Category Archives: Gifts of Age
The Best Thing about Getting Seriously Old
The best thing about getting seriously old is that you don’t have to.
The Spirit
At first, it seemed as if God walked
through the garden of my life
on velvet kitten paws,
gifting me with fleet impression
of brushing soft caress,
leaving feather light prints
in the tender earth
of my spirit.
In later times, God climbed
the granite mountain
of my stubborn will,
using painful stake and hobnail boots
to gain each foothold,
bringing about His kingdom
through the thundering voice
of circumstance.
Then, recently, I sensed God lost,
absent on Sabbatical
of undetermined length,
leaving only fading echoes
in my memory.
Until, at last, in desert night
and aching loneliness,
I faced my emptiness.
And discovered Her –
within.
Fear and Faith
I am definitely in God’s Learning Disabled Class. I am so afraid that I am letting God down, that it is hard for me to accept the challenge of people who have outgrown where I am.
I have admitted that I am a wus, a devout coward, a congenital worrier.
Yet, I experienced God’s gift of faith, when I was aware of panic in the operating room during my surgery and at the same time I experienced my energy level sinking rapidly, so assumed I might be dying. It was ok. God gave me faith and peace at that moment.
Several times my husband has had near death events and God gave me faith for the crises, even enough to drive him seven miles to the hospital in an ice storm dodging trees and downed power lines on ice encrusted back roads.
But, I still don’t manage to trust for dangers that I imagine in the future. These are not imaginary or unlikely dangers. They are real. But no matter how many times God has rescued me and my family, I still worry.
I have a friend who frequently cheerfully proclaims to one and all, that she has faith, so she doesn’t fear anything. I find that intimidating. It makes me feel like a failure, so I tell myself that she’s in denial.
Yesterday, I told her that and for a moment, we glared at each other across the abyss of my accusation.
I learned long ago that grace is for the moment, not worries about future possibilities, even probable ones. But, in reflecting on yesterday’s conversation, I finally let myself hear God challenging me to develop the habit of faith. He has shown me over and over that He is with me in every situation. I know He loves my family more than I ever could.
I don’t need to believe nothing painful will happen. I just need to believe He will be with me and them in those times and can give us the grace to not only endure them, but to persevere and grow from them.
I don’t need to just trust His words, “I will be with you always.” I have experienced that over and over and over.
And knowing that, even wus that I am, I don’t have to live in fear of my own weakness and inadequacies, for His grace is enough.
He knows I’m a wus. He accepts me as a wus. But He expects me to trust not in my own understanding or my own strength, but in His faithfulness, which He has proven over and over in my small life.
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.
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!”
Got a Gig Tonight
Ready for Gig
Whoo Hoo!
I get to do a couple of my blog posts at an open mike tonight. What fun to do for the first time at seventy-five. I think this is going to be a great age.
My gig is at The Open Hand, a coffee house behind Cat’s Music in Pomona after 7pm. I’m doing my posts, Grace a la Manure and God’s Spiritually Challenged.
I lead devotionals at a nursing home, so I figure even an empty house can’t be a very much harder audience than there, since many are stone deaf and some are living a whole different reality.
Please feel free to pray anyway.
Pecs and Buns
Breathes there a woman, from age so dead, who never to herself has said, “Now, there goes a nice set of buns.”
I was asked recently, “When did you realize you were getting old?”
Realizing and feeling are two very different things. At seventy-eight I still don’t feel old, because all the people I’ve been at different ages are still part of me. Remembering is not like imagining. Remembering takes me back. I don’t have to imagine what it feels like to be young, because I’ve been there, done that.
But, I also remember clearly the day in my fifties, when I first realized I had reached the age of invisibility. I went into an auto repair shop for some help and though several men glanced my way, no one came forward to ask what I wanted. It was a wake-up call leading me to notice that men’s heads didn’t turn anymore when I came into a room or passed them on the street.
That was a traumatic entrance into an angst filled change of life.
Rites of Passage
Grieve with us for youthful beauty lost,
remembering our vibrant gracefulness
bright’ning eyes and turning manly heads.
Mourn it with us. Keen our woman’s loss.
A strange invisibility is now our aging fate,
like graying ghosts, unseen, we walk.
Beat your breast. Shred your public garment.
The maggot of our egocentricity
leaves a hollowness of empty vanity.
Wail. Keen. Howl. Beat the ritual drum.
Celebrate the death of youth until it can be borne.
EoN 1993
However, as I moved into my sixties, I discovered there actually was an upside to becoming invisible. This stage of my life involved a lot of travel, so I was spending many hours waiting in airports. There I discovered the fun of watching the young men walk by. I worried that someone would notice and consider me a dirty little old lady, until I remembered that I had on my invisibility of age cloak. After that, I spent many enjoyable hours comparing buns and deciding whether I was a pecs or buns woman. Someone needs to write a ‘Pecs and Buns’ song, similar to ‘Tits and Ass’ from the musical, Chorus Line.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 