by Susan Moon
The woman who answered the phone asked my age, and when I told her I was fifty-nine she said, in a warm but businesslike voice, “I’m sorry, but currently we’re not taking any women over fifty-two.” I asked her what age men they were “taking,” but she wouldn’t tell me.
A lesbian couple who are my friends met and fell in love at the age of sixty-five. They told me, “You have plenty of time!” They encouraged me to consider women, reminding me that women generally don’t mind the wrinkles as much as men do. I said, “I had some experience with that years ago, and I found out I’m not really a lesbian.” They said, “Sex doesn’t have to be all that important. It’s nice, but it’s a small part of the show.” Still, it didn’t seem right to decide to be a lesbian solely because I had despaired of attracting a man.
I consulted the personal ads and set bravely forth on several blind dates. In one of my last efforts, I “went out for coffee” with an enthusiastic hiker and cyclist in his sixties, who did environmental consulting work. He seemed like a nice man. His wife of thirty-four years had died of cancer, and after two years of grieving, he was turning his attention to the world of dating. It made me like him that he had waited those two years.
He asked what had gone wrong with my marriage. That was a long time ago, I said. It was hard to stay married in Berkeley in the seventies. Nobody even believed in marriage.
He wanted to know what had gone wrong with my last relationship. Well, I said, I needed more independence in my life than he could make room for, and he needed more domestic companionship than I could give him.
So what had gone wrong with the relationships in between? I mumbled about being a single mother and the difficulties of balancing the needs of children and a boyfriend.
Then he wanted to know what made me think any relationship was ever going to work. Why was I answering ads? Why had I called him? “I’m just an ordinary person,” he said. “I’m probably not any better than any of the others. Supposing we became involved, why should I imagine you’d want to stay with me?”
That brought me up short. “I hope I’ve learned from my mistakes,” I said. “How did you stay with your wife all that time?”
“It was the commitment to the marriage,” he said. “We never questioned our commitment, even in the rough times.”
Before he wheeled his bike down the sidewalk, he said he didn’t think there was much point in us meeting again.
It was hard, after a conversation like that, not to blame myself.
I called together a group of women friends my age who were single to talk about our situation. I wanted to know how they faced the challenge. We had a potluck lunch and sat in the sun and talked. We shared lonely feelings: “I don’t know what my identity is without a partner,” said one. Another said, “I miss the container of a relationship.”
And we encouraged each other, too. One woman said she talked to a good friend every day on the phone, and it helped her feel connected. Another commented, “It occurs to me that the feeling of being in love that I’ve had at first with so many guys is actually nausea,” and another added, “I need a lot of solitude in order to hear myself think.”
We didn’t all feel the same about being single, but we felt connected to each other and we made each other laugh.
It’s hard work trying to meet a partner. It generally doesn’t happen by itself if you’re an older woman and so you have to take the initiative. People used to tell me, “Just let go and that’s when it will happen,” but I noticed they stopped saying it when I got past sixty. You’re constantly reaching for a state other than the one you’re in, and this, as we know from Buddha and other experts, is the cause of suffering. Joy comes from accepting things as they are, but when you are looking for a mate, you are wishing for something you don’t have.
I couldn’t completely enjoy the fullness of my life because I always had this partner business in the back of my mind. It wasn’t just the feeling of dissatisfaction that got me down; it was the constant strategizing, like making my vacation plans according to where I might meet the most single men. I was too old to sign up for hang-gliding lessons, but a wilderness photography class bore temporary fruit in the form of a dinner date. And then I was reminded again that there’s a lot of distance to travel between meeting a guy and setting up house with him.
Sixty came and went and there was no new boyfriend.
I look back over my life and I wonder what my part is in all of this. Am I single due to dumb luck? karma? choice? statistics?
A familiar demon whispers in my ear that I am simply incapable of being in a committed relationship. A gentler voice suggests that I don’t have a partner because I don’t want one. Maybe I’m the one who has turned away from mating, without consciously admitting it, because I love my independence. Or a darker thought comes: maybe I’ve become attached to my loneliness; maybe loneliness is my significant other.
But lonely is a feeling, not a marital state. It’s a simple feeling. It’s clean and sad, and then it fades, and comes back later, and goes again. If I let myself feel the sadness when it comes, it loosens the bitterness of envy and regret. Bitterness is clenched, but sadness flows through it and melts it. Lonely turns into alone. I’m alive, alone.
Izumi Shikibu, a Japanese woman poet of the tenth century, wrote:
Watching the moon
at midnight,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely,
no part left out.
Gradually, without noticing when it happened, I seem to have let go of trying. It’s a big relief, I can tell you, not to be scanning the horizon for a spiritually minded socially engaged emotionally intelligent senior bachelor every time I leave the house. There are even days when I forget to look at the ring fingers of men my age when I first meet them.
I acknowledge that finding a partner can happen late in life, to straight people as well as gay people. It happened to Miss Punderson, after all. It might happen if you keep trying—especially if you’re not too fussy—and it’s remotely possible even if you stop trying. My widowed grandmother embarked on a happy second marriage when she was sixty-five, and two friends in my Zen community fell in love with each other in their seventies. I’m happy for them. I’ll say it again: I’m happy for them.
I’m making it a practice now to refuse envy, and I do mean practice, because it doesn’t come easy. When I notice envy’s hot flicker, I think about the Buddhist quality of mudita, or sympathetic joy. Taking joy in the joy of others is the flip side of envy, and anyway, I probably wouldn’t have been happy married to Norman Rockwell.
I’m turning my attention now to enjoying the life I have. I’m studying the benefits of being single.
A married Zen friend said, “You’re lucky. You have opportunities I don’t have to explore solitude. You can investigate what it means to be a human being.”
This makes me think of Sumangalamata, the wife of a hat maker, who was one of Buddha’s first women followers, in the sixth century BCE. She wrote the following poem:
At last free,
at last I am a woman free!
No more tied to the kitchen,
stained amid the stained pots,
no more bound to the husband
who thought me less
than the shade he wove with his hands.
No more anger, no more hunger,
I sit now in the shade of my own tree.
Meditating thus, I am happy, I am serene.
My friend reminds me: “Being married is like running a three-legged race, twenty-four seven. You have to compromise all the time. He likes two-percent milk; I prefer one-percent. He wants to arrive at the party on time; I want to get there half an hour late. He wants to set the clock radio; I want to sleep in. But you can do whatever you want. You can go wherever you want.”
The poet May Sarton said, “Alone we can afford to be wholly whatever we are, and to feel whatever we feel absolutely. That is a great luxury!”
I should laminate these quotes and keep them ready in my wallet for the next time I stumble across one of those books about soul mates.
There’s another good thing about being single, and it has to do with renunciation. Aging urges relinquishment upon me. It’s time to scale back, to simplify my life. Everyone, whether single or double, finds out that getting old rhymes with letting go, but the go-letting of old-getting is easier to embrace if you’re single. You can give away books and dishes without asking anyone.
Sometimes, not just when I’m lying awake at three o’clock in the morning, but at other times as well, I think of Peace Pilgrim. She walked back and forth across the United States from the time she was forty-four until her death at the age of seventy-three. She carried no money and had no possessions but the clothes she wore and a few things in her pockets. Her vow was to “remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace, walking until given shelter and fasting until given food.” I couldn’t do what she did—that was her way, not mine—but it makes me feel brave to think about her. She didn’t have a husband either.
The main thing is, I’m not separate, I only think I am. I’m one of the jewel-like nodes in Indra’s Net, that vast spiderweb of the universe. I’m not a thing at all, I’m an intersection where filaments connect. Pluck me out and the whole thing falls apart, like a knitted shawl unraveling from one dropped stitch. The universe holds me and the universe needs me. No way is the universe going to leave me for a younger woman.
I’m learning to meet my most intimate needs without a significant other now. I keep a long-handled bamboo backscratcher on my bedside table. I’ve named it “My Husband.” It’s like having my cake and eating it, too—I’m getting those hard-to-reach places between the shoulder blades scratched without having to pick up anyone else’s socks.
My friend Walter was in his seventies when he left his apartment in San Francisco, where he was surrounded by doting friends and relatives, and moved into a tiny cottage at the edge of an apple orchard in Sonoma County, in search of more solitude. I was telling him about my struggle with loneliness, and he said he loved his own company. “I’ll be taking a walk on the beach,” he said, “and I’ll say to myself: ‘Hey Walter, ol’ buddy! It’s great to take a walk with you!’” He clapped himself affectionately on the shoulder. “You could do the same,” he told me.
So sometimes, thinking of him, I call out to myself, “Hey, Sue, old pal!” and I clap myself on the shoulder, too, pretending to enjoy my own company as much as Walter enjoys his. It doesn’t take away the sadness, but it helps.
Exchanging Self and Other
Those desiring speedily to be
a refuge for themselves and others
should make the interchange of “I” and “other,”
and thus embrace a sacred mystery.
—Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva
I’M LOOKING OVER my laptop out the window of a former bait shack turned summer cottage on the coast of Maine, where my old friend Susie and I are spending a week on vacation. It’s late afternoon. I’ve paused in my writing, and I’m watching Susie take pictures of the fleshy boulders, with the water of Penobscot Bay lapping up into the cracks between them. She and her long shadow move lightly over the granite, stopping and going and stopping again, like a spider.
I first met Susie when she lived across the hall from me our freshman year of college at Radcliffe. She had come to New England from Mexico, where, as the daughter of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, she had lived since the age of eight. I had come to college from two blocks away, where I had grown up, and so, like an armchair traveler, I was glad to make a friend who brought me the taste of worlds I had never imagined—Hollywood, Mexico City, American Communists. But even before I knew any of that about her, and I didn’t know it right away because she was shy, I was drawn to her. You can fall in love with a person you want for a friend, without any romantic feeling, especially when you’re a college freshman, wondering what kind of a person you are and what kind of person you want to be.
Susie wore her hair in a long brown braid that hung down her back, with a thick piece of Mexican yarn woven into it, sometimes a bright lime green, sometimes fuchsia. Another girl in our freshman dorm used to creep up behind Susie in the corridor and suddenly pull on her braid, calling out, “Ding dong! Ding dong!” Susie would mutter “Don’t!” and scurry away. It made my scalp sting, too, when it happened.
We were roommates the next three years of college. I remember her climbing the walls at night in our shared room in the college dorm. Literally. I woke more than once to see her kneeling on her bed and clawing at the wall beside it, as if she were trying to climb up or out, and calling out in words I couldn’t understand. When I woke her to reassure her, she didn’t know where she was. We were a long way from Mexico City.
She took me to visit her family in the summer of 1962. They had moved from Mexico City to Italy. We were nineteen. Her parents, her five siblings, and various extended family and guests were spending the summer in a rented house perched at the top of a cliff on the Italian Riviera. We sat on a patio, under a grape arbor, looking over the dark turquoise sea, eating fresh croissants from the local bakery, and I listened eagerly to their talk, mostly in English but sometimes in Spanish, about LSD and psychoanalysis, and about ex-Communist friends back in Hollywood who were starting to work again under their own names. Susie’s mother included me in the conversation, as if I were a grown-up, even though I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time.
Susie introduced me to faraway places and ideas. I, on the other hand, had a family up the street from our dorm, and so I could offer her a taste of home and the familiar ruckus of younger siblings. My parents grew fond of her, and sometimes she came for Sunday dinner. I think it helped her feel the ground under her feet to know a family who lived in an old house made of wood, with a fire in the living room fireplace on cold New England Sundays.
The year after we graduated from college, Susie became my first close friend to have a child. I went to see her and the baby in a tiny upstairs flat in Cambridge on a bright winter day, with snow on the streets and sun on the snow. I was excited. I wanted to know what motherhood was like. I don’t remember anything Susie said, but I remember sunlight blazing through curtainless windows onto the creamy apartment walls, and the quick flick of a smile she gave me before her eyes went back to the baby. I remember how deeply she and her daughter, who was wrapped in a white flannel blanket, gazed at each other.
She sent me out to buy nursing pads so that the milk that was leaking from her breasts wouldn’t soak through her shirt. I had never heard of nursing pads. I wondered: how does one learn about such things? I walked down the snowy streets to the drugstore, and back to the apartment, nursing pads in hand, feeling important and useful. Up the wooden stairs and into that nest of sleepy, milky light. So this was what new motherhood was like, this commanding brightness. That baby is now in her forties. She doesn’t know it, but when I see her as a grown-up, as I occasionally do, she still shines for me—the first baby in my friendship circle.
After Susie and I were both divorced, we lived for a year in her house in Cambridge together, with our four young children, two hers and two mine. The kids formed a detective club called the Non-Squeaky Sneakers, and Susie took pictures of them climbing on fire escapes and spying through windows in the neighborhood, looking for suspicious clues. I wrote the text, and we made a book together.
When I moved to California, I didn’t see her or even talk to her often, but our connection stayed strong over both time and space. We could always pick the thread right up, as if we’d been in the same room the whole time. When I was in a bad depression some years ago, there was a patch of time when I phoned her almost every day. She listened to me across the miles, and talked to me, and sent me homeopathic remedies.
As you grow older, old friends become more precious. Unlike family, friends start out by choosing each other, but if the friendsh
ip continues over time, through thick and thin, old friends become family. Old friends are a great benefit of growing old. I thought I had old friends when I was young, but I couldn’t know then what an old friend was. After all, you can’t have a friendship that’s any older than you are, and the older you get, the older your friendships are.
In Muir Woods National Park in California, I have seen the cross section of a giant redwood tree, a thousand years old, with a ring for every year. An old friendship is like an old tree, with rings and rings of shared experiences under the outer bark, making the friendship thicker and taller. Sometimes, like a redwood tree, there may even be a burned out hollow part in the trunk, but the friendship still stands.
Childhood friends keep me connected to the whole narrative of my life. The further I get from my childhood, the harder it is to believe that I was once a nine-year-old girl practicing juggling with my best friend in her back yard until we could both do three crab apples, but my friend can confirm it. She was there. She was my witness and I was hers. In this way, I find as I get older that my life does not belong to me alone—it belongs to the people I’ve spent it with. My childhood belongs to my childhood friends, and theirs to me.
I recently visited that same friend after she had knee surgery. She lives far away from me, in the same house she grew up in, the house with the crab apple tree whose fruit we used for juggling, the house where she showed me how to put in a tampon, the house where we talked late into the night about Einstein’s theory of relativity and how time passes at different speeds. More than fifty years later, when she showed me the scar on her knee, I had a powerful moment of recognition. I thought: I know that knee, with or without its scar. If somebody showed me that knee, and only that knee, through a peephole, I would know whose knee it was. It matters to me what happens to that familiar knee.