We have time to grow old.

Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?

We left the play, all of us, with a little cloud over our heads. A cloud that changed colors, emotions, the more we thought about what we'd read, and what we'd seen. None of us could stop thinking about what we were waiting for.

First: "It all seems so urgent. So much more urgent than I had initially read it." And then: "I need to get a new job." And later: "It makes me think of that Rilke poem: 'You must change your life.'" I went home and tossed and turned in bed, unsettled. What am I waiting for? How am I biding my time? At one in the morning I turned to J and said, desperately: "I don't want it to go too fast."

I start to wonder if it's destructive to dissect things. Destructive, and possibly pretentious. (Certainly the latter when talking about anything related to Beckett.) The fact that I have the luxury of these thoughts is even more pretentious. Filling in the void of real worry with this false worry, this sense that something is approaching faster than I want it to, even if I have no idea what it could possibly be, or when it will come.

A few months ago I read this Doris Lessing quote at Crooked House:

When scientists try to get us to understand the real importance of the human race, they say something like, "If the story of the earth is twenty-four hours long, then humanity's part in it occupies the last minute of that day." Similarly, in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as actually experienced, then I'd say seventy per cent of the book would take you to age ten. At eighty per cent you would have reached fifteen. At ninety-five per cent, you get to about thirty. The rest is a rush -- towards eternity.

I related this quote to my mother, who studies aging, hoping she'd say "Pah! Nonsense." Instead she confirmed it. "It's UNBELIEVABLE how fast it goes. You can't even imagine." The thing is I don't want to imagine it. I can't stand it. I won't have it. I listen to these characters in bowler hats talking about crawling through the muck and all I can do is wish for more muck and more crawling.

We want to live forever. And then we grow old.

As I leaned over the railing in row EE, trying to get a better view of a flailing John Goodman, I devised in my head a staging of the play that takes place on the grounds of a nursing home. Each character burdened by his own age-related affliction: Estragon's Alzheimer's, Vladimir's incontinence, Lucky's Parkinson's, Pozzo's failing eyesight. Godot as death, waiting in the wings, never coming fast enough. The boy reminding them of what they once had. What they gave up.

It's possible I'll fear mortality less the older I get. Understand death better when things stop functioning. (Certainly the older I get, the better I understand Woody "I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens" Allen.) But for now, in my final rush towards eternity, all I can do is wish for more muck and more crawling, and the sense to make something beautiful out of both while I still can.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.