SEPTEMBER 6, TUESDAY

LIFE STAGES

I had breakfast in Asheville this morning, invited by Jude Stuecker and Emily Staton, former Warren Wilson college students who traveled to India with me years ago. Emily was here in town visiting Jude, and breakfast was before they were about to go off overnight camping and spending a day at the lake. As we made conversation I said offhandedly that I thought we go through huge stages in our lives and that women go through more extreme stages than men, who seem to be able be able to focus on work or achievement and to not be as rocked by internal changes. But I am always me, Jude said, however I change. Mine was an off handed comment, and so was her answer. We talked of the weather and other things.

But my comment wasn’t as off handed as it sounded. I have been wondering a lot about these stages in life lately probably because I have just transitioned from one to another.

Here is a photograph of me at 8 or 9, dressed up in a sailor suit because it was taken during the late stages of the Second World War, probably around 1944, when American support for the war was important (with my future wife, Käthe, a girl living in a little German village, the enemy). That is Bill Mosher, all right, I recognize the face. And I have hazy memories of that time. Everyone had a square plot Victory Garden, so called, behind our apartment building where there would normally have been grass. It was part of the war effort. I remember picking carrots or tomatoes from various Victory Gardens without permission and enjoying them with the dirt brushed off. That was me. I had a nightmare once of frying my school teacher in a huge frying pan and other nightmares of huge dry waves sweeping over me and terrifying me, usually accompanied by a high fever. No doubt about it, that was me and not someone else.

But that isn’t the kind of nightmare that I deal with now. Those are the dreams and the activities of an 8 year old.

And then suddenly I wasn’t in Hartford, Connecticut by the Hog River, a little stream that flowed through the woods on the other side of Sherman Street. I was in Landour, Mussoorie and was soon picking bright red rhododendrons from thirty foot high rhododendron trees in the Himalayas or going swimming with my father in the almost mile wide clean, blue, broad Jumna river near our house on the plains of North India at Allahabad. This was still me.

There have been many passages in my life, such as when I was in the Army in Germany, or teaching at Warren Wilson in Swannanoa, or traveling with students to India again and again. Falling in love and marrying and then for years being centered on a growing and constantly changing family as my children grew up were stages in my life. After that came years of Kathe and me, a sweet couple palling around together until Kathe got cancer and died a little over a year ago. And then I became a wanderer. But I was always me.

But when I look back on the ten year old and the 15 year old and the 22 year old I can also see that at every stage in my life I was also a different person. And now it seems to me that as I felt my way through life, picking carrots, then rhododendrons, then being baffled by adulthood, then settling into parenthood, that the life force was different within me at each point. I wasn’t the same person. At one point I was exploring, at another wondering, at another committing, at another letting go. I was going through huge convulsive changes and still am. And as I reach old age I am facing the most convulsive change of all, my death. At every one of these stages my inner emotional feeling along self, my out of consciousness self, is yo-yoing me up and down, a rocky ride. Whenever I get settled into one stage I am shaken out of that stage and enter another equally dislocating one. But, yes, I am also the same person all along and all of those memories were me.

But now I have the feeling of being a bareback rider, riding a different animal, my inner drive, at each stage of my life, hanging on for dear life and often getting bucked off and having to climb back on and finding when I am back on that I am on a different animal that I don’t know how to ride. Just when I am able to ride this new animal I’m thrown off again and have to start over.

So yes, I am that boy in the sailor suit, but I have been so many other feeling along, yo-yoing selves since then and am now an octogenarian, having had to feel my way through stage after stage in my life, not knowing how to get through any stage correctly or even satisfactorily but doing the best that I could, or at least hanging on, as I was being impelled along by invisible drives within me that kept changing. The side of me that was aware of what was going on, my conscious sense of myself, stayed the same and didn’t seem to change. But the inner invisible feeling along part of me kept swerving and changing. And so here I am sitting quietly, sedentary, writing, with this being my current way of understanding what is going on but waiting for another convulsion to start.