Yasmin at 40

This month Yasmin will turn 40. This feels to her like stepping off into an abyss, giving in to Lands End and play dates, collapsing into bed without a thought of anything more, OK with tuna casserole. She thinks this is a farewell to hipness and to her young, creative soul. But she's wrong. She has transformed through the ages, each time into something new and wonderful, a deeper, stronger, more awakened self: A child in pigtails and dresses, fragile and yearning, crossing rough neighborhoods with school books; an adventurous girl with rummage-sale clothes and red lipstick, dancing into the night and beyond the city into a far off dream; a fierce woman, pain still fresh, swinging at injustice with a hate muscle so strong it would change the course of her own history; a world traveler, chasing life with a backpack and a rolling suitcase -- artist, scholar, poet, dreamer -- to hell with the past, this life is about NOW. And it still is. She is the woman I married, sultry and powerful, black hair exploding (now with a few strands of gray), brainy glasses hiding sweet eyes, the mother of my precocious son. She is Ting and oxtail, her mother's laughter and her father's artistic eye, a committed educator, which makes her Aunt proud. Loud party music is in her, along with the solace of canyons and waterfalls. She is not simple. And on the precipice of a new transformation she sleeps without a sound. I wonder what she is dreaming of, and who she wants to be? Sometimes, tuna casserole is a beginning, not an end.