On Being Eighty
by Lucia Owen
Late, lot almost empty so no one sees me pull the car too close to the Pay-to-Park exit pay thing and I can’t reach anything anyway just open the door halfway, wind the window down, stand squirm and twist to Insert and push and Insert and expect the slip to work like at the airport but this one just wants a scan so I unwad the slip and slip it in so it finally works so I follow the arrows to the next step still half standing in and out and Insert and Remove Quickly bar strip right and down and my arthritic fingers do neither fast enough so I begin to hope I have a blanket in the back so I can spend the night and I see a face in the chrome above the card slot – haggard eyes, wrinkles, an uproar of white hair- how will she get out? – her face gets bigger when I lean towards it – and Thank You erases her face and flashes over the card slot the gate lifts and I untwist get in put the card and receipt somewhere I’ll try to remember later wind up the window put it in gear fast so I can drive out before the gate comes down across my trunk and I floor it in time to turn the wrong way onto the one-way street.
Lucia Owen moved to western Maine to teach high school English over fifty years ago. Until his recent death she was the caregiver at home for her husband of almost forty-eight years. Her work has appeared in The Cafe Review, Rust & Moth, Please See Me, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Metaworker Literary Journal, Smoky Quartz, THINK, and The Healing Muse (Fall 2024) as well as in a number of anthologies. In her eighth decade she finds that reading and writing poetry helps her keep on keeping on.