I am older than Penelope waiting for Ulysses

At 9:13am this Monday, I passed my 37th solar return and began my 38th trip around the center of our solar system. Kirk Douglas was there to celebrate with me in the form of the Ulysses of my childhood. Once I was a child sitting on the carpet in front of the living room television tuning in to Tom Hatten and his Family Film Festival just to see if Ulysses was on. Now I watch the figure of Penelope, still beautiful but irrevocably mature, the child bride of sixteen who has waited through twenty years of lost youth to have her life again, and I realize, I am older than she is.

I am carrying Julia Child's My Life in France about with me. Julia, like me, just beginning to "be" in middle age. When Julia was 37, she had only begun to seriously learn how to cook. She was only coming in to a sense of knowing herself, knowing her "fearlessness". How much of that fearlessness was inborn, and how much distilled from the years of being unloved and unknown, and how much from the power of being loved and known so well by one devoted soul at last? Who is to say if Julia herself knew? I want to "daven fearlessly". I need more heroes like Julia, in this youth-worshipping culture, more heroes whose greatness came from what they became in middle age.