The Gifts of Old Age

 Gather around, children. It’s story time.

Sometimes I worry that I am too happy.

Understand – in my earlier adult years I planned to be a hard charging elder, still singing, still performing, still writing. I thought I’d drop with my guitar on. Just blink out in the middle of a song.

At that time, I had no idea what was ahead – that I’d cruise into my late seventies unable to walk without falling over, having to use a walker, and sometimes, on bad days, a wheelchair.

I’d say I didn’t see breast cancer coming, but I kinda did. I was in shock when that jagged little object showed up in a mammogram, but so many women get breast cancer that I thought it was simply my turn. The experience I had was not a big deal as cancer treatments go, but frankly, in my opinion, cancer treatments tend to be brutal. Even though my treatment was comparatively simple – surgery, radiation, no chemo, and the experience turned out well, still – it changed me. It changed my body. The experience left me tired, and it was almost a year before I emerged from the brain fog the radiation produced. We’ve all heard about “chemo brain.” Radiation brings its own challenges: “radiation brain.” Boy, was I surprised.

I also did not see in my early years that my husband would die so young. He was 68. From the vantage point of 75, that’s young. He’s been gone for almost ten years now. I integrated my grief into my life and have kept living, even though I have often wondered why, when it seemed like my functional life was over and most of my energy was drained by taking care of myself day to day. Once more I was asking the God I believe in, why? Why this?

After wrestling with the conundrum of why I was still living but not being productive, at some point a deep relaxation set in, and I became downright complacent about my non-productiveness.

“I did nothing today, and I’m okay with that.”

 I could not have imagined doing nothing all day when I was young. I was so driven by my need to prove I had worth, to justify taking up room on the planet, to prove I was not lazy, but now I have many days when I hang around the house and read, and play solitaire, and watch British mysteries and comedies and period pieces in the evening.

I talk on the phone with friends and family. A lot of my purpose now – my productiveness, if you will – is listening to people. I have always loved listening to people. I love their stories, and their spirits. I feel like listening to people is the best thing I do these days.

A bonus is that listening keeps me from shooting my mouth off and saying something incredibly stupid. Seriously, I almost always regret saying anything in any public venue. While I’m kicking myself for what I did say, as well as for what I forgot to say, it is exquisite agony. Why did I say that? Why didn’t I say this? Will I ever not feel like I don’t belong in a room?

Okay, I’ll tell you when I feel like I belong in a room: when I’m singing and playing with other musicians. I still worry about being off the beat or being flat when I’m tired and singing low notes, but mostly we’re all in it together and having a good time. The best time. Yeah. Doing music together is the best time there is.

It doesn't happen often enough anymore – the pandemic kind of threw us all off, and we’re still learning to congregate again, or at least I’m still learning.

I am learning that as the truth of this being in my last years and knowing death is not far away sinks in, I still want to be of some use in the time I have left. I still want to laugh with people – inappropriately if possible.

And I hate it that I’m going to die. I don’t want to leave this party. I am finally getting the hang of life, and many times I am more happy and contented than I have ever been before. This is one of the great gifts of old age.

I didn’t see that coming, either. But I will take it.

 

 

 

The New Computer

 I was getting complacent about my old computer, which turned out not to be wise, because it started blacking out on me. Solid black nothing for a few seconds, and then it came back on. I was going to live with it, until I realized that the blackouts were happening more frequently and lasting longer.

So I decided to get a newer, non-blacking out computer.

Which I have done. Now I’m on the new computer learning curve.

This is an all-in-one computer, so it’s a monitor and a keyboard, and somewhere under or inside the monitor is where the computer innards live. It’s taking a little getting used to. My old computer ran on Windows 10. This one runs on Windows 11. There are little differences to which I need to become accustomed.

So far so good, right? I will reach a point where I’ll feel like this computer is as comfortable as old shoes, but I am not there yet. It has properties and abilities of which I am not even aware. My main uses for a computer are email, watching reels of gorillas and monkeys on Facebook, and playing solitaire. Windows computers have always been good for playing solitaire.

In fact, Mac aficionados have cast a lot of shade on PCs because they believe Macs are superior in every way. They might be right. I don’t know. I only know that I can afford to buy a PC, and the price tags on Macs are way out of my ballpark. I know they are good machines – I started on Macs back in the 1990s, believing they were superior. I had at least three – a Performa, an iMac, and an iBook. All worked fine, until they didn’t, and then I had to take them off the island to a Mac repair shop. About 2004 I purchased a Dell laptop because the newspaper for which I wrote used a PC platform.

I discovered almost immediately that I like PCs better than Macs, for a few reasons, but the main reason is that PCs are language based, and Macs are visuals based. Language is my wheelhouse, and I was happy to start using the dolled up DOS system upon which Windows was based. It felt more natural to me than the Apple products.

Also, for a few hundred bucks I could get a computer that did everything a much more expensive Mac did. The other reason I like PCs is that I don’t have to leave the island and find a repair shop every time something goes caca. Nowadays, you don’t even have to defrag computers once a week.

I used to enjoy the colors that came with the defragging screen, I admit. But I don’t miss the process of sitting here waiting for the computer to sort itself out. Soon the defragging process was changed to an unsupervised process that automatically took place in the night. You could pick the day and time. Now defragging is not even mentioned. I wonder if computers defrag anymore.

One of the properties of growing old is realizing how fast your life went by. The pace at which computer technology and usage has grown parallels that speed. You can get the best and most modern version of a computer, and in a blink there are machines coming out that do more, faster, and your computer is a dinosaur.

A dinosaur is what I feel like these days. I really enjoy talking with members of my cohort – the early baby boomers – they get the references and jokes that I get. Whenever that meme comes up on Facebook that says, “If you remember more than 10 of these things, you are older than dirt,” I say, ten? Heck. I always remember every single one of their examples from bygone days. Wringer washing machines, little wax “coke bottles” with sweet syrup inside, candy cigarettes, and meat from the butcher shop wrapped in brown paper and string. We reused that string, too.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, new computer, I feel like a dinosaur, and my printer won’t work yet. It will, I know, if only because I have three boxes of ink cartridges for it and I don’t want to give up on it until I have used up that ink.

So here I am, trying to figure out this spiffy machine’s workings. I’ll get there.