DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA
I sit in the early morning while it is still dark full of visions and ready to take on the world, a 14 year old amazed to be alive and filled with delight as the world opens up in front of me. Then I go into the bathroom to dress and look in the mirror I see an old bald man with a white beard and sleepy eyes with a hint of madness. I see Don Quixote.
I am about to get on my boney horse ready for new adventures, riding once around the United States having great adventures ready to tackle anything as fully alive as I ever have been, living in my own dream world. But after breakfast I am suddenly sleepy and settle in for an hour’s nap, simply a tired old man.
How did this happen? How did I get to be ancient Don Quixote with the wild eyed wonder of a 14 year old? What is happening at 85?
In the Hindu understanding of the passage of life we are first children, then explorers, then householders who marry and raise a family, and then in the fourth stage leave domestic life and wander as homeless old men focusing on renouncing this world and achieving moksha. Is that what I am doing now that I am no longer a householder with a wife and children to care for (children who now want to care for me). Am I searching for moksha, bliss. I have nothing that I have to do at home. I have started to wander. I didn’t plan this, I just saw a cheap fare to Greece, pushed a button that paid for it and I was off without knowing where I was going or why. I stopped looking in the mirror. Suddenly I was Don Quixote responding to any Dulcinea, actually anyone who paid attention to me, who would write to me and wandering around the world in search of adventure.
Not quite. To anyone else I looked like the wandering cheerful old man that I was. But something odd was going on inside.
And, of course this is a male perspective, but I am more and more aware that I only happen to be male by a flip of the coin, that I could just as well now be female. What would my passage have been then? I would have opened up to the world as a child, made my own mythic exploration of relationships as I felt my way to the intensity of romance, then likely have settled on a man and become entwined with a life balanced between romance, motherhood, awareness and work sustaining a family. If I had had children I would have been much more immersed in nurturing a family than I have been as a male. But the kids would have grown and left the house and maybe my female dream then would have been the dream of the same solitary life, of finally putting myself first and doing whatever I needed to do to be fully alive. It probably wouldn’t have been a Don Quixote adventure, it would have been a very feminine crone’s adventure. I can wonder about who I would have been as an old lady, but I am probably clueless and am having trouble enough being an old man.
It could be that as we realize that our friends are dying around us and that we are next, that we suddenly don’t want to miss out on life, we want to experience it fully and to have adventures that will dislocate us and bring us to life, a feeling, almost, of desperation. Suddenly we don’t care what anyone thinks of us or how foolish we appear. The time of pretending that we are staid and responsible adults (Sancho Panzas) is over. We can go back to being 14 years old again and simply open up and feel our way along. I don’t know if that is what is happening. But I do know that when I look in the mirror I see Don Quixote.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 