Tic Marks

Recently I have been getting more and more junk mail trying to get me to come to seminars on retirement or that offer to help me work my way through the Medicare maze. This junk mail is addressed to me personally, rather than the usual "current resident." I guess it is just that age thing…the stages in your life, like the tic marks on a ruler, marking it off so you can know where you are and get the measure of things.

As I get older, I notice the finer points of these stages. It’s funny the way the beginnings of things have a hidden and seldom considered counterpart which is the ending of the same beginnings: the first day of school and the last day of work, the first time you successfully did a forward one and a half summersault off the diving board and the last time you successfully did that, the first time you drove a car and the last. Tic marks on your lifeline. The lifeline that seems to curve around to meet-end-to-end like a Mobius strip… so that when you come back around to the where the beginning and the end meet, it is not the same place at all. So it seems we need the tic marks to distinguish things. After all, what use is a ruler without tic marks?

The answer came to me in the form of a visual memory. I remembered yesterday when I was stopped at a traffic light on the way home from work. I looked over to watch a flock of black birds flying in to settle down to roost in a couple of trees. Each bird was a distinct individual, completely independent, capable of flying alone wherever they chose to go. Yet they flew in beautiful, coordinated patterns, moving shapes with clear, yet fluid, boundaries…grouping and ungrouping, following intuition and impulses. They were enjoying life, the exquisiteness of flight, and the simple pleasures of being themselves. They did this while still pursuing the value of cohesiveness and while still pursuing the goal of settling down on their own spot on their own particular branch or telephone wire…to settle down to rest among family and friends and strangers.

And then the light changed, and I drove on to my home.