A passage, or maybe just a tight squeeze

First, a poem, one of my favorites since I was 14 or so, by Archibald MacLeish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_MacLeish):

L'An Trentiesme de Mon Eage*

And I have come upon this place
By lost ways, by a nod, by words,
By faces, by an old man's face
At Morlaix lifted to the birds,

By hands upon the tablecloth
At Adlebori's, by the thin
Child's hands that opened to the moth
And let the flutter of the moonlight in,

By hands, by voices, by the voice
Of Mrs. Whitman on the stair,
By Margaret's "If we had the choice
To choose or not --" through her thick hair,

By voices, by the creak and fall
Of footsteps on the upper floor,
By silence waiting in the hall
Between the doorbell and the door,

By words, by voices, a lost way --
And here above the chimney stack
The unknown constellations sway--
And by what way shall I go back?

(*English translation - "In the thirtieth year of my age" or "In my 30th year")

I have always loved this poem; for some reason, even as a teenager, it spoke to me with the delicacy and deliberate pacing of these memory tufts the speaker has accumulated in his 30 years. I hadn't even looked at this poem for a long while, but tonight, the porch light trembling outside and the lilting breath of a quietly chill Texas night made me want to reread it.

Also, it spoke to me now more than ever. Being 30 is like being a middle manager. You have the wisdom of hard knocks from your more naive and dumb 20s, yet you are only starting to grasp the larger concepts at work in the world: love, perfection, loss and eventually, death. You start to remember what led you to this point through the fractured yet sustainable lens of what came before, what you suffered, what you did not suffer, what you felt and mixed all through this is the ever-widening canvas of vivid snapshots, just like the "child's hands that opened to the moth/And let the flutter of moonlight in."

You feel (or at least I feel) like you can grasp some epiphany, some revelation, if you just stretch your hands out far enough, but you have not earned the wisdom and stoicism yet to do so.

Even while acknowledging the breadth and power of time, you still marvel at how much time HAS already passed, and wish you could go back, reboot, relive some particular moment or instance that you took for granted years ago.

You feel like your footstep resounds in the doorway, but you don't know which doorway it is; you don't remember the exact pacing step that led there. But you do know that you must go through it, if you are to advance.

Tonight is a ruminating kind of night. The wheel advances, overarches, heavily falls again. Tomorrow, I may feel differently. But right now, I am fine here in this passageway, so exactly 30, so inexactly molded.

blind leading the...well...blind

At the baggage claim at ABIA, there was a group of blind high schoolers. I guess it never really piqued my interest before - how DO the blind find their luggage on the steel-partitioned carousel? But dammit if I wasn't fascinated tonight. I could not take my eyes off them. They were leaning slightly over the carousel and palming, cupping, caressing the blank air between bags. One of them finally caught one that was his - from a single touch, he immediately assessed it was the correct bag. I wish I could learn this sensory-rote technique. I wish I could find a way to memorize the tactile sensation, the solid grace and texture, of even one of my possessions.

Like a lover's face, is it possible for a seeing woman to divine the shape and grain of a thing based purely on touch and measure?