About half way

Half way 1.

I’ve always liked having 1 July as my birthday. It’s bang in the middle of the year, and my birth date – 1.7.71 – is a neat little pallindrome of a number. Getting older has never bothered me, although looking older sometimes does. (It typically catches me out first thing in the morning, before my brain has woken up to the fact that I’m not 19 any more. When the pillow leaves wrinkles in your face rather than your face leaving wrinkles on the pillow, it’s hard to keep a sense of perspective about aging.)

Half way 2.

This year, it’s occurred to me that as well as my birthday being halfway through the year, this one also might be half way through my life. 78 is not an unreasonable age for a woman born in the latter half of the twentieth century to die;  I’d be about ready to hang up my knitting needles by then, I think.

Mulling this over, I realised I’ve lost my fear of becoming old. I don’t mean that I relish the prospect: the longer I can stave off the rain hood and wart with a big black hair growing out of it, the happier I’ll be. But I’ve been thinking about my own grandmothers, who died in their 70s, and who were both so very important to me and so influential in what I have become. (One knitted. One baked. Both coped with fortitude and patience through difficult situations – long illness for one, sudden widowhood for the other.) I saw them very often – almost daily – and in my memory, they were both doing nothing when I arrived. OK, Grandma Boyd might be knitting and watching TV – she always had a fine appreciation of the footballer’s physique – and Grandma Breeze might be baking or reading something by James Herbert. (I didn’t get her appreciation of horror. She once loaned me a book to take on holiday and I don’t think I slept for a week.) But it seemed to me that they were just waiting for something to happen: the something, in this case, being me. I used to wonder how I would ever cope with the boredom and narrowness of old age.

Now, in the last year or so – and it might be the result of my dance with cancer, or it might have happened anyway – I get what they were all about. I get that family and friends mattered more than anything, and that life was about the quiet moment and the crossword completed and the heel turned. I can see – often do see – that what brings the most satisfaction is the stillness and smallness of what’s around us, rather than the big excitements that my teen self, visiting Grandma and anxious to tell her all about my firework life, was so obsessed with.

Half way 3.

On Saturday last I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to do a class in quilting techniques (in connection with the Quilts exhibition drawing to a close there now, one of the finest things I’ve ever seen). During lunchtime I wanted to go to the shop so I took a shortcut through the galleries to get there. I found myself in a room full of statues of the Buddha. Some were smiling, some laughing, some lost in contemplation. All of them were beautiful. The air was soaked in silence and serenity. I went from rushing, dashing woman on a mission to something like a statue myself, standing still and looking around me. I felt myself smile. And then I went on. But it’s the buddhas, half way between where I was and where I was going, that I will remember.