Benefit

In the subtitle of this blog I didn't confess that aging would turn out to be one of my regular topics, but it has. Just thought I'd mention a benefit I never anticipated, and in fact have been assuming was an occasional spate of creativity:  too much to say. After decades of looking for what to say, of trying to decide if there was anything I (as opposed to ten other people) could say, for the past year or so, I find I have more to say than there's time to say it.

I realize, of course, that that doesn't mean anyone will want to read it. I just thought I'd mention it as a kind of unexpected (and rare) benefit of being on the downhill side. Wait a while; maybe you'll be so lucky!

An Examined Life--a Good Thing?

AN EXAMINED LIFE?

Can you remember the first time you noticed that you could recall an event that happened ten years ago? That was the first jolt of reality that really shook me. When you're old enough to remember clearly things that happened that long ago, you suspect you're no longer young—or at least not as young as once you were. Of course, when you have a clear recollection of things you did and people you knew fifty years ago, you know you're getting old, even if nothing else has made that knowledge inescapable.

So what other signs are there of our reclassification in the actuarial tables? One that seems almost too common  to be mentioned is the realization that you can't climb stairs or run or jump from stepping stone to stepping stone across a stream with your old agility, not to mention play a pickup game of basketball, or enjoy sandlot baseball or kayaking any more. What about the day you get through weeding the flowerbed and have to think carefully, arrange your legs and hands judiciously, and clamber to your feet with the hope that no one is observing your imitation of a giraffe?

            Travel tires you, driving at night becomes more of a challenge than you're willing to face, you long for not only your fireside in the metaphorical sense, but also the literal—not to mention bed at an earlier hour (or perhaps much later) than was your wont.

            Do your memories make you wish to live the best times over again, or grateful that you'll never have to? How much would you do over if you had a chance?  How many miserable moments would you choose never to have known, even given what they may have taught you? Do you long to relive the happiest times? Can you answer those questions without a pause?

            Maybe it helps adjusting to where old people find ourselves if we can say we wouldn’t want to go back. In spite of having lived a life too happy for me to deserve, it isn’t something I’d want to live again.

Having said that, I wonder if I can say why…perhaps because I don’t remember the person I was at those times as anyone I would want to meet now. If I haven’t learned anything else, I’ve found out that if we can feel we’ve become wiser, more compassionate, steadier, and more humorous with age, there are few of us who wouldn’t be ashamed to be the self-absorbed, over-confident, basically ignorant youths we had to grow up from. Even if we could choose to relive a day in our lives like Emily in Our Town, many of us wouldn’t do it. Maybe it made sense for her because she died so young.

            What we do need to figure out is how to resurrect the joys as well as the anguish of our callow selves by recalling them in our present state of decline. My list of those is long, and I’m surprised at how some of the worst things seem to have lost sharp focus. I’m glad for that. There’s no need to try to sharpen what is now blurred; I can concentrate on looking at the photos that capture the times when I was so happy. I even knew it then, and just give thanks now.

            The hardest part, I think, is recognizing the necessity of looking forward enough so as not to fall into the trap of trying to live the rest of our time so focused on the past that we throttle all possibilities of, at the least, enjoyment in the here and now. Writing this post is one of those anchors for the present.

Carolina Blue Day

Had to sit down after about an hour of strenuous (for me) gardening. Might as well put it to some use. If one is fortunate enough to be in good health and as old as I am, this will probably sound like a reply should be "Duh!" Two things remind of me my age: the difficulty of getting things moving when I get out of bed, and the fact that no matter what I do, I can't do it as long as I could before I got where I am.

Today in NC is like something out of a real estate brochure -- and the whole week has been the same. I can't stand to be indoors all day.

This brings up the old problem of priorities. IF it rains tomorrow, at least I'll have about a quarter of the gardening I need to do ready for it, but I'll be two days behind what I hoped to be my self-imposed deadline for two reviews and an essay I've promised. As they say, "Sigh." Besides, I want to go to an art show and poetry reading on Saturday, so hope the weather isn't a problem. I hate walking in the rain with a new permanent. How's that for triviality?

What I really need to do is go out and take a new picture for this page.

Rodney Dangerfield's Complaint

Reading my favorite blogs keeps me in a state of continual embarrassment because I can't seem to keep up with their frequency. One hampering factor is that when a thought strikes me hard enough, I always feel it must be evaluated in the light of its potential interest to someone other than the writer before deciding to out it here.

I have just seen a discussion of problems for elders with young people in the various medical fields that cries out for comment and support. I haven't asked, but I hope that some of the idiotic behaviour that's really insulting in a doctor's office is the result of someone's notion of what will put a patient at ease. I keep trying to think of a way to tell a 20-something CNA, or whatever, that I really would rather be called Mrs. So and So (or Miss, or even Ms.) without hurting her feelings or making her defensive.

After my husband's death, I resisted writing to the hospital while I waited for their usual survey after a stay there. It never came. Seems they have a policy of not bothering the families of those who have passed away in their care. What stupidity! When better can they get really useful information about how to serve patients better?

Native American and most Asian cultures revere age for its own sake. While unfortunately, too many of us know older folks with very little of their lifelong intelligence and perception left, it would be better to assume a person carrying a lot of years is still sharp mentally, and then adjust later if it turns out to be necessary. Nowadays, though, it seems as if the assumption is the reverse.

There are enough difficulties with being merely old, without adding unnecessary indignities too!

Finding the Label

One of the labels I used for this blog overall is "aging." Another is "the writing life." It's too bad to be repetitious, and no blogger wants to bore possible readers, but it's so difficult to imagine what label would draw a stranger in. I've been reading John Updike's collection of short stories that are the last he wrote. Let me suggest the book, My Father's Tears and Other Stories to anyone interested in either or both labels. You can read my review next month on Senior Women Web.

As Junot Diaz said in a recent interview, there is no better preparation and continuing exercise for a writer than reading. It would be a challenge to get through all the varied collection of everything from criticism to fiction to poetry of someone as prolific as Updike, but I'd bet money that trying would be worth it for anyone with authorial aspirations.

Changing times

Recently a writing friend told me of a plot premise that she'd thought of. It involved a woman going to the store to pick up a chicken, but she picks up the butcher instead. I thought of the sources for chickens these days and realized that a place where I would be most likely to buy one would offer no opportunity for meeting the butcher, let alone picking him up.

When I was growing up, even in New York City, we had a local grocery store. The proprietor's name was Mr. Lovelock. The worn floorboards were covered in sawdust. Every customer had to negotiate around the black and white cat who always occupied the center of the space between the door, the counters, and the shelves. When my mother had chosen what she wanted, we would go home to await a delivery by a lad who must have been about fourteen. There's not much of that sort of customer relationship around these days. I'm eager to see how my writer friend's story will develop, and where it will be set.

To be at the far end of your life tends to make you think backwards perhaps more than is good for the morale. So many changes that have happened in the Twentieth Century have come about at the speed of a 100-yard sprint in the Olympics, and so many are of marvelous consequence for those of us who have lived to see them. On the other hand, that very pace has exacted a price, which for me is the leisure to contemplate details--of personalities, of eccentricities, of individualities, and the most obvious pleasures of the natural world, which is so rapidly becoming a distant backdrop instead of the close surround of everyday life. When using the word "leisure" I imply the mental and emotional time and freedom for appreciation in both senses of that word.

I'm distressed daily by the fact that I miss half the birdsong around us because it's being drowned out by the racket of diesel eighteen-wheelers. I can barely see the mountains day after day because of air pollution, and I have to watch my dog to be sure he isn't getting into some area newly treated with chemicals to discourage weeds. As for buying the chicken, I have to pick one out from twenty others so tightly encased in shrink-wrap I can't tell them apart except for the weight indicated on the labels. Nowadays, if I'm willing to pay over $10 a pound instead of under $3, I can get a "free-range organic" bird, but even then I won't have the feet available for broth that would be like what I imagine Jewish mothers hand out to cold sufferers. REAL chicken soup is really a thing of the past. I mind having to pay extra to get carrots with tops, lemons one-by-one, local tomatoes in August. A can of baked beans isn't even just a can of baked beans; now I have to choose among several different versions for use with different accompaniments. I admit it's nice to be able to get "ethnic" and "gourmet" foods, but where's the cheese wheel from which you could get a slice cut to order and so sharp it made your tongue sting when you tasted the sample offered on the blade of a knife half the size of a machete?

One of my biggest plaints as a senior citizen is directed at the tendency to enlarge everything, especially restaurant portions and publishers. Does anyone among the latter have anything they will admit is a "mid-list" today? They can't afford one any more. An editor no longer can browse the slush pile for something that might be to his or her individual taste and take a flier on it. As for fiction: the formulas for success (read enormous sales) have multiplied. Does the story have a thriller pace? Check. Plenty of sex, preferably explicit and at least somewhat unconventional? Check. Violence? Check. Shocking characters, scenes, plots? Check. Or, perhaps to fit into another category, it may need to be gently bland, without a suggestion of the unpleasant realities of life and certainly no more than a hint of sex, and make every character call regularly and verbally on the Almighty. Even the category romances of my day have become less rather than more convincing.

What has happened to verisimilitude? I can only be grateful for the authors who have managed to get into print who are the exceptions to prove those rules cited above. My feeling, though, is that they are too few, and if one can find their work at all, it doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

Is it time to organize, to shout while waving a banner inscribed with the names of literary artists in all languages, to rebel? Should there be a convention for the preservation of real literature? If only we had Mark Twain or Voltaire to make the campaign speeches, Aristotle or Kant to force us to entertain enough thought to allow some expansion of minds. Even Edward Lear and W. S. Gilbert might be fun to listen to so we could figure out how to enjoy jokes. There isn't enough poetry around in spite of the legions of willing small independent publishers, largely because it's hard to convince a customer that the price of a chapbook is worth it when there's so little time. The trouble is, we don't have the millions of dollars it would take to make us heard. Maybe we should try to start an online fundraising effort dedicated to the proposition that independent publishers of books and periodicals should have the same proportion of public support that goes to Public Radio and Television, both of which have already had to succumb to at least "institutional" advertising. Farewell Harold Ross, and all your ilk. You're missed.

Days grow short...

SEPTEMBER…
The month of changes—or so it seems to me. Back to school, end of summer, beginning again for matters of work and worry that fell out of the forefront during vacation time. Soon there won’t be a need for the AC at night, the trees that looked tired and dried out last month will begin to color with the promise of flaming October, bird and monarch butterfly migrations will catch the eyes of gardeners and hikers, wooly bear caterpillars will wend their zigzag ways across the pavement.
Of course, these are all signals of ending too. Earlier darkness and later light, the growing season even here in North Carolina is drawing to a close, and the end of the year becomes visible like a distant landmark. I never can decide whether I’m happy to see September, or a little sad. The wonderful lyrics of “September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday pretty much tell it all: “…Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few…” that we treasure when we get into the 8th decade, where we qualify for the symbolic September of our own days. “It’s a long, long while/From May to December,/ But the days grow short,/ When you reach September.”

To reread or not to reread? That may be the question

I used to reread The Forsyte Saga about every eight or ten years, and enjoyed it as much every time as I had the first, and with greater appreciation. And then, some years ago, I picked it up again and discovered I had actually had enough of it. Something about the reader was changed, for surely nothing about the book had, and that made me think perhaps such an unwitting alteration is an unrecognized evidence of continuing possibilities. That's a comforting thought as the days ahead begin to look so sparse in comparison with the days behind. Maybe we can grow while growing old, after all. Unless, of course, we're simply regressing, like the poor character described in the riddle of the Sphynx, and by Shakespeare's seven ages of man in As You Like It (of course I had to look it up in Bartlett's to be sure I had the right play!).

The older I get...

...the less I know. Well, this is certainly not a new notion. The trouble is, it's like most cliches because it's too true to ignore or sneer at. There's a lot that's a question of starting too late to get the proper instruction, like all the hi-tech computer stuff, and there's the problem with what we used to call the generation gap, which probably just boils down to not being up on current slang. But the things that matter the most seldom come into the conversation, except in ways that remind me of the snags one had better be careful of when canoeing on a scenic river. If you hit one, the results can be quenching. What DO you say when writing a sympathy note? How do express your admiration for the kind of literature that actually makes your throat swell or makes you burst out laughing? I don't even know what a reviewer means who carps about a short story, saying it's been "workshopped to death." What on earth does that mean? Do you dare to express an opinion during a tirade from an acquaintance on religion, politics, or "kids today?"

An on-line acquaintance recently said her subject is aging. I retorted that mine isn't. Now I think I misspoke. It's getting to seem more and more that that's just what my subject is. I'm not satisfied with the wimpy, sentimental, over-explained "women's" books that cram the shelves these days. I resent being talked down to on paper. At the same time, I don't want to be subjected to the ax-grinding self-absorption of so many young writers. I love suspense, but eschew horror (too cowardly, I guess--or I have too much imagination). Even while I seek entertainment, I'm looking for something at least slightly thought-provoking. Furthermore, I know for a fact, my generation is growing daily in numbers, and when it comes to books and fiction in particular, publishers seem to be oblivious. So, I guess "aging" is my area of interest, after all.

But I'd like to shout out loud about the young writers who seem to me to be already wiser than I'll ever get, and whose artistry is astonishing: Sara Gruen, Khaled Hosseini, Laura Hillenbrand ... well you get the idea. What worries me is that these are the ones who've become known. How many more are out there that don't get promoted and/or recognized that we don't read because we don't know about them? How do we find the agents and publishers who will seek them out so we can read them?