Old Love
Free-Flying Through Time and Flashing the Financial District
VOL. 1 ... No. 6 February 15, 2023
Hello Friends ~
In honor of Valentine's Day, I thought you might enjoy an essay I wrote that was originally published in Skirt! Magazine, February 2008. Stu and I had been married for 25 years when I wrote this. Newlyweds!
A couple of years ago, my husband Stu and I were making plans to visit San Francisco. I had lived there in the seventies and hadn’t been back for thirty years. The funny thing is I hated to go back looking middle-aged. Only a young, sexy person would fit into the San Francisco of my memory, and I didn’t want to be just another gaping tourist with aching feet and shopping bags. Mostly, I wanted Stu to experience the city as I had known it – as a place of magic and mystery. I was afraid we were past the time in life when magic happens. We knew too much. I spent a few extra hours in the gym, dyed my hair, and hoped to sneak into town before the hippie ghosts of my past caught sight of me.
Stu shared none of my concerns. It was his first visit and he was excited, silver hair and all. But, San Francisco was the place of my youth, of nude beaches, long hikes through Muir Woods, of magic mushrooms and sexual experimentation, of civil rights and women’s rights, and forbidden interracial romance. It was a place of wildness, where I could create excitement just by walking into a room – braless, half-naked wonder that I was back then. I loved that city. I loved who I was in that city. Going back as a middle-aged woman felt like somebody else’s story.
We rented a room on the third floor of a small boutique hotel that overlooked a cable car line in the heart of the financial district. After we had finished unpacking, I asked Stu to go down to the street below and take a picture of me in the window. Wearing my new turtleneck sweater, I leaned out, smiled and waved to him. He snapped the picture. I motioned for him to wait a minute, ducked back inside the room, removed my sweater, and came back in my bra. He snapped again. Well, you know what came next. I, and my middle-aged, though still rather grand boobs, flashed the financial district. I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe those hippie ghosts were already working on me.
The city hadn’t changed all that much. The cable car I used to hop on for work was now too full of tourists to be used for commuting, but it was running. Street musicians still filled the air with sweet music. Artists and beggars and psychedelic burnouts were still there, holding on, making a life. I showed my husband all the places I remembered.
As luck would have it, my old apartment building was holding an open house, and the little studio I had lived in for a couple of years was for rent. We posed as parents looking for a place for our daughter and when we walked in, I felt giddy and twenty again, giggling, with a dance in my step. Afternoon light filled the tiny apartment. I felt as if it were filling me, streaming through my body. The Murphy bed I remembered so fondly was tucked neatly back into the wall just the way it had been when I lived there. The Golden Gate Bridge glinted in the distance out beyond the bay window. I pointed to the window seat and whispered excitedly to Stu, “This is where I used to sit and play my guitar in the late afternoons. The sun used to glisten on the bridge just like today.” Eyeing me tenderly, he said, “I’ve never seen you like this.”
I felt an old excitement well up inside me. I was back in my apartment by the Bay with a man who loved me. He put his arms around me and held me for a moment. The way he was looking at me, I thought seriously about pulling down the Murphy bed! Maybe the city hadn’t lost its magic after all.
Later that day, after driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in our rented Chrysler convertible on the way to Sausalito, we entered a long, dark tunnel that rose sharply uphill. We scanned the radio and found The Allman Brothers in the middle of "Tied to the Whipping Post." We cranked it up and just as we were nearing the end of the tunnel, the beckoning sunlight and ethereal blue skies opened like a glimpse of heaven, and the band roared its way into that wild, classic guitar break, with its inspired crescendo. It sent us free flying through time and space, holding hands, and laughing our asses off.
We crested the hill into the sunlight. Sausalito lay below us to our right, with its pristine white buildings and blue and white sails in the harbor, glistening like a sleepy Greek fishing village. In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about how old I was. I was just feeling the wind and sunshine on my face, and the pure sexual energy flowing from my love’s hand to mine. It was so much better than being twenty. I was with someone who truly knows me – someone who sleeps beside me in bed and awakens at the slightest beginnings of my nightmares and reaches to hold and comfort me. I have spent twenty-five years with this wonderful man, who tells me every day that he loves me, who still finds me incredibly hot, and who wants my happiness and success even more than he wants his own. Together we hold our memories. We confess and forgive. We bleed, burp and fart, unashamed and unselfconscious.
I had been afraid that the magic was gone from my life. I thought it was located somewhere in San Francisco or back in time. I was young then, and inexperience makes everything seem new for a while. I never thought an old love could have any juice. I used to look at old couples holding hands and tottering along together and I would think, patronizingly, “How sweet. I hope I feel that way when I’m old,” as if old age were some foreign city that I would never visit. Now that I’m on the outskirts of that city, I intend to drive a hot convertible full-tilt into it, rocking to the beat of my own music, with my sweetheart beside me. Look for me. I’ll be the old woman flashing the financial district.
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
— Lao Tzu