Recently, someone sent me a small framed copy of Banksy’s sketch, “Girl with Balloon.” It’s propped on the kitchen counter, between the mixer stand and the telephone. This is a tenuous location. The telephone is a landline, and when it rings, sometimes requires leaping across the counter to grab the receiver before the machine picks up. Like a downed electrical wire, nothing should lie in the path of a landline.
In Banksy’s sketch, a little girl in a black-and-white pinafore has just let go of a red balloon, and she is watching it sail off. Her shoulder is outstretched as if the attached arm were planning to sail off, too. Her face in profile seems full of interest. She wants to know where the balloon is heading now that she has let go. It’s rising, and one thing is clear: it’s not going to return.
Memory moves in an opposite direction from Banksy’s balloon; not up, but backward. As we grow older, what is visible is what has changed.
Thirty years ago, when we moved to Belmont, we were the youngest people on the block. The neighbors, who were the age then that I am now, seemed kindly and ancient. An elderly woman across the street, poured from the original New England mold, swept her front porch dressed in an apron every afternoon, which filled me with some shame. I didn’t own a broom and wouldn’t have used it if I did. The dust she swept off her porch was accumulating on mine.
In my dignified house in this dignified town, I felt myself to be a fake adult. It was only a matter of time before someone else realized it. One day, the woman across the street invited me for tea. She served it in actual tea cups and on actual china saucers. This might have been the moment of unveiling—caught in the act of impersonation—but there was no accusation. She was charming, gentle, soft-spoken, widowed, and interested in a new face. A few years later, when she moved to a nursing home to prevent her children from worrying, she left me several Royal Albert teacups. Afterward, we corresponded by stationery, envelopes, stamps, and postboxes, even though the nursing home was only about four miles away. She remained a lady until her death.
Now, we are the oldest residents on the street and ignored by bicycling children, although the dogs who trot by continue to show some interest. The kitchen has been renovated, and there are two new bathrooms in the house, except that they are not new—they’re 20 years old. A number of windows are there that didn’t exist when we signed the purchase and sale agreement. Some things, however, have not changed. No one is sweeping the front porch.
It is pleasant and poignant to think of all this, to have once been the youngest and to now have become the oldest. One way or another, we are all girls with balloons, watching time sail, following it forward or backward because it is out of our hands.
Elissa Ely writes about seniors/baby boomers for The Belmont Voice. She is a community psychiatrist.