For our annual winter stay in New Orleans, we rented a place in the old Bywater district. It's a feature of the neighborhood that one house is a perfect example of classic vernacular architecture while the next one over is a ramshackle mess, smelling of mold and nearly swallowed by yellow cat's paw creeper. And then one over after that is a vacant lot, the home having been demolished years ago.
Almost all Bywater houses touch or impinge on the sidewalk, European-style, and many of their owners decorate the public way with pots of common annuals, especially those lovely rocket pink snapdragons. Others set out repurposed bathtubs and various other containers filled with flowering perennial plants that I can't identify. It's a mighty colorful area -- when it isn't derelict.
Somewhere on Royal Street (or was it Decatur?) between Desire and Independence, we admired the sidewalk garden of a renewed double-shotgun (a common kind of home) and fell into neighborly chat with the bright-eyed old lady sitting on its porch (or stoop, or veranda, or patio). We offered, "good day for taking some sun," and she, perhaps lonely, launched into a monologue: "my friend takes care of me. He's young. I broke my hip last year, so no more stairs." Etc. And then she asked, quite out of the blue, "how old do you think I am?" Clearly, she was proud to boast of her many years.
Now, I've been around enough blocks to know that it's never a good idea to estimate someone's age. It's a difficult art -- you must guess about ten percent below what you think is accurate, because if you guess older you've insulted the inquirer and if too much younger you're guilty of insincere flattery. So I hesitated, kept quiet. At last, to break the silence, I replied "well, ma'am, how old are you?" I thought I had given a safe response because I could see that she wanted me to be curious. "I'm 84, can you believe it?"
I was more surprised than she had imagined, because if I had ventured a guess, I would have said 92. Or at the lowest, way up in the 80s, because, well, the woman looked ancient and frail. She reminded me my two grandmothers, who died at 87 and 89 and who, in their last years, rarely if ever left their homes but if they did venture out, did nothing more adventurous than to sit on a bench for a few warm minutes.
But I'm 85, a year older than my new Bywater acquaintance. She's inactive, winding down her life, resting in a soft chair, and I'm not only upright and walking, but happily exploring a distant city. For a moment I felt a bit of superiority, of triumph. I certainly did not say to my elderly friend, "yeah, you're 84 but I'm 85, look at me." I'm not that crude. But I confess that those or similar words passed through my brain. Not a sentiment that I admire in myself and one I quickly banished. It was unhandsome, ungenerous even if it came and went in a millisecond.
I know that I'm fortunate to be moderately vigorous, still strolling the avenues and enjoying good health. Yet I am very aware I that my well being is not an achievement about which I can be vain or proud. It's simply the luck of the draw, luck of the genes. In addition, it's a fact that I have been fortunate enough to have had access to a lifetime of superior medical care. Without that surgery in 2010, and the later one a decade ago, I would not have been touring the Bywater. I'd have been dead or at best, wheelchair-bound and in pain, gorging on advils and aspirins and narcotics. A moment's reflection served as a good antidote to any feeling of superiority that I might harbor.
Still musing, I began to wonder about my Royal Street friend. Who is she, aside from an ancient person savoring the sun? What memories does she hold? Who knows, perhaps she lived a wild and varied life. Was she a traveller, an adventurer? Enjoying complicated and deep relationships with a series of devotees? Perhaps she was a talented musician -- a soloist in the church choir -- or an artist? I allowed myself to fantasize what she was like in her glamorous thirties -- crossing the equator on a cruise with her first husband, the one with the estate in Jamaica. And the children: one a famous surgeon, the other, the unlucky one who was a hero in Iraq but who took years to regain his footing. Or was she, perhaps, a scholar?
Everybody has a story; what is hers?
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