Peter Thorlichen

​Opening Night

Aging is an extraordinary process whereby
you become the person you always should have been.
David Bowie.
 
I turned 70 a few months ago. That’s crazy.    My mother was half that when she committed suicide. Weird mathematical tangent.    2 yrs. ago I joined Third Act. A democracy and climate organization for people over 60.   Life, a three-act play. A classic formulation.   
   
You were always there
Wish I’d seen you earlier
Too much blinding me
 
Many filters and hesitancies. Rooted in familial shame; insecurity. Worried about others’ reactions to my thoughts. Perseverate over decisions to do or not to do.    
 
Life’s resolution
Coming into focus now
My own hero’s arc
 
Palpable fear of dying in the early months of COVID. At-risk category. That brought clarity to the moment.   I started writing about my life, my family.  And shared it with many!   Led me to this WTF stage of life.    Learn to say yes to saying and doing.    
 
New persona blooms
Roots planted in the first act
A tiger flower

**

On the Home Front

Historical Markers Within Seven Blocks of My House

It’s a biting cold, windy late December day as I walk down Massachusetts Avenue to photograph historical markers. Part of my self-imposed “noticing” project. To go beyond what flits before my eyes each day to see detail, essence. On the right, over here, behind the stone wall and across the lawn is the yellow Jason Russell House: Site of the bloodiest battle on the first day of the American Revolution—the Battle of Menotomy, as this area was originally named by the Massachusett people. The Massachusett, I remind myself, were forcibly removed by the colonists and devastated by diseases inflicted upon them. Villains one day can become heroes the next. Arlington is proud of the blood that was spilled and re-enacts the battle every year. As I arrive in the center of town, I notice a large white trapezoidal sign honoring a hero from that day: Samuel Whittemore was 78 years of age when he became the oldest known colonial combatant in the American Revolution. He was reportedly stabbed with bayonets, shot in the cheek, and left for dead. Remarkably, Whittemore survived for another eighteen years. Across busy four-laned Pleasant Street, there’s a statue, within a C-shaped concrete surround, of Samuel Wilson: A native son born near this site. He became our national symbol Uncle Sam. The Uncle Sam posters were used to recruit young men to fight in WWI—the war that everyone thought had ended all wars. Chilled, I head home. So much of what we honour has to do with war. We now have a department named for that, one premised on maximum lethality and violent effect. It’s said that Canada is a less violent society, in part, because their independence did not come as a result of a revolutionary war. Home, I swipe through the blood, bayonets, and boys sent to kill. Americans, from the start, this is what we do. This is my neighbourhood, my country.
 
Sounds of Silence, Not

The construction company made the grassy area outside our house the staging area for seven months as they worked to replace the gas lines in different parts of our neighbourhood. Expensive, unnecessary work, since we’re supposed to transition to renewables. I listen to the bam bam bam bam bam of the jackhammers pounding the air outside and the rumbling of the trucks with the incessant beep, beep, beep when they back up. And then and then there are the gas leaf blowers howling in their torturously intermittent way. Where have all the rakes gone? Long time passing. When did landscaping go from being the province of the ultra-wealthy to every absentee landlord’s-no-consequences-for-them-every-two-weeks-on-a-contract-no-matter-whether-it’s-needed-or-not-and-even-if-it’s-only-a-postage-stamp-sized-lot intrusion into our world? It pains me to say that some of my neighbors also hire the leaf blower army. Please, I’m seventy years old, and I use a rake. Which reminds me, my wife recently bought me a magnetic I HATE PEOPLE bookmark. It’s shaped in an arc with a blue, green, yellow, and pink rainbow, two blue clouds and two blue hearts on either side of the rainbow, and a flying bat. It makes me smile.
 
Town Park Ordinance
 
Dogs shall be leashed AT ALL TIMES in the woods. As I walk, I hear multiple dogs barking atop a hill I am about to climb. Oh shit. As I reach the top, a dog comes racing towards me from another part of the hill. Barking furiously. Stops right in front of me. Teeth bared. I freeze. I’m scared. A man wearing a white cap comes out from behind a boulder. He appears with two other dogs, leashes strewn over his shoulder. Me: “This is not okay.” Him: “You don’t like barking? Well, I don’t like the sound of motorcycle engines.” Me: “Fuck you.” I walk away, muttering to myself that Mr. Whitecap probably voted for Trump, the unleasher of callous disregard. I realize my neck hurts when I reach the bottom of the hill. This interaction was obviously not healthy. I was dismissed. What if I had told him that I was scared?

**

Touchless Carwash

She’s both in the line and not in the line in front of me. She walks over and asks, Does the door at the other end close when you’re inside?  Yes.   I don’t like that, but my husband would think I was crazy.   I actually prefer it to rolling on the tracks in the regular carwash. I worry that I will make a mistake and forget to put it in neutral, or not close the window after paying the worker, or that I’ll drive off the rails. I’ve done two of those things, almost the third. 
 
In my salty car
I tap the icon for BEST 
Under Chassis wash

The light is green. I inch forward. The car is hit on all sides by blasts of water. I concentrate on the light, waiting for it to turn red. What would happen if I went too far? The light turns red. I stop right away. Proud of myself. It’s cold. Should I leave the engine running? Keep the heat going? But I don’t want to breathe in the fumes. Is there even ventilation in this box? Would I be contributing to climate change? (I once left the car in Drive after I turned it off. When the light turned green to indicate I should move forward through the drying ducts, I tried to start the car. It wouldn’t start. I panicked and started to get out of the car to see whether I could contact someone to help me. I did figure it out. Glad there was no one to see this. They don’t have cameras in these things, do they? Do they?) I turn the engine off and wait for the touchless cleansing. In the regular carwash, plastic flaps slap all over the car. Can we agree to call that a touching carwash? A blue arm comes slowly across the front of the car, spraying soapy water. I never feel anything in my undercarriage. Do they really clean down there? I hope it’s not a scam. The arm returns to rinse away the soap. And then the dénouement. My favorite part. The drying ducts boom air against the car. I am allotted sixty seconds of drying. I roll ahead, making sure that I use each and every one. 

A few drops remain
the brine washed and rinsed away
I sit there untouched

**

What Does it Mean to Retire?

Just before I retire. An NPR story. Neil Pasricha of The Happiness Equation says never retire. Leads with a story about his high school guidance counselor who was forced to retire. Dies of a heart attack within a week?!   The two most dangerous years are the year after you’re born and the year after you retire.  Interesting.   Have always thought of retirement as a kind of rebirth.    Variables in Pasricha’s equation are the four “Ss”—social, structure, stimulation, and story. These vanish in retirement.   Really?  
 
Freedom of each day
Compose a different self
Its meaning written
 
A car with new wheels
Driving unfamiliar roads
Never so alive
 
Five years later.   Happy in ways I never could have imagined. Communities of writing, singing, and politics. Essays and a memoir to be published.    Then the wheels come off all around me, us.
A different equation   A different output     Courage, perhaps.
 
Each day exhausting
Assaults on democracy
Cruelty abounds
 
Companies retreat
Bowing to the dictator
Cowards all of them
 
Asleep in my bed
Made sure to set the alarm
There’s much to be done
 
**

Peter Thorlichen’s essays are published in the Woven Tale Press and The Brussels Review. His memoir, Hope Farm, is forthcoming from Pierian Springs Press. Peter is a retired educator, and former community organizer and union activist, who lives outside Boston.