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On Turning 45 and the Endless Search for Wonder
We All Hope to Find Our Unicorn
In the couple of weeks since I turned 45, I’ve been thinking about thresholds, the passageways between one place and another. Maybe it’s because this new age feels consequential (even more so than the act of turning 40 during the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic). Maybe it feels like I’ve reached a transition, a tipping of the scale into the second half of my life — as I am truly middle-aged now (if 90 is close to the end).
Or maybe it’s that I’m longing for a threshold, a doorway I can walk through, an opening to the pathway to the life I want. But instead of a door, or even the hope of a door, all I can seem to find is a kind of wistfulness and longing.
Recently, I read Asa West’s essay “Becoming Molly Grue,” which perfectly reflects what I’ve feeling — so much so that when I read it, I burst into tears. Molly Grue is a character from the 1982 animated film, The Last Unicorn, which I watched over and over again as a child. I remember always being deeply moved by Molly — though I couldn’t have fully understood her at the time.
Molly is introduced in the film as part of a group of bandits led by Captain Cully, a man who imagines himself a kind of Robin Hood. Molly is dressed in rags and barefoot, serving rat soup to the group of…
