It was a small realization yet it shifted her world on its teenage axis: 1964/1965 New Years Eve, Atlanta, Georgia, at a noisy café/pub she and her high school folksinging friends were celebrating, entertaining the noisy crowd, and she had just come back from the Ladies Room, where she had realized for the first time in her life that midnight was not all that late anymore…this amazed her….she used to think it was the dead dark of deepest night, and as a little girl she had been stunned when allowed to stay up until that magic hour….now, older, she understood that midnight was not really all that late after all!
By then, she had experienced the true magic of a teenage nightlife after midnight, innocent enough in those days, but somehow naughty nonetheless. She liked the hours after midnight. She had kissed her first serious boyfriend after midnight one night.
But as she was wafting back to the entertainers’ table, long folksy tiered skirt gently swaying in the cafe smoke, she had another realization that stopped her in her tracks….it genuinely had not ever occurred to her before that moment , and it nearly stopped her heart, it was so sudden, so deep, so real: she would one day die…all the people around her, her friends, laughing and drunk on beer, all…all would absolutely unavoidably die.
She thought: Aren’t I too young to know that? I’m only 17…how can I know that at 17?”
Nonetheless, she had that real unshakeable sudden knowledge: we all die.
Sure, she had a friend or two who had already died, in the random car wreck or early cancer onset, but these deaths were mere headlines in the school newspaper, not feeling real at all……they reached only as far as her brain…and the sadness was that shallow as well… a weird understanding that she wouldn’t be seeing that particular person around the hallways anymore , and the brief silences that pervaded the entire school assembly…she was that aware…but as she approached her New Years Eve table, for reasons she probably would never know, the thought that she too would one day die, for real die, like vanish , disappear, be no more, hit her like a ton of bricks, leaving her breathless, yet oddly not frightened. Calm, was more like it. A restful understanding.
An astonishment.
Like the archeological uncovering of an ancient artifact.
Then, as she sipped her 3rd rum and Tab of the night, she remembered that her father had also died, only one year before that very evening in fact, and someplace inside her got very very still…very wary….as she understood that she had not let the truth of that injury into her body either: to her, her Daddy was just away on a fishing trip or something, soon to return home.
He never would of course…return home, that is…and a stab of fear paralyzed her heart.
At that moment her walls of defense started leaking sand, and on that New Years Eve, awash in noise and music , her life became something far “other” than what she thought it would be, almost as if that lightening shock of acknowledgement shifted a gear in the engine that would forever drive her forward.