Free Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach

to work in the bookstore, relieved, I think, to be back in her familiar milieu of friends dropping in to talk about books, neighbors, customers, other dealers. She is a social soul. I often think she finds the isolation of a long vacation with me and only a few occasional friends very trying.
    I, on the other hand, sink back into hours of solitude in the carriage house with great pleasure. Does one enjoy solitude more in old age because it is a preparation for the long loneliness, as Dorothy Day called it in another context, of death? Once settled into my study, I move out of my growingly unresponsive body into my head, where I can reside comfortably for long periods of time. It is an effort to come out. Time passes slowly in that abode, more slowly for me than in the world of events, noise, movement, and people.
    The first day back: I cannot settle into writing. I forget to bring the clipboard over from my luggage in the house, so, naturally, I cannot write a word. I decide to stretch out on the hardbacked, hard-cushioned couch and find myself making a list, in lieu of anything better to occupy me. I decide to do it in the form of questions rather than statements of fact, because assertions no longer come easily to me. Questions are a more suitable rhetorical mode.
    a] (better, more algebraic and ambiguous, than I ) Is there anything of significance I still wish to acquire?
    b] Is there anything I have that I no longer wish to keep?
    c] Is it possible, at this late date, to lead a life based on principles, a guiding or ruling philosophy?
    d] Do I take as seriously as I should the fact (this one irrefutable) of my mortality?
    After all my childhood joys and terrors, and shallow adolescent anguish; the shock of October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed and my father, ‘wiped out’ as he said, put his head down on the dining-room table in the middle of dinner and cried, at about the same time that my best friend’s father, whose name, I recall, was Robert Dince, took his life by jumping from a window of a tall building in the garment district of New York; and after the exhilaration of learning how to learn and reason in college; after the suicide (or accidental death) of my friend John Ricksecker, who jumped (or fell) from the roof of the School of Commerce on the last day of classes of our senior year, his arm catching on the no-parking stanchion, stopping his fall for a moment, and then coming off at the shoulder; after the war, in which we women served, and were served by the elevating symbol of the uniform we wore and the power of elating and irresponsible love affairs; after the short-lived postwar optimism during which I had children because I believed the world was going to be better, we would be extraordinarily successful and, someday, very rich; after the slow descent into the present, marked by the dissolution of family ties by death and divorce, by the dilatory liberation of blacks and women, by the minute beginnings of a recognition of overt sexual diversity and androgyny (what in my youth was called ‘perversity’), by the gradual disappearance of traditional forms of religious belief, of hopes for peace after Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia, of faith that the forests were protected, the rainwater, springs, and water table pure, the cities safe, interesting, and clean; and after my sad loss of patriotic conviction that this is the smartest, most ethical, richest, and most trustworthy country on the face of the earth, of certainty that medical science’s injections and pharmaceuticals are a sure protection against most viruses, bacteria, germs, fungi, I have come to this age of anxiety, despair, and hopelessness. All this has happened in my lifetime, in two-thirds of a century. This morning, listing it all as I lie on the couch, I still have no firm answer to the question that continues to plague me:
    e] ‘Who am I?’ Or the question that runs parallel to it: ‘What has my