Sunbathing

Sunlight is dazzling to the eyes of all of us accustomed to soft gray, overcast days. We're like moles, blinking and squinting. When the sky clears, look out! It's about to turn very cold. On Thursday or Friday we might even have some snow for the first time this year.

Margie is reading Kindred, a book about our Neanderthal ancestors, as she continues work on her memoir. "All this memoir is really for me," she admits. "I say it's for my children, but it's me, trying to make sense of my life before I leave." Laughing, she says, "You just can't see it when you're forty or fifty. You're too much into your ambitions. You have to prove something to somebody. Then in your sixties you let go of trying to prove yourself, and if you get to keep on living after that," she pats the table by the phone, "you start to see the shape of it. You can see what the point of it was."

I ask her, "What is the point of it?"

She laughs, "Everybody has a different point! That's the thing. If you live long enough, you see what your life lessons were, and you see that everybody has different issues, different opportunities. I think for me it was important to stop being compliant. I get that now. But everybody has a different curriculum. I don't know what it's like for people who die before they're ninety. I don't see how they have enough time to get a handle on it, but maybe they do. Maybe it comes in a flash right at the end. I don't know."