The youth of old age

I had a birthday in a place that once was home

I still miss smoking.

Isn’t that silly? Such a pointless and destructive habit. But sitting here, notebook and coffee in hand, a view over Padstow harbor, my fingers are twitching to spark up a Marlboro Light. I want the crackle of the flame on the blunt-cut tip, the sucking-in and blowing-out of a curling plume: There’s something satiating about it; a way of gulping up the moment.

I’ve let go of so many vices over the years. I guess that comes with age. Or it should. Addiction doesn’t wear well. Those naughty pleasures and recreational poisons once consumed as a vain assertion of immortality just don’t look or feel the same after forty, and especially not after fifty.

I used to pity and kind of look down on people who went sober in later life, like they’d allowed themselves to become weak and delicate, as if it should be possible to stave off middle age, old age even, just by maintaining a stubborn allegiance to the things you valued at twenty. But now that I am fifty-three as of last Sunday, I know that what I valued at twenty was a hologram constructed by the culture around me and my anxious toehold on it. It had very little to do with what is enduringly true for me.

I was twenty-four and pregnant when I first moved to England. I’d had a rough couple of years career-wise, hadn’t booked any new acting jobs in ages, and my US visa was about to expire. It seemed like the perfect time to say why not? to having a baby with an Englishman I barely knew, but knew to be a challenging character.

Of course, nothing in life works out exactly as expected (or hoped), does it? And maybe that goes double for hastily chosen partnerships with sharp men.

I spent nine thrilling, harrowing, inspiring, occasionally lovely years in London before moving back to Canada twenty years ago and, later, moving again to Los Angeles. If the pattern holds, I should be due to move back here, too, at some point. I wouldn’t mind. I sure would love to live nearer to my daughter now that she is rolling along in her own London life.

I landed at Heathrow ten days ago and took the new Elizabeth Line to S’s flat in Highgate. Less than 24 hours later, she and I were driving westbound past Heathrow again, headed out of the city on the M4. Funny, when I lived here I very rarely ventured beyond the bounds of the M25 ring road that encircles greater London, yet I’ve spent almost all of the past ten days outside the city. Turns out there’s a lot to enjoy in the English countryside.

She and I bombed down narrow hedgerow-lined lanes not much wider than our rented Subaru Outback. Took rainy walks along the cliffs above the Dorset coast. Ate scones and clotted cream at the foot of a looming castle ruin. Played swingball with my niece’s little girl in my sister’s bloom-filled garden. And, yesterday, walked miles of sandy beachfront here in Cornwall with my friend, Mary.

I’m collecting little nuggets of knowledge to take home with me, like pretty seashells or pocket-sized fossils.

1. British summer flavors — gooseberries and rhubarb, red currants and blackberries, cream and custard — are some of my favorite in the world.

2. My body still remembers how to drive on the left. Useful.

3. The roots of friendship can magically continue to deepen even when you’re quite occupied with totally different lives on the other side of the world. Sometimes — not always — it is possible to step right back inside that capsule of fond familiarity after years of separation and find it every bit as warm.

As I zoom out on my fifty-three years, I am mildly shocked to find myself at this point in the timeline. My god, it sneaks up on you! It’s not that twenty years ago seems recent; it doesn’t. A hell of a lot has happened since then and I’m practically a different person. But when my senses recall those distant moments, it feels as if there is no gap of time between then and now at all.

Sitting with Mary this morning over an oat-milk latte and a tahini-cinnamon roll, we could just as easily be sipping Early Grey tea and nibbling pains au raisin while our babies crawl across a rectangle of sunlight on her whitewashed wooden floor. But the children are not children anymore. They’ve been traveling in Japan. They have been in a steady relationship for four years. They have just finished their MA. But the smirk in Mary’s eye as she cuts into the pastry between us is unchanged. There is no past or future in this moment, only an unbroken now.

The fabled tahini-cinnamon bun; Mary in the Prideaux Place walled garden.

Victor Hugo said that forty is the old age of youth, and fifty is the youth of old age, and this sounds good and right to me. I think that fifty-three is an excellent age to be. There is an exciting sense of possibility, but less manic and with lower stakes. I have nothing to prove, and all the potential gains are optional.

At this point, I am no longer preparing to dive into life. I am standing in the middle of the stream.

On one bank: my youth. I am still easily recognizable as the person I was when I was first called a woman. Still nimble and energetic enough to scramble up a grassy bank, or hoist a suitcase up a steep and twisting staircase. I still have enough runway to lay out a substantial new plan, if I want to.

On the other bank is the future I am wading toward. There I see the parents — my own and my friends’ — who have died or are ailing, those whose bodies have packed up before their minds and vice versa. I can see the destination I’m moving toward, but I’m not there yet.

There is deep comfort in knowing that a place and person to whom you once belonged is still a sort of home that you can return to and shelter in.

Mary and I are elements in a kaleidoscopic, ever-morphing image whose theme is enduringly familiar and reassuringly constant: two women, fingers curled around mugs, plucking crumbs of something nutty and toasty from a shared plate.

Each of us tells the other she hasn’t changed a bit, which is true and not true. Our hair is streaked with grey but our styles haven’t changed much. Our hospital stories are of hip replacements and mastectomies rather than of childbirth. Our bodies have new lumps, ripples, and scars, but I would know her by her bouncy, upright gait at any distance.

Time’s effects fall unevenly on us. The solid aspects of life — body, home, world — change constantly, while the intangible — the love, the witnessing of self and other — these vaporous things turn out to be made of the sturdiest stuff.