Doors to Life

            Almost all my aging friends have been looking back on their lives and even talking about writing a memoir. The astonishing thing about these friends of mine who are in their 70’s and 80’s and 90’s is that they claim that they do not feel old. They’ve come through some tough times and suffer many of the indignities of aging but they are still here, still living and doing things they enjoy. As the groundbreaking artist Pablo Picasso said in his senior years: “It takes a long time to become young.”

            One of my friends discovered the beginning of a short story she had written in her youth and shared it with me.  It goes something like this:

She was on her toes the whole way from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but her new life began at the door like so many moments in a play or in life.  Doors: Entrances and Exits. In or out?  A choice or an order.

This, the door that faced her, was a special door: dark brown Mahogany, hard and resistant to her small fist with just a tiny peephole where everyone behind that door could see her and judge her.  Yet she knocked.

She stood on tiptoe and knocked.  Softly at first, then a bit harder.  And she waited.  She was nine, no not exactly nine, more like eight-and-one-third years of age and she was carrying a small cardboard suitcase made for her doll’s clothes.  When the door finally opened, she had her speech ready: “Excuse me please, but may I come and live with you?”

Before she knew better, and even for years afterward, she thought of this moment as the hardest thing she had ever done. Later, she discovered that there would be many hard moments and she would survive them all.

            I thought there might be something here, something in this preface, something in the opening and closing of doors, something in the thought that with each opening and closing of a door one thinks “this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” And it is not.

Currently, I live in an apartment complex of sorts, a large, wooded space with cabin-like structures sprouting in all angles that lead to the sea.  There are, thankfully, many young people here.  Several of the young women seem to gravitate to my door, looking for an opening, an answer to man-troubles or job-troubles or just plain LIFE.  They seem to feel that because of my advanced years — I have wisdom to scatter at will.

“I am not wise; I am merely old,” I tell them.  The years are filled with complex and diverse experiences.  And those experiences, no matter how painful or earth shattering or exuberant, confirm the door theory: open it, even with trepidation; walk through.  It might slam shut or creak to a close, but you have made it through — marriage, divorce, birth, death, disease, joblessness, the empty nest, the cluttered nest. 

And there it is, another door beckoning, challenging you to knock, to put a hand on the knob and turn.  And whether there is sunshine peeking through or torrential rain — you learn something, you build on that knowledge, you’ve made it, you can close that door.  The splinters are with you but so are the fond memories. And, if you are lucky and you persevere, you no longer need to ask for a home. You have made one inside of yourself.