Reinvention

Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm has discovered that we are younger than we think, at least in most of our body’s tissue. Some of our cells—red blood cells, for example—get knocked around so much and have to work so hard that they last only three months before being replaced. The cells lining the stomach really get a beating, lasting only about five days, while bone cells make themselves over every ten years. A few parts of the body seem to last a lifetime, including the neurons of the cerebral cortex, yet still, on average we are a mere fifteen or sixteen years old. Little did I know that I’m a teenager in my chest muscles and a virtual newborn in my stomach. And what about the mind? Many of the authors in this issue write about the reinvention of the mental side of our beings and our sense of self, a process that is not always easy or pleasant.

Aaron Gwyn’s powerful essay “Ostrander at the Door” is a chronicle of fear and escape. As a young man Gwyn faced the realities of his age and place and realized that he would have to find a way to move elsewhere and start over. While growing up in Seminole, Oklahoma, Gwyn was semiorphaned. When he was a teenager, a reckless former classmate of his amused himself by doing such things as forcing the head of an acquaintance between a truck tire and a concrete parking block and hammering it with a shoe. The essay is a portrait of Ostrander, the personification of brute violence, and of Gwyn, a young man on the brink of leaving his home for better opportunities. It’s partly fear of the bully that makes Gwyn understand that he can’t stay where he is: “I knew what I’d envisioned for myself—settling in the county where I was raised, having a family here, living and dying and watching the people I’d come up with live and die—wasn’t going to happen.”

In “All Ages Were Represented,” Jim Dameron describes venturing forth from his newly leisured state of retirement on a nude bike ride with ten thousand other cyclists in Portland, Oregon. When he takes off all of his clothes and rides through the streets, visible to so many, he finds himself to be the one looking the most critically at not just his own shape but all that it implies about ageing. And as a photograph of him buff biking appears on the Internet, it provides further cause for thought about his self-image.

In her essay “The Blue Boot,” May-lee Chai describes going with her mother to visit her maternal grandmother during her senior year of high school. Young May-lee is uncomfortable with her grandmother’s circumscribed life and tales of domestic toil. The story’s blue boot is a knickknack passed down from Chai’s great-grandmother, whose life was even harsher than that of her grandmother. To her mother it is a coveted heirloom, but when May-lee takes it, she knows that for her it represents the urge not to identify with the lives of the women from whom she is descended but to create her own new identity.

Leslie Parry’s short story “New Heaven” is another intergenerational tale, in which Parry’s twenty-seven-year-old protagonist, Patricia, returns to her parents’ New Haven home for Christmas. She is shocked when her aunt tells her offhandedly that her grandmother, who committed suicide years earlier, was a nymphomaniac. As her aunt has discerned, Patricia is herself sexually needy and promiscuous, and she is also angry about what she perceives to be her sister’s sense of superiority and achievement. In the course of her holiday visit, Patricia sleeps with an old boyfriend who is engaged and later has casual sex with a bartender. It is a story not really about sex, though, but about a young woman who isn’t comfortable in her own skin and who finds in the tale of her grandmother’s promiscuous life and eventual suicide a...