No cats in space
Write what you know. Her mind raced, flipping through the Rolodex of her life, looking for inspiration. (Well that dates her, doesn’t it? Maybe scrolling through her Instagram would be better.) No boring stories about old people, or was it no stories about boring old people? She couldn't remember. A few years ago she had expressed a great fear that she was growing into a boring old person. Ditching a husband, taking a new job, and moving halfway across the country temporarily helped assuage that fear, but the march of time was relentless and she knew she could slip back into obscurity in an instant, melt into an overheated apartment with word search puzzles and soap operas. At least she didn't like cats, she had that going for her.
No surprise dead children. Well, that ruled out a big chunk of her childhood, surprisingly dead and perhaps dying sisters were something she knew all too well. They were convenient topics, but maybe too conventional. Nearly 50 years later she could still put herself back in that funeral home, church, or hospital and recall in vivid detail the plush carpet, the pink dress, the stained glass window, the labored walks through linoleum halls. But, no dead kid stories, no need to go there tonight, move on.
No stories about animals inhabiting your body. She wondered if that included stories about ear worms, those times when snippets of song get stuck in your head. Had that ever happened to her? What about the restless legs that would sometimes keep her up at night with that feeling of ants crawling inside her thighs? Maybe too close to an old lady story, though. There were those fire ants, marching north from Central America. Was there a story there? Or the Zika virus? Does a virus count as an animal inhabiting your body? A virus isn't an animal, she didn't think. Bacteria, those were maybe animals. Well, this didn't seem to be going anywhere.
No heartbroken twentysomething stories. No danger there, those years were far in the past. Heartbreak certainly feels different at sixty than twenty. An older heart doesn't shatter the way a young one does. Instead it collapses, folds in on itself, and squeezes—takes your breath away. Deep and visceral, your heart holds a lifetime of losses.
Stories that take place in foreign places were good, she recalled. Should she write about catching a venereal disease from the Soviet intent on marrying her so that he could defect? Or being in the back of a cab in Leningrad at 3 am, drunk and unable to remember the name of her hotel; holding out a handful of rubles and hoping the cab driver was kinder than the men who had left her at the bar? Those seemed a little too revealing, perhaps. Wasn't there something about sex on that list, though? She thought she might be good at writing erotic fiction. Maybe that was a way to go. That, at least, might help dispel the boring old lady stereotype.
She had more living abroad stories. Experiencing the events of September 11 in Germany, the sense of dislocation, the first-hand witnessing of foreign sympathies, the joking of her French neighbors about the harshness of the English language, "’AfghaniSTAN,’ ‘PakiSTAN,’ it is like you are dropping a bomb every time you say it!” Her parents carried five pounds of grape jelly through Heathrow because you couldn’t get grape jelly in Germany and the boys were complaining. That was before the 3-1-1 rule. Funny, that you could do that on September 30, 2001, but not September 30, 2015. Were her parents boring old people? She remembered her father remarking, at an age not much different from hers, that he was doing more things for the last time than for the first time. That's why she canoed in the Boundary Waters, scaled a high ropes course, and rode a zip line this summer. Vigilance was key.
No pieces that are only dialogue with no story. She feared she was drifting into that territory. Her life drifting in space, words from a great black void. Is that what growing old would be like? Space travel, that doesn’t seem boring at all.
