Monthly Archives: August 2012
Gifts of Age (Part Six): Aging Like Fine Whine
Some years ago I regularly visited several elderly people in our local nursing home. They frequently complained that their children didn’t visit them very often. Since, at each of our visits, they itemized and complained about their numerous aches, the quality of the food, the noise level, the dullness of most television, and the weather, I developed a pretty good idea of why their children’s visits were few and far between.
It reminded me of the joke about the young man who joined a monastery committed to silence. The monks were allowed to speak briefly to the Abbott every two years. After the first two years the monk said, “My bed is too hard.” After four years he returned and said, “My room is too cold.” Then, after six years he said, “The food is awful.” Finally, when he returned after eight years, he informed the Abbott that he was leaving the Monastery. The Abbot responded, “I’m not surprised. You’ve done nothing but bitch, ever since you came here.”
As my friends and I became older ourselves, we realized we were singing that all too familiar song, “My knee bones disconnecting from my leg bone; my back bone is hurting my hip bones, and my ears don’t work anymore. Can’t even hear the Word of the Lord.”
Those older ladies’ complaints of years past, though annoying, we now knew were legitimate. So, several of us decided to try to minimize the fallout from our own problems of aging on others by limiting the amount of whining we did.
We decided that everyone does need to whine sometime, even God’s people. Think of the Israelites in the desert; whine, whine, whine all the way home.
So, we took some liberties with the Scripture to cover this challenge. We began to spread the word that “Monday is the day the Lord hath made for whining.” Now, in order to not be too legalistic, we allowed for a moveable feast when we did not whine on Monday. In that case, you could whine on another day of the week. Whenever we noticed each other slipping into whine mode on a non-designated whining day, we would remind each other that, “Today is not Monday.”
This has had a salutary effect on the quality of our conversations and our popularity with younger generations.
So, remember, Monday is the day that the Lord hath made for whining.
Another Day, Another Gig. Ho hum. NOT!
Second Gig at The Open Hand
Whoo hoo. Rachel just called. We’re on again tonight for open mike at The Open Hand behind Cat’s Music in Pomona.
Scary, but exciting. Will be using some of my blogs. Not that good at extemporaneous, since I have frequent memory melts on common words and names!
Steve suggested if I do the one that includes references to frequent no warning dashes to the bathroom, that I could run off stage mid-act. I told him I more or less did that last time. When I finished my bit, I went to the bathroom before returning to my seat. When I came out the MC was saying, “Where did she go?” Kind of like the Christine Lotte academy award presentation with her in the bathroom. Well, on a slightly smaller scale……..
Great news, son Steve in Atlanta, now has a blog: http:// http://www.steveisweird.wordpress.com
He says all the good names were taken. Family thought it was the most appropriate. I aided and abetted his entering the blog world, which I may live to regret. He remembers all the family fiascos that I have blotted out and he’s much funnier than I am. Tommy, our computer guruh, may regret helping also, since Steve’s High School English teacher read his essay “Only the Shadow Knows What’s In There” about the state of Tommy’s bedroom to the whole teaching staff. This does not bode well for the family image in the future.
Not that it matters, I think we have collectively pretty well blown that years ago.
One son, unnamed, told a radio audience that his mother always fixed a special dinner for his birthday. When asked what it was, he replied, “Fish sticks and tater tots.” So he is waiting for karma to catch up with him through this blog.
Ahhhh, old lady revenge for teen years. The power of the blog. How sweet it is! Just kidding. I know that he still has access to a larger public than mine!!!
Must go work on my gig. My public awaits. NOT!
Gifts of Age (Part Three): Milestones, Kidney Stones, and Cobble-stones
Shake, Rattle, and Roll
Of all the birthday milestones such as: school age, driving age, voting age, and drinking age, the most unexpectedly celebratory one is Medicare age. Because without Medicare, just trying to stay alive would take an NFL star quarterback’s salary and bonuses. It also needs to coincide with retirement age, because we are suddenly averaging at least three doctor appointments a week. Since these often involve MRI’s, CAT scans, ultrasounds, treadmill tests, and more, this leaves a work week of about fifteen hours. My husband counted recently and discovered that he actually has one internist and sixteen specialists. I think that’s at least one specialist per body part. On the way to appointments with these, we find ourselves humming, “Getting to know us. Getting to know all about us” (our colons, our kidneys, our prostates, and mysterious moles in places that have never before seen the light of day). I suggest forgetting credentials and looking for specialists that are young and good looking, because believe me, we don’t know the ultimate in physical intimacy until we reach the age of sixteen specialists.
For some of us, a more positive aspect of retirement age is the opportunity to travel. We were blessed with thirteen years of free air travel, while one of our sons worked for an airline. So we got to travel abroad much more than we would have otherwise. Unfortunately, even in my best years, I was athletically challenged.
So my travel experiences often became unexpectedly medical:
a broken pinky finger while playing miniature golf in California,
a sprained ankle from a missing sidewalk tile in Spain,
an Achilles tendon screaming in protest when chasing taxis in Paris,
a gaping hole in my smile after a crusty bread roll removed the crown on a front tooth in Portugal,
traveling stoned on Benadryl after an English castle tour revealed a severe allergy to mold,
and finally loose dentures from riding in a wheelchair over cobblestones almost everywhere.
Hiding Places and Safe Places
Grown-ups have hiding places,
ones where we hide
from ourselves.
The bottom of a bottle
is a traditional favorite.
Toxic relationships are another.
In those, we just focus
on pleasing the other.
Conformity is a camouflage
of many different colors:
a church, a club, a cause.
But the most popular are
roles or titles:
mother, teacher, CEO,
policeman, criminal,
priest or ho,
even being gay.
You see, a long time ago,
we hid our patchwork
selves away.
But hiding places and safe places
are not the same.
Safety only comes
when we have nothing
left to lose.
When we no longer
cling to idols,
or hide behind an image.
Only when all else fails,
do we explore
the darkness inside.
Then coming face to face
with our emptiness,
we find God
and peace.
Gifts of Age(Part Two): A Life Long Klutz Learns to Draw
My philosophy in life had always been, “If at first you don’t succeed, quit, don’t make a fool of yourself.” But my recent small success in the domestic art of crochet opened up new possibilities. So, at a time when my physical abilities were becoming seriously limited, I decided that I needed to risk failure and persevere at something totally new and foreign to me, that didn’t involve walking.
While debating what I would try, I received some note cards with art by paraplegic artists. They painted holding the brush with their teeth or even their toes. The art was very good. It dawned on me that being a klutz with my hands, might not preclude learning to draw.
As early as kindergarten it was obvious that I lacked eye-hand coordination and any natural artistic talent. Stick figures were my limit and when cutting out paper dolls, I inevitably cut off their heads. Even later when dissecting frogs in college biology lab, I was nick-named, Jack the Ripper. And over the years on report cards of almost all A’s, the C’s in art and handwriting were pure kindness on the teachers’ part.
But now, I came across the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which claimed that anyone can learn to draw. It showed first attempts by students of all ages, who obviously had no natural talent. Then, it showed portraits they had drawn after less than ten weeks of instruction on learning to draw in right hemisphere mode. The differences were astounding.
When we use our right hemisphere, we see things as they really are and see the parts in their relationships to each other. In left hemisphere mode we transpose things mentally into symbols, similar to cartoons. It’s a sort of minimal and generalized way of depicting lips, eyes, trees, and so on, that isn’t a true replication with shadows and depth and correct proportions. Our left hemisphere is linear and used for language. Our right is spatial and used for images. One or the other is usually dominant in each person. But, even if our left hemisphere is dominant, there are simple tricks that help us use our right hemisphere.
After reading the book, I found a drawing class for beginners using some of the same techniques. Like the students in the book, my first attempt was laughable, but by the end of nine weeks, I too, produced a detailed shaded drawing of my great-grandson that actually looked like him. And when the teacher moved to another city, she even asked if she could use my first effort and my end of the course portrait to advertise her classes there. For me this meant more than just success in producing a likeness. The most helpful thing I learned was that perseverance is the greatest talent of all. And a bonus was that being in right-brain mode is an experience of living in the present moment.
Throughout my sixties, I took color pencil, watercolor, and acrylic painting classes. I have learned to live with the fact that most of my fellow students are right-brain dominant natural artists, who often, but not always, produce better art than I do. But, I’ve also found that even if it takes me three tries, I can end up with a painting that I actually like and that my children will hang in their homes. Finally, I can accept my failures as part of the learning process of life, which should never really end.
Besides, cut into strips, my failures make great book marks.
Gifts of Age ( Part One): I Can See the Door from Here.
I’ve never been a person who lives in the present moment. I have always been mentally rushing pell mell into the future. I’m either worrying about running late, planning ahead to avoid a possible problem, or dreaming hopefully about a future project or stage of life. Hitting Medicare age definitely presents a challenge for people like me. We have to face that we may be running out of future.
In my early sixties I developed some health problems. Though not life threatening, they were time consuming. Suddenly, I was spending a lot of time in Doctors’ waiting rooms. People who live with one foot in the next minute, day, or year are not naturally patient people. Sitting for hours in small rooms listening to people in more advanced states of physical decay is a definite stressor for us. Although I have the domestic talents of a Gabor sister (though unfortunately not the physical endowments), a friend suggested that I take up crocheting to help me stay calm. It was stretching my limits to learn how to simply make straight rows of approximately equal width and of whatever length that the time in a waiting room allowed. This was amazingly soothing, an experience of grace. However, it began to cause others frustration, when they asked me what I was making and I replied, “Nothing.”
It would seem that for many people, making nothing challenges the very foundations of their value systems. It is at the very least unpatriotic, if not ungodly. So, I found myself getting much unsought advice on useful things I could be making. I finally realized that I was actually, though accidentally, accumulating a collection of what appeared to be winter scarves. Admittedly, some were long enough to come to the knees of NBA basketball players, but still it gave me an answer for the Martha Stewarts of the waiting rooms. And as I ran out of family members with birthdays about the time cold weather arrived, I was inspired to begin donating them to a homeless shelter. Now, I was not only calm, domestic, and productive, I was altruistic.
This period of difficulty along with its gratuitous side effects brought alive a sermon I had heard back when I lived in the land of denial. A many seasoned Minister had passed on these gems, “Life is hard.” and “For every goodie, there’s a baddie and for every baddie, there’s a goodie.” It seems impossible that I lived to sixty without admitting to myself that life really is hard. But since, I always focused on the wonderful untarnished possibilities of the future, it happened kind of naturally. For dreamers, running out of future means slamming into a brick wall called reality.
We’re like the joke about the two little boys, one a complete pessimist and the other an incorrigible optimist. The pessimist was put in a room with all the toys imaginable for a boy his age. After a few moments he began to sit dejectedly ignoring them all. When asked what the problem was, he replied, “I just know they’ll break, if I play with them. Or my mom will put a lot of them away for later, so I don’t want to like them and have to give them up.” Meanwhile, the optimist had been put in a room full of horse manure, where he was cheerfully singing and excitedly digging his way toward the bottom of the pile. When asked why he was so cheerful, he replied, “With this much manure, there’s bound to be a pony in here somewhere!”
Actually, both worrying about worst case scenarios and dreaming impossible dreams are attempts to avoid reality.
Since we are only given grace for the trouble at hand, not for those we imagine for tomorrow, my biggest challenge is learning to live in the present moment. Sometimes the brick walls of reality are themselves the agent of grace. There’s nothing like running out of future for providing motivation for living in the present. So the upside of hitting Medicare age is that it can open up a whole new way of being in the world.
There is always enough grace for the moment even for a dreamer/ worrier like me. With the grace of God I can learn to “seize the day!”
God is in the Timing 2
Several times, God has answered my prayers in ways that show He really does understand a wus like me.
One year I was teaching a third grade Sunday School class, but woke up feeling hopelessly unloveable. I didn’t think I could communicate God’s love very effectively in such a state, so I went straight to my equivalent of a prayer closet, the bathtub.
There I prayed, “Lord, I know you love me and that it’s weak to ask for signs, but please reassure me, so I can share Your love with the children.”
Just at that moment, my nine-year old daughter came into the bathroom. As I opened my mouth to scold her for this uncharacteristic violation of my privacy and our house rules, she wrote with her finger in the mist on the mirror, “God loves mommy.” Then she smiled and left before I could say anything.
It was very easy to teach with conviction and joy about the love of God that day.
Fame Finally
Today is a red-letter day.
If you Google, Laughter: Carbonated Grace, the first nine results of almost 2 million are my blogs.
But the piece de resistance is that if you Google Manure Tea, on the fourteenth page of 3,950,000 results, you find my blog! Now, if that isn’t fame, what is?
Of course, it raises the scary question of why would there be that many posts on manure? Who would wade through that much manure? Does this say anything about our culture and the dark side of the electronic age?
Are we filling the ether with…………………………….
On Eagle’s Wings
Seventy-four was the right age to do it.
To quit needing to belong, to stop letting a group define me,
to give up seeking courage through numbers.
By trying to always fit in, I somehow lost my sharp corners,
becoming rounded off with small, but important parts lost in the process.
It was a hard year of letting go, but it’s paid off with new life at seventy-five.
Choosing to be whole, not a chameleon, is like rising up on eagles’ wings.
Distinguishing between wants and needs, mine and others, so I can get to know and celebrate my unfinished self,
and begin again to grow more like the person I was created to be.
This Is My Bliss
To try to both encourage and challenge others by sharing stories of my journey. To flesh it out with seventy-five years of experiences of failure and perseverance, weakness and grace, aging and humor, seeking and insight, sorrow and joy.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 