Audrey Hepburn once said (or at least I think it was her) and if not many others have provided a variation on the theme that growing old is not for the faint of heart. This is truly a serious statement and I believe never more so than for my generation. As usual I am a dangling participle and so is my generation. We don’t fit. We don’t fit the way our parents aged and we don’t fit the younger generation. We are forging new paths and ways of being for both them and especially for us.

We are an aware generation. We have been forced to examine much about ourselves and the world around and within us. The generation right before us pretty much had their career paths laid out for them . My sister and brother, both more than ten years older than I, did what they were told and what was expected of them. My sister went to college, became a teacher, worked for two years and then married and then raised 3 sons. My brother went to college, then to medical school and then got married and raised three children.

Me, well, let us see. I started college, I quit or rather flunked out in my junior year. I worked as a recreational therapist in a state mental institution and that is another story and worked some more and then eventually went back to school. The mental institution provided some memorable experiences for a young impressionable girl. They were very different in those days. I remember looking into a room though a peephole and finding a bloodshot eye staring back at me. I am still impressed that I did not scream. It was a patient who was in solitary confinement, had been there for quite a while. He was brought in after he attempted to have sex with a corpse and it woke up. It kind of unhinged him.

I also remember being required to play the record player while patients had electro-shock therapy. It was supposed to calm them down but I am still unsure how anyone could be cal waiting for volts of electricity to be passed through your brain. I ended up assisting during the process. The patient had to be held while the voltage was administered and it was important that they be held carefully. While the current was passing through the brain the body tended to raise up from the waist up and from the waist down in a v-shape. If you weren’t careful the patient could jackknife bringing the knees to the chest and breaking the spine so we had to hole onto both ends. I lasted at that position for a year and then decided that this life was not for me.

I eventually returned to school and graduated going on eventually to earn an alphabetic arrangement of degrees that can make a resume look very impressive. Oh, and did I mention I never married, never had children and horror of horrors have never been in a serious relationship for any length of time with either a man or a woman. One day I woke up and realized I had forgotten to check the societal expectations of me and here I am doing it again.

The Meanderings of a Dangling Participle

My Life As A Dangling Participle

My life has been a journey of spirit and never more so than now.

Sometimes I feel like a dangling participle off the edge of my own life. Not sure exactly where I am supposed to put myself or where I fit in. You remember dangling participles from middle school or junior high, as it was called in my day. They comprised the awful part of diagramming sentences. Never quite went with anything else – they dangled. Well that is me ---- I dangle.

Well, alright, what the hell is that supposed to mean. It means that I never quite fit in to the logical sequence of life. I came many years after my siblings in response to my mother’s fears that she was growing older and her children would soon be out of the house and she would be left………alone……. enter me… and as is inevitable, I eventually left her alone.

Ok, then there was my schooling – whoops I was a foreigner or at least I wasn’t white. My parents came from a Mediterranean background, which meant I didn’t look like all the blonde hairs and the blue eyes in the group ---- I still remember the day someone asked me what I was – because I didn’t look like everyone else.

Oh and did I mention the other great asset that set me apart (ah, at the time I am not sure I saw it as an asset) and that was my intelligence. It came with perceptiveness and what was then called aggressiveness – an unfortunate tendency to feel that I had the right to defend myself. I can still see the English teacher, appropriately named Miss Heller, who felt that I was indeed a spawn of that place and who described me as immoral and amoral both within the same criticism. Hm-m-m-m, it took many years for me to realize that immoral and amoral were mutually exclusive. I could only be immoral if I understood that I had morals, which I was deliberately going against. Since it took many years for me to understand the concept of immorality, I suspect her assessment of me being amoral was correct or at least correct by her standards.

I remember this woman distinctly, the hair on her legs was long enough to knit – ok, that is enough of petty retaliation. On to bigger and better factors that shaped the indeed, remarkable woman that I am today. Someone has to praise me and it might as well be me. I certainly earned often enough that it was fine to criticize myself but to take credit for who I am as a person was considered to be the height of conceit. I never quite understood why I was allowed to denigrate myself and to make fun of myself but not allowed to give myself credit where credit was due.

Anyway , this dangling participle woke up one day to find that she was facing the last third of her life. Oh, that sounds harsh…but it is true. I was sixty. I had lived through two-thirds of my life from 1 to 30; then 31 to 60 and here I was at the last third. And the question remained “how did I want to face this last section”? And the weirder thing is that for the first time I realized that I had control over how this happened.