I attended a musical performance of a selection of E.E. Cummings poems yesterday at a senior center across the river in Montgomery, NY.
I was presented with a new sensation as I waited for the performance to begin. For the first time ever, I was looking around at the older people around me not as they are now (as older and elderly folks) but as they might have hadbeen. It was strange.
I saw them as a projection of how they are now, but in some unreal facsimile-of-old-age-way, as if an example of really bad facial prosthetic makeup that makes young actors appear like their elderly selves had been applied to the faces of this Sunday afternoon crowd. Their elderly features felt fleeting at best and totally bogus.
I imagine this shift in vision is the result of my own aging. My mind's eye sees a reality that is altered in the mirror.
My own sense of self is still so weighted in that hadbeen of me that it must be producing a visual empathy with the 'geries' and seeing how they may still see themselves.
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