This morning I reached for a glass of water and noticed (again) that my hands looked just like my mother's hands used to. I am becoming her. I think of photographing this, my hand reaching for the glass, and then thought that this awareness has no significance to anyone but me. Or so I thought. My friend Beverly was visiting from Atlanta and I told her about this reaching and what I noticed, not for the first time, and she said "Oh, yeah, I know." Then she looked at her own hands for a moment and looked at me with the look that aging women give each other. We are friends because we got to know and love each other as teenagers and now our friendship is a given. In the years between then and now, just like our mothers, we had families, good times, bad times, travel and hard work, and like our mothers, we spend a lot of our time now wondering how to be (and look) younger than we are. We both wish for a closer relationship with our children.
My hands are wrinkled and the veins are prominent even as I type this post. I am so grateful for them though, no matter how they look. I read Charles Bukowski this morning and realized that he says what we what we all understand to be truth as well as any poet I know. in the bottom of the hour lurks the mad writer in a cork room, the falseness of the Senior Prom, the submarine with purple footprints...in the bottom of the hour lurks the tree that cries in the night, the place that nobody found, being so young you thought you could change it, being middle-aged and thinking you could survive it, being old and thinking you could hide from it.
This is the book The Last Night of the Earth Poems that I picked up after waving good-bye to Beverly. Be safe I said.