For some bizarre reason many of the young people in my life, and when I say young,  I mean YOUNG…my teenaged nieces, my sons middle school pals, my near and dear’s children, have decided to “Friend” me on Facebook.  On one hand, I consider this a compliment, a commentary on my accessibility and, no doubt, youthful nature.  On the other hand, it’s actually just weird and I should probably be embarrassed.  But I use it to full advantage to spy on all of them.  Nice “Friend” I am. Thus far, I’ve only tattled once to a parent of my generation.  Thankfully, most children I know seem to behave almost too well on Facebook and post nothing even slightly interesting.  But last week I came across the most hilarious exchange on a middle schoolers page.  The page belonged to a he.  A lovely fellow who hasn’t yet turned thirteen.  The exchange was between him and a female classmate and it went something like this…

SHE: Do you think I am pretty?

HE: Yes, I do.

SHE: Does it bother you that I don’t have big boobs?

HE: No, I don’t care but the good thing about being twelve is they still might grow.

THE END.

Somehow this sums up life.  Doesn’t it?  Or at least the life of the young.  The endless possibility of increased bra size.  The endless possibility of love, of success, of adventure.  It is something I have felt slipping from my grasp.  At my age, the only possibility is reality.  I turned fifty two weeks ago and had written a blog, perfect for the tick, tick, tick toward death.  A rant at the indignity of drooping and creasing flesh and slightly softer thighs despite HOURS of exercise.  Of commitment to husbands and children and the deprivation that commitment entails from sleep, to sleep in a bed without someone jolting you from sleep and knocking the wind out of  you with a hairy arm or leg, to wild affairs with inappropriate men.  Commitment = NONE OF THAT.  The blog was funny, it was nasty and it was full of swear words.  And then something happened.  Something so big and so impossible that it took my breath away.  I am still having trouble taking in air.

In Massachusetts where we spend our summer there is a spot in front of my parents house called the “drinking rock”….no, not because of some incredible abilility to capture “run off ” but because we have logged many an hour there consuming alcohol as the sun sets over the fields and lights the saltwater river and our faces with it’s unbelievable end of the day glow.  In the daytime hours the kids use it as the “thinking” rock…or the place that Nana makes you eat lunch when she doesn’t want the house to get dirty.  But at the end of a long hot beach day as the sun starts to dip, the thinking/lunching rock transforms effortlessly into The Drinking Rock.  The community we live in all know of the drinking rock and people roll in (only after five o’clock as is the New England WASP way), no invite necessary, to have an end of the day snort and enjoy the last minutes of that days summer sun.  It’s a beautiful place to sit.  One day this July past, I sat on the rock at five oh five, not a minute sooner or later, a glass of something white in my tan hand.  My parents were there along with two young friends who were deeply in love.  He was somewhat new to me, having only come into our lives four or so years ago because he fell in love with she, who I have known since she swam in her moms belly.  She is beautiful and perfect in that imperfect way.  Naughty and terribly, wonderfully nice.  She is an artist and someone who laughs with a wicked glint in her eye.  “No wonder he loves her so”,  I thought as I sipped, feeling the nice warm glow of pinot grigio and sunlight and admired the tiny dip in the middle of her chin, the way she tilted her head toward his and the perfect return curl of his lips as if in disbelief at his luck .  I watched as the golden sun, now low in the sky, bounced off both of their perfect faces and they snuck those small admiring and intimate glances that we all remember as they talked of things in their rich future. Excited, animated, the world was theirs.  They are in their twenties and the talk on the rock was of the house they are thinking of building on the land they have bought.  And I sat there feeling the gravitational tug of fifty, watching them with deep admiration.  And deep envy.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to have what they have.  I have always felt an affinity for her imagining that I was like her when I was her age.  Or she like me, only thirty years behind.  And now, here she was, there they were, everything ahead of them, houses to build, adventures to go on and children still to have.  I remember thinking of how beautiful their kids would be. Beautiful babies. Lucky babies.  And I remember the pang, the sense that all was ahead of them and all was behind me.  Her art was becoming something, his fishing business was flying, the house, the friends, the laughter in their future.  How lucky they were and how wonderful it was that they had all of these things still to happen.  Things they could only imagine, firsts they had yet to experience.  Wonderful firsts that open your eyes to the amazing magic where people lend you money and let you buy or build house and love creates kids and kids grow to be people, and  where life is a party and you learn to cook and clean and balance the checkbook and everything feels bright like a new inspiring penny.  The world of the young, ripe with possibility.  Those pangs of envy I felt that day, perched on the drinking rock, were not about denying them but trying to remember me.  Me, who had once been she.  Me who had dragged boyfriend after boyfriend to the drinking rock, letting them gaze at me as he gazed at her,  as the sun hit the horizon, none of mine passing the test until the man I married.   But the days of gaze were gone.  The time of firsts was behind me, my children no longer needed much snuggling, my spouse loved me but no longer longed for me, I cooked well and cleaned poorly and the house we’d live in forever needed a paint job and the mortgage was due every month.  And every night on the drinking rock the sun fell below the end of the field and we went to bed, warm with the familiar feel of sunburn and wine.  Familiar.  Too.  It all felt so done.  So over.  My life.  I was going to be fifty. My life was done.

I was so wrong.  It was hers that was done.  She took my breath away by dying the week before I turned fifty, at the age of 22, on a snowy road in Bangor, Maine in an accident that had nothing to do with anything other than the insane cruelty of fate.  The meaness of life.  And on that snowy highway, so went those beautiful babies and that happy man so in love, and the house and her father and brother and sister’s hearts and all of the rest of us dying a little bit with her.

So here’s the deal.  I am not going to try to find some meaning in her death.  There is none.  Most pointless waste of a beautiful person I can imagine.  But I am going to tell you what it did for me.  It fucking smacked the maudlin “I’m Turning Fifty Blues” right out of my pitiful self absorbed head.  It spanked me into instant sensible submission and made me realize that, my god, was I lucky to have the chance to turn fifty, that each annoying and depressing fold of flesh was a goddamned gift , that who the hell cares if my thighs jiggle cause they work and that every time my kids make me get up with them at night or throw up all over the chair instead of making it to the toilet, well damn it all, how lucky am I to have had the chance to have kids, to clean up their throw up and to receive their sweaty perfect hugs.  I am not kidding.  I am not kidding.  It made me see that I can still have expectations for life and I can still revel in my friendships and the people I love and that the sun is out today and it snowed yesterday and there’s a pretty darned good chance that spring is about to bust loose.  And I can still hope for bigger boobs.  And can probably achieve them if I am willing to pack on the twenty pounds that I’m beating back constantly.  And that, yes, indeed, I am fifty.  And I am so lucky to be fifty.

I don’t know if I’ll ever breathe the same way again.  Jack loved Poole. That is her name.  She was the first, of what I hope will be many, beautiful woman he loved.   I have lots of pictures of her holding him as a baby, she a junior mother and he, plump, happy and content.  He grew up and she taught him to sail.  The day after she died, Jack turned to me, with begging twelve year old eyes and said “Mom, please, promise me there’s heaven.”  I knew what he was asking.  I looked at him long and hard and suddenly understood the answer to a question I had never really been clear on.  “Yes”,  I said “Jack, YES, until someone can prove me wrong, YES, Jack, there is heaven!  There is heaven. ”   I am not sure I understood until that moment how much I needed there to be heaven.   Talk about possibilities?  Even at fifty, the possibilities are endless.  Heaven.  How the heck is that for a possibility?