Who I Want(ed) to Be

Me trying to set the Orphan Reds up like the Beatles crossing Abbey Road:

I'd kind of forgotten about this until Julia sent me her photos--it was just one of several stops we made as we rolled the library cart to my workplace a couple days ago, and an unsuccessful one:
the wind kept knocking the Reds over.

When I saw it, I thought, 
That's the sort of person I wanted to be when I was young!
Someone who is free on a Tuesday afternoon [and unafraid] to kneel in the street with her toys, on the way to her thrift-store job, like a mix of Maude, from Harold & Maude, and the Brother Sun, Sister Moon version of St. Francis. 

A childhood hero who is missing in me is the dark & dashing romantic/tragic persona––Bogart in Casablanca; Vincent can Gogh in the song "Vincent".
In real life, those characters are not viable (or fun) to be, and not lovable (or fun) to know.
I'm OK with not turning out that way. Very OK.

Luck & Chance

Luck and chance play a huge role in how I've turned out so far, of course. I've had the unbelievable good luck of easy good health (no credit to me!), and public libraries. 
But aside from the luck of positioning (which you can't really set aside), we sort of . . . sieve through the chances on offer, don't we?
Say yes to some, and no to others.

When I was 26, for instance, I turned down a job offer to work in some snazzy corporate office in Chicago. A couple weeks later I took a job cooking in a whole-foods deli. But I could have gone that business route--maybe I'd be rich now!
Money was never a motivator for me though.

And, funny to think, I've even had a couple marriage proposals from men. In my mid-thirties, a guy who worked on an archeological site in Turkey asked me to stay with him, for instance. 
"We could get married so you could stay," he proposed.

They would have been disastrous, but I could have said yes. I know someone who ended up with a beautiful baby from such a liason in Italy.
(Maybe if he'd been a good kisser... He kissed like a lamprey. That simile is more disgusting than it really way--it wasn't quite that bad, but it was very weird.)

I suppose, looking back, that I wanted to be more glamorous and beautiful and accomplished than I am?
Did I?
Maybe more like... Susan Sontag???

Yes, I suppose I did want that, since I register a tiny inner ping when I looked her up just now. 
But it's tiny. 
I am sooooo entirely not suited to being Susan Sontag.
LOL

Next?

Anyway, given that I've managed to wander in the general direction I wanted to go decades ago, I wonder, what direction do I want to go in the next decade or three, if I'm lucky enough to live that long?

Well... I suppose I'd like to (it'd be smart to) prepare to meet illness and death with some composure. 
I'd love to be lucky enough that they'd arrive in a form gentle enough that I could meet them with some curiosity and grace and humor, instead of them rolling in like bowling balls that knock down all my pins.

Could aging be an active ...adventure? I think of Timothy Leary saying with relish of death, "I've been waiting for this all my life."

It's the rare old person I've met––in nursing homes, mostly––who does aging beautifully, even under adverse circumstances, but there have been some.

Harvey!
Harvey was a dumpling of an old man who had worked his whole life as a janitor. He had no family (never married, no kids). He loved goodies, and when he was out of his room, I used to empty his drawers of stale donuts and cake from the dining room he'd squirreled away, just for cleanliness sake. 
He had dementia so he didn't notice, and he soon replaced them.

Rather unusually, he had a lot of visitors--people he used to work with. Many of them brought him sweets. One guy told me Harvey had paid his rent one month when he was short. I got the sense Harvey was always open-hearted like that, and he still was.

I liked to sit and chat with him myself, though he said the same thing over and over.
One thing he said was, 
"The messiah is coming. . . " (He was Jewish.) "But don't hold your breath."
And then he'd laugh.

So, yeah. Like that. I want to grow toward that. I think I'm sort of on that path. I hope so. In my low-key way.

I think it's partly a matter of cultivating what is natural to you, the parts that you like; letting yourself BE and EXPRESS that, trying to reduce the stuff that impedes it, so it flourishes, even if it's small.
(I don't garden, but I picture it something like that. Potter Miller says planting one dried bean gives you a zillion fresh beans.)

Yesterday, for instance, the lead-furniture guy went to get ice-cream shakes for a couple of us. When he came back with them, another coworker was unhappy he wasn't in on that.
So I asked him if he wanted some of mine.

"No, no," he said, shaking his head like a sad dog.

I was going to accept that social lie. And then I didn't.

"Yes, you do!" I said, grabbed my coffee cup and poured half the shake into it, and handed the rest of the shake to him.

Of course he took it.

The messiah may be coming, but until then, we'd best do it ourselves.