I Was You
More, November, 2008

At nine o'clock one warm summer night, I'm at the desk in my attic office, trying to write. Trying to hear myself think, as my mother used to say, despite the noise that's flooding through my wide-open window: the percussive pounding of out-of-synch drums, the jackhammer beat of a bass guitar. Damn kids, I think, slamming my window shut. Don't they know what time it is?

Nine twenty PM. The racket is getting louder every minute. I pay taxes in this city. Doesn't that entitle me to a little peace and quiet at night? I throw a coat on over my pajamas, storm out of the house and stomp around the neighborhood until I find the source of the noise: the bungalow with the rattling windows and shuddering walls. I ring the bell. Wait a civilized 30 seconds. Ring it again. No one inside can hear me, of course; the "music" is too loud. I knock on the door. Nothing. I bang on it, hard.

The music stops. The door is flung open. I freeze, fist in midair. I'm staring into the face of a dreadlocked hippie. "This is a residential neighborhood," I bark. "You're making too much noise."

The young man looks me up and down with something akin to pity. Who is this crazy, wild-haired old lady in flannel sushi pajamas and 10-year-old chartreuse suede clogs? I see myself for an instant through his eyes. Oh, I realize. That crazy lady would be me.

Then he smiles beatifically, extending his hand: "I'm Namaste, your neighbor. What's your name?" If you think you're going to sweet talk me out of my righteous indignation, I tell him silently, you're one drummer short of a band.

A familiar odor wafts out the open door. I sniff, peering past Namaste into the house. The living room is filled with long-haired, bearded guys in crocheted caps and torn Bob Marley T-shirts, each with a conga drum propped between his legs. A girl in a flowing Indian-print skirt glides in from the kitchen, a ceramic bowl overflowing with apples and bananas in her hands. More kids are sprawled on cushions and sleeping bags all over the floor.

I recognize the smell now. It's the fragrance of my long-lost 1960s youth: a piquant potpourri of patchouli, sweat and mildew, spiced with a not-so-subtle top note of pot.

My mouth falls open with a shock of recognition. "I was you," I blurt out. "This was my life."

Seemingly unfazed, Namaste nods knowingly. "Would you like to come in? We're about to fire up the bong."

Mesmerized by memories, I follow my pied drummer into the house. "This is Meredith, our neighbor," Namaste announces. Without a glance at my menopause pajamas, his roommates and friends welcome me with smiles, with a new burst of drumming, with the bong. I shake my head at the boy who offers it to me, trying not to inhale as the cloud of smoke passes me by. The drumming sounds better here, I notice, than it did from my office. I feel the vibration of the bass in my belly. Before I know it, my foot is tapping to the beat. How can I be mad at these kids, I think. Their faces are so open, so innocent, so sweet.

The music stops, dissolving into a paroxysm of coughing and laughter. The spell is broken. What was I thinking, partying with a bunch of kids?

"You sure you have to go?" Namaste asks me as I'm backing out of the room. "We're just getting warmed up."

"It's 10 o'clock at night," I say. My voice sounds gravelly and stern. It sounds like my mother's voice. When did I turn into my mother, I wonder. I force myself to focus on the task at hand. "You can't play loud music this late."

Namaste nods earnestly. "I hear you," he says.

"Just so I don't hear you," I reply, and leave for the comfort of my king-size, pillow-top, orthopedic bed.

I first noticed the shift at around age 40. At 55 the process seems near complete. First my dentist was younger than I was. Then my lawyer. My editor. My boss. Resisting the circling-the-drain sensation that my elder-status evoked, I tried a few new mantras on for size. Don't trust anyone under 50. No: too bitter. Senior power. Not ready to go there just yet. Fifty is the new 30. Tell it to my thighs.

Over time, being older-than has become my new normal. I've become accustomed to getting my root canals, my paychecks and my legal advice from people who have run fewer laps around the track than I. Accepting that reality is one thing, but it's quite another to see people half my age wearing what was once my life, when I don't remember ever agreeing to lend it out.

My brother, my partner, Katrine, and I are flying into Oahu airport, visiting my niece for Thanksgiving in her new home. A supermodel turned actress turned flower child, she ditched Hollywood at 27 for Hawaii, sold her fully loaded Escalade, put the red carpet gowns into storage and rented a one-room, two-burner stove top studio on the North Shore. At the gate she drapes us in leis and leads us to her "new" car: a rusted-out, smoke-spitting 1967 Volvo wagon–exactly the car I was driving in 1974.

We'll be having our Thanksgiving feast at a friend's house, she says. My mouth waters; my imagination runs wild. I see us at some movie star's beachside mansion, savoring kalua pig lifted whole from a steaming sand-pit, drinking papaya daiquiris with my niece's entourage of celeb wanderers. But when she turns the Volvo off the highway, she doesn't pull up to a wrought-iron gate or announce our arrival into an intercom. She parks beside a falling-down chicken coop and leads us to a funky compound of Buddhist-prayer-flag-draped shacks. She exchanges kisses and hugs with her friends, who are gathered around a long outdoor table. A beaming, island-tanned girl wearing not much more than a garland offers us a

glass of sparkling organic cider and a joint the size of a cigar.

"Everyone circle up," a girl in a tie-dyed sarong calls out. Talk about your acid flashbacks! As we join hands around the table, I swear I'm looking at a bunch of twenty-somethings I knew 30 years earlier. That bare-chested blond guy with waist-length hair and a puka-shell necklace. That radiant black girl with a fuzzy Afro halo around her head. That earth mother with the baby at her breast and the toddler playing in the dirt at her feet. Oh my goddess, I think. I'm having Thanksgiving with the cast of Hair.

"Let's go round the circle and each say what we're thankful for," our ringleader proclaims. Oh no, I groan silently. These kids are going to be bursting with gratitude; I know the type. I was the type, until a few decades' worth of disappointments, dissolutions and disillusionments showed me the error of my foolishly grateful ways. I do a quick calculation in my head. If each of these people speaks before dinner is served, we'll be cutting into our poi pie sometime around New Year's Eve.

"Won't the food get cold?" I ask helpfully. Katrine squeezes my hand. "Don't bad-vibe the kids," she whispers. So I shut up.

"I'm grateful for my real family, which is all of you," the first person in the circle says. Her sent-iments are echoed and expanded upon by the second, and the third and the fourth. I shift from one foot to the other, thinking of the various "real families" I shared Thanksgivings with, after I ran away from my home-of-origin at age 16. Who were all those people I adopted as my family-of-choice, I try to recall. And where on earth are they now? The old Woodstock slogan echoes in my brain: If you can remember it, you weren't there.

But I was there, and I do remember it. I kvetch silently as the gratitude goes on and on and on. Do they even know where they got their back-to-nature, smile-on-your-brother, make-your-own-family thing? Do they know that their parents invented it? Did they say please before they borrowed it; did they say thank you when they took it as their own?

I flex my knees, feeling a familiar twinge. If I have to stand still much longer, my chronic hip ache is going to kick in long before the contact high.

"We're all giving thanks for being together," our leader interjects after the seventh or eighth person has said her grateful piece. And not a moment too soon for me. "We all want the same things: peace, love and happiness," she decrees. "Let's eat."

Famished by now, I grab a chipped plate off the stack of mismatched dishes, pick up a set of chopsticks, pour myself a generous serving of the Champagne we contributed to the potluck feast. As I make my way around the groaning board, my heart sinks to my freshly pedicured toes. The table is covered with an array of utterly unappetizing offerings: several permutations of lentils, brown rice, stir-fried veggies, beans. The centerpiece is a misshapen "turkey" which, an achingly lovely young woman informs us proudly, is actually made of seitan. I sink gingerly into a rickety chair and stare at the all-too- familiar substances on my plate. "I refused to eat this exact meal in 1968," I mutter to Katrine. "I can't believe I'm about to eat it now."

When did life become such a dead-serious undertaking that I can't eat a few lentils without whining about it, stand up through a few affirmations, witness the beauty and buoyancy of youth without growling cynically into my jowls, grousing about my aching hip? When did I start wallowing in nostalgia about the past and fretting about the future, instead of reveling, as I used to do, in being here now? When did the lifestyle I used to scorn as the epitome of the Problem become the epitome of me?

Case in point: the no-electricity, outhouse-only cabin in the woods that I bought when I was in my thirties, when my kids were nine and 10. For nearly two decades I cherished it as a family getaway and writing retreat, happy to chop the wood and carry the water that a week in the forest required. Then the benefits of hot showers, down couches and Wi-Fi started outweighing the joys of silence, solitude and simplicity, and my trips to the cabin became fewer and farther between. Wouldn't you know it: Just when I'm getting too old to enjoy the cabin (or too yuppified, or too citified or all of the above), my sons are old enough to enjoy it in a new, grown-up way. The little boys I used to wrench away from their video games and school dances for snowy Christmas breaks at the cabin go there now with their girlfriends, who love the place as much and in exactly the same ways as I used to.

It's not just people who are much younger than I am who make me feel at once envious (when did the party stop for me?) and judgmental (do they realize how naive they are?) and, more than anything, relieved (I'll never be that naive again). Several of my closest friends are in their forties. Hearing the things they're going through–knowing that I've been there, paid for that–makes me glad I'll never face midlife mishugas again.

"When I was your age…" I find myself saying when Susan or Katie tells me about her turbulent love life. "When my kids were your kids' ages…" I begin many of my motherhood discussions with Lianne. "When I bought my house…," I recalled when Meg and her husband were struggling to buy their first home, then struggling to pay their monthly mortgage, which was nearly the same amount I'd paid 20 years earlier as a down payment for mine. I remember the agony of confronting those problems; I remember the ecstasy of having the boundless hormonal, maternal and financial resources to solve them. But my step is lighter without the weight of that drama queen crown on my head.

Sure, I've lost my skin tone and my innocence. No combination of unguents or longing will bring them back. But at 55 I've also found most of the things that I spent my youth yearning for: meaningful work; a hot, stable relationship; passionate, interesting kids; a great place to live (with an almost-paid-off mortgage); smart, loving friends. When I gather my clan around the Thanksgiving table these days, the turkey is actually a turkey; the pies are pumpkin, not poi. But I always serve a vegetarian option, and I always take a moment to count my blessings: a tip of the hat to who I once was, tempered by gratitude for who I am now.