Forever Young?

Posted on October 20, 2012 | 1 comment

I think one of the challenges of being in my sixties is to know my limitations but not let them limit me. This has become a kind of mantra. I used to say: “accept my limitations” but I’ve refined the concept to include ‘knowing’. I don’t want society or an individual defining me or my ability or limitations. I won’t accept their perception of what a senior citizen can or cannot do. Neither do I want to be an idiot and push myself beyond my capacity. Been there, done that and am writing the book about driving with a cast on my foot. (Trust me, don’t try it! Thank goodness, when I did I was on a deserted street.)

At my age, you do realize you can only push your body so much and it will push back. Hence, the knee, hip, shoulder replacement docs are doing a booming business. When I go to the gym and see guys lifting massive weights with so much effort that their faces are contorted, I foresee a future for them of contorted limbs. I know I need to respect my own limbs better than I have.

Aging is not something my generation is accepting gracefully. We’re the “forever young” babyboomers, dontcha know? But I don’t want to block enjoying and understanding this part of my life, even if the United States of America categorizes aging as a disease. I basically feel healthy and vibrant, brimming with vitality, especially if I get that catnap every day! I think most people my age do feel great,  although we’re portrayed quite differently in the media. Madison Avenue would have me wearing a LIFE ALERT in case I fall and can’t get up.

Here’s what sixtish looks like.

Self knowledge is important to me. I want to know who I am, what I want in life, where I’m going. In order to do that, I need to get quiet, which I find increasingly hard to do. It’s so easy now, being IPhone addicted, to never have a conversation with myself. Even on a walk alone, I can call my friend in Minnesota and talk the whole time, like I did today. Or in the car, I can talk or listen to music or a book. I never turn off so that I can tune in to my inner voice.

The other day I took a gym class that I thought might lead me to some inner reflection. It was called the Warrior Within. I saw that it combined Tai Chi, Yoga and meditation. I didn’t read the fine print, which explained the class featured the BOSU. Heck, I didn’t even know what a BOSU was. When I saw that little half-dome, it looked innocuous enough, and I liked the blue color. I thought, how bad could it be? I didn’t know that some sadist had created the disstablizer from hell.

BOSU Batterer.

We had to stand on it, which was not easy. Then we were expected to move on it and do a sun salutation while keeping our balance. We had to kneel on it and do leg lifts, turn over and do crunches. There was only me in the class and a guy who looked like he was in mid-forties. Damn, I wanted to quit, but my pride wouldn’t let me. I forged on, becoming the Little Engine that could—even if it was killing me.

Look at the biceps on these guys. Sheesh!!!

One of my inner voices said, “It is good to try new things. It is good to be challenged.” Another voice cussed that one out. I said aloud, “Are you kidding me?” The only good thing was that time, which normally flies by, slowed down to the point that each minute lasted at least ninety seconds.

So what did I learn about myself: I’m getting old? I have terrible balance? I don’t know when or how to quit? I can do more than I thought I could? I’m not sure what I learned. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

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Celebrity Citings and Honoring our Vets

Posted on October 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’ve just had an interesting ten days. It was my husband’s birthday and we celebrated in Hawaii.

Peaceful Harmony: Sunset in Hawaii

Concurrently at our hotel, Jack Osbourne, the son of Ozzy and Harriett, I mean, Sharon, was getting married. I guess it was hush-hush so the Paparazzi were out in force. The beaches are public in Hawaii so these guys were free to lurk a few feet away from the hotel’s private property walkway. If you wanted to sit on the beach while on vacation, you had a guy dressed in safari gear waving a telephoto lense near your head. There were also confrontations between security and the Paparazzi.

Two Paparazzi On the Prowl

The security guys played a kind of keep away with them, trying to block them from photographing the Osbourne family at the pool. I’m telling you, it was hard to get in touch with your inner-mermaid under these conditions.

Photo Paparazzi Took of Kelly Osbourne

I must admit to a morbid curiosity. We’d heard rumors about the wedding and you just couldn’t help looking around. I don’t even care about the Osbournes, but it was fascinating to see them. One day after all the hoopla, I was taking my usual walk and up ahead saw what I thought was an older woman limping along with her grandkids in attendance. As I got closer, I saw it was a man with long hair who was all dressed in black. I should have gotten a clue then—how many people dress all in black at 8:15 in the morning in Hawaii, but I had to hear the man speak before I realized it was Ozzy. The fresh-faced teenager smiling from ear-to-ear at the man’s story? I didn’t realize until later that it was Kelly Osbourne. I’d only seen her with a sneer on her face, and didn’t realize how pretty and sweet she could look.

At the same time, forty Medal of Honor winners were being feted at the hotel. Being a writer, I am observant of what’s going on around me—a nice way of saying I’m nosy—and I had noticed this group of mostly older men and their families. One day they wore Hawaiian shirts of similar design. I had no idea they were Medal of Honor winners until I was in yoga class. Someone had sat in on a meeting when each man told his story of how he’d earned his medal. She was still overwhelmed by their bravery and modesty. “Each story brought tears to my eyes,” she said. I began watching these guys—really looking at them, trying to see in their faces what had made them able to act “above and beyond the call of duty”.

Medal of Honor winners in Hawaii, 2012

As an aside, you can imagine with all my looking, I don’t watch where I’m going. No wonder I stumble a lot!!

Not only do I look but my mind takes me elsewhere. Here, I thought, were men whose pictures should be in the news. TRUE HEROES. Their claim to fame was not behavior on a concert stage or on a reality television show, but lay in their ability to act in dire situations. How had our society’s priorities gotten topsy-turvy? We honor celebrities but we overlook the valiant among us.

It is something to think about.

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Age is Just A Number

Posted on September 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

Getting older. It’s not something baby boomers do gracefully. We, after all, were the generation who wouldn’t trust anyone over 30—let alone 60. As we come up to that magical Medicare age, it’s not only been a shock to many people’s system, but I have seen an attitude of fear—fear that’s it’s all over and that Death, with a CAPITAL D, is lurking on their doorstep.

Last year on his birthday, my husband seriously said that if he’d known he was going to live this long, he’d have taken better care of himself. He had no idea he was quoting Mickey Mantle—in his family, all the men die of heart attacks in their fifties so he figured he would too. But because of modern medicine and living close to Eisenhower Hospital’s ER, he had his heart attack and survived. So he could live to be a hundred.

The Birthday Boy.

A lot of people are doing that—living to a hundred and living quite nicely. I am playing Words With Friends with Marvin who turned 100 last May. Being a former English teacher and a writer, I am good at this game. Marvin is not only a worthy opponent, he’s giving me a run for my money. And he writes me witty messages, too.

Words With Friends game.

His wife, Rose, will be 100 soon. I’m not saying that they don’t have health issues—they do. But they also have all their marbles and still know how to play. Here they are with their daughter, Barbara.

 

My friend Earl’s dad just turned 99. He pays his own bills and balances his checkbook. When asked what the secret was to his longevity, he said, “It’s all about family. And if need anything, I call my wonderful son.” He paused, “And then there are my nine different doctors and about 6000 pills.”

He obviously has a great sense of humor and a great sense of center, as well. I think that’s a clue to living long. My dad was that way too. I remember once admonishing him about eating pastrami when he was 91. He looked up at me from his sandwich and asked, “What, if I eat this, I won’t live to an old age?”

 

A colleague and I taught a memoir writing class to a group of assisted living folks in Seattle last winter. We had no idea who would take the class, but the youngest to show up was 94. You would never have guessed their ages—they looked to be in their eighties, but most were 96 to 98—and excellent writers, too. Getting to share their memories was like history coming to life, and we didn’t need to do much editing.

David’s birth date is February 7, 1916. Does he look 96?

I have a lot of friends bumping up to the end of the sixties and hitting the big 70. They are in a panic. Many feel that a respirator and walker can’t be far off in their future. Their five-year plan is to cross their fingers and hope they’re still alive. Not good. Studies have shown that you are as old as you think you are. If you think that 80 is old—then that’s when you’ll get old. I’m thinking middle 90’s, myself. As I told my kids, count me in when it’s 2050.

 

 

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Americans Need to Stand Together

Posted on September 15, 2012 | 4 comments

Are you a Republican? Are you a Democrat? A tea partier or a liberal? Are you so fired up about the transgressions of those in your opposite party that you can’t stand to look at one of them? Well, it’s time to get a life. We, Americans, better start standing up for each other, and we need to do it fast.

Ambassador Chris Stevens

Four Americans no longer have a life to do so. Ambassador Christopher  Stevens and three others: Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods gave their lives in the pursuit of the ideals that have guided the American Dream. At the ceremony for the returned victims of the Libyan attacks, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, said, “Today we bring home four Americans who gave their lives for our country and our values. To the families of our fallen colleagues, I offer our most heartfelt condolences and deepest gratitude.”

The ceremony was marked with a dignity that I find lacking in our customary American attitude today. In our informality, we have become sloppy. Our standard of what is correct has been lowered too far. People feel it’s all right to disrespect our officials. I believe we have the unalienable right to disagree, yes, but we also need some rules of civility. Civility—that’s definitely lacking in this election campaign.

“Four Americans, four patriots. They loved this country. They chose to serve it, and served it well,” President Obama said during the ceremony in Maryland where the flag covered coffins were loaded into hearses. “They had a mission they believed in. They knew the danger, and they accepted it. They didn’t simply embrace the American ideal, they lived it; they embodied it.”

Let’s not forget these men.

And let’s not take this as an isolated event. We have enemies and they mean to do us harm. An American Embassy is under the sovereignty of America. And that’s where the attack was aimed—at you and at me, no matter where our politics lie.

AQAP Fighter.

The Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking credit for the attack, saying it was revenge for the killing of Sheikh Abu Yahya al-Libi. ARAP (which I had never heard of until I started reading about the attack) is reported to have used the demonstrations against an infamous anti-Islam film as a pretext for actual terrorist attack that it was. It worked.

Usually I write about the issues in my little corner of the planet—things that occupy my days but aren’t earth shatteringly important. Today I couldn’t summon the enthusiasm to talk with you about any of it. They’re just too insignificant. I am thinking, however, about how I get so caught up in my “To Do” lists that I barely register events like the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 or the 1998 U.S. embassy attacks in Tanzania and Kenya or the USS Cole attack in 2000. And they were the preludes to the 911 Twin Tower attacks. We need to pay attention.

USS COLE

Remember all those “United We Stand” posters that sprang up after 911? After the attack, people forgot their partisanship and remembered they were all Americans. But it didn’t last long, did it? We need to remember the second part of the quote: “divided we fall.” We need to start working together to make our country strong, if not bullet proof. We are on the same team, after all.

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Teaching in the Sixties, One Regret

Posted on August 31, 2012 | 2 comments

I don’t really regret much in my life. I’ve always believed I had a strong moral compass that led me in the right direction. And I almost always try to do the right thing. But today, my confidence in the belief that I have known what the right thing is was shaken.

I was in my workout class doing crunches to the Marcels singing Blue Moon when I was hit with a hammer of regret. I remembered back to the late Sixties when I was Talent Show director at Meany Junior High in Seattle.

 

Meany Middle School location.

It was a crazy time period—rapid social change fueled by good intention and bad, resulting in a lot of chaos. Just doing a talent show was unusual. Some of the kids had gotten up acts lip-syncing to the music of that era.

“No,” I said. “Lip syncing is not a talent. You have to sing the song with your own voices. Then you can be in the talent show.”

What stupidity on my part! Now I know it would have been so beneficial for these kids to just have participated in a show. So what if they lip-synced (ask Madonna, etc.)? They would have had fun doing something positive in school.

But, oh, no! Judgmental little twenty-one-year-old me showed them the door. Was “True Art” so almighty important to me?

I don’t remember the acts that were in the show. I do remember that my husband came, and he was one of the only people to stand for the flag salute. And roving bands of kids overturned a lot of cars in the parking lot. (Ours was untouched so I don’t think it was a Lip-Sync Vendetta.) It was just that kind of era.

I was pretty rigid in my standards back then. Things were right or things were wrong—black or white. I hadn’t had the life experiences to know that there are many shades of gray having validity. I gained some of that insight in the next few years. By the time I left teaching at Meany, there weren’t talent shows anymore. Instead there were lock-downs and riots, and kids coming to class stoned. I was happy if I could get people to just put their name in the top left-hand corner of the paper. I was grateful that the Obey Tate decided to pull his gun on Mr. Wilson’s class instead of mine the next period. (Funny how you never forget some names.)

The Year Book.

I know I cared about my students, and believed in them. (except for the guy who scared me spit-less when he did show up. Usually he didn’t because he had taken over his brother’s job while he was in Vietnam. The brother was a pimp so Virgil worked all nighters and didn’t come to school much.) I know I wanted to teach my students how to read and write and speak. I felt these were tools to success for everyone. I still do. I know I encouraged people to think for themselves. I think I did a good job. But I do wish I’d let those kids lip-sync. My apologies to any of them reading this.

There’s a blue moon on August 31.

 

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The Theory of Relativity: Time Travel

Posted on August 24, 2012 | 1 comment

I never understood Einstein’s Theory of Relativity until I got older. Yesterday brought its relevance back in focus for me.

In the morning, I had a phone conference with a group who work for Writer’s Relief, an author’s submission service that has guided my writing into many literary magazines. It was a strategic planning meeting. I was telling them I am working on “Radio Days”, a group of stories, each featuring a radio.

“So far, the stories are mostly memoir. I’m working on one now about Bobby Kennedy being shot,” I said. “I woke up to my alarm clock radio broadcasting the news.”

There was a loud silence from the other end. I’m not sure if they were awe struck by talking to someone who was actually old enough to remember the day Bobby Kennedy was shot or they felt sympathy for me, but I felt compelled to fill the silence.

“It was a terrible time in our history. Martin Luther King had only been killed two months before. I was teaching in an inner city school in Seattle that was probably 65% African American. There’d been riots then,” I continued.

I realized that to my quiet “audience”, it was U.S. History. To me, who had lived through it, it was part of the fabric of my life. I’ve never forgotten the shock of being awakened with the words, “Bobby Kennedy has been assassinated.”

I remember going to school that day in June. I was in mourning for another of our fallen leaders. Would it ever end? Bobby Kennedy had campaigned in Seattle that March. I was downtown with my mother and we went to see him as his cavalcade drove down the street.

“What a handsome young man,” Mother said. She was usually so serious and I thought it a frivolous comment. I was going to say, “We don’t elect our leaders by their looks,” but the moment passed.

Two months later Bobby Kennedy was dead just like Martin Luther King. I expected the kids to be upset, but I was wrong. These same people who’d wanted to burn the school down when MLK was shot, didn’t really care about Bobby Kennedy. It was June—time for school to be out. Time to have fun.

Forty-four years later, I went on the Facebook Group of many of my former students. It’s weird communicating with them, seeing how they thought of me. My memories have been cemented by my perceptions. I wondered how they perceived that day in June.

Thinking about it all day, I remembered it seemed a long time period between JFK’s assassination and Bobby Kennedy’s. It was only five years. As a teenager and a twenty-two-year-old, those five years had taken me from high school to college to marriage to a teaching career. I had evolved from a child to an adult. That time period was an eon for me.

Today, five years is gone in a flash. What was I even doing five years ago? A whole season of the year seems like a month to me now. Didn’t summer just start? How can the kids be going back to school? That can’t be a yellowed leaf on the ground, can it? But it is.

So I understand the Theory of Relativity now. Time is not a constant. The seconds may tick by constantly on the Master Clock at the Greenwich Observatory in England, but it gives us only numerical data. It is life that gives Time truth.

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Worry, Worry Go Away!

Posted on August 13, 2012 | 4 comments

It’s August 13 at 12:58 PM. I am sitting in my daughter-in-law’s kitchen in Chicago wearing borrowed sweats—it’s 63 degrees outside and the rain is bringing a chill to the air. Why is this significant? Because I’ve been worrying for two months about how I would endure the heat and humidity of Chicago in August. And guess what? I’ve been here almost two weeks and we haven’t had any. The temperatures have been mild and the humidity non-existent unless you count the two days of rain we’ve had. I guess that could be counted as 100%. If it were hot, that is.

Why is this significant? I ask again. Because it’s such a good lesson in the futility of worrying, which, I admit, is one of my best honed skills. I can worry about anything–I can worry about not worrying!

I spent several nights recently not being able to fall asleep because I was worrying that I wouldn’t be able to handle being outside while I was in Chicago in August, and that I’d disappoint my grandkids in some way. They might have wanted to go to the park, go to a Cubs game, go to the lake and I might have had to opt out.

This was a groundless worry as it turns out, but a worry based on past experience. I don’t do well in heat and humidity. I wilt faster than a Hibiscus flower out of water. I become dehydrated. I become a somnambulist, bleary-eyed and dragging through the day. I become non-functioning. I know this because it’s happened to me in Chicago before. I barely made it through one visit when Dave was in grad school. If I sat down, I’d fall asleep. If I stood up, I wanted to fall down. Come to think of it, that was 15 years ago, and they lived in a 3-story walk-up with no air conditioning. Things have changed. Might be time to move on.

Now, what I can learn from all this? To stop worrying would be good, but it may be to difficult a habit to give up cold turkey. I’m sure I’d have withdrawal. Hopefully I will remember this experience and bring it up in my mind every time I start to worry. What if I used that technique on the golf course? I could stop worrying about the sand traps and water hazards waiting to entrap my ball. Then I could just hit away with a relaxed confidence. The ball might fly through the air with the greatest of ease.

What a thought! I might just have found a life-changer, here. Now, if I could just warm up a little.

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Weathering the Storm

Posted on July 20, 2012 | 2 comments

I didn’t realize how set in my ways I’d become until last Friday morning when I got caught in a thunder and lightning storm with my daughter and granddaughter. I know I like things done correctly and I like things to be nice, but who doesn’t? (Well, my husband says these traits make me OCD, but that’s from someone who doesn’t unpack his suitcase for three weeks.)

Anyway, to get on with the story: I have a new purse. Well, I’ve had it for a year, but I just started using it. (Oh, the lessons we learn at our mother’s knee and never forget. I always had to bring new things home and save them to wear. I hated that and would let my daughter wear her new clothes home. But now I see I still follow Mother’s rules on myself.) I love this purse. It was sitting on the seat when my husband heaved himself into the car last week. Not looking, he crushed it with his elbow. I grabbed it away so fast he fell forward. “It’s brand new,” I wanted to say. “Let it stay nice for at least a few days.”  I didn’t say it, but my action might have indicated my state of mind.

The next day, I took my new purse to the park. My granddaughter had been asked to be in a photo shoot so I went along to help since she is six months old and new at sitting up. My purse could have stayed at home, safe and sound, but oh, no, I had to take it.

The sky was gray and every once and a while, there’d be an ominous rumbling. As the sky darkened and the growl of thunder became louder, I could feel the threat in the air. I looked up to see if there was lightning visible. A friend of mine had a brother-in-law who’d been playing golf during a storm and took shelter under a tree. He took a direct hit from a lightning bolt, barely surviving. His clothes were burned right off of him.

I looked around at all these people standing under trees or tents held up by metal poles. Babies sat in strollers with metal frames. To me, they looked like cattle lined up waiting for slaughter. I didn’t want to be the old grandma predicting dire circumstances, but when I saw a flash of lightning, I couldn’t help telling my daughter I thought we should leave.

My daughter agreed with me, and we began walking to the parking lot. A few drops of rain became a torrent in less than a minute. The rain morphed into hail balls that hurt when they hit your skin. Serious lightning and thunder played above our heads as we hurried up the path.

My daughter pulled the space-age sun cover over the baby to shield her from the hail. I looked at the stroller, wondering just how much metal it was made of. That’s when I saw the condition of my new purse. It looked more like a pail than a purse. Both of the side pockets were filled with two inches of water. The main part was spattered with rain and mud.

And I didn’t care. In the scheme of themes, a ruined purse didn’t add up to much. So what if things weren’t perfect or nice? It really didn’t matter. I was glad my phone was sheltered in my pants’ pocket, but what I really, really cared about was getting the three of us inside the car. When we finally were, we dripped water all over the seats. We were drenched and looked like drowning rats, but we were safe.

My new purse after rinsing. it cleaned up and dried well.

My daughter put her wet hands on the steering wheel and started laughing. I shivered a couple of times, and joined her. A moment later, so did the baby. We sat in that parking lot and didn’t move. We just laughed.

Why? Because we were safe? Because the whole thing was so ridiculous? Because people plan and God laughs? Because perfect is so obviously not important? Yes, for all of those reasons. But in the end I think we laughed just for the pure joy of it–of being three generations of Muscatel women sharing a moment we’d never forget.

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A Bag Lady?

Posted on July 6, 2012 | 1 comment

I don’t usually tell about my true life on Facebook, but I have to share this story witih my Facebook buddies. Every time I think about what happened yesterday I start laughing out loud!

We’ve been having this wonderful Hawaii stay with friends and family. Last week, our daughter’s family and our cousins’ family stayed in our house and we moved into the hotel. We were “homeless in Hualalai” and loving every minute of it. Let me tell you, being catered to at a hotel is real hardship duty!

Yesterday we moved back into the house from the hotel. I was wearing my walking gear, which includes a large straw hat and beat up tennis shoes, and carrying a beach bag loaded with all my bathroom toiletries. A nice young man offered to carry the bag for me and I accepted gratefully.

“So,” he said after a few minutes, “do you work for the hotel?”

I started laughing. He could only have thought I was some low level worker.

Bag Lady babysits too.

“No, I’m a guest in the hotel,” I said.

“Really?” The disbelief in his voice made me giggle. And I’ve been chuckling about it ever since. On further reflection, he probably thought I was a bag lady and was “borrowing” stuff from people’s rooms.

There goes my glamor image, down the drain!! LOL

 

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Posted in About Life in General, Aging with Grace

Katie and Tom, Cruise-ing on Different Ships

Posted on June 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

I just have to weigh in on this latest important news flash. Tom and Katie are divorcing! OMG!! What about all that couch jumping, Scientological marriage counseling and expressions of dying devotion? Not worth the paper the press relation experts created it on, I guess.

Didn’t the whole thing seem like fiction from the beginning? My greatest shock is that it lasted six years. Although Katie and Tom kinda look alike, they never seemed to really be on the same page. A lot of rumors swirled around their hasty courtship–none of them kind. I’d had my own theory about Tom. He never had kids with Mimi, who went on to have three with her next husband. He adopted two with Nicole and divorced her when she had a miscarriage. I just figured he couldn’t have kids. So that was what surprised me when Katie turned up preggers, supposedly with his baby.

Re-reading this I see that I must have too much time on my hands even though I fall into bed each night exhausted. How do I know so much about these people? Why do I care? Who knows? But it is fun to gossip about people who may or may not be actually real. No harm, no foul, right?

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