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Nutshell Kingdom: . . . and a Little Later
2003
I started thinking about getting old. I don't feel old personally, but it is easy for me to imagine. The piles of baggage (emotional and physical reminders of lives past: photos, scars, ticket stubs), the death of friends and family, the 'letting go' of things grown familiar by so many years that we can barely imagine what it must feel like.
Aging is strange. You would think that as you grow older, the world becomes more and more like home, that you wou would get used to things and get to know your surroundings more intimately with each passing year. Instead, ironically, the world and the place you live becomes stranger and stranger, just familiar enough to evoke the ghosts of youth that come and haunt you as you push your cart through the grocery store or sit on a park bench. Neighborhoods and streets become fantastic amalgams of the too-familiar past and the too-strange present.
Or maybe not. I don't want to sound morbid, but I really believe that life is set up this way. I've seen it in the eyes of the elderly and sometimes heard it in their words.
