons, the teacher explained to me I had stored the guitar improperly and it had warped into uselessness. I was overcome with shame – and relief. I can’t read music, I have no ear, and it’s not like I don’t have anything else to do.
With a little creative thinking, I am able to let go of my dreams of financial security with similar ease. My love for the outdoors and a lifetime of camping have, after all, made me uniquely suited for living under a bridge.
As for professional success and personal fulfillment, they might still be out there somewhere, right?
Recently my husband was warning our young friend, a chicken of 30, not to waste her life procrastinating as he had. “If you want to accomplish anything,” he lectured, “the time to do it is right now.”
“Yeah, well, could I start next week?” she said. “We just got Direct TV.”
I feel just the same. I know I ought to be winning the Booker Prize or discovering a cure for cancer, but I have to plant those peas and anyway it’s Sunday.
Do you think it’s too late for peas? I don’t. This is the South for one thing and there’s global warming for another, and above all there is denial. At my unthinkable age I may not have developed an impressive stock portfolio or bustline but by God I have built up my self-deception skills until I could deny for America at the Olympics.
So yeah, I figure I’ve got plenty of time.
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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