The Art of Old Ladies

Despite how I must look to strangers, I do not feel old. The essential Jane is still here, the Janie that woke up early in the summers to ride her bike to Indiana and back, the school girl often lost in daydreams, the one always with a plan that turned into disaster before ending up as innovation.

Yet, today, with wrinkles and gray hair I appear (if anyone indeed notices at all) past all definitions of prime, competent, vital. Someone in need of Geritol—remember those commercials? Again, I’m dating myself. For most of us we walk from the car to the front door of the supermarket, down the food aisles, back out to the parking lot and no one knows that beneath our clothes, hidden under the flesh is a rock star.

Lately, I’ve become fascinated by YouTube videos (sorry, not on Tik Tok, hahaha, too old!), featuring vocalists from the 80s—such as Natalie Merchant. Of 10,000 Maniacs fame, Wonder, These Are the Days. She’s old, has long gray, more salt than pepper hair, wrinkles like me, no longer Dexedrine thin, but the voice is the same. She opens her mouth and there she is—these are the days.

And—oh, how they fly, getting away from us.

She leans close into the camera, unself-conscious or not caring, of how the lens amplifies the lines, the curves, how unkind time has been. She knows her essence.

Tower of Babel is in league with her other output of songs. Hints of self-awareness, commentary on the world today, but also good licks; she still has the chops. Inside versus outside. With our eyes closed we hear Natalie Merchant, yet looking at her we are amazed—we are no longer who we once were. Like a Tower of Babel we do not understand, we are thrown into confusion. I get the sense she is playing with us, her audience, challenging us to encompass the whole, no matter how layered and complex—and unrecognizable.