Ninety

A smart, older person, trying to help me discern future vocation, asked me the following question: 

When you are ninety years old, what do you want to see when you look back upon your life?

  

A few pictures--some clear, others blurry--arose unbidden in my mind's eye.  To start with the clear, I (for reasons yet unclear) remembered a particular day in South Africa in which half of our student group trooped down to Itipini, "place of the dump," a village built on top of a trash heap.  With sunglasses pulled over my eyes I stared out the window of our moving van trundling happily along to Trash Dump Town, certain that whatever I was about to see would incite sorrow, anger, discomfort.  We arrived at Itipini and tiptoed over a path made of dirt, pig shit, and broken glass to the door of a clinic and community center begun by Jenny McConnachie, a British surgeon and ex-patriot.  I pulled off my sunglasses, stepped inside, and promptly returned the glasses to the bridge of my nose because I had begun to cry.  The clinic was nondescript, white, bare.  Jenny was plain, simply dressed, quiet; it was all so unexpectedly peaceful.  We floated through the center, touching pictures, neatly stacked papers and sharpened pencils, breathing in the hard won stillness carved out of a discordant place.  

Outside the clinic black, barefoot children swarmed to our white sides.  Their mothers (sixteen, fifteen years old?)  watched in the wings.  This isn't hard, I thought, and touched a face here, smoothed a brow there, marveled at hardened feet that ran so carelessly over trash.  

As I contemplated the scene before me in the shade of the clinic roof, now free of children and feeling dazed, a professor stood beside me and tapped my shoulder:   

"Could you see yourself doing something like this?" he asked. 

"Yes," I answered.  

Though I don't know why.  

As for the more blurry pictures, wisps of images float to the surface like bubbles rising from a deep, underground spring.  A solid, gracious house.  A front porch.  A long, wooden dining table with people around it.  Lamps lit late into the evening for conversation.  A writing table. A window.  And my own face, looking startlingly like Jenny McConnachie's, with a gray braid coming apart around my shoulders and eyes that are like falling into a well.