Saturday, January 21, 2006
Does this cloak of invisibility make me look fat?
I was walking home from downtown tonight and a handsome young student was walking toward me and I smiled at him and he seemed to look at me just long enough to decide that I wasn't anybody and he didn't smile back. I didn't feel bad, surprisingly. Instead, I had this clear-headed moment when I realized that he didn't actually see me because... I'm too old! A middle-aged woman in the student ghetto is invisible. Kinda interesting for a few minutes, to feel one's own insignificance and irrelavance with such certainty. Maybe it was because I also happened to be walking downhill, but as I walked, I could feel how I am slowly moving towards the margins of what matters. In a town of twenty-year olds, every additional year pushes you further from the center. And I realize this with no little relief. The outer edge is a powerful place to be. I spent last evening with a group of Catholic peace activists. They live in the margins. They are free to speak the truth to the ones in the center. There are a lot of sweet, irrelavent, ageing fools in the margins and I am drawn there and if there is some tea and some laughter and some prayer and some music then I will probably be very happy there. And I'll save a place for that handsome young man, just in case he gets old one day and doesn't feel so comfortable at the center of everything.
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4 comments:
oh my goodness, a comment! My first comment!
Thank you, C'dog. This wakes up my brain by kind of shaking it back and forth:
"without a center, there can be no edges. without edges, no center."
thank you for that and for being awake.
xo
s
Suzanne, I am going to read the shit out of your blog, pardon the language. Now I've read 2 posts. This "cloak of invisibility" was also my costume when I waited tables in this town, both as a graduate student and beyond. In New York City the handsome young men, because dammit I am a handsome young men, despite the fact that I am 27 and my hair is alarmingly thin in the usual male pattern places, I look at the beautiful people (NOT in quotes) of all ages and think of them often. Intellectually, artistically, and carnally. I'm not saying "move out of that town!" Not at all. I love that town. But every once in awhile, take off the cloak and visit a huge urban center and just accept certain things that happen as you walk down the street, while likely rejecting, with contempt, certain other things that happen as you walk down the street.
hey Massey- thanks for stopping by and for your kind intention to read the shit out of my blog. I'm not sure that it can stand up to that, but we'll see. Don't read all the shit out of it- there might not be anything left.
E. confirms that you are indeed a handsome young man (in case anyone had any doubt).
A huge urban center. Sigh. Yes, that is very good advice. I visit Detroit every week, but there is not much of a center there, and one doesn't really walk down the street so much, what with the freeways criss-crossing everywhere. Still, I breathe differently there and I think differently there and even though i am always glad to return to this pretty little bubble of a town, I am always hyper-aware, on re-entry, that we are suffering in this town from a severe lack of something, and a severe surfeit of something else.
S
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