Last Exit

Traffic is a wonderful metaphor. Remember Aretha Franklin's Freeway of Love? You cruise along and then you have bottlenecking. You speed forth like an ideologue as you come out of the midtown tunnel, but then have your head handed to you as you travel further into Queens where the highway meets turn-offs for the airports and the Grand Central Parkway. Then your hubris is likely to come back and you feel like the road is your oyster, not remembering that depending on the time of day you’re going to run into congestion at heavily populated areas beginning with Huntington at exit 49. In human development you have a similar series of signposts. There are the early years when every kid is getting a bat or bar mitzvah or confirmation. The marriages with their childbirths culminating in the demise of an earlier generation. You were zipping along, but your day is going to be interrupted by a spate of funerals which will inevitably interrupt your schedule of yoga and therapy appointments and/or trysts. Then for a while it seems like smooth sailing until you start to find that the troops are beginning to fall around you with the varying ailments that mark the passage from middle to old age. Which exit on the thruway is that? Surely one that’s closer to the end.Those hips and knees become like hazard signs, but now if you’ve successfully gotten this far, it’s likely to be clear sailing to the end.