Cold brew is cold press in Minnesota, but I can’t tell the difference. At the Jones Coffee Fulton in Edina in Southwest Minneapolis, their brew, um, excuse me, pressed coffee is just as tasty as mine which I make at home, my personal gold standard. As a type on my iPad atop a scratched, worn wooden table that looks like it once belonged in a midwestern schoolhouse, I ponder the last day I can truthfully call myself sixty-four years old.
I recall a year ago I was on the cusp of, or just suffered, one of the worst heartbreaks of my life—the aloof disinterest of a teenager who once had to tell me anything and everything on her mind. It wasn’t just the insecure withdrawal of that awkward age. The knife of my invisibility got twisted by her talkative interactions with the other adults at a family dinner in my honor. I suppose she resented the requirement that she attend? I never asked.
I had known her since she was barely six hours old, and I came to this small dose of the utter heartbreak that befalls every parent, perhaps even multiple times, as a way for me to realize that my commitment to her self-determination over-rode my too raw, and too exposed, feelings about my status in her life (or lack of it). I’ve always wanted her to be who she is. A year ago I found out I really do feel that way.
The line “will you still love me, will you still need me, when I’m sixty-four?” from The Beatles song by that name became particularly poignant.
And then, if you’ll recall, most of the airline reservations systems that day suddenly went down in a catastrophe of Windows updates gone wrong, cancelling thousands of airline flights reliant on computer terminals that now displayed a lonely field of royal blue because Windows won’t boot. This disrupted my long anticipated dinner plans that evening in a bizarre twist of fate connected to a friend’s travel plans. I don’t remember what I actually did on my birthday, which is telling, but I still haven’t eaten in the restaurant I picked out for the occasion
I wasn’t crestfallen, it wasn’t some landmark of heartbreak in my existence like the dinner with the teen, but on the eve of my next birthday tomorrow I do notice that I am wondering what disasters could befall my low expectations for the next one during this week of residency at my zen center in Minneapolis. Will the grid go offline? Will Minneapolis freeze-over in July? WIll the Felon in Chief get caught lying about his own previous lying?
Ok, that last one already happened, and it is kind of a birthday gift, but I am wondering how the stars will align this year because I dodged fate’s plans at the last minute by hopping over to the midwest. The last year has been a good one. I am in a better place in practically every area of my life than last year.
I’ve decided, in my mid 60s, that I am a late bloomer, a very late bloomer, a Boomer Bloomer, if you will. If I had gone to the University of Oklahoma I could be a Boomer Sooner Bloomer, but fate had other plans. In any case, at almost sixty-five years of age I am more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have been even though it is increasingly thin and tears easily these days.
Sixty-five has always been a threshold number for me, that is, as if beyond it I am something different from what I am as an approach it. I don’t know what, this hasn’t been a very conscious notion; it isn’t something I really noticed before. However, I can’t deny that sixty-five feels old, retired, and is full of reflections on forever lost opportunities.
I very wisely chose to seek refuge with my church this year. I don’t wear my religion on my sleeve. As a reader here you are reminded of it’s role in my existence far more than anyone who knows me personally. When my zen teacher conferred what constitutes official membership on me in 2012, his first piece of advice, delivered with a wry smile, was “You can call yourself a Buddhist now, but I don’t recommend it.”
I’ve taken that advice very much to heart. At the zen center, there is not a single image of the buddha in sight except for those on the covers of books and magazines in the library. A potato stone sits on the altar. We do not worship graven images here. To do so would ignore our view of the teachings. Other Buddhists have different ideas about that.
Here I find a group of people who share my values, my views, my approach to life, and my spiritual inclinations. We know very little about each other in a conventional sense. I can only cite the professions of a handful of my fellow members, even fewer last names, but we know and feel the common bond of our corner of the Soto Zen lineage, passed directly through generations of teachers to our own. It isn’t beliefs that we have in common, not exactly, but rather an approach to examining life which binds us together.
We sit still and stare at the wall together in silence.
I’m spending a week cleaning the toilets and doing the yard work at the zen center. I do not have to explain a bit of that to the people here. They fully understand the honor and privilege of cleaning toilets and weeding gardens.
We are individuals who follow the same forms and ponder the same formlessness in a world that barely recognizes this way of understanding human existence. Most people, understandably, regard zen as the bougie spa of religions, promising serenity, mindfulness, and stillness. Zen practice certain can have that effect, and frequently does, but this is not the point.
It feels like I am about to launch off into an explanation of what zen really is, and normally I would, but I am here this week so that I can take a break from doing that. The people around me know. That’s the refuge of what we call the “sangha,” the community of believers.
Whatever sixty-five and beyond is, I’m ready to face it.