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09/18/2004: ""I GROW OLD, I GROW OLD!" ... MY PICKUP TRUCK IS SOLD!"

After 52 years of driving I'm car-less. It's been a tense experience going through the steps to accomplish that but I'm getting used to the idea and liking it more with time. It is for me one more of those milestones that mark the steady withdrawal from life as I once knew it. Each seemed at first too extreme, too difficult to accept, very sad to see as inevitable, then not so bad and finally quite nice. It was that way with departing both my exes, giving up on my career in engineering, not being able nor caring to earn any more money, etc. etc. Those doors that close behind us never to reopen.

One illusion associated with having a car that seems to linger longest; the road leads to the "land of beginning again", the land of Oz. Maybe it was being born into a culture that had the myth of the frontier as a place of renewal or it's counterpart, the quest as a rite of passage. In any event something tells me I've finally learned that packing everything I own in the back and following the varicose vein of a map to Valhalla just doesn't cut it anymore. Ditto with trying to do my own mantenance work with a bod no longer suited to crawling around and under the beasty nor trying to meet expenses that seem more appropriate for brain surgery and such. I think I can appreciate how those old cow pokes must have felt when the time came to hang up the saddle for the last time and put old "Paint" out to pasture.

I've been relearning this summer how to ride a bicycle after a lapse of thirty years. Hoping to dust off a sense of balance after that long and finding it alive and well was wishful thinking. It's not like sex and swimming, the body does forget...and how! In spite of that I have progressed so that staying within the narrow confines of a sidewalk is no longer the death defying feat of early days. Steering has eluded the master's touch of my childhood. It reminds me of taking a neighbor's dog for a walk; it had it's own agenda and only with near strangulation by the leash would it adapt to my plans. Maybe my vintage thrift shop bike still has technology far more advanced than my clunkers past and has a front wheel with a mind of it's own? We'll just see about that! I've added a neat thrift shop bike trailer/child stroller so I'm able to truck home a week's worth of groceries. A wire basket on the front of the bike suffices for trips to the library. It's nearly a month now and so far I haven't missed a vehicle at all. With winter coming I plan to convert the trailer to stroller mode and walk as I did anyway before being sans wheels.

I have adopted a means of coping with shifts in my life by doing something to occupy my hands and mind intensely. Of late that consists of rearranging software for my web site. My ex used to make a quilt. I knew it was going to be like walking a minefield when all the snippets of colorful fabric started littering the living room. With this latest I rewrote parts of program script that generates an atom.xml file for this blog. This I needed like a lifetime subscription to "People" magazine. What I did need is some complicated (for me at least) series of puzzles to solve that when done right, would send me a signal that I had succeeded. And so my faithful Odis and my belief that the road led to something better have vanished. Losing old, comforting illusions becomes harder with old age because like friends, it becomes much more difficult to make new ones.
Happy trails, Pilgrims