The Seventies Show

The photo is black and white. In it is a young woman, 20 something years old. She has long hair reaching towards her waist. Parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears, it fans out over her shoulders as she bends forward. She wears bell bottoms, platform shoes and a plain t-shirt. A funky looking watch with a large face circles her thin wrist. She sits on a stool and leans over a drawer pulled from a library card catalog. She’s intent on the task. She uses both hands to flip and pull a card that might just be what she’s looking for. The origin of the photo is from the 1970s. I posted this photo on Instagram stories with the caption, “Me in grad school circa 1970s.”

It certainly struck a chord; I received not just likes, but many DMs and comments. For those in our 70s who were young women in the 70s, it sparked a remembering. For each of us, a distinct memory. I’d love to have known more about what they were for others. In mine, I recall the pleasure I have always received and still receive from researching and writing about something I know little about. I saw the potential in the card’s title, thumbed through the stacks’ contents, and checked for valuable finds. What a rush when you found that book that contains the core of everything you want to think and write about, that would become the foundation for a paper that consumed you until it was done. And even then, lingered. Research then and now is an adventure for my imagination and an escape from the parts of my life that cause me pain.

Since this time last year, when triggered by many losses I began therapy, I return over and over to the 1970s, finally understanding how that decade profoundly, in all its many traumas and triumphs, both expanded and limited the woman I would become. The woman I am now. Unconsciously, as I move through the process this last year, my body and what I choose to wear changes. I return to a time that, when I remember it, still smells faintly of patchouli, one that was very wild and quite risky. But this time I am not terrified as I re-live it because I know how it all turns out. Now I can simply feel it as it’s supposed to be felt, in the way I was not able then when fear and guilt kept me numb. Fifty years later, I am still here, feeling it now.

Since I entered my seventies, there has been a gradual, yet distinct, change in how I prefer to process the world. Yet one that feels vaguely familiar. I am engaged with the mystical, the spiritual. This is after years of extolling a scientific rationality, proselytizing evidence-based practice and neurobiology. I re-visited the years when I read Herman Hess, Kahlil Gibran and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The time of mushrooms and mescaline. I pull beautifully illustrated Tarot and Oracle cards; every day I write about them in my journal and take photos of some that capture my attention in a particular way. I try to discern how they interact with this newfound belief in my intuition, a certainty and trust I seem to have gained only in these early years of my 70s. I light scented candles on my desk when I write and order Japanese paper incense. From my glass cabinet, I choose a fresh perfume every day, even when dressed in overalls or sweatpants.

I pay attention to the Moon and turn myself over to her gravitational pull. I pull the Moon card. The card of imagination, visions and images. While the Moon can stir up wildness, its coolness provides calm as well. If we accept the wild things brought up from our depths, as I have had to do this past year, those things from the 1970s, the moon brings peace. The traumas retreat, as does the tide and imagination in all its glory returns. I buy seeds to plant a garden that blooms in the night, moonflowers and others that only unfold and release their intoxicating fragrance from dusk until dawn. I know in the upcoming months there will be times Calvin and I will need to sit peacefully in the dark with them, to smell them, to allow them to replenish us.

My hair is long now, side part instead of middle. Auburn fades to white. Denim for shirts, pants, jackets and coats. Long, gauzy, light cotton Indian print dresses for summer. I’ve never been a scarf person but am now enamored with tribal print ones, long and flowing. The never-ending rectangular scarf you can wrap around your neck, some have tassels. The first one I bought during one of our “one tank of gas” weekend trips is unbearably light, whipped whirls of orange paisley. All the scarves I acquire seem to contain the color orange.

The artist Wassily Kandinsky described orange as, “red brought closer to humanity by yellow.” He theorized a good deal about color, its interaction with other senses and human emotion, “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings.” According to Christie’s, his work, “Orange”, “represented a step in his artistic development, moving towards greater clarity and serenity in his color palettes while still maintaining a playful energy.” I love that for him, I love that for me. Those are the first words I find that suggest how my 70s feel. I wonder how who I am becoming might manifest in what I decide to wear as the decade evolves. My scarves a whisper. On my desk, there is a photo I took during another weekend trip. It’s an empty mannequin waiting in a window. It’s pleasurable to imagine, to anticipate what it might display.

Perhaps wearing orange is my response to what I don’t even want to name. A desire to bring me closer to humanity. For the last two weeks, I’ve struggled to write something about the times, to incorporate feminist theory, to write a hybrid ESSAY. A very smart ESSAY. A work that could be called IMPORTANT. Stung by the striving busy bee again. The demand to “do or say something” relevant and modern. I don’t want to write an ESSAY. I feel the same way as I did when I started my blog because writing as an academic felt too constraining. Rebellious. While I deal with all the disruption outside of this space (my partner’s cancer and living in the unrecognizable country I live in) asking myself to be disciplined, productive and to write like I’m in an MFA program feels way too hard. I don’t want to do that kind of hard anymore.

This writing space is my “midnight garden”. A creative, fragrant, and replenishing retreat. To write and explore what it means to be in one’s seventies. While there’s lots of novels and narratives about our 40s, 50s and 60s, it gets scarce after that except for the odd account by Abigail Thomas or May Sarton. There’s Fellowship Point, a novel by Alice Elliot Dark and, of course, the novels by Elizabeth Strout featuring my beloved Olive Kitteridge. Alice Elliott Dark tells me she is working on a novel where the protagonist is 92. I can’t wait to read it! How else will we know what’s coming as life expectancy extends if we don’t read literature about these years? What possibilities there could be?

In my experience, and I wonder if those of you in your 70s and beyond would care to share yours, something really shifted since I entered my seventies. There are the expected and unexpected events like a parent or friend dying or a partner having cancer, becoming ill ourselves, a new grandson, a book published. But there is a change that I can’t yet articulate clearly. I just know my body, and who I know myself to be seems profoundly different. Something I’ve not experienced before, and therefore I might tentatively label exciting. Very different from when I turned 60 which still meant to me at least, being a little wild, free and highly energetic.

I feel quiet more often these days, move slower, turn inward more. Yet still so open to infinite possibility. To new people, old people in new ways, music and conversation. To midnight gardens, long hair, learning something I never knew before. To following my intuition instead of my intellect and will. To spontaneous writing and to what might come out of me on any given day. There is a joy to cooking, to pressing one’s hands deep into the dirt, to the aroma and taste of morning coffee. Perhaps because I sense they're fading, I want to experience all my senses all the time, to live in sensuous luxury. Most of all, when I am writing in the way I am writing today, for me and to you, I feel free to let go of it all, the expectations, the aspirations, the demands. To just move on, my long orange paisley scarf billowing behind me, letting me float softly into the rest of whatever may turn out to be my life.

Curious to hear from those of you who have 70s stories no matter what age you are.