Silver and Gold

On my eighth birthday, my mother put a deep red rose on my pillow,

Sweet-smelling, luxurious, seductive.

She wrote a note, tied it to the long green stem.

I don’t remember what it said, but I remember waking up to read it,

To inhale that heady scent.

I felt so grown-up that morning,

So sophisticated.

That morning I was a princess.

I was an angel.

My eighteenth birthday is  in three days.

I still feel sometimes like that eight year old girl, awed and in wonder, smelling a rose. .

There are days that I feel like I did on my sweet sixteen, when I blew out the candles and laughed and laughed,

the candelight illuminating my face,

 sparkling with eye shadow.

Those are the good days.

But Sometimes I even feel  like I did at my sixth birthday party,

When  one of the other little girls told me she didn't like her party favor and I began to cry.

Sometimes, I don’t feel like a grown-up.

Sometimes, I feel like a child, four years old, pretending to be asleep in the car so my father would carry me in. Needing to be held.

I think in all of us the years are just layered, one on top of the other.

They don’t get replaced.

And there is something beautiful in that,

Because even though the United States government says  I am an adult,

I can carry my  weight,

I can have a voice,

I can buy cigarettes,

I can enlist,

All of these strange measures of grown-up,

I am still growing.

Maybe not any taller

But I am still growing.

My heart is expanding and changing,

And so is my mind,

Making room for new ideas, new hopes and dreams.

When I was in kindergarten, we learned a song about friendship.

It went like this,
“Make new friends and keep the old,

One is silver and the other’s gold.”

I like to think of our memories like that.

I like to make new ones and keep  the old,

Filling  my treasure chest, building my collection.

I don’t know which one’s silver and which is gold,

But I know I have plenty of both.