the times are changing.

This is a strange age.

Of death, of dying, oneself, and relationships, and yes, even lives. What mournful morning is not tinged with grief. Rhetorical questions aside, I wonder, where was all this when we were young? I know it was there. I was lucky and escaped most brushes with death. My great grandma Dumpling, named after the meals she made with her steady Czech hands, died a few weeks short of 102. I remember thinking she was almost there, she had almost made it. At that age though, death is not a foe but a friend. I know she was tired. I know she was forgetting. I know she wanted to run again. I never asked her, but I feel like she was We cried. No matter what age, it's unsettling seeing adults, your grandparents, your parents, weep. Snotty noses and reddened faces and swollen eyes are unfamiliar on family members, almost a shock, a reminder we are all little children underneath our age and groaning bones. I sat listening to words family and friends said, a room of people who will never be the same and will never sit under the same walls again, and wished I had a memory to add. I might have said something about the red glass candleholder she let us touch. I was like that, eager to please, but confused at my own turmoil. I cried and didn't recognize the face in the casket. Casket is a cold word that sounds like a door opening and closing with a bang, an east wind blowing a screen door shut. I still have her red candle.

With all coins, there is good alongside the bad, though sometimes an ending is not altogether horrific, just sad. Moving to Seattle is not terrifying, but bittersweet. I am ready to run again. Maybe I will fall in love, this is my thought process. I'm trying to shape it into, maybe I will fall in love with a place, with a project, with a community, with a passion, and not put so much emphasis on relationships. Being surrounded doesn't make this simpler, although I am happier. My friends are married, or falling in love, and there are babies. Babies I've held, babies in tummies, babies just a thought. We are babies. Every generation says as they beget the next. When will we say, we were babies? That's the true test. But back to babies. I don't understand how my friends, are the ones with these children. They don't remind me of any parent I know. Do we grow up into being parents? Do we stay young and stay old simultaneously?

I went to a dinner party at a sweet couple's home while in Seattle. First time meeting them after years of knowing them online, which makes the first happenstance nerve wracking. Will they like me, will we get along? They couldn't have been lovelier. She was pregnant, still a few months until birth. They named their baby Evelyn Wilde, if you want to know. That's a weighty name for a precious soul and with her parents, she will carry it well. He is a gentle giant with a voice to match, she a woman who looks like she'll be a mother her children will sing songs about. They served us gluten free pizza, a spinach and feta one, and a sausage and tomato one. Both were delicious. We talked about film cameras and the industry, their family and their vision for their lives, and silly things. Icebreaker things that became funnier the more we talked, until we were laughing. Soon we'll have wine at these dinners. I sat there in my chair and gave Lillian a look, she smiled and I felt as if she understood.

Later, when we walked back to the dorm, I said, I was sitting there thinking, we're the ones having people over for dinner, not our parents, and we're the ones talking about babies and relationships, we're the ones who are engaged and married and having babies, and we're the ones doing -- this! She smiled again. I kept running over the thought in my mind like a small splinter in your thumb. Not unpleasant, but unfamiliar. How long until this feeling will be a memory, too?