Now You Take It Smack in the Teeth, Baby

The beautifully brilliant woman who used to teach in my classroom left behind The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin: 1973).  I am certain she no longer needed the snarky well crafted prose, but I do still and may always.  (Believe me when I tell you that this book is worth purchasing, if only for her scathing takedown of Kerouac's The Subterraneans.)

The last piece in the book, an uncollected article titled "The Middle or Blue Period," contains the title of this entry.  In it she is waking on her 40th birthday and gives herself a pep talk that has very little to do with pep and is so fraught with tangential asides that one wonders who, in fact, she's talking to.  It certainly can't be herself because, if it were, the reader would have to think her quite insane and pray she did not live to see 41.

The article resonates with me today because I have been thinking a lot about age and how the things we do that are bizarre at one age become immature by another (thank you, Janet Livermore).  I haven't done many of the things I'd planned on doing by this age, and I find myself doing something I'd never imagined and planning not to do one that society expects of women.  And, whether I care to admit it or not, I am tragically, terribly, terrifically tangential in my own circuitous way of speaking both to students and friends and, sadly, to myself.

Tangent 1 (with a point):
I've had several conversations with a good friend about how age looks on a man.  Words like distinguished, sophisticated, polished, dapper and learned get thrown around.  Men of a certain age are charismatic, world traveled, salt and peppery.  Perfection.  Women, though...we are lumpy bags of lukewarm oatmeal under thinning helmets of gray straw.  Let's face it, there just aren't very many women who age gracefully and you can stop right there with your Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall, and Ann Margaret.  All stunning, yes, but every single one of them still dyes her hair.

Tangent 2 (also with a point):
I've reached an age where, statistically, all of my adventure ought to be behind me.  I should be comfortable settling down and settling in to a nice quiet life, but I am not.  In the last few years, I have met a version of myself that I did not know existed, the one I thought I could see winking at me conspiratorially from the dark blue ring around my irises as I stared into the mirror wondering who the hell I was looking at, the one who knows that books and breathing are really, without exaggeration, the same thing.  I'm in a place where the thought of being alone feels simultaneously like a death sentence and a Get Out of Jail Free card.  I'm no Mrs. Mallard, but I can see what Kate was trying to do there.  I really can.

So where does all this age ramble take us?  In her article, Dorothy rambles far and wide, from the analogy that trying to lie about one's age is like placing sandpits on an archipelago, to a feigned letter to Rosetti asking 'what the hell a watered shoot' is.  She gives herself a staunch reality check early on:
Now you face it, baby.  Now you take it smack in the teeth, baby.  Quote baby unquote.

But she also advises herself to remember how far she's come and to acknowledge the solid ground on which she stands.  It is those words, these words, that I plan to return to from all of my tragic tangents in the coming days.  Lord knows if they're good enough for Dorothy, they're good enough for me:

Your path stretches so smooth, so gracious.  There are no more ways for you to make a fool of yourself; you have assembled the complete set.  There are no more mistakes; you have made them all.  There are, for you, only ease and fulfillment and tenderness.  And you did not work to gain them.  They are given to you as gifts for this, your happiest birthday.