A lifetime lost outgrowing being white, middle-class and from Greenwich Connecticut.

100108 01:34
Life is defined by elementary factors: race, creed, gender, education, age, and so on. These identifying elements are accepted, taken for granted, seem fixed, immutable and life a seamless continuity. Yet as life is consumed these roles become blurred, worn, with experience, and birthdays no longer celebrated. We move past our vocational definition either accepting or rejecting retirement. Our enhanced or diminished capacities integrated into the ordinary of daily life.
I think myself increasingly odd growing younger, and more vital, daily. Eccentric perhaps but I find joy merging into the flow of other generations to follow and those that preceded mine. It helps to ignore the bruises and contusions normal to we fortunate enough to live long aspiring to become wise, sages, to ourselves and others?
Questions from youth are answered, dreams realized and lost, expectations become more modest; simple. Food, shelter and clothing no longer sought as remarkable status symbols--whatever/whichever--is adequate the long cold night to come at winter's advent.
Decades it has taken me to outlive the curse cast in adolescence. A lifetime lost outgrowing being white, middle-class and from Greenwich Connecticut.
Depending upon which side of the railroad tracks you are from, it is one of the three wealthiest communities in the world. Rich, wealth sought for its own sake, means many things.
And to my family it was, I believe, never fully acquired. Remembered best was the quest, the longing hunger and thirst for wealth as safety. The pretense and delusions of grandeur, choices made at savage cost, loss of moral and ethical norms, now lost as the democracy of death closes/closed upon the past generation, a culture ruptured and civilization in collapse.
Now poor I merge into my neighbors, a community of the elderly, without hope of reprise. Yet I celebrate my estate reflected through their infrequently visiting children, grandchildren, younger siblings, a reason to praise the advent of each new day with thanksgiving the gift of life now. Each day become a season and generation of wealth precious, unique and explicit the value sought and prized.
It has been unusually cold here, where I live fled to escape the dreary winter of my youth, lately past. Passing into a new dawn surprised in the peasant dead celebrated by succeeding generations of their kith and kin in New & Old Mexico. I am now one of, and with, them gladly so. Since now I know the meaning of three steps forward and two backward in my skipping journey into whatever lays ahead knowing life and love will go on if only in prayer.