LIFE
The Autumn Leaves
I don’t feel old, I am old, and what that really means in my books
“The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold.” — Nat King Cole
I looked at my 20-year-old niece in her cropped top, navel exposed, multi-pierced body with out-of-bed hair as she sauntered into the living room. She was on her semester break. These days, seeing her was as rare as a peacock-sighting in the middle of the city center. There’s the zoo, of course, and you need to pay an entry fee for that. It felt the same way.
My niece, Tia, wore a blank expression on her face. The kind you couldn’t tell if she was concealing problems or had none of them. That’s impossible, I thought. The latter, I mean. I call it the stolid bourgeois look. The face Marie Antoinette often wore that led to the French revolution and her head decapitated by the guillotine.
I couldn’t help myself but to disturb her.
“Who are your role models?” I asked her abruptly.
“Huh?” Tia broke out of her reverie.
