Fisher - Sister Age

Vintage Books Edition, May 1984
Copyright 1964, 1965, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1983
by M.F.K. Fisher

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1983.

Some of the stories in this collection originally appeared in
Ellery Queen, Prose, and Westways. The following stories
originally appeared in The New Yorker: Another Love Story,
Answer in the Affirmative, A Delayed Meeting, A Kitchen
Allegory, The Lost, Strayed, Stolen, Moment of Wisdom,
The Oldest Man, A Question Answered, The Second
Time Around, and The Weather Within.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fisher, M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908
Sister Age.

1. Old agePhilosophyAddresses, essays, lectures.
2. AgingPhilosophyAddresses, essays, lectures.
3. Ott, Ursula von, b. 1767Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Title.
[HQl061.F54 1984] 305.26 83-40314
eISBN: 978-0-307-77920-5

v3.1

S t. Francis sang gently of his family: his brother the Sun, his sister the Moon. He talked of Brother Pain, who was as welcome and well-loved as any other visitor in a life filled with birds and beasts and light and dark. It is not always easy for us lesser people to accept gracefully some such presence as that of Brother Pain or his cousins, or even the inevitable visits of a possibly nagging harpy like Sister Age. But with a saint to guide us, it can be possible.

This story about the portrait of Ursula von Ott, a forgotten German or Swiss lady, may seem odd as an introduction to a collection of stories about aging and ending and living and whatever else the process of human being is about. I know, though, that my devastated old piece of painted leather, half eaten by oil-hungry insects when it was already worn with years, has been a lodestar in my life.

Before I found the picture in a junk-shop in Zurich, in about 1936, I was writing of old people who had taught me things I knew I needed, in spite of my boredom and impatience. And years later, after I had sent away the boxes of notes made in the several decades since I first met Ursula, I realized that all this time when I had thought I was readying myself to write an important book about the art of aging, I had gone on writing stories about people who were learning and practicing it long before I was.

Sometimes we met for only a few seconds. Probably the old Bible salesman who stumbled to our door at the Ranch did not remember me five minutes later, but he was the one who first taught me that people can cry without a sound, and without knowing why. It was a valuable lesson, and as mysterious now as it was when I was about twelve, watching him walk slowly out to the dusty road again, and feeling the cool new tears run down my cheeks. And I forgot it, for about thirty years.

Sometimes the meetings with Sister Ages messengers are long, tedious, even unwitting. For instance, I knew my fathers father for almost twenty years, but we never really met, and certainly did not recognize each other as appointed teacher or pupil. By now I sometimes regret this, because I see him as possessing great strength and dignity that were mine for the taking. I doubt, though, that he felt much more interest in me than I in him. We were as impersonal as two animals of different sex and age but sharing some of the same blood, unaware that we lifted our hooves in a strangely similar way as we headed for the same hay-mangers, the same high hills. Even now I cannot feel any strong reason for making notes about him. But I may, I may.

Certainly there were violent flash-like meetings, all my life, with people much older than I, of different colors and sexes and social positions, who left marks to be deciphered later. This was the case with the Bible salesman: I did not think consciously of him for a long time (Why should I?), when suddenly I knew that I must add some words about him to the boxes of notes.

The art of aging is learned, subtly but firmly, this way. I wrote fast, to compress and catch a lesson while I could still hear it, and not because it had happened to me, so that I was recording it, but because it was important to the whole study. It was, for the time I made the notes anyway, as clear as ringing crystal that such hints are everywhere, to be heeded or forever unheard by the people who may one day be old too.

So all the notes I took were caught on the run, as it were, as I grew toward some kind of maturity. I never thought of them as anything but clinical, part of the whole study of aging that Ursula von Ott was trying to help me with. I kept on checking dates and places and events, not at all about my own self but simply as a student in a class, preparing a term paper and leaving scraps that might be useful to other workers in the same field.

By now some of my notes sound like fabrications, invented to prove a point in an argument. This is because it is my way of explaining, and it has always been a personal problem, even a handicap. When I tell of a stubbed toe or childbirth or how to serve peacocks tongues on toast it sounds made-up, embroidered. But it is as it happened to me.

This may explain why I have spent my life in a painstaking effort to tell about things as they are to me, so that they will not sound like autobiography but simply like notes, like factual reports. They have been set down honestly, to help other students write their own theses.

And now my very long, devoted collecting is over. The reports are stored in some academic cellars for younger eyes to piece together, perhaps. The stories that stayed behind are mostly about other people than myself, and may at least prove that I have been listening for clues that Frau von Ott has tried to show me. Some of them may be useful, in moments of puzzlement as to what to do next in our inevitable growth.

So, with the usual human need for indirection, I introduce my Sister. St. Francis might call her, in a gentle loving way, Sister Age. I call her my Teacher, too.

The first time I met Ursula, and recognized her as a familiar, I was walking with Tim down a narrow street off the main bridge in Zurich.

Tim was to die a few years later, except in my heart, and Zurich was a cold secret city in Switzerland in 1936, and probably still is. We were there because we lived near Vevey and Tim was silently involved with some of the Spanish fighters living in Zurich during the revolution in their country.

We were innocent to look at, and Tim was useful in getting drawings and paintings out of war-wracked Spain, and I was strangely adept at drinking good coarse wine from a skin held far from my open mouth and then keeping it firmly shut, while all the men talked in the small dim cellar-cafs. We were treated with care. I was greeted politely and then put into a corner, with an occasional squirt of roja to remind me of true Spanish courtesy, while the schemings went on in more languages than Spanish and French and German.

At home again, we did not talk much about these smoky meetings, but usually they meant that Tim would be away from Vevey for a few days, always carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, like any proper Anglo-Saxon gentleman. Four or five years later, there was a big exhibition in Geneva, of treasures secreted from the Prado, and it was odd to walk past etchings and even small canvases that had come into Switzerland inside that bumbershoot, that prim old Gamp.