Two-Thirds of the Way to One Hundred

Seven years ago, on August 21, 2014, my 60th birthday, I wrote a blog post trumpeting the curtain's rise on what I was calling Act III of my life. The timing was partly reflective of my recent retirement from almost a quarter of a century of teaching in the University of Colorado Philosophy Department as a tenured professor. It was also partly reflective of the milestone birthday, though my husband always maintained that our cultural fixation on birthdays ending in zero was purely a fetish owed to Base Ten math. 

That post now seems. . . quaint to me. The woman who wrote it was so sure that Act III of her life was going to bring with it wondrous adventures, now that the main tasks of those middle-years of her life were accomplished. Little did she know that she would return to significant child-rearing responsibilities for her two little granddaughters following her son's bitter divorce, or that she would face the anguish of a family member's entanglement in the cruelty of the American criminal justice system, or that she would bury her husband after his heartbreaking decline from advanced Parkinson's. 

Well, I can't say that Act III was boring! Though even as I write this, it occurs to me that I do find the genre of survival stories to be downright dull, with their predictable parade of disaster after disaster that the hero must confront single-handedly: fire, flood, tornado, volcano, mudslide, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. I did bore myself with the same litany of miseries over and over again. 

Yesterday was another milestone birthday, at least in my reckoning. I'm now 67, or two-thirds of the way to 100. I can't figure out if THIS is where Act III is REALLY beginning, with all the intense drama of the past seven years just the finale of Act II. Or were the last seven years a very compressed Act III, with the curtain now rising on Act IV? Or I am entering some kind of Epilogue, which will include all the subsequent, quietly happy events of the main character's life, deemed less worthy of staging for their absence of conflict and drama? 

Or maybe... and I like this idea... maybe after seven years of a survival story, my least favorite genre (well, second only to horror), it's time to switch metaphors, and indeed to switch genres altogether. My favorite genre of film is what I call "Middle-Aged Women Following Their Dreams and Finding Themselves, Preferably in a Foreign Country." My favorite film ever, which I practically know by heart, is Nora Ephron's Julie and Julia. Julia Child finding her true calling in Paris! I also adore Enchanted April. Downtrodden English ladies escaping from their dreary lives to a villa in Italy!

I recently mentioned to a friend how I envy people who walk away from their lives and start a whole new life somewhere else. "That's my favorite genre of book!" she exclaimed. She obligingly sent me a list of titles, and so far I've read Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach, A Year by the Sea by Joan Anderson, The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg, and My (Part-Time) Paris Life by Lisa Anselmo. 

Maybe, at two-thirds of the way to one hundred, I'm going to stop thinking of my life as a three-act play, with all that emoting in front of the footlights. I'm also going to allow myself to hope that my life stops being a survival story. Maybe I'll think of it as an example of my now-favorite genre of fiction (only real life this time!): the story of a woman heading off to Paris... or Croatia... or Latvia... or somewhere she hasn't even thought of yet, having poignant and delicious experiences of a form she can't yet fully anticipate... 

Maybe I'll think of it as the story of a woman delighting in expecting the unexpected....