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

An All Too Typical Morning at Casa Tuel

First, I woke up late, because I stayed up until quarter to three watching a British police procedural.

Then I noticed that the lymph node under my left ear was still large, hard, and sore. I have been watching this lump the last three days, putting heat on it, and it has not shrunk. It's still hard and painful. This really concerned me, so that started a round of phone calls: to Swedish Breast Imaging to cancel the mammogram I had scheduled for tomorrow; to my PCP's triage nurse to talk about the lump, and make an appointment to see my PCP to check out the lump, to my oncologist's office to cancel the mammogram online follow up appointment I had for Thursday.

So far, so good. 

Called my son in Tacoma to tell him what was going on. While we were talking, I knocked over a large glass of water onto the table, and me, and the floor, plus my Chromebook and my phone. As we all know, water does not play nice with electronics. I put the Chromebook in a garbage pail, standing on its end to let the water run off, I dried the phone off with a towel. Neither appear to be harmed by the water.

There were two towels on the floor and one on the table at this point. 

I spill water and other beverages all the time. It's a normal occurrence here. I could posit a lot of reasons: clumsiness, not being aware of my surroundings, moving an arm impulsively. This was a larger than usual catastrophe, because it was such a big glass of water.

While I was mopping the water up with towels, I knocked over an open prescription bottle and the pills scattered in the water on the table. Oh, carp. I quickly began picking up the pills to put on a towel to dry (yes, if you are keeping track, there were a lot of towels in play by this time) to dry out. They were slimy and slippery, so extremely difficult to pick up. I could only get one or two at a time. Finally grabbed a scrap of paper and used it like a dustpan, pushing the pills onto the paper which I could then use to set them out to dry. 

They look a little fuzzy from their brief swim. When dry I'll put them back in their container. 

All this happened in the first hour and a half I was up. 

I can't wait to see what other surprises the day brings.

I Can't Hear You

One of the not so delightful aspects of aging is hearing loss.

Both my parents had hearing loss, although I often suspected my father was faking it so he'd be left alone, because if I said something I didn't want him to hear when I was on the phone way across the room, he heard it clearly and sometimes made a tart remark. That sort of thing can make a kid jumpy.

My mother was in denial to the end of her life. Once when she was visiting me, we were driving down the Main Highway, and she kept saying, "What?" to everything I said.

I finally said, "You know, you can get hearing aids if you need them." I was trying to be helpful and caring. She didn't see it that way. She was ticked off, and then she ticked me off. She said, "My hearing is fine. It's you. You mumble. You have no frontal resonance. You never did."

So that was the end of that subject between us.

(Fyi, Google says, “Frontal resonance, also known as the ‘mask of singing,’ is a vocal technique that involves resonating sound closer to the front of the face. This can reduce the impact on the vocal folds, which can make speaking more efficient.”

I remember Mrs. Varin, my voice teacher, trying to get me to make my upper palate and nose - that mask - vibrate with sound when I sang. I did not realize that was frontal resonance.

The other part of singing was sustaining my sound with breath that came from my diaphragm. That seemed to be the most important information I picked up in three years of voice lessons. Breathe from the belly. Later I took lessons from Kendall Aikin Davis here on the island, and she told me one day to support my voice with my breath, "like you're taking a dump."

Oh. Okay. 

But that's sending sound out. Receiving sound, mishearing it, and misunderstanding what someone is saying, is part of aging. I suppose it doesn't happen to everyone. Maybe my mother's hearing was just fine. Too late to determine that now.

When I was in my fifties, I noticed that I was having a hard time hearing what people said. There are three main factors in my hearing loss: one, aging; two, all those over-the-counter painkillers I took during my migraine years; and three, all those incredibly loud rock concerts and dances I went to in the 1960s. 

At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, when bands were playing, I heard whistling, which stopped when the music stopped, and I thought it was the crowd showing their enjoyment of the music, cheering and whistling. Years later I realized that cheering and whistling was the sound of my inner ears screaming in pain. So yeah, a little hearing loss there.

Three years ago, when I went to my grandson's high school graduation, I found myself frequently saying, "What?" "Sorry, I couldn't hear that," and "Say again?"  By that time, I had also noticed that when I was in a noisy place, like a restaurant, where people were talking and laughing, and dishes and utensils were clattering, I could not hear what anyone was saying at my table.

I realized it was time for hearing aids. There was a slight delay after I fell on Sporty's back patio and broke a vertebra (L3, if you're interested). But after that, when I was able to drive again, I trundled down to the Tacoma Costco and got some hearing aids. They worked fine. I'm wearing them right now.

 I don't wear them all the time. When I'm at home by myself I often don't put them in because they are foreign objects and after a few hours they start to hurt. I can turn up the TV or whatever else I'm listening to when I’m alone.

When I am not wearing my hearing aids, I sometimes mis-hear things. Recently I was listening to someone talking about "Durable Power of Attorney," and what I heard was, "Gerbil power of attorney."

Last Sunday when I was listening to the church service online, when the priest was reading the Gospel, I heard, "Jesus and his apostles were walking through the drain field ...” Now I knew that couldn't be right. I don't think they had drain fields in first century Palestine. As the scripture went on, I realized they were walking through a grainfield, not a drain field. Whew. That was a relief.

As Miss Emily Latella used to say, that's very different, isn't it?

Where you are now

2/8/24

Do you ever think of me where you are now?

Do you miss me like I miss you?

Is it grand where you are 

Sunny days No storms

No crises that must be fixed by you

 

Are there pillows where you are

So you can throw your arms around one

And pretend that you’re holding me

Does the feel of my body live in your eternal mind

Am I as real to you as you are real to me

Where you are now

 

Is it blissful and peaceful where you are now

Do you have all the pencils

And pens and ink you need

Are the streets paved with gold

But gold doesn’t matter

Where you are now

 

Where you are now

Money doesn’t matter

Where you are there is no poverty

I cannot imagine what it’s like where you are

I hope you are happy and free

Where you are now