The Dawning (and Fading) of Aquarius

The day begins not with coffee and oranges in a sunny chair but with pirate radio beamed in from spectacular Radio Caroline bobbing on the surging main of the North Sea. I am dancing through the loft to She Came In Through the Bathroom Window while eggs fry in the pan and The Beatles reprise a time in my life when I did not have a pan, plate, or cup. Those days are long gone but that 19 year-old renegade girl is alive in more than memory. She looks at my almost sixty-year old arms and face in the mirror and wonders how I let this terrible betrayal happen to her. Katrina, my ersatz devil daughter and the spiritual twin of my teenaged self, writes from the steaming jungle of Indiana to say she has defied the odds makers who say she is more likely, at 40, to be killed by terrorists than to find a mate and have a child. She is pregnant with a new, defiant girl who will make her screaming debut sometime in January. Another Aquarian. Amen.
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That child has some shoes to fill. She had better, on her mother’s side, be prepared to pilot a leaky skiff solo down the Irrawaddy from Mandalay to Rangoon, to climb the Himalayas, rebuild orphanages on the tsunami struck coast of Sri Lanka, have hundreds of lovers, and drink them all under the table. Her parents are artists. Of course, she must be her own incarnation of the divine whether that means she will be a monk, an astronaut, or an accountant named Rainy-Dae.
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Hey you, out there getting old, can you hear me? Don’t give in without a fight. The work of youth is rebellion while conservation is the task of the old. I don’t know that I’m up to the job as my resume is quite thin in that area. It is literally do-or-die time for me and my g-g-generation Who hoped we would die before we got old. We will grow old AND die. Ha ha, mean old Time laughs from the echoing tunnel, here is your big lesson as you transit from middle aged to old: there is a difference between knowing and believing. Did I really think that by never choosing, never marrying, never partnering, never having children of my own, never committing to anything that time would stand still while I skipped around from place-to-place, identity-to-identity, job-to-job? Iggy Pop, sixty-three and shirtless, sings I’m A Wild One and I dance. I’m a real Wilde child. I’m quite aware of what I’m going through—ch-ch-changes.
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Only awareness exists—all else is illusion. Approaching a time of “lasts,” I eagerly anticpate the “first” of a child that might just carry a meme from me—an intuitive, sensitive rager who can host a salon of adventurers, write impassioned novels no one will publish, read Proust and Woolf on the subway, or be sought after as an astute critical editor who can salvage almost any manuscript except her own from the ashes of burning excess. Little angel, dance.
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And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.