Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement
By Susie Kaufman
Resource Publications, 90 pages, $14
The title, Twilight Time, is perfect. It takes one back to 1958 and the Platters singing, “Heavenly shades of night are falling, it’s twilight time.” What Kaufman calls the “seventy-somethings” were then at the dawnings of our sexual and social consciousness awakenings. But the title also refers to the present, 2019, when those of us in our seventies have arrived in life’s twilight decades.
Susie Kaufman’s joy in putting words together enlivens each page. In one essay, she speaks of going back to bed mornings with her laptop and very strong black coffee, emptying her brain onto the page as she slowly drains her coffee cup. She makes the flow of her precise words and vivid particulars seem effortless.
The tone is perfect — this collection of short essays is memoir, but there is no ego here, no sense of “look at me I’m dancing.” Kaufman simply opens windows of clear image. She paints the Jewish secular NYC world she grew up through, the world she has met on her many travels, and her life for the past 46 years here in the Berkshires. In places the book is pure poetry.

Make sure you have a good stretch of time before you start this book because it will capture you. You’ll love the language, the gentle humor, and the pictures painted on your mind. This book is a living thing, so alive with sensory particulars that it follows you long after you set it down.
The essays in Twilight Time are not arranged chronologically. Each essay is its own entity, yet they weave and play off one another. The voice is consistent: brilliant, honest, funny, warm, and wise.
The book, though rich in cultural history, is current. We are often snapped briefly back to our difficult and absurd present political situation. We aren’t drowned in that darkness but are reminded of the precariousness of sanity and social justice in these times.
Susie Kaufman worked for several decades as a hospice chaplain and so has listened deeply to people facing death. She has accepted her own mortality. About what comes after this life she says, “Not knowing is the final frontier.”
Susie goes beyond the idea of impermanence to speak of “evanescence.” She says, “Everything that matters to me is evanescent. Infancy, daylilies, serenity. Sound, taste, color. I know I’m onto something when I try to grab it and it slips through my fingers.” What is holy, she says, can’t be clutched, but paradoxically, its very evanescence is what makes something holy.
In her preface Susie says, “My days are nothing more than the lifespan of a firefly writ large. But while I’m here, I am aging in amazement. I am awed by what I have seen and what I continue to see.”