There’s a few OldBucks from the days of my youth still roaming around town.  Every once in a while, I’ll stumble across one at an art event.

 

On occasion, I’ll seize the privilege of my older womanhood to cross the room and speak my mind freely to one of them. I use the word privilege because human interaction can now take place for me, to my great relief, without any artifice; because at my age the misdirecting headwinds of sexual trading are gone.  And sometimes, in lucky moments, this encourages not only me but the occasional OldBuck to openly speak our minds.

 

So, the other night I’m at a screening of fem video performance works presented by Molly, a young woman curator I’ve been following. There I see this OldBuck, Philip. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him at this woman’s events.  “He’s spotted Molly, too,” I think to myself, annoyed. Then, remembering to willfully practice choosing confirmation rather than competition from his presence - as in “She’s my find, what’s he doing here?” - I decide instead to think and then feel, “Good for him.”

 

Afterwards, he and I walk together in the early dark of our NW winter. We stop on a corner in this city that has changed utterly over the course of our lives here.  The white crossing light cycles several times.

 

Knowing him to be well read in political philosophies, I launch into assertions of my belief, still, in social progress, even in this especially nervous moment; of my faith in creative expression, its ability to yet till meaningful soil despite the tattering of our treasured social and cultural structures, so hard built by our generation & by all before.

 

Perhaps because of a realization from his own OldBuckdom, perhaps out of simple courtesy, he takes in my thoughts, doesn’t toss them aside although I know him to be a more cynical human.  Instead he asks, “What are you working on?”  For this recognition, I feel grateful. Encouraged.

 

I tell him I've been thinking lately on the fact that I have lived a life my mother could only imagine and that was unimaginable for my grandmother.

 

I tell him I have no desire for any "sweeping it all away" because this change I've lived in the womanpossible gives truth to the idea of a progressive direction in history.

 

Besides, I say, I know how women fare in chaos, who seizes power in caves.

 

And, I add, I have no desire for the young women today, often accused of taking for granted their expansive lives, to be pulled back into the old fights – battles past with those body counts.  Rather, I want for them to move forward with the work at hand: the yet opening and still in the making of what it is to be female.  Like nothing experienced before.  Ever.

 

Maybe it was the late winter afternoon we’d shared of fem video imagery and the encouraging tilling we'd experienced there, but the OldBuck and I end by expressing faith to one other. That the young, who have strength for it, do recognize the depth of the task ahead as well as the beyond calculation of lives-come-before to bring us here, to this opening place of growth and sharing, this bountylife.