On Being a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Turning 60. I feel like a grilled cheese sandwich. All nicely toasted on one side, and then somebody comes along and flips me over. All the cheese from the baked side starts to seep through the vulnerable inner bread on the flip side.

This is not the best analogy, but I am trying to describe the way that each of the thirty year periods of my life are suddenly aligned, and the past is backwashing, filtering through the newly completed 30-year layer comprising young adulthood to “maturity.” My memory will flood with reruns from my early years, something like old movies on TV. I'm lost in the good and bad, the ugly and sad, the amazing, and the pathetic. Retro-view in both color and black-and-white.

Fumbling back to bed on the way from the bathroom one night, I caught the reflection of the bedroom in the window glass, and had the strangest feeling that I was walking inside the glass; the sense of being a goldfish (but that’s hubris: let’s say a guppy) inside a liquid, fluid medium with no end or beginning. Is this the altered state of the yogi, the embryo, the Senior Citizen, or the dawn of the legendary Second Childhood? Will it end in adult diapers or in enlightenment? Or both?