Age, Part 3

The final section of this little essay on aging. I will say that aging is one of those things in life we cannot speak knowingly about when we're young. Duh, you say, but many young people think they know what aging is about. But here's something from an "older" person, a friend of mine--who is 78, doesn't look it, and is still working in the federal attorney's office. She says this of aging, "It's a dirty trick."
Obviously, at age 44, when I wrote the essay I've posted here, I thought I was old, and I thought I knew something. Now I know I was young and was only guessing. But that's life. Lots of guessing. Right?

Part 3  

When do we know we're old?  If we're young inside, and he was, must we admit to being old because others see us that way?  because our bodies insist we are?  Age brings its benefits; we really do know more old than we did young.  But mostly what it does is bring us up short when we catch those unplanned-for glimpses of ourselves in the mirror.  "Oh!  Is that what I look like?"  I know I'm not 19 or even 39 anymore.  I can even put the number on it--44.  And I don't mind being it as much as verbally owning up to it.  But inside me there is no age, and there is always the feeling--is it fantasy?--that I am young.  At the same time, I know the urgency one feels at this age, the need to rush, to catch something before it is gone.

            The feelings I'm experiencing have earned a label.  Our culture calls them the mid-life crisis.  I am tagged.  I wear the label as prominently as Hester wore her A; it is in the color of my hair, in the lines under my eyes.  It goes with me into the college classroom where I am one of the "mature" students.  For my dad, society's tag was old age.  Imagine an 89-year old man wanting to buy an artichoke farm.  In either case, with or without the label, the aging process does not relent.

            In the autobiographical story, Coming Out of the Ice, Victor Herman, who has spent 10 years in Soviet prisons, is now free.  He sits in front of the mirror in a barber shop and watches the haircut and shave he has waited 10 years for.  When it is done, his face, clean and bare of its beard, wears now a look of sadness, of disappointment.  We are confused.  Shouldn't he feel a luxurious, joyful sense of relief, a renewal of life?  The young woman who has done the barbering sees his disappointment, and she asks our "why?".  He answers simply, "I thought I was younger."

            We feel the poignancy of his reply, and we suffer with it.  Yes, we have suffered with him through his torture and beatings and isolation.  But at that moment, I think we hurt for ourselves as well as for Victor.   We have not been 10 years in a Soviet prison.  But we have known those quiet, private moments when we see that life is passing more quickly than we can keep track of, and we sense having lost somewhere a chunk of time, a piece of our own life.  We have had those brief shocking glimpses when we must face our own aging.

            I don't always know how old I look.  Older than I want.  But it doesn't matter; I'm younger than that.  My dad was old, and his years, his eyes, his body marked him old, as he spoke his dream of Watsonville and artichokes.  But my dad was younger than that.

Age, Part 2

So, I've been thinking. Perhaps when people say "Oh, you're so cute," they're actually opening the lid of the box they have put me in because of my age. Something I've said or done surprised them coming from an old person. I mean, I think we do not expect much from our senior people. They're done. They're relegated. This is actually a complaint I have had for a long time, and it is as much with getting old as with how people regard the old.

Part 2

In the last year of his life, his 90th year, Daddy wanted Mama's '67 Dodge back from my teen-age son.  He was going to move to Watsonville, California, and buy an artichoke farm.  He would live the rest of his life there.                   

            Watsonville.  One of the many places Daddy fell in love with in his earlier travels up and down California as a soft-sell life insurance salesman.  Wherever Daddy would go, he'd get the paper and check the Want Ads for real estate buys.  That's why he had property here and there--not vast holdings, but a house or 5-acre farm.  "Income property," he called it.  He had a place in Santa Cruz, near the Begonia Gardens; a small farm in Oceanside, southeast of the Rosecrutian retreat; and a cluster of rental houses in Lancaster, on the Mojave desert.  Daddy didn't own property in Watsonville, though I often heard him and Mama speak of the place fondly.  And he loved artichokes.

            But my dad had no driver's license in the 90th year of his life.  Cataract surgery on both eyes had left them only partly seeing.  (Those terrible thick glasses he wore made his eyes look bigger than eyes ought to look but did not make them see.)  He couldn't sit, rise, or walk unaided.  He didn't dress himself.  We all knew he couldn't move to Watsonville or drive or raise artichokes or do anything but stay right where he was and let us take care of him.  And when we told him, he knew it too, likely had known it all along.  He said, "I know.  But I want to."

            Maybe these were his attempts to keep living.  Death was near, he surely knew.  These were ways to turn his back on it, ignore it.  Maybe then it would go away.  Maybe then he would be young again.

           

Age: Perspective from An Artichoke Farm

Age is a definer, not that I want it to be. I say this because of how other people insist on regarding me. "Oh, you're so cute," in response to some funny thing I may have said or done. I've been saying funny things all my life. Now such behavior makes me so cute. People call me "Sweetie" or "Hon" or, yes, "Cutiepie" instead of my name. They might as well just call me old woman. That is what those titles mean. I insist I have never done this kind of thing to anyone.
And I insist that inside me, like in my soul, age matters little. Only when my joints hurt or I get more tired than I like do I feel my age. That is, those are the times I feel old.
Here is something I wrote many years ago. It's about age and my dad and about me, hence the title of this blog post.

Part 1

I walked around the corner of the house and saw my dad perched at the top of that tall ladder with his can of paint and brush.  Painting the house again.  It was a tall ladder, though never quite tall enough.  That and Daddy's five feet, six inches meant that the eaves of our 2-story Victorian never felt the slap of the paint brush, never wore the fresh cream color.  But Daddy painted often.  Perhaps he thought sometime he would reach the eaves.

            I wonder now if the neighbors chuckled when they saw him painting again--his stout, round body not quite filling out the white overalls, his white hanky knotted at the corners, covering his bald head for protection from sun and splattered paint.  I knew how he looked, but I never laughed.  Always when I saw him on that ladder I was frightened he would fall.  I can still feel the fear I felt for him then, though he is now gone and long before he died had given up climbing tall ladders.

            Daddy was about 60 years old then and I was eleven.  But I didn't know his age, not then.  He was just my dad.  When we would walk the six blocks from our house straight to the beach and the big slide there, it wasn't Daddy's age I thought about.  It was trying to keep up.  I had to run because my dad's walk was a stride, full of purpose and direction, a real executive walk.

            In the 89th year of his life, Daddy proposed marriage to a middle-aged spinster with history of emotional instability.  That was charity in him.  Yes, he was lonely without Mama, but to him, this was a charitable, loving act and the woman's family would be flattered.  Through the mail he proposed because he lived in Utah and she in California.  Her parents responded by mail, not flattered.  We--all of his children--suspected they would refuse. After all, Daddy was 88 years old.

Sorrow

Our hearts are broken. We mourn with the families in Connecticut.

We, as they, are still stricken with sorrow and still find it all unthinkable, unimaginable.

Words have little power to comfort, but I here promise my prayers and pledge my hopes that comfort will come and life will again hold some joy for them.

No doubt there are more

Things Wayne said. Or sang.

Does a chicken have lips?

Rock of ages cleft for me hardly ever. Rock of ages Clef TV almost every time. (This he sang. We had an appliance store in Santa Monica--Clef TV.)

You heard about the cock-eyed seamstress? She couldn't mend straight. (He said it. I didn't.)

How long is a Chinaman--with or without the question mark.*

And, of course, what time does the Chinaman go to the dentist? Two thirty.*

Does it have nuts in it?

The one I've written before about the book we saw as we waited in the Albertson check-out line. You Were Once A Dot. Wayne said, with no hesitation, Anwar Sadat right now.

A few jokes he may have made up. I never heard them from anyone else. 1. The old guy whose hearing was getting worse. 2. The employee sent to the company psychiatrist. 3. The horse who went into the bar.



*Very politically incorrect and perhaps offensive to Chinese men. I apologize.

Why Johnny CAN Read

Johnny is a red head. Wait, that's not what this is about.

Johnny is five, a new kindergarten guy. But he can read.

Last night he read two books to his mom, and when his dad put him to bed, Johnny was heard to say, "I can read. I can read."

How come? Why? I know you're aching to find out.

It's because of all the reading his family does in that home. They all read scriptures every morning, and for as long as Johnny has lived, he's heard a book or three at bedtime every night. That's the way it works. You hold the kid on your lap or close to you, and he (or she) follows along as you read out loud. I repeat. That's the way it works.

Besides, you could walk into a room in the house at any given moment, and it's likely someone would be sitting on the couch or the floor or somewhere. Reading.  It rubs off. Really.

At those morning readings Johnny has read a verse or two by repeating what his mom or dad read. Now, I'll just bet he's trying it on his own and doing fine with minimal help.

And it's no wonder he's proud and excited. Reading opens the world to him. Don't be doubting me. It's true.

P.S. I'm pretty sure his blond cousin Axel up in Canada is not far behind in this reading thing. Pretty darn sure.

About my mother

Mama

Short girls

are never beautiful,

my mother said,

only tall girls with long necks.

I thought she meant it

as instruction for me

to grow tall and get somehow

a neck worth notice.

But, no, it was for her,

a lament about her own lack
of height, knowing

she couldn't change it,

maybe trying to make me

think she wasn't beautiful,

one of those things mothers say

when a glance in the mirror

brings them up short.

If she was no beauty

I never knew it.

The other story

Sean, 23, bought a new-to-him truck. Exactly the truck he'd always wanted. Of course, he looked it over carefully. So did his friend John, a mechanic, along with Sean's girlfriend. They even crawled underneath. They all said it looked great.

Sean and his girlfriend took a drive on the freeway. The left front end dropped out--wheel, axle, all that goes with that assembly. The truck went toward the median, crossed it, and faced a semi, which hit Sean's truck. Sean was thrown out and was killed. The truck was destroyed, except for the little cocoon-like place where his girlfriend was sitting. She had some bruises. That's all, except for her great loss. Sean.

Sean is the son of my dr's nurse. Her only boy. She told me many things last Friday, including the above account, and cried all through our visit. Says her husband is devastated; he had plans for all that he was going to pass on to his son--not things. "Now what?" he asks.

I can still learn

It isn't always about you. That is, it isn't always about me. Sometimes I think it is, or I behave as though that's what I think.

Last Friday's dr appointment was all about me, and I didn't want to go, didn't need to go, had been to the cardiac dr on Wednesday. So I called and said, "I want to know what this appointment is about."

"The nurse says this is a follow up to your heart attack."

"But I have just been to the cardiac clinic. Just today."

"I will have the nurse call you."

No call. Next day I call again with the same questions.

"I'll check with the nurse." I'm on hold. Kind of impatiently on hold. You know.

"The nurse says you need to come."

I could have said, "Tough, I'm not coming." But I didn't. Friday morning I went. I was right, though. I didn't need to be there, but since they said I needed to come--you know, like they made me come--I decided to tell the truth about something that has irked me there. So I told the dr I have a problem with drs who come in, hand extended (the glad hand approach, I call it), to show the patient, me, they really care. "I figure it's something they're told to do. But I only like handshakes that are genuine." He said it wasn't that way with him. No one told him to do it (I didn't believe it. Dr Burr, Dr Funke, PA Carmichael--they all do it, like somebody told them to.) Then he said, "And it is genuine."

"Hmph," I thought. And I was sure I didn't need to be there.

Then the dr asked me if I'd been writing much lately.

"I have."

"What have you been writing?" he asked.

"Well, I have written four poems in the last several months. All pretty much the same theme. Death." So then we talked about death. I told him a few lines from the latest poem. The conversation was all about me, really, because I know so much about the subject, you know.

Then I asked him if he had experienced the death of anyone close or anyone in his family.

"My father died three weeks ago," he said. And suddenly, it wasn't about me.

I gasped, couldn't help it, and said with heartfelt sympathy that I was sorry. I asked why he had died--"aneurism in his abdomen; it burst, and you don't live through that."

I asked his dad's age. "Sixty-one." I gasped again, couldn't help it. "Oh, I am so sorry." I said it again. "Then you're just a kid," I said. "You're not 40, are you."

"I just turned 40," he said. And he was starting to cry, doing his best not to, but his eyes welled with tears. I asked if he cries every day. "Not any more," he said.

He told me he knows all the technical stuff about aneurisms and about people dying. "But it isn't the same when it's your dad. Those things don't help."

I said again I was sorry and hoped he would always shake my hand, which he did before he left the room.

That was why I needed to go, so he could talk about his dad, cry a little bit. It wasn't really about me at all.

There's more, but I have to write it tomorrow or another time. It's about his nurse, whose only son was killed in June.

It's about writing

Last night a young man--would-be lawyer--came over for help with his two-page essay, required as part of the application process.

What he had written showed he was trying to do too much in those two pages. But there was a lot to work with. He said he had rewritten two or three times. I say, good for him, but it was very much like a dumping out draft. Just getting ideas down on paper.

I told him he had work to do. We talked about many things. I asked many questions.

Thank goodness he is willing to keep working on it. Not all people are willing to do that with their writing. But he's 26 and very serious about getting into law school. Shows some maturity.

I told him he had to write this one--the not so good one--before he could write a better one. Duh.

But some folks don't accept that. They think either a) I'm done or b) this stinks. The ones who think a are just that. Done. For better or worse, usually worse. The ones who think b get discouraged and think they should throw it away.

This guy is neither a nor b. He's c) willing to work on it. He'll be back in a few days with a new draft. I'm encouraged.

Update

One day last week I could see my owl in the tree. I knew where to look, of course, because of what was on the walkway. He spent the day there, mostly sleeping. Not his first day there, as you know. He is gone now. I don't know where owls go. Is it south?

This is the third time I have had owls hang out here. Did I say that before? Always the small grey screech owls. I quite like it, except for the cleaning up after them.

Speaking of owls. My fake owl had lost his head; I have just now put it back on and I don't know why. That scare-away-the-birds-and-squirrels device never worked. Not on the back deck, not on the front porch. But I guess he is sort of part of my place now. No, I have not named him.

Speaking of frogs, and we weren't, a tiny green frog perched on the window slat of my front door for most of the day today. Now he is sitting on the walkway close to the front porch. I told him he should move because he might get stepped on where he is. He ignored me. I do not want to be the one who steps on him.

Speaking of my skin cancer surgery, and we weren't, I got the stitches out today. The doctor says everything looks good. What did you expect her to say? The black eye/lid/cheek looks horrible, but she didn't mention that. Her assistant said to do the heat and ice packs. Okay. I will.

Good things:

• today's phone call from Richard, his story about Axel
• Friday's phone call from Wayne and what he said to Alyce and Ben (we were in my car together)
• the entire weekend, including the Brimley bonding
• Andrew taking me to the rehearsal last night; Andrew singing in my choir
• Lola playing for it
• The music we're singing
• my telephone chat with Ann today
• I can now get my entire face wet

A New Resident on My Property

So now I have an owl. He sits in the ash tree that hangs over my front walkway. Here's what he--cute little guy that he is--has meant to my life.

•  The sparrows who have and raise up their babies in the bird house on my back deck are out of here. Quit their nest building mid-task. And they are nowhere to be seen, not on my deck, not in the backyard trees, not on my porch or flower pots.
• No robins or starlings peck around the yards.
• Flickers and quail I occasionally see in the neighborhood, but not at my place.
• I hear no finches outside my writing room window.
• The mourning doves have quieted and do not sit on my roof.
• Squirrels are scarcer. I'm not weeping over it.
• I heard the owl calling in the early dark one morning, no doubt signaling these other animals to stay clear of his territory.
• I have told him this is my house. I know he heard me because he was looking right at me.
• I have to wash and scrub the front walkway daily. And for a little owl, I mean, he is a cute little owl, he leaves a lot of stuff. Large splatty poops and small brown bundles of regurgitated animal parts. Did you want to know about that?
• The other day, when I turned on the sprinkler to wet down the place and start my scrubbing, he watched the water move across the lawn.
• I do not yell at him. Not yet, at least.

I like him and I don't like him.