On the Shelf: Forty Years and Still Wandering

By Judith Bolton-Fasman

I interrupt this regularly scheduled column to pause, to reflect, to wonder. To turn forty. I begin with the obvious. Forty, is after all, just a number. But I, who cannot balance a checkbook to save my life let alone actually keep track of my finances, actually like numbers.

I love numbers, really. Love them like I love my father the accountant. Love them like I'm sure he loved me. My father communed with his numbers in the basement of our house, filling in his clients' tax returns with exquisite precision. He worked his adding machine with rapid-fire efficiency so that the numbers themselves flew in the air, some of them even bouncing off the green visor he wore.

My father never said much. He used his words sparingly, kept his extensive vocabulary in check. Now in old age he is mute. His brilliance shines inward, illuminating the things I will always remember about him. But I, his first born, am reaching the age at which he started his life over by finally marrying and having his children. My father once told me that he thought heÕd never be a father. He said it without hinting whether or not fatherhood had been a transition or a transformation for him.

My husband swears that you feel no differently the morning of your fortieth. All body parts are still attached. It's a milestone, a marker as airy as time. But IÕve been waiting, watching for something more than a milestone. That state of mind is what is clinically described as anticipatory anxiety. I've inherited the condition from my mother. On her dreariest days she was certain she would be dead by the time she turned forty. She survived and went on to dread being fifty and then some.

More numbers fly around me. My father and I used to add up license plate numbers on car rides and make up contests like who could find the most numbers divisible by three or seven. I still do it out of habit, and now also in homage. At a long light, it will pass the time. On a longer car ride, it puts that time into sobering perspective.

Love of numbers also leads me to gematria which, loosely translated from Hebrew, means numerology. No question that forty is the mother lode of gematria. Just for starters, Noah survived the worldÕs greatest flood for forty days and forty nights. There are forty days of the omer, that static time between Passover and Shavuot. Some treat it as a period of semi-mourning. It feels more like a period of hibernation to me. Then there is the most famous forty of all--the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert before reaching the Promised Land. Now thereÕs a metaphor just ripe for picking. Maybe too ripe, but I'll say it anyway. Here I am standing on the cusp of middle age, looking back at the wilderness, hopefully heading straight into the Promised Land.

But my favorite thing about turning forty is that the rabbis feel that I am now sturdy enough psychologically to study kabbalah or mysticism. So forty is really a mystical number. Even more so for me because this year IÕll become a bat mitzvah in therapy. Thirteen years on this long, arduous road to well-being, and IÕm still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. But after thirteen years, I accept that I have to take some responsibility for this indecision. Another thing I like about growing older is that my therapist says that physiologically my nervous system will probably start to quiet down. Send no money, take no pills, just simply wait. ItÕll happen as naturally as breathing itself, which for me has always been a little too rapid.

What does age really mean anyway? The older I get the more random the number feels--like the sum of those license plate numbers. But I canÕt ignore it. I relate everything around me to this birthday. A few weeks ago, the teacher in a writing class IÕve been taking suggested an exercise in which we find a familiar symbol or book title and write whatever comes from it. The Guide for the Perplexed and The Book of Splendor are my choices. I barely know anything about either of these works, but they suggest to me more than recommended reading for the forty and over set. Just conjuring those titles bestows a sort of "before and after" wisdom. Having said that I'm on to the true subtext of all this birthday rumination: time flies; it goes. So says my six-year-old daughter Anna, a budding poet, and someone who will almost certainly be able to study kabblah when sheÕs 20. As in so many of our wondrous exchanges she deservedly gets the last word on the subject:

Time
by Anna
Time flies in
My eyes
ItÕs very
Slow But it tells
You when
to go.

Recommended Reading

A Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. Translated by Shlomo Pines. University of Chicago Press. The great Maimonides plumbs the mysteries of Torah and other holy matters.

The Essential Kabbalah by Daniel C. Matt. Harper San Francisco. A classic primer on the subject.

The Chair in the Desert: Poems by Richard Chess. University of Tampa Press. These poems use Jewish metaphor in fresh, enriching ways. Chess' work does find the holy in every day life.
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