Does being in midlife do strange things to the ways we recall experiences?
Almost six months have passed since I taught my last class. I haven’t thought much about my time in classrooms, even though I spent half a century in them, if you count my time as a student, faculty member and artist-in-residence. (Sometimes those roles overlapped, e.g., when I was a graduate student and assistant.) On the other hand, I was a New York City bike messenger for one year, before I started teaching. Today, I found myself thinking about a particular incident from that time for no particular reason.
One late Fall afternoon, I made a run to a Spring Street gallery. At that time, that part of town—SoHo—was still an “artsy “ neighborhood; its streets hadn’t become the rows of designer boutiques and cafés that make Starbuck’s look like a gas station convenience store they are now. I picked up a framed print wrapped in brown paper. It didn’t fit into my messenger bag; my left arm was just barely long enough to cradle it against my jacket as I pedaled ten kilometers to an apartment on the Upper West Side.
I breathed a sigh of relief that the print—an artist I’d heard of?—was, as best as I could tell, intact. A doorman didn’t stop me on my way in. (Could it have been because I’m White?) I climbed a flight of stairs, rang a bell and the door opened to a face I’d seen before, though not in person, framing blue eyes like no others I’d seen: mirrors of vulnerability.
When I picked up the print, the name on the tag was one I’d grown up with, yet it could have belonged to any number of women, including some who looked nothing like the one who answered the door. Seeing those days confirmed she was indeed “that” one: Judy Collins.
She had to’ve known I was trying not to show how star-struck I was: I was probably the 19457th person who tried to be “cool” in her presence. My “professionalism” gave me away. “Thank you.” “Happy to help, Ms. Collins. Have a nice day.” “You do the same.”
That memory was prompted by something that came up when I opened a Google browser: an interview in which she talked about, among other things, her 40-plus years of sobriety. That confirmed what I thought that day: She was drunk or hung over; given the timeline, she was probably a year or two from sobriety.
She was also in midlife, at least chronologically. She is now 87 years old, on a “farewell “ tour. Somehow I believe she is still in the middle of her life: She is still creating and performing. Even if she is ending one of those things, she’s nowhere near the end.
