Uncle Caloy

When I was a teenager, Uncle Caloy spent the summers with us in the Philippines. Not a visit. Months. Long enough that the house learned his hour.

He was in his seventies. I jogged with him. I thought I was doing the kind thing, keeping an older man company on the road. He did not jog like a man who needed a teenager to look after him. He just went, and I went along.

One morning I asked him what the difference was. How it felt to be older, compared with when he was young.

He said there was nothing. It feels the same. The needs are the same. The wants are the same. What changes is the body, which is older, and the experiences, which are more vast.

I nodded, the way a teenager nods when an older person has said something large. I filed it under things uncles say on a hot road. I still believed age was a door. You walked through it and came out quieter, smaller, done with wanting. The jogging looked like a leftover habit. I did not yet see it as proof.

Years did the explaining he did not bother to add. I have watched people decide they are finished because a birthday arrived, and I have watched other people start a kitchen, a book, a class, a morning run, long after anyone asked them to. The difference was not the body. The body complains either way. The difference was whether they could still hear the person they were when the want was new.

I know it now, in my own bones. At whatever age, if you want a new life, you can begin one. If you want your energy back, you can call it back. It is not gone. It is under the errands, the aches, the polite idea that wanting is for the young. You remember that same energy. You remember the youthful dreams, not as costumes you outgrew, but as directions that were always yours.

Uncle Caloy was not making a speech on that road. He was being accurate. He felt the same because he had not resigned. The body kept the years. The wants did not. When I lace up now, slower than the girl who ran beside him, I am not chasing her. I am doing what he already knew. The life you still want is allowed to start today.