Ripeness
Fri, 26 Nov 1993

This talk of May-October relationships reminds me of the olden days (early '80s, that is) when everyone was getting their "colors" done. Women would walk up to you saying, "Hi! I'm a Winter! What are you?" I am 35, so on the seasonal scale of time that puts me...hmmm... right about at July 15th. Does that make me a midsummer night's dream? I suppose I'll have to ask Donald about that one!

35 is smack dab in the middle--'taint old and it 'taint young, but it is somewhat schizophrenic as younger people see you as old and older people see you as young. On the one hand, if I look close I can see these beautiful streaks of silver beginning to form little rivulets through the black background of my hair; on the other hand, grocery store clerks often seem shocked when they card me and see the '58 on my license: "My gawd, you don't _look_ that old!" One young woman working at a computer store did the usual driver's license double-take and then started giggling uncontrollably and said, "You can't be that old--you look just like a little girl!" I started giggling too and tried to show her my rivulets, but she wasn't having none of it--she just laughed harder!

Tee hee, that CompUSA clerk was more on target than she'll ever know... Didn't someone in this thread say recently that she was 22 with 22 years' experience? Well given my markedly gerontophilic inclinations and my penchant for "reverse pedophilia" fantasies (I love to imagine that I am a child being molested by an adult sado-dominant), I'd have to say, in turn, that I am five with 30 years' experience! At least that's the age that the part of me that doesn't age is at. My soul stopped under a big douglas fir tree one gorgeous day near the dawn of my time (and well before it'd reached the double-digits), lay down on the soft, scented needles, gazed up at an impossibly blue sky peeking through the cracks between the branches and said, "Yep, I like it here!" And so far, I haven't found the time to get back up.

I think that things can get better intellectually and emotionally as you age. I've kept journals for years, and when I go back and take peeks at them, it feels as if from age 13 to age 26 my mind was in this sort of dark stuffy smelly little closet. Then something happened at age 27, a dam burst, a light was turned on, a sea change, something, that allowed mind to expand out of the narrow rigid rooms of youth into a vast prairie. All of a sudden I was getting ideas out of nowhere. All of a sudden I was able to appraise something critically and objectively without my personal emotions steaming up the glass. The real emotional breakthroughs, however, did not begin to burst into my life until after I met Donald, three years later, and _those_ fireworks ain't over yet. So I go back and read my journals and sadly think of what a dope I was, how little I knew, how narrow my horizons were, how unable I was to break through the rigidity of my youth--for that was all it was: stiff, narrow, uptight, intolerant, blinkered youth, afraid to really think, afraid to really feel. Rosie the robot. Poor girl. And all she had in compensation for this morass was slightly smoother skin.

Although chronologically I am a midsummer, my erotic life definitely spins 'round the Autumn types: late October, November, December. The Mays and Junes just don't do much for me, perhaps because when I read my journals and remember what a miserable little wretch in hell I was during my teens and twenties, I can't help but think that most other people passing though the early seasons of life will have similar head and heart problems. But that's not entirely it because, by golly!, some of my best friends are in their 20s . I think that were I dominant I would have no trouble playing with or engaging in relationships with exceptional and compatible "youngsters." But as a sub who is only a sub, I find the thought of someone younger than myself being capable of dominating me in a way I would find realistic, satisfying, thrilling, etc. unlikely to impossible. I just don't think I could sincerely submit to someone I had reason to believe was my intellectual, emotional, or experiential inferior. Maybe this is just a phase I am passing through, maybe when I am crunching noisily through the autumn leaves of my life, I'll find the spring buds a little more succulent...but for now it's a beautiful head of silver, or a well seasoned face expressing complexity and ambiguity, or a comment resplendent in robes of experience and perspective that cause my tummy to leap and my face to burn, not the bland staring smooth perfection of a life not yet lived.

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