I am old

I am old 

I pause now to consider

How shall I live these last few precious years of my life?

I nobly vow to be part of the Resistance

To the terrible fascism that has taken over my country

(Is there any fascism that is not terrible?)

Equally nobly I vow to love as many people as much as possible

And be grateful every day for who I got to be in this life,

And who I am now, despite my advancing years.

Lovely goals for a human being as flawed as I am,

Don’t you think?

 

Yesterday was my 46^th wedding anniversary

Never mind that I observe it alone

It’s a date that resonates in my mind and heart

A bit of Rick lives on in me

I want to apologize to him for the parts I didn’t get right

I want to respect his authentic self.

Better late than never.

 

Meanwhile, I watch Japanese TV

And play solitaire on my computer

And read Alison Bechdel cartoon collections

And have yogurt and granola for breakfast.

And coffee, of course.

I try to keep up with the laundry, and sometimes even

Sort through some of the overwhelming clutter.

I wash the dishes and sweep the floors and rake up cat hair

And doom scroll on Facebook

And keep waking myself up when I catch myself staring off into the distance,

at nothing

Which happens often.

 

I am old

I get confused easily

I can’t hear anything the first time

I sometimes take a nap in the late afternoon

And then I’m up until three or four in the morning

And miss a lot of daylight.

These things can deter a happy mood

But I keep trying

As long as I live, and write, and sing.

 

So let’s change the strings on the guitar.

They are old, too.

 

 

 

 

 

How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

Bottom of Form

 

Are you kidding me?

Life today is different in almost every way from what it was like when I was a child. There were no cellphones, no computers, no internet. No television, at my house.

There was radio, and I remember listening to radio shows with my brother in the early 50s: Fibber McGee and Molly; the Great Gildersleeve; the Lone Ranger; Amos and Andy.

Amos and Andy were a couple of white guys pretending to be black guys. The show was hugely popular but disappeared after about 1960. Times changed.

On Sunday mornings I listened to “Puck the Comic Weekly Man,” a national syndicated program on which a guy read all the Sunday comics, with descriptions, from the Hearst publications. The San Francisco Sunday Examiner, a Hearst paper, was the paper we got, and I loved listening to the Comic Weekly Man.

Milk, in glass bottles, was delivered by a milk man who came along in his truck once a week.

Our family didn’t get its first television until 1957. Well, thank goodness, because all the other kids at school had televisions at home and talked about the shows they watched.

I never got to see Howdy Doody, or Soupy Sales. What I did get to see was “Uncle Gary’s Fun Club,” on channel 8, which ran vintage cartoons and old comedy shorts. Charlie Chase, Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals.

I started kindergarten in 1953, at Salsipuedes Elementary School, named for the Salsipuedes Rancho, which took up most of what is now southern Santa Cruz County. Salsipuedes was a K-8 grade school.

We wrote everything by hand with pens and pencils. Typewriters were around, and I took a typing class in high school. I’ve always said that typing was the only thing I learned in school that helped me make a living.

Okay, what I learned in my college journalism classes has come in handy throughout my adulthood.

Across the hall from the journalism department was the printing department. There was a big room full of linotype machines that printing majors learned to use. The printing majors thought they were learning a skill that would guarantee them employment. Alas, linotypes became dinosaurs thanks to the computer.

Computers in the 1950s filled entire rooms, and did a fraction of what a cell phone can do today.

I used to marvel at what my parents had seen in their lives. When they were born, cars had not completely taken over from horses and buggies. A few days after my father was born, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic. When my mother was born, the USA was not yet involved in the Great War, the war to end all wars, later renamed World War I.

So my parents lived through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. My father was deployed in the South Pacific.

The atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

Horses had become leisure creatures, and cars ruled.

I came along not too far into the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.

We liked Ike, Richard Nixon was called, “Tricky Dicky,” a nickname which he unfortunately lived up, or down, to, in the 70s.

Joseph McCarthy ruined people’s lives by calling them Communists.

We saw the Folk Scare (Peter, Paul and Mary? Kingston Trio? Bob Dylan? anyone?).

The Vietnam War heated up under the auspices of John F. Kennedy and his administration, and thousands of kids were drafted to go over and die in the jungle. Eisenhower had warned him not to go there.

The Civil Rights movement, mass protests against the war, the Beatles and the British invasion!

Assassinations: JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, Malcolm X, and more.

Drugs: marijuana, LSD. Worse drugs came a little later.

Acid rock, country rock, folk rock, fusion jazz, and a man landing on the moon!

Mind you, in my parents’ lives they’d gone from horses and buggies to a moon landing. How do you wrap your head around that kind of change? Not that they had a choice.

Tricky Dicky got caught in the Watergate scandal and had to resign the presidency.

My father died in 1975.

The 1970s, a “blister of a decade.” - Doonesbury

Disco. Ridiculous haircuts and fashions. Polyester.

President Jimmy Carter, a fundamentally decent and progressive guy, so he had to go.

The Iran hostage crisis.

The 1980s: Ronald Reagan becomes president, and starts doing to the country what he did to California. Iran/Contra/a failed assassination attempt. George H. W. Bush presides for four years; Dan Quayle can’t spell potato.

Bill Clinton comes along and starts cleaning up the mess left by the Republicans, who catch him exercising what was traditionally powerful male privilege: fooling around with a woman who was not his wife. Republicans lose their minds and try to nail him to a cross for that, for years, spending millions on the effort.

Pretty funny, in retrospect, when you look at the Republican moral examples we have now.

So Bill Clinton leaves the presidency with the books balanced and a surplus of funds, which the Republicans, under the figurehead of George W. Bush, proceed to blow.

In the mid to late 90s the personal computer revolution begins. Amazon and Google are born. We all get on the internet.

My mother dies in 2001.

9/11 happens. We start a pointless war in Iraq, and then Afghanistan. We lose thousands of people and we don’t get out for twenty years, and the Republicans lose their minds criticizing Joe Biden for the way we got out. People died!

We will lightly gloss over the thousands of people, US and Iraqi and Afghani people, who died during the twenty years we were there.

The Great Recession warms up in 2007, and the housing bubble bursts, Barack Obama becomes president in 2009, and of course is blamed for the financial mess the Republicans orchestrated.

Meanwhile … a couple of space shuttles exploded and that program was put to sleep.

And so on.

In 2016 the unthinkable happened: Donald Trump became president, and set the country well on the way to becoming a fascist dictatorship, with DJT as the dictator.

Joe Biden stepped up in 1920 and tried to save the country. For which he was attacked and libeled and hated.

Now DJT is president again, and is busy tearing down and destroying the America I grew up in.

We used to be the only place a lot of people could run for refuge. Where shall we run?

And that is how different life now is from when I was a child.

Annals of Aging - The Reacher-Grabber

As we age, and as some of us begin to have trouble doing things physically that used to be a piece of cake (mmm ... I could go for some cake), there are certain aids and tools that clever people have invented to  help us out.

The first one I want to address is the reacher-grabber.

If you do not know what a reacher-grabber is, it is a tool for picking things up off the floor, usually, or pulling something that's not too heavy down from a high shelf, or getting into a tiny space behind a heavy piece of furniture or an appliance. 

It consists of a long metal stick with a claw at one end and a handle that opens and closes the claw at the other.

The original concept of the reacher-grabber was the Long Arm, a wooden pole with two slats that functioned as fingers that were manipulated by a cord. The Long Arm was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1768 for pulling books down from high shelves. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything Benjamin Franklin did not invent.

From Franklin's retriever of books, the idea was developed and the tool was changed and refined, until today we have these lightweight aluminum reacher-grabbers in many different styles, and even in colors, which are inexpensive. Most of them are 26 inches long, though some are 32 inches. Some of them fold, for easy transport.

There are different styles. My favorite has serrated “teeth” on the claw (the better to hold on to you, my dear), and a magnet at the claw end of the stick, which really comes in handy sometimes.

There are other styles that do not have teeth but have smooth little pincers. They work most of the time, but things slip out of those smooth pincers easily.

You do not have to be old to use and appreciate a reacher-grabber. It is handy for all of us when something is just out of reach.

I still have the ability when I am standing to bend over and pick things up, but if there are like six little pieces of paper on the floor, and I am in my wheelchair and not excited about standing up on my aged knees, the reacher-grabber becomes my best friend, and I pick things up with it.

So you can see what a nifty helper the reacher-grabber is. I try to have one or two in every room of the house. Because one of anything that is good is never enough for me.

Reacher-grabbers are good. You might want to pick one up.

Elliot’s Homework

 The teenage son of a friend was assigned by his Unitarian Church to ask questions about core beliefs of an older person. I qualified as old.

He had a questionnaire, of which I have retained only the first two questions for this essay.

1.     1  What were your core beliefs during childhood?

I went to a Baptist church Sunday School, and I swallowed the Jesus story whole, including the promise of heaven and the fear of hell.

In Sunday School, we observed birthdays and sang the Baptist birthday song:

“Happy Birthday to you,

Only one will not do.

Born again means salvation.

How many have you?”

I gave my life to Jesus I do not know how many times when I was a child, hoping I was sufficiently born again not to go to hell.

Fire insurance.

I said later that Jesus was the nicest guy I knew as a child. Maybe I said that because Jesus never hit, hurt, swore at, or molested me. So that made him nicer that most of the adults into whose hands I fell.

 I was one of those girls who loved horses. I don’t know if I “believed” in them, but seeing them, real or models or toys, made me happy, and when I was 12 or 13, my uncle, the same one who would soon molest me, gave me a horse.

Good old Sultan. I appreciate him more and more as time goes by. He was just hell to catch, but he wasn’t mean or aggressive. My father said, “Either you’re the boss or he’s the boss,” meaning, take a hard line with the horse. I think Sultan was the boss most of the time.

 2.     What about your teenage years?

I don’t exactly remember believing in anything in my teen years. I stopped going to Sunday school because my brother dropped out of church when he was sixteen, so I figured I could do that, too.

So, at 16, I stopped going and put Jesus on hold. I was busy trying to survive as a very square peg in a very round hole in high school.

After high school I became a hippie while in and out of college.

That’s when I learned that getting drunk or high is not for me. I have lived a fairly teetotal life. None of that stuff made me feel good, which it was supposed to do, and seemed to work for people I knew, but not for me. I felt bad, and scared, by being out of control. Also, all that stuff cost money, and I did not want to spend money on something that was not any fun.

A dear friend on an LSD trip one night danced into the schizophrenia which had been coming on for months, but nobody saw it coming. I grieve for him still. I don't know if he is still alive.

Yeah. Getting high or drunk is NOT my jam.

 In my late 30s I felt a strong call back to Christianity. I had put Jesus on hold, but he had never left me. I entered into what I call my “Adult Conversion.”

I became an Episcopalian. I realized that I love liturgical church services, and concise Episcopal sermons.

Some Protestant clergy can drone on for 45 minutes or more. I believe that if you can’t state something succinctly, going on and on is not going to make it any more intelligible or inspiring.

3.     Core belief now:

If there is a god, or divine spark or intelligence underlying reality, it is literally light years beyond my comprehension. I am okay with that.

I think all the human religions are right, except the fear-mongering ones or the ones relying on man-made dogma, which, in the final analysis, I think may be all of them. Darn. I continue to think of myself as a Christian, but I do not say so often because the very word is toxic to many.

It is people who mistake themselves for God or represent themselves as a conduit of God’s wisdom and rules, allowing them to also be a conduit of physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse, who have done, and are doing, terrible damage to people.

It’s easier to follow a leader or a rulebook than to take responsibility for your actions, do the work, and form a good moral core and a living theology. That is hard.

We human beings tend to look for the easy ways to live our lives. Unfortunately, life is not easy. What a bummer, huh?

Which brings me to heaven and hell: if we go around once, as many people believe, I think we have heaven and hell right here, right now.

At some point I stopped believing in hell as eternal punishment after you die. That is an old and perhaps Catholic idea, along with Purgatory, a man-made idea of an in-between place where you work off your sins, OR you can buy your way out. I think they called that “indulgences.”

I also stopped believing that God is an old man with a beard in the sky, even though Michelangelo did great art based on that concept.

It is hard to imagine that God is something you can’t imagine. 

Indulge me and read that sentence again. 

I believe the word, “god,” is a human sized concept, a little box if you will, that signifies the illimitable, infinitely vast reality that is beyond our ability to imagine, much less grasp.

I refer you to photographs relayed to earth from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes. Those pictures were what really sold me on the infinite unknown. I really can't wrap my mind around reality.

 At some point I realized that something did not have to be a fact to be the truth, and that realization has served me well. That is the power and blessing of myth, I think.

 

4.     My parents’ beliefs: I am sure my beliefs are far different from my parents’ beliefs. Mind you, I don’t know what their beliefs were. They did not go to church, and they never talked about their beliefs. When I asked my mother to go to church, she said, “I got enough of that when I was a child.”

Sometimes I think that Sunday School was free childcare where she hoped I might learn some moral rules. Maybe. I do not know.

 

5.     Biggest belief I have changed my belief about: I was raised to believe that Jesus died on the cross to wash away our sins, so we could stop sacrificing children and animals to appease our gods and devils, but it’s not a done deal – we can still screw up and go to hell, which I feared. Better walk that line, little sinful human. And give some money to the church.

6.      I have run into people who think they know who is going to hell, and delight in the thought. I think that is spiritual “stinking thinking.” My biggest change is letting go of what I think of as superstitious fear, which some people use to manipulate and control other people. That gets in the way of reality.

Platitudes I do not believe: “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Hah. Plenty of people are dealing with more than they can handle, every day.

“God has a plan and there’s a reason for everything.” No, I really do not believe either of those statements. I have seen too much randomness.

 My newest belief is that this, too, shall pass, and I won’t live to see that. I don’t know if it will pass to better or worse! I never imagined the world going through the clusterfuck which is our current condition, or our country going upside-down in my lifetime. But I hope humans survive and learn and maybe even do better. I always hope, and I pray. I pray because I believe in Jung’s collective unconscious. We are all connected. I believe that deeply. Praying is not like putting in an order for takeout, nor is it magic. But it helps me to converse with the infinite mystery, at least.

8.     Which beliefs are hardest to stay true to:

Not whining! And kindness. Kindness is everything, but I am a lifelong smart-ass, and I don’t always stifle my braying.

9.     Core beliefs that have brought me joy: I believe that I was born to sing and write. Doing those two things keeps me semi-sane, and not fighting who I am. My third purpose seems to be listening to people, being present, usually in long phone calls.

10 Still a square peg in a round hole. I am learning about ADHD and how being "neurospicy" affects me. I am profoundly happy knowing that my sons have grown up to be good people despite my parenting.

11 Life is full of surprises, and in the words of Tom Lehrer, among many others, “You never know.”

Letter to a Friend in Los Angeles

 

Part one 1/14/25

Hi,

Hope your blood draw was easy.

Needles can be challenging - I have veins that roll, and are hard to find, and I used to be freaked out by having blood taken. I ended up with a lot of hematomas. The trouble was that I would tell the vampires (blood draw techs) and I think it threw them off their game. 

Then Benny was diagnosed with diabetes and had to start injecting insulin. He used to be afraid of needles. Not anymore. Watching him I thought, who am I to be afraid of needles? 

So for some reason I stopped telling vampires about my rolling, hard to find veins. Miraculously, blood draws became easier, and the vampires were successful almost every time.

There was that one time my veins defeated several nurses in the hospital phlebotomy clinic. 

Blood draws are part of life, because I must have my A1C tested, among other things. So I am a lot more blasé about blood draws now. Benny now wears an insulin pump that constantly monitors his blood sugar and puts insulin into his blood as needed. We live in an age of miracles. At least for diabetics.

So I hope your blood draw went well.

 While driving to Tacoma and back, I was listening to NPR, and the news was full of the LA fires. They are reporting more on the emotional, mental, and financial wounds people have suffered now, as well as the fires. The grief.

And they did say repeatedly that the Santa Ana winds would be starting up again.

  Finding a place to live now is easier if you have money than it is for the less financially well endowed, the working people. And the homeless. 

Landlords are price-gouging renters. Well, of course. We're talking about human beings here.

Sad, though.

 Your metaphor of a soot-covered LA being similar to a coal heated London sounds apt. Sorry to hear about the polluted air. That is also sad, and I am sure it is making people ill and making people who were already having respiratory problems worse.

I wonder what efforts it will take to clean the air, and how long it will take.

 When I lived there (55 years ago) the smog was at its worst. One fourth of July weekend, when I was driving up north to observe the holiday with my family, I was crawling along through the San Fernando Valley on 101 with all the other people getting out of town, I looked up and in the sky above the mountains it looked like there was a solid dirt island in the sky. A big one.

Sometime in the last few years I was listening to a program about air pollution, perhaps specifically about LA, and doggone - that exact date was mentioned as the day of the worst smog recorded in the Los Angeles basin, and how clean up actions began after that.

You'd think that having to tell people not to let their children play outside because of the poor air quality would have been a tip-off that something needed to be done, but oh well, it takes what it takes.

 Part two 1/15/25 Martin Luther King's birthday

 NY Times email subject this morning: "Why Biden might matter."

Geez. Of course, he matters, you morons.

Jimmy Carter, who has lately been praised to the skies for his decency, was disdained as "the worst president we ever had" in the past. People badmouthed him something awful. My take was that he was too decent and honest, a good guy who walked the Christian talk (you know, love, forgiveness, compassion, working for the greater good), and that's why he had to go. All it took was a little treason and Ronald Reagan. 

Carter was vilified. I think the rabbit incident did him a lot of harm - what kind of president was scared of "a harmless bunny rabbit?" Hah. If you never lived with rabbits, or never saw "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," you might not know that bunny rabbits can be vicious. Yes, some are lovely pets, but some are like Marvel villains with blood on their claws and teeth. Your blood. 

I watched a documentary last night about immigrants who succeeded in America: Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, a guy from Iran who supplies most of NASA's hardware (or something - made him rich, anyway), Hedy Lamarr who has been dead for decades but is now getting credit for a system she designed during WW2 to confuse torpedoes. Not that the Navy was smart enough to use it. They weren't and they didn't. Now that system is the basis of the internet, cell phones, and computers. So Hedy Lamarr is now getting credit for her work. In her lifetime she did not get credit, or money. Not that she needs money wherever she is now.

More immigrants: a Ukrainian woman who is now in Congress, a Chinese woman who lived through Mao's cultural revolution (which set China back a few centuries) and doesn't want to see it happen here, a man who was an economic adviser to Republican presidents from Nixon on. 

And so on. All immigrants who came here a long time ago (Nixon was 50 years ago😐), and whose hard work paid off for them.

Over and over again, the immigrants said that America is the greatest country in the world, that the freedom here attracts people trying to make better lives for themselves, and in America anyone who works hard can succeed (i.e., become rich).

It sure sounded like the kind of thing I was taught in the 50s - greatest country, hard work will take you anywhere you want to go, etc. You might remember.

The stories of the people they highlighted were interesting, but the rah rah  propaganda element made me uncomfortable. At the end, I read in the credits that the narrator was Newt Gingrich.

Oh, PBS, I thought. You are going to the dark side.

I should not be surprised. We have seen the erosion of our stated morality in so many ways, and it's all part of whitewashing Trumpism - making it sound like it's okay, and patriotic, and normal.

It is none of those things. Just my opinion.

The LA fire tragedy is ongoing, and no less tragic for the fact that the news cycle is moving on. "Deadly car crash in San Benito."

Gawd. We have the attention span of gnats.

Fortunately, I am not in the position of being responsible for changing all the things that I see as wrong. I know I'd make a (bigger) mess and fail. But this being America, the greatest country in the world, I am allowed to gripe.

So there.

love

m

 Oh - and here's a picture of Rick and me singing, probably at the Strawberry Festival, probably in 1981.

 

The Golden Years - a semi-autobiographical memoir, in the third person.

 

October 4, 2024

The Golden Years

“Damn it,” the old lady said as she eased herself down into her wheelchair.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate my knees, she thought. They carried me through life for decades before they gave out.

Their ruin had been set in place years ago: a beach hike camping trip with a full backpack when she was 26; a meniscus torn while holding the leash of a dog who dashed off after something when she was 53. Neither insult to the joints ever recovered and became worse as the years went by.

Then there were those two broken vertebrae in her lower back, which made standing for any length of time unbearable.

Bad knees, bad back. She could walk when she used a walker, but most days the pain decreed that “this will be a wheelchair day.”

So there she sat.

She wheeled over to her computer to check her email, the weather, and the news.

Email was the usual: one message from someone she wanted to hear from, and dozens of advertisements and duns for donations and mailing list texts. She thought about how when personal computers and the internet became a thing in the 90s, she was so excited and had so much fun, despite the squawking and screeching of those old phone connections. This was before Amazon and Google and Myspace and Facebook. Before all of it.

She remembered how cool it was the first time she was able to send and receive email. Thrilling.

It’s a whole different thing now - as usual, humanity started playing with the new toy and ruined it. Scams and money pits and hackers, and cults, oh my.

An old person can still find a community online, though, on “Fogeybook” or “Boomerbook,” because people her age use it to stay in touch with each other. It started out as the great new thing that the young people loved. The young people who were in their thirties and forties now.

Oh well.

She went to the site of the local paper to see who had died this week. There was almost always someone she knew or knew of.

When she got there, she hit the paywall. Subscribe! It said. 

Not this again. A few months previously she tried to subscribe. Took out her credit card, filled in the form … and the site would not accept it. No subscription.

She tried again with a different card. Nope. Still no subscription. Feh, she thought. What is going on? She knew the cards were good and up to date, but the newspaper site wasn’t having it. Pity – how was she going to know who had died? So many friends and acquaintances are already gone. There’s at least one she wishes was gone, but the less said about that, the better.

It had been a few months. She thought she’d try again.

She was told she already had an account. How? When they wouldn’t let her subscribe? But she pressed on: got a new password, recovered her username(!), filled in the blanks, and was then told, “Don’t recognize username or password.”

“F****** technology,” she swore. Technology and gravity – both seemed to have turned on her the last few years. Everything either didn’t work, or fell, including her.

Oh well. Another day in the Golden Years.

“That gold is leaked pee,” she thought.

She now realized that she had reached an age and condition where it took courage to get up in the morning and navigate through her painful days.

“I’m too old to have to summon up courage,” she thought, but there it was. Physical pain was a constant. Every day when she woke up, she thanked God for another day, and thanked God for her unexpectedly long life and the many things she had done and been, her children and grandchild, and people she loved and people who loved her, and the dogs.

Especially the dogs, those affectionate goofballs. She had cats now, and even though they clung to her like Velcro every time she sat still or got into bed, they were not the same as dogs.

Anyway. After thanking God for all her blessings, she had to summon up courage to get out of bed, because she knew it would hurt. Oh, the pain would lessen as she moved around, and she used CBD balm and arnica gel and acetaminophen to get the noisy joints to quiet down a little, and she got through her days, but she realized now that it took courage. No one hands out medals to the courageous people who get up and deal with pain every day. She felt more understanding and compassion for people who got hooked on pain pills.

Here we are, a generation on the way out, she thought, the Boomers who are now the older generation, chock full of wisdom no one wants to hear, and skills that have passed out of use, but still kicking and screaming and thinking and voting, keeping on in the face of our body’s opposition and young people's indifference. Grateful for all the history we lived through. The wars, the music, the space travel, the internet. Except for wars, nothing was the same now as it was when we were young. 

Now we are old. The golden years. Barf.

Velcro cats