Of Old Maids and Happy Birthdays

On Starting to Stack

When I was a little girl, we used to play the card game “Old Maid.” The pack featured a cartoonish image of a frumpy old woman with a gray pompadour, a floral hat, and a 19^th century style dress. (The sexism of the 70s was pretty brazen.) The goal of the game was to get rid of all your cards, and to not be the person left with the last card, i.e. The Old Maid. In an older version of the game from Germany, the losing card was the racist caricature “Black Pete” (which merits further unpacking, but  that’s for another day.)

I thought about that game when I looked in the mirror recently and noticed with a little anxiety that my face is changing.So what? My face is supposed to change. After all, It has been exposed to the elements for 52 years. And yet I do want to go back. Not to look like I did half my life-- 26 years--ago but to feel (in some ways) like I did 26 years ago (hopeful, imaginative, courageous. Yes I want to hold fast to what I’ve earned in my 52 years on this earth and all the lessons, good bad and ugly, but I want to renew something too.

Maybe because this a landmark year for me, And since I’m a writer, I’m going to write about it.

52 isn’t ordinarily considered a landmark year. But it is for me because I now have 2 children in college. I don’t know if “empty nest “is precisely the right term, the nest is always here for them. But it is the case that my weekly schedule has shifted pretty dramatically and I’m facing a new set of questions about how to lead my life. That’s a big part of what this Substack is about. Today I’m 52 years old, there are 52 weeks in the year (and that’s as long as I’m committed to doing this substack as a trial run)  and there are 52 cards in a deck. (Insert clever quip about playing the hand that’s dealt.)

So now you get the 52 part in naming this substack should therefore be pretty clear. But then there’s the second word, curate.

A curate (noun) is a tender of souls. Some years ago in my book Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018), I talked about leading a curated life. In that context I was talking about making deliberate choices in our lives, consistent with our ethics and aspirations, rooted in the role of the curate as a tender of souls. We are overwhelmed by competition and consumption at every turn. We face crises that can seem insurmountable. Curating feels essential as a way to anchor decisions about how we choose to act, what we choose to read, to watch, to learn, with whom we seek to be in community and conversation and so forth..  So in this substack I’ll be sharing my own curated living speculations, aspirations, meditations, vexations, and practices.

And… since this is my birthday, I’ll start with how I’m curating this moment. People have asked me what I plan to do for my birthday. Nothing big. I sometimes feel pressure to celebrate in some externally recognizable way, but when I do, I’m usually disappointed. This is a crunch time of year for academics like me. And besides, pressuring specific days usually makes me anxious. So I’m ignoring the pressure and just trying to do some lovely things. When I consider the activities that I enjoy, many don’t require a significant expenditure or any kind of display. I like having my bare feet in the earth, reckless gardener that I am. I like lighting candles on my altar.  I like cooking my favorite things just for me. I am a sensualist, so scent (lavender) texture (chenille, cotton, and velvet) and taste (honey, harissa, berries, etc)  are all the things I want to feed.  All of these things are on hand, on the regular.

This birthday  (day, week, month?) will be filled with everyday things that are deeply joyful. And I’ll also take some time meditating on the bigger things:

I want to pare down my belongings so I can live more simply and with greater clarity. I want to allow for the unexpected while I plan and cherish people I love as a daily habit ever more deliberately. I continue to hope that my life-work is meaningful and just, and try each day to make it so. To that end, I’m off to teach a class (The introduction to African American Studies class at Harvard where I’m a member of the faculty.) We are going to talk a little bit about Frederick Douglass- that great Black abolitionist who freed himself through gaining literacy despite the law and then claimed that freed self by running to freedom and his disagreement with Henry Highland Garnett his fellow formerly enslaved abolitionist leader who was more radical in his approach to freedom fighting. We’ll begin class listening to Esther Satterfield’s rendition of Miriam Makeba’s “Jikele Maweni” (The Retreat Song). I hope both will stir their souls.

Teaching, after all, is a form of curation. Learning is the work of becoming.  Welcome and be good.