Passing through a phase

Passing Through

by Stanley Kunitz

—on my seventy-ninth birthday

Nobody in the widow's household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren't for a census report
of a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother's address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I'd have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.

Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don't take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I'm passing through a phase:
gradually I'm changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

"Passing Through" by Stanley Kunitz, from The Collected Poems. ©W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Reprinted with permission
This again from the Writer's Almanac,
This again,my "fall funk"I too am passing through a phase, I guess we all are interminably passing through a phase. I share the sentiment of never really having been a birthday party girl.For now, however, I do enjoy being as well as being who I am . I have only just begun the "comfortable in being who I am phase" in the middle of my life. I do not want to practice being old right now,I am content not practicing being, but actually being. Perhaps a colorful crisp ride on my bike through an autumnal forest will bring me out of this funk more into this being...