So, to recap, Juliet sends her Nurse (appropriately named “Nurse”) to the marketplace at nine o’clock to give her lover Romeo a note about a later important meeting. When the Nurse has not returned by noon, our sweet, soon-to-be-dead Juliet throws some serious shade on old people. She says that love should travel between lovers by thought but instead, she had to send the Nurse and that girl is slooooow.
“Old people,” Juliet muses “some feign as they were dead, Unwieldy, slow, heavy, and pale as lead.”
I remember feeling that way when I was her age and even way past her age, at a time when I might have had more empathy and compassion. I remember being fourteen and finding any delay caused my mother to be both infuriating and inexcusable regardless of cause. Especially before I got my driver’s license. It seemed like she would make a POINT of answering the telephone just when I wanted to get to jazz/tap class early. My husband’s mother, if my husband is to be believed, took an extra hour after Church on Sunday talking to friends and neighbors JUST TO BE SPITEFUL.
Well, friends, pay back is, indeed a ‘bitch’. It is a privilege to grow old, even to grow relatively old. There are some perks to age. For one thing, it is the great ‘shit happens’ drug. If someone gets my parking space I wish them well, truly. I live in a small town, I’ll find another one. Same thing for people who pass me on the freeway ostentatiously. I get it, they’re in a hurry. Perhaps, I tell myself, since I have the time to reflect at the speed at which I’m going, their wife/husband/surrogate is having a baby. For another, and related, is patience. I, unlike the rude idiot who just passed me, am not in a hurry. I’m in Act 3. There is no Act 4 in this Schema.
But, without pretending to be dead, there is no doubt that I move more slowly now then I did when I was Juliet’s age. I have to take stairs deliberately. I have less stamina, strength. I can still walk fine but I don’t walk as far or as fast or as late at night or without my phone. Things change. I have less energy, less wind power. Even without the gentle but real ageist harassment and the deadly knife fight in the village square, probably Nurse did take her sweet time getting home.
But come on, even if she did dawdle a bit on the way home, she got there in the end, didn’t she?