Learning to Fly
Posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 2:00.
We’re all heading home now. In my body, there is buried some strange memory of learning to fly. It will lead me to the origin of me: prehistory. –Monarch by Matt Alber
I recently read that some classified documents would be unsealed in 50 years. I excitedly shared this news with an older friend. He replied, disinterested, “I won’t be around.”
Within the next two years, I will reach the age where, statistically, I won’t be around in 50 years. In some ways, I feel that I still haven’t accepted not being a college student. College was a period that I anticipated and fantasized about for a decade prior to experiencing it. It’s done. over. almost three years now. I dealt with a “quarter life crisis” shortly after graduating, but now I’m working on accepting that there is something to be excited about at 25 and 30 and 50 and beyond, which our culture doesn’t beat into us.
A few weeks ago, Arthur and I went to see Matt Albert in concert. He briefly talked about Monarch butterflies and how their migration takes several generations to complete. As one generation dies off, the next continues the journey.
I’m posting today because it would have been my mother’s 47th birthday had she not died of cancer at age 34. Knowing how much she has missed and not been able to look forward to at the ages that I’m creeping closer to is oddly assuring that there is so much to anticipate. I hope to live enough to pack two lifetimes in the years to come in her honor.
Written over a bowl of Kix. Kid tested. Mother approved.
