Another New Life

     Sometimes it occurs to me that people during their lifetime actually live a number of lives within that lifetime, one life opening up the way to the next, which opens the way to another and so on, each old life being simultaneously  -  and paradoxically  -  both left behind and brought along  as we move on to each new life.
      Of course the frontier between one life and the next exists in each person's individual perception, if that frontier even exists at all; it could be that there are people - maybe even most people for all I know - whose lives seem to be woven of whole cloth, who have no sense of moving from life to life within the span of their lifetime.
         But as for me, I feel that I have crossed a number of new-life frontiers in the six-plus decades I've been kicking around the planet, each subsequent life full of new experiences, unanticipated outcomes  and quite amazing, sometimes astonishing, discoveries.

    I think of childhood as my first life, the starting point where I lived for a dozen and some years before I left it behind and brought it along with me,             

...when I crossed into the new life of my high school years,

...which I left behind for the new frontier of college life.

    Then there was the life of the years I lived and worked in Germany;

...followed by the early years of married life.

    And then the strange, new, challenging yet wonderful, all-encompassing life of parenthood, the entrance into which somehow made me feel as if I'd become a card-carrying member of the human race.

      It was during the years that I think of as my Parenting Life that I began to write,

...and became a  published author.

   It was also during that life that I became a piano teacher,

...a produced playwright,

...and the co-writer of a musical Western comedy,

...that, unfortunately, never made it farther than my living room and the living rooms of some of my friends.

      Then those years were gone to wherever years go to, my children grown up and moved on to start their own lives, and I crossed over into another life in which I mostly sat on the sidelines of my children's lives, though moving in and out of their lives as I was needed or wanted, relishing along the way the joys of their successes, marriages,

...the births of my grandchildren,

...while helping my children with life's challenges and adversities in whatever way I could.
    Meanwhile in my own life I went about my daily routine such as it was, teaching piano, plowing my way through a novel I hoped to someday finish,

...getting together with my Posse,

...traveling to visit my children from time to time,

...and occasionally thinking about the old Peter, Paul and Mary song called "Mon Vrai Destin" - my true destiny -

...and wondering whether I'd ever find my true destiny, or if I were, perhaps, already living it out.
      But it turned out that I wasn't yet. 
      In 2013 Tom and I walked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago de Compostela through Spain (see www.tightenyourboots.net and www.andlightenyourpack.com).    

     A friend suggested that I write a daily blog during the journey and, following her advice, I did. The web logging  of our journey along the Camino turned out to be for me the entrance to my next life, as by the time the trip was over I'd collected a very small but engaged readership, some of whose members expressed to me the hope that I would continue blogging.
        But now that I was back from  Spain I wondered what there could be for me to blog about. It was one of my readers who solved my dilemma when she told me, "Just share your observations on daily life." 
           And so I decided to do that, and on December 20, 2013, my blog "Ailantha" was born,

...with this first post, explaining the blog's title:
     Ailanthus Altissima, called either Tree of Heaven or Slum Palm, is a tree that thrives in places where no respectable plant would grow: in vacant lots,  between the broken glass in alleys,  up through rubble and  cracks in the sidewalk.  It is widely considered an urban blight, an ugly invasive eye sore, and because of its tenacity, campaigns to rip it from the face of the planet are ongoing and expensive.   
    But there are others out there who praise the Ailanthus for standing up to the asphalt and concrete and bringing a bit of welcome shade and greenery,  a little oasis for passersby.  So what is Ailanthus?  Occasional oasis or tenacious blight?  And which will its spin-off Ailantha be?
     And so, in my sixth decade of life, I crossed over yet another border into another new life as I began writing everyday and posting my observations as a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations, hopefully of interest to my fellow travelers. 

     In 2017 when my novel, "Equal and Opposite Reactions" was finally published,

...it seemed not so much as if I'd crossed over into another new life, but rather as if, like a literary Christopher Columbus, I'd discovered - or rather, been propelled into - a whole new world.

       And so my life had settled into a groove of blogging, writing - I recently learned that my next novel, "Hail Mary,"  the sequel to "Equal and Opposite Reactions" will be released in May 2020 - teaching, traveling, and taking care, more or less, of the daily business of my life such as it was, leaving me to suppose that I had finally discovered my vrai destin, and that there would be only one more new life left for me to discover somewhere in that mysterious country of my own old age.
        But no. I have just stepped over the border into yet another new life, one I've head tell of so often from others of my generation that I marvel that my own entrance into it is turning out to be for me such a prodigiously unheralded experience.
         And yet it is, as I now understand it must be for everyone who steps into this new life. 

      Last Tuesday, November 12, my 99 1/2-year-old mother, 

...moved from her home in Seaford, Delaware to an assisted living facility nine-tenths of a mile from my house.  I'm now my mother's guardian, advocate, daily visitor, emotional care-giver, and provider of her needs.  
      It's a whole new life.