One story toppling into another. I’m always comparing what I think and do now to what I thought and did when I was young. 

This tentative step is like that tentative step.

This knotty decision is like that knotty decision. 

This loss is like that loss. 

The details couldn’t be more different — I get that — but today reminds me of yesterday because inside, I’m just a kid. Regardless of our age, we’re all still kids, grappling. Trying to find the opening in our uncertainty. That feeling, back then, of not being ready for what came next is like this feeling, right now, of not being ready for what comes next. 

Wait. I’m eighty. Shouldn’t I have caught on by now how to be ready?  

Oh, goodness, if ever there was a time of not being ready for the next thing, it’s in old age. We all know what’s next. Are we ever ready?

My way of preparing is to reassemble certain memories — genesis stories, I call them, stories that go to the heart of each life passage. Touchstones. That back-and-forthing. Where we are, where we’ve been, how time is a circle, the world repeating itself, endlessly. My life now, hinged to my life then.

At times, l even find myself comparing a genesis story of mine to someone else’s genesis story — my older sister’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. Another kind of back-and-forthing. As though families have themes running through them.

So, what am I trying to say in these pages?

That turning eighty is a lot like turning sixteen, thirty-five, sixty — how we keep entering uncharted territory, over and over?

That old age is really not so different from young age?

Maybe this: The past is just sitting in our palms.