Who Is That Behind Those Foster Grants?

I had to butt in. The conversations had been swift-changing and lively at Tommyknockers Tavern, as Kelly and I had lunch and a couple of beers. Amid all the retelling of San Juan Mountain life I wanted to tell of my experiences that day.

“We were up around the Rio Grande National Forest, near the reservoir, and saw this herd of mountain sheep.” (Actually, I said “flock” and everyone laughed and informed me it was a “herd”.)  “They were in a meadow along the road we were on. It was a ram and several ewes.”

“More likely all rams,” said our bar companion. “At this time of year the rams all come down but not the ewes.”

“Really? I didn’t see any horns on the others.” I was skeptical.

“Oh, yeah. They all had horns,” Kelly said. “They were just very short.”

“That sounds about right,” our barstool friend said. “A lot more young ones and fewer older rams.”

It was just trivial chatter but

I was engaged and leaning forward as I talked. I told of how we had scrabbled around the scrub and rocks and had flanked the sheep to get closer views, resulting in both grazing and running camera shots. I realized, as I talked, that I had been gratified, too, with how I was learning the use of the different lens lengths and the sequential shot function of my camera. In my mind, the new experiences in the mountains, my telling of tales at the bar and my acquisition of new photography knowledge were all stimulating. They immersed me in an excitement that washed away any present-moment awareness of age.

I could easily have been twenty-five as far as my experience was telling me. As the words and thoughts generated, I was unaware of who the person was peering out through my eyes at my surroundings. It occurred to me later that my audience was seeing someone quite different from the “me” I was experiencing. Looking outward and not seeing how I appeared to my audience, the person speaking through my lips had not changed from the days thirty-five years earlier when I had told similar tales.

The people around me at the bar did not see someone in her twenties but yet I don’t think they quite saw me as the sixty-year-old woman I am. There was definitely a disconnect between my experience and their observations but I believe my animation and engagement even decreased my age in their eyes to some degree.

I’ve thought about this often. What is it that generates an internal experience that is out of sync with chronological age? Is it just wishful thinking? Is it just that quirk of human nature that Norman Rockwell illustrated so well when he showed himself painting an unrealistically flattering self-portrait? Sometimes I wonder if it has to do with having children. Do children and then grandchildren plant markers that peg one’s life to certain perceptions of age? Or, maybe it is acquaintance with death that does it. My parents are still living and I am not well acquainted with death taking ones close to me so I haven’t had that abrupt reminder of age. I have been healthy and the joints, bones and ligaments seem to be holding up well, so I don’t have a distinct feeling of my body having changed. The slow pace of my decrepitude deceives me.

In addition to a lack of these life events, I think my experiences have also contributed to a feeling of youth. The breadth and diversity of my experiences have been, I think, more broad-ranged than experiences of some others my age. I can’t help but think this has added to a sense of awe that I feel. Awe always has a child-like quality to it.  Having seen different cultures, beliefs, politics and religions, having been in some far-ranging parts of the globe and having increased my knowledge of science and the vastness of our universe have probably kept present before me the infinitude of things yet to learn. New and diverse experiences stave off the creeping misperception that there is not much useful left to learn. It prevents stagnation.

I have been fortunate to travel and to have health and to not have been trapped in poverty or crippling relationships. But for these quirks of fate, temperament and genetics, I genuinely believe I would not have been sitting in the Colorado mountains with Kelly nor would I have felt it was a twenty-five-year-old speaking that day in the bar.