I took some time yesterday to stroll through the gardens.  I hadn't been able to get there for a couple of weeks, and while there's still plenty of color and life, the space has been utterly transformed.  As it is every year.  But every year it's a surprise, like waking with a start from a wonderful dream.  And it's not that the reality you wake up to is so bad, it's that you can't get back to the dream. 


And in comparison the reality is a little punishing.  You have to shake off the dream and get on with life.  Thank goodness it's a recurring dream is all I can say. 

I can see why our ancestors came up with reincarnation.  Religion is certainly at least partly an attempt to reconcile cyclical and linear time — to make sense of the fact that while we can observe cycles in nature, the individual experiences time in a line whose two ends never meet. 

Something like this, maybe:

Or — as I get older I see it more like this:

I was chatting with my current landlord, the movie critic Jay Carr, who, no disrespect, is getting up there, and we were both marveling that it's been nearly three years since I moved in.  I started talking about things that happened years ago that seem like just yesterday.  He begged me to stop. 

He said for him time was starting to feel like something out of a sci-fi horror flick.  It's going at hyperspeed, twenty years at a tick.

I'm not up to g-force yet.  Not in total free-fall, but 2009 has been a bit of a blur, I've got to say.

This is why I have to roll my eyes when some twenty-something — most of whom haven't even had their "endless summer" yet — comes out with this "age is just a number" line, thinking they're consoling you for being twice theirs.  Never mind the absurdity of the phrase "just a number" — I mean, is it a whole number?  an irrational number? a complex number?  — for the record, "age" is the length of time a thing has existed.  However you might feel about time itself, the number is not exactly arbitrary.

Of course I understand the broad connotation — that it's a mistake to use time to measure age — but I still think the expression is almost as absurd for someone who has survived into middle age as it is insulting for someone half his age to suggest it. The laws of physics aren't pretty.  It's not personal, but, trust me: gravity is real, bitches.

When I walk through a garden this time of year there's some solace that in a few months it will be back in all its glory.  But looking at it now, it's as quietly heart-rending as seeing an old friend after a long absence and realizing that you have both grown old:  the bones are there, but the fullness, the light, the life has faded.

And I say this appreciating the light and life that remains.  But growing older is all about marshaling fewer physical resources to do things you used to do without a thought to the energy they require.  It is not that the stairs in your walk-up have multiplied, or that the earth's gravitational pull has increased.  It's you.  It's all you.  This is what makes ordinary old-age heroic. 

It just hit me harder this time, walking through the gardens, seeing their bones.  It was like: whoa, where'd it go?  Where's my big, busty, voluptuous floozy of a garden?  Now it's all dried up and clacking its dentures in the cold.  It's still beautiful, somehow, in a sad way.  The way things are because you know them, because you've held them and loved them. Because you remember they way they were.  Because they're no longer beautiful.  You know: that kind of beautiful.

OK — it's not not beautiful.  There's an austere beauty-in-itself to the gardens this time of year, but it's a complicated kind of beauty not always immediately recognizable as beauty.  For most people it's hard enough to stop and smell the roses when they're everywhere you look, never mind having to hunt them down. 

There are a few still in bloom...


... and some other tiny hangers-on here and there ...


Maybe this is some small consolation.  In the garden, as in life, it's possible some bloom well into the wilds of autumn.  Still, one thing you can be sure of: there's always a killing frost.