Who am I, I asked myself at the cusp of my seventies. Now, at its close, I have an answer. It is so simple. It is so clear. I am the same person I have always been. Gaining years did not in itself significantly slow my speedy self, lessen my need to control or bring me spiritual enlightenment. Nor did it flatten my playful whimsy, dull my tender vulnerabilities, or constrict my driving life force. Being old did not make me wise, or patient, or benign or any of the other tropes of old age. Where I possessed those traits they remained. Where I didn’t, they never rose out of the mist.

Certainly I grew and changed. When my youngest daughter played soccer at ten, I diligently drove her to, and stayed for, every practice and match. Parents screamed and yelled on the sidelines, rooting for their child. They jumped up and down. They hugged and high-fived. They cupped their hands around their mouths and exhorted their child to “Run. Get that ball. Get it. Get it.”

I, in contrast, watched silently, excited inside but too restricted to let out any whoops or hollers.

“I want you to yell,” my daughter told me. I couldn’t.

Thirty years later I fly up for the roller derby bouts of that very daughter’s daughter who is eleven. In the stands at the side of the rink, next to my daughter, my grandson, my son-in-law and a crowd of almost frothing attendees, I shout. I yell. I hug. I jump. Every iota of my being is invested in the noise, the support, the game and the release. Oh Lordy, it feels good.

What took me so long? I took me so long.

A year ago I went to a stand-up comedy event to support a friend who was trying out the medium. The club was small. I made the mistake of sitting in the front row. From there I watched, laughing at times to myself, making mental notes as I tried to understand what made good comedy and what didn’t, thoroughly engrossed in taking in and parsing the evening. Just before the M.C. closed she pointed to me.

“What a lot of yucks this one is,” she told the audience. “Not a laugh out of her the whole night. What’s your problem, honey? Forgot this was a comedy show?”

I sat there smiling, shrugging and rolling my eyes to frame a quizzical expression, my way of saying what she saw was the best I could do. And it was.

I am that woman at the comedy show. I drove to the club by myself on a dark Los Angeles night, close to an hour on unfamiliar streets, propelled by the need to support my friend. There I sat, my tight little self, on an adventure, intellectually analyzing all around me, and having a wonderful time doing so. Maybe not quite as wonderful as joining the steaming crowd of yelling fans at my granddaughter’s roller derby bout, but exhilarating none the less. And that is how I will move forward. The same way I always have. One foot at a time. In my own imprint. Dogged. Inquisitive. Present, Caretaking, Competitive. Attached. Independent. And with a hunger for the unfolding of self.

Yes, some things are done. No more couch potato fantasies of being an Olympic athlete or surfing the breakers at Venice Beach. And no more, or almost no more, dreams for a perfect partner.

Yes some things are done.

But not all.

I still struggle.

I still rejoice.

And I still wonder.

Among the questions: Who will I be at eighty?

I know the answer, if not the specifics.

A woman.

Even older.

The same me, wrangling personal answers from age old questions. Bargaining with time. Straddling the thin ridge of the final high stakes. Building my story. My coming of aging.

Margaret Grundstein

Bio

I was raised in Detroit during the fifties and sixties, went to college on the east coast and upon graduation followed the great radical migration west. My first book, Naked in the Woods, My Unexpected Years in a Hippie Commune, published by the Oregon State University Press in 2015, is the narrative non-fiction story of how I abandoned my graduate degree from Yale in 1970 to start a new life in the backwoods of Oregon, sacrificing not only my education and ambition, but also phones, electricity and running water in a search for utopia. Strong connections formed with the land and each other, but disillusionment came hard and fast when conflicts developed around money, ultimately forcing recognition that no matter how far out we venture, it may never be far enough.

My second book, Bargains: A Coming of Aging Memoir Told in Tales, is a collection of twelve personal essays. In it I move through my seventies, from the last vestiges of middle age to the true beginning of old age. Intimacy, sexuality, friendship, family, self, work and mortality are explored.

I have a B.A. from Goddard College, a Masters in Urban Planning from Yale University and a Masters in Family Therapy from Loyola Marymount University. My career has been eclectic, ultimately settling into a niche that fit my life as a single parent; the owner/director of a preschool in Venice, California for the past forty-four years. Twenty years ago I added a private practice as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. Since then I have added writer to my resume.