The Simple Secret

Age 62

I know exactly what I’m going to do when I turn 64. 

When I was a little girl, I loved my parents, my dachshund Sam and collecting chestnuts at 22 Obererkirschwiesenweg.  Our house was in a tiny hamlet outside of Frankfurt surrounded by woods and farms.  But mostly woods.  And just like Hansel and Gretel we had our very own witch in those woods.  Some of the braver kids would throw pebbles at her door and windows while the rest of us clutched each other ready to tear out of there if she opened her door.

 Raised basically as an only child; my sister was fourteen years old when I was born and genuinely unimpressed with the new family addition.  By the time I was four, she had moved out, so I never got to know her well. When I wasn’t at school I was outside playing; either with my best friend Gudrun and her brothers Siegfried and Johann or with other ex-pat American kids from the International School. During the summers we played until it was dark, scraping knees and hiding and seeking until the fireflies glinted and our mothers beckoned.

I grew older, albeit no wiser and when we were twelve Anne O’Haire and I concocted a plan.  We would save up our allowances, skip school and walk to the end of the road to a bar and drink!  So that’s exactly what we did, and we had a marvelous time until Anne passed out and I threw up and the bartender phoned our parents and the Politzei. That was my first hangover and it was a few years before I pulled any more pranks.  By then we had moved to England and I began hanging out in the smoking area of my high school in London with all the other mixed up confused teenagers. Our school had an experimental policy of open classes which we took full advantage of; usually by just skipping the whole thing to lie around Primrose hill smoking Stuyvesants.  Weekends were spent tripping over junkies in tube stations and hunting for cheap Indian peasant blouses while suffocating on clouds of incense.  I hung a life size Jimi Hendrix poster over my bed and enjoyed the total lack of parental supervision due to my Dad’s full-time travel schedule and whatever it was my mom did which had nothing whatsoever to do with me. 

I travelled, with them and with other families until the summer before senior year when I fell in love on a Portuguese beach with a permanently stoned hippie named Orlando.  He made me shell ankle bracelets and wrote watery notes in French on bar napkins.  I went back to London temporarily heartsick and then spent my senior year forgetting all about him. 

When I graduated my parents booked me on Pan Am all the way to a small liberal arts college in Ohio.  It was chockfull of preppies and big American boys who played lacrosse, and who all seemed to know each other already.  I didn’t know about culture shock, but I was shook.  I knew nothing about anything and lost myself for a while.  Throughout college I was Brad’s girlfriend.  He had never been to Europe and told me he never wanted to go. But he wrote love letters and hid them in library books for me to find.  He wore flannel shirts, drove a BMW named Merlin and broke his promises. Eventually I broke mine too.

 I moved to D.C. after graduation and landed an advertising job where I learned a little bit about marketing but became an expert at living the moment.  The moment lasted until I turned thirty and married my long-distance boyfriend Charlie. We bought a tiny flat in Greenwich Village where we laughed and played and loved each other until a year later, pregnant with our first child we did the same thing everyone else did – we moved to the suburbs.  Darien was full of exactly the same people that college was, and I began to understand how this particular world worked. Charlie commuted and I immersed myself in the simultaneous excitement and boredom of babies and toddlers.  Three kids and a few years later Charlie took a new job which meant moving the family to Texas.

Suffice it to say that Texas felt surreal and completely the opposite from the Northeast.  The accents, the food, the noise, the heat.  All the cliches about Texas are actually true.  (Except the big hair. Women don’t have big hair; they have extremely expensive salon dyed blonde hair blown dry daily to look wind swept). It’s called “Texas blonde”.  It’s a thing.  And it really works for them.  The women are beautiful and the men are macho.  And they like it that way ya’ll.

We loved our life there until the children left and the nest felt lonely and spent.  The relentless heat smothered me and the monotony of constant sun triggered my very own special autoimmune disorder.  So, we sold our house and moved again, this time to a place with seasons and cool dry air.  A place that feels a lot like Germany with its mountains and evergreens.  

Then came Covid and shut it all down.  Down came the travel, our daughter’s wedding plans, our home building plans.  Away went the fun. In came the fear. The uncertainty. The unknown that was of course always unknown only I didn’t know it.  Not really.  

I called a close friend from Dallas the other day to see how her life was going during our new reality, this pandemic of CV.  She said things were quiet there; most people finally wearing masks and paying attention.  Like the rest of the country restaurants are going out of business and even Neiman Marcus is boarded up. She said that they had their monthly supper club in the garden last Saturday night; everyone all socially distanced until many bottles of wine were drunk and everyone kicked off their shoes and danced like crazy.  Singing along through their masks. 

That was when it hit me.  I know exactly what I’m going to do when I turn 64.  I’m going to dance and laugh with some of the people I love the most.  It is really all so simple.  

Eliza……from Hamilton 

And I could be enough

And we could be enough

That would be enough