Annals of Aging: the Golden Years

 Photo: me and my friend Charly Franklin, probably at Lisabeulah, many long years ago. It got inserted by accident and has nothing to do with the essay, but I like it, looking at us with dark hair and big smiles. Ah, youth. Well, middle age, I think.

It is my theory that the golden years are golden because of the urine we leak.

Do not pretend that you do not know what I’m talking about.

As we age, different parts of the body throw in the towel at different times, and the progression is different and unpredictable for everybody.

My knees, for example, did not write me a suicide note when they gave up, but that was a process that happened over several years.

When I was younger, I broke a couple of vertebrae in my lower back, and vertebrae do not heal back the way they were. I saw an x-ray, and I swear they looked like a jar of gravel. I am grateful that I can walk at all.

Mobility became harder. I went from a cane to a walker, and now, to a wheelchair.

The wheelchair is because my sense of balance has left the building, and I hope to avoid falling by not trying to walk. It is working so far. Haven’t broken anything since starting to use the wheelchair.

I cannot express how heartbreaking it was to discover I could not get myself up off the floor when I fell. I am independent, and stubborn, so I’m told.

I tried. Pushed my legs so hard with nothing happening until I gave up. I had to call 911 for a floor lift. For a while there I was a frequent flyer with the Fire Department EMTs.  

For the most part the EMTs were gracious, which I do not consider a given because I am obese. Not an easy lift. But they have ways of dealing with these things, and they got it done. Thank you, EMTs. You rock.

But getting back to the gold, incontinence is a common condition. For a lot of women, it began when we gave birth, so we have lived with this condition for a long time. A sudden laugh, a sneeze, a cough, running, standing up! So many things led to leaks, some larger than others. I started wearing pads and carrying spare pads and sometimes even spare underwear and pants when I was going to the mainland. You plan your life around it.

Sorry about the TMI. I would not be so generous with my sharing if I did not know that I am not the only one dealing with this. An inconvenient fact of life for so many of us is what it is.

I have heard that some people have been able to heal incontinence through surgery, or exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor. Not me, at least not yet. I am keeping the adult diaper companies in business.

They all advertise that they don’t leak, but my experience is that they do.

“Wouldn’t you like to wake up dry?” their ads say.

Boy, I sure would.

Darn. Nobody told me that old age would be like this. Wet. Golden.

When you are young, you want to live a long time. You cannot know or understand how different 77 is from 27. Things happen, not the least of which is your body aging naturally, and the accidents which hurry along your decrepitude.

So I say to you, brothers and sisters and gender neutrals, we are all in this together, though dealing with it individually.

And to those of you who are still high and dry: well, aren’t you lucky. Enjoy that.

Letter to a friend whose husband recently died

Dec. xx, 2025

Dear *****,

I did see your daughter's notice of her dad's passing. I am so very sorry.

If you will pardon my saying so, fuck cancer. I hate it. It has taken so many people too soon.

My Rick was 68 when he passed, and I thought he was way too young, and it was way too soon. He was ill for five years.

For the first four and a half months after he was gone, I was numb, and sat in a chair on the kitchen porch staring at my little slice of heaven here. 

About May the numbness wore off and I started to crack like an egg. That was an interesting summer. 

Everyone’s experience is unique.

I will not tell you, “It gets better.” It might not.

I will not tell you he’s in a better place. The best place for him would be alive, and well, and with you.

I will not tell you that God has a plan. If there is such a plan, it is random and brutal.

I will not talk about the “stages of grief.” You may find yourself going through all the stages every day, many times.

It changes a bit as time goes on. I can tell you that.

You are now a member of one of those clubs that nobody wants to join, but you will find that people who have been through it will show you so much compassion, and understanding, and sympathy.

You will also notice that people who have not been through this loss really don’t get it. It’s okay. They can wait for their turn.

You will find, if you haven’t already, that he is part of you. Things he said and felt and did are all part of you, melded with you over the years, and he will show up every day in your mind and heart. He is always with you.

Okay, end of sermon.

I wish you all the best. I wish and pray for you to have peace, and grace, and the knowledge that you will get through this. You will. Your daughters, your friends, anyone decent who encounters you, will support you, even if they don’t say a word.

So there.

Blessings, love, hugs,

Mary

There is a graveyard in Manteca

 

There is a graveyard in Manteca

Where some of my ancestors sleep.

Pioneers.

 

When I was in school, learning about "manifest destiny"

And Indian wars and mountain men

And heard about the wagon trains

I wondered if that was how

Our family came out west.

So, I asked my father, 

"Did the Litchfields come west in a wagon train?"

I can see him sitting in his kitchen chair, laughing, holding a cigarette that he was smoking,

Still laughing, he said

"No, they waited until the railroad was built,

And then they came out west."

Oh. 

So the Litchfields waited until it was easy.

I was disappointed.

 

I have since learned that my father’s narrative was not wholly accurate

There were some Litchfields who came out west 

Before the railroad did

And they settled around Manteca, California, where they were farmers.

Later, more Litchfields did come west on the train

They were coming to join their relatives who were already living in the promised land of California

Farming in the fertile soil of the northern San Joaquin Valley

At that time, the railroad across the country had only recently been linked,

East to west, with the driving of the Golden Spike

A Litchfield family - mom, dad, and children

Boarded a train from their home in the Midwest to go to their family members, and a new life, in California.

People rode in one of three classes of passenger cars:

First class were the Pullman passenger cars

Third class were cheaper, for immigrants/emigrants

Sometimes, not usually, people rode in boxcars.

According to a family history, that’s where those Litchfields rode

But they were going across the country on a train in a few days

Instead of spending months in a wagon train, with all its hardships, illnesses, and deaths

So that must have been an improvement, don't you think?

Except

On the way

One of the children became ill

And died.

 

When the family finally arrived in Manteca

They were greeted by their family members

And they were able to lay their child to rest.

I suppose it was good to have a grave to visit,

Instead of leaving his remains under a mound of dirt somewhere on the prairie

So yeah, that was better than going by wagon train.

 

It is common knowledge that many children died all through history,

From various causes

Go to a nineteenth century graveyard, where you will find the graves of multiple children from the same family

 But then Dr. Alexander Fleming came back from vacation in 1928 and noticed a mold growing in a petri dish,

And the mold was killing bacteria

So he fooled around with it, named it penicillin, but abandoned the project in 1929.

Then

In the late 1930s

Two scientists at Oxford University, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, began working with penicillin again

And had production of the drug figured out by 1943

After which it saved the lives of thousands of soldiers who would have died without it

A miracle drug! 

Before penicillin it was not uncommon for children to die

Happened all the time,

Just like women died in childbirth all the time

Death was a common part of life

Maybe you didn’t expect all your children to make it to adulthood

Or yourself to make it through pregnancy and birth.

But I put it to you that the people left behind never became insensible to their losses

They grieved as profoundly as we do

When someone they loved died.

A child, a spouse, a sibling, a cousin, a best friend

Grief made them wail a howl that began in their bellies

And consumed their whole being.

Just like you and me.

 

More children grow to adulthood now,

Fewer women die in childbirth

At least in some places

But death, after all, is what we all have in common

And if you live long enough

You will see a lot of it

And lose a lot of people who were the landscape,

the environment,

even the furniture

Of your life.

 

So yes

S0me of the Litchfields came west on the train

They had it easy compared to the people who traveled

By horseback or wagon or on foot

Right?

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.”