Onions and Roses

(Written 9 September 2008)

I woke up old this morning.

-

I had aged twenty years overnight. I know the exact moment it happened, too, because it woke me up from a sound sleep; from a sound sleep and a beautiful dream.

Funny thing about dreams, at least mine, anyway. I am all ages at once, but no one specific age at any time. My childhood comes back to me with the rational understanding of an adult, yet I fly in my dreams with child-like glee and an unquestioning acceptance of the impossible. I can be anything and anyone I want to be in my dreams.

-

Except this morning, around five or so. That’s when reality intruded and I awoke with the gravity of my years pressing me back to earth.

“No,” I was correcting myself, speaking to my dream partner. “I am sixty-one!”

The shock of those words made me wake instantly and rise up to the side of my bed. I sat there unsteadily, trying to focus on the lamp on the nightstand. My eyes settled on the clock, near the lamp. “5:06,” it blinked at me.

You are old, my mind whispered.

-

I leaned toward the lamp to turn it on, and my wrist made a popping sound as it took the weight of my upper body. (I didn’t know we could pop our wrist bones the way we can pop our knuckles.)

Sadness swept over me, not so much from the unavoidable truth of the words I had spoken in the dream as from the loss of it.

I was being courted, in the most elegant and charming Old-World manner, by a man several years younger than I thought I was in my dream state. He reminded me of a young man I knew in my twenties, but looked different; more Mediterranean, less north-European. I think the dream had been developing for some time during the night, but the part I remembered clearly was the few moments before I awoke.

Our friendship was changing to love, and it seemed we had moved to the stage where it either deepens and you commit to one another, or you decide to remain close friends. He took me home to meet his parents and siblings, who welcomed me warmly, if with some reservation. His younger sister was teaching me the tango, to everyone’s amusement – especially mine.

Someone knocked at the backdoor, then joined the rest of us in the living room. My beloved introduced me to a former girlfriend of his, a drop-dead gorgeous woman in the Catherine Zeta Jones style of drop-dead gorgeous.

At that exact moment, I was wearing a bunch of freshly-pulled scallions atop my head, the green tops falling like loose curls across my forehead. (I didn’t have roses for my hair, you see, while learning the tango, so I had grabbed the bunch of onions and plopped them... you get the picture, I’m sure.)

To his credit, and maybe his upbringing, my dream beloved acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary – neither the grey-haired, grandmotherly woman he introduced to DDG as the woman he hoped to marry, nor the bouquet of highly aromatic onions crowning her head.

“How do you do,” I said, extending my hand to her. She was staring at the onions.

“I can’t stand the odor,” I went on, “but they make lovely curls, don’t you think?”

The dream then dissolved into a blur of faintly remembered activity, until we came to the scene of my awakening, literally and figuratively.

My dream-love and I had gone outside to a vine-covered terrace for privacy. He pulled me into an embrace; a hug I didn’t want to end. I knew he was getting ready to ask me to marry him. I also knew I was a few years older than he was, and we had never discussed our ages.

“But, you don’t know my age,” I began.

“It doesn’t matter to me how old either of us is,” he answered. “Love knows no such boundaries.”

Cue the sound of romantic Spanish guitar music playing in the background. (Oh, yes it did!)

“You need to know this, if you are about to propose marriage, and I think you are,” I foolhardily insisted. He hugged me closer and murmured something sweet (but unintelligible) into my crown of onions.

“I’m forty-one,” I started to say, but something was telling me I had it all wrong.

“No!” I said, pulling away from his loving embrace. “I’m sixty-one!”

The guitar serenade ceased in mid-note, ending like a bird in mid-squawk. The sunlight filtering down through the flowering vines went out like a cheap light bulb, and I was left in that darkening limbo world between sleep and wakefulness, and even that was rapidly disappearing.

Now I know how it feels to age twenty years in a few nanoseconds of time. It feels a lot like when you’ve been swimming for a long time then try to climb out of the pool too fast, but it isn’t your swimsuit that seems to pull you downward, though. It’s your own skin, your own soul, your own heart and mind...your own misspent, unloved youth.

-

-

It’s every mistake you’ve ever made, every love you’ve ever lost, every love you threw away. It is all the regrets you didn’t even know you had.

It is the realization – and, even more weighty, the acceptance – of just where you are along your life’s road and the fact that the end of your road is approaching faster than the dream had faded.

I am sixty-one, and I'm afraid any love I will find now exists only in my dreams.

So, next time, I’m keeping my damned mouth shut...and I’m taking my own roses with me, just in case.

(Photo of wild rose, above, by Jeff Gold, http://www.sover.net)