Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate

NoSnowBirds

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

They leave.  This is the time.  Lois, our cleaning lady, poked her head in and said, “Good-bye.  See you in April.”  Mark and Elizabeth leave on the 29th for Grass Valley in California.  Many others are already gone to Florida or Arizona or New Mexico or Mexico.

We call them snowbirds, though it should be nosnowbirds, since they fly away at dropping temperatures and clouds of frozen moisture.  The reasons they go are diverse, I imagine, but cluster around icy roads, slick sidewalks, the uninviting nature of cold air for being outside.

It makes sense.  At a certain age, one I’ve reached, driving on roads and navigating sidewalks slick with ice and polished snow can be scary.  To get outside requires more thought in dress and more intention.  Just going out for a stroll can mean preparation. There is, too, the lure of a different place.  The beaches of Florida, the culture of the Southwest and Mexico.  A way to break up the year, give it a punctuation when work no longer provides it.

Still.  I love the snow, the cold, the quiet, the coming of the inside season.  The holiseason makes a good deal more intuitive sense with distinct seasonal changes, seasonal changes I find crucial to my own spiritual practice.  Putting the garden to bed, letting it rest for a season plus also feels right to me.  I would not want to continue my gardening season past the end of September, early October.

No.  We’ll stay.  Here.  In Andover.

Aging, Art and Culture, Music, Third Phase

.5%

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

Last night Jerry, who has a big band show on KBEM, gave us some statistics.  “2% say jazz is their favorite music.  Another 2% say classical.  .5% like both.”  That puts Kate and me into the .5% bracket.

(Coltrane)

Jazz and classical music are an acquired taste.  Rock and roll and the other forms of popular music are, too, I suppose, but their acquisition comes laced into high school, i-tunes, radio.  Support of their sound comes through commercial channels that, though increasingly fractured, still provide marketing and distribution for them.  They also have youth culture on their side.

Jazz still has a certain underground feel, a music played off the main streets of American culture and by the marginal and marginalized.  It is a music that languishes if it becomes popular, witness the fusion era and the cool jazz played on easy listening stations.  Now, with it’s popularity dwindling again, it can regenerate, offer the lure of the hidden, the cult.

Classical music has a dwindling band of listeners, too, graying as are the jazz audiences. Classical music will find itself refreshed as it, too, becomes the province of smaller gatherings, people devoted to musicology, to the repertoire of yesterday.

Neither of the significant aural art forms will disappear.  Yes, the opportunities to hear them may diminish, but there will always be live performances somewhere for both. The availability of recorded and digital music ensures that they will survive until other audiences find them.

(Musical_Instruments  Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677)

So it may be that classical music aficionados will attend trios and quartets in performance more than orchestras, though here the SPCO seems to be on firm footing at last.  Jazz followers will head to clubs and bars, much as they always have, and to the occasional festival.  Performers in both will gain renown in smaller groups, but they will be remembered.  Popularity is not the mark of good art, though you can’t deny its value for paying bills.

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Subjugation and Submission

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Samhain                                                                     Thanksgiving Moon

The nurse had a corner office.  “Yes, you can see Olive Garden over here and the Allina clinic over there.  Oh, and cars on the freeway.”  She’d had it all day.  When she handed me the gown and robe, she assured me that the glass had mirroring, “You’ll not be making a show.”  Didn’t bother me either way, though spread out immediately below the third floor windows were two large parking lots and people came and went from their cars.

After gowning and robing, I got a look in a mirror.  There was another old guy in hospital wear, slightly bemused.  Me.  This time the old guy in the mirror was me.  Took me a bit to acclimate that.

We make these visits once in a while as strangers from the non-medical world, visiting a world truly known and understood only by those who work in it daily.  Kate was among them.  It’s a world where the casual infliction of pain is part of the job. Like the IV I had inserted.  It’s a world where strong boundaries in our world are constantly breached.

People not known to us, or known briefly, may touch our naked bodies and may insert objects in different orifices.  These are acts that, outside of this special world, are crimes, even felonies.  Here we consent, play the masochist to the system’s sadist.

That system says it wants us as partners in our own health care but our lived experience of the medical world is one of subjugation and submission.  We take and do what the doctor orders.  Subjugation and submission.  Rebeling here challenges your own self-interest in a very direct way, so the penalty is high.

The TSA, as I observed last month, trains us in submission, too.  Take off belts, shoes,  empty your pockets, carry only this much shampoo, this much toothpaste, stand here, raise your arms.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait.

These self-contained worlds, whirring and buzzing, act as they do for our benefit.  And I believe they do. He said, choking a bit on the TSA bone.

Still, for those of us with stubborn, strong personal boundaries and a high sense of self-agency, encounters with these systems jars the most basic and sensitive aspects of our psyche. They leave me tired and out of sorts unless I’ve been drugged.  As was the case yesterday.

My regard for the often maligned American health care is, paradoxically, quite high.  I’ve had generally good results, confounding my aversion to subjugation and submission.  Efforts I’ve made to make myself more of a collegial actor in my health care have helped.

Still, as I look at third phase life and its inevitable downward turn, the thought of entering the strange and often alien world of medicine more and more often is not a pleasant one.  It does motivate me, if I needed another motivation, to stay healthy.  Not sure what to do with this, but here it is.

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Once More Onto the Gurney

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Samhain                                                                Thanksgiving Moon

Purified, my documents for the temple in order, I’m ready to go lay myself on the table of sacrifice.

Though I’m not nervous, it is sobering to realize that this is one of those moments when the outcome could be life altering.  To continue my now over extended metaphor, each time we draw near the holy of holies we risk the wrath of the gods.

Of course, this is supposed to have the opposite result, timely knowledge.  I’m in favor of that.

Aging, Bees, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Good-Bye Garden. See You On the Flipside.

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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

The transition from growing season to fallow season creates a sudden release from one IMAG0604domain of chores.  No more spraying, harvesting, weeding, checking the health of the plants.  No more colony inspections.

Many baby boomers, the paper says, have migrated to downtown apartments citing outdoor work and home maintenance as primary motivation.  While that once might have made sense to me, now I wonder.  The outdoor work, as long as I’m able, keeps me active, close to the rhythms of the natural world.  It gives more than it takes.  Cut off from it in an apartment doesn’t sound appealing.  If you don’t like it, if it takes more than it gives, then, yes.

I know that feeling. Home maintenance would take far more than it gives if I felt IMAG0944 Kate and me1000croppedresponsible for doing it myself.  So I can understand wanting to move away from that.  In an apartment the building takes over the plumbing, the furnace, the windows, the doors. Even there, however, being responsible for seeing that the maintenance gets done, though it does feel burdensome, maintains our agency.  And I like that.

More than any of these matters, though, is the single word home.  This is home.  Though we could, I don’t want to create another one.  At least not now.

Aging, Health, Latin, MOOCS, Third Phase

The Wall

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Samhain                                                              New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Hit a mental wall yesterday.  Could. Not. Do. One more MOOC or Latin related thing. Brain was not interested.  In the AM  we completed the last of the garden chores for the season and I went downstairs to work on Ovid.  Nope.  Then turned on ModPo and, for the first time since both MOOCs started I did not complete a week’s work on time.  So this week I have to finish week 9 and do all of Week 10.

Doable because I no longer have Modern and Post Modern, but I don’t like to be behind.  I’ll catch up today or tomorrow.  At the same the new Latin learning style Greg recommended is, again, doable, but it takes more time.  For now.  The combination of the ending of Modern/Post Modern, the assessments due in ModPo, the home work Kate and I did to get ready for the Samhain bonfire and the bonfire itself, coupled with the changed Latin working style short circuited me.  Or threw an internal G.F.I.

Then, there is, too, the G.D. time switch.  I’m a naked, blanket, no prisoners opponent of messing with time.  Leave it on standard time and damn the consequences.

As I write this, I realize I’m not much further along today.  Need some more rest.  On the other hand, feeling tired means I’ve been active and that’s how I want to be.

There is, though, one more flaw in this ointment.  I started my low fiber diet yesterday, clear liquids starting at 11:45 pm tonight.  Then that fun couple of hours with a Powerade Miralax punch.  Those of you over 50 almost certainly know this routine.

As I read the rules for this procedure, it reminded me of ascetics who would undergo elaborate rites of purification before entering the temple to commune with their gods.  In this case the god will appear in white armed with a long, skinny camera.  He, not me, will be going deep inside myself, gaining self-knowledge for me and recording it with a camera. It’s better than meditation! Gastroenterologist be with me now and in the time of my procedure.  So help me Galen.

 

 

Aging, Latin, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Splitting Wood

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon

Each day has its lessons.  Today the Latin was harder than yesterday or the day before and I had to spend time in the grammar book reminding myself about supines and gerundives. On top of that I still couldn’t wrestle a sentence out of the two verses that troubled me.

When I’d run my brain as far as I could down the old Latin way, it was a good time to go IMAG1084outside and split wood for the Samhain bonfire.  Boy, it had been awhile since I split wood.

The splitting maul combines a dull axe and a sledge hammer. When you’re splitting wood you want to force the fibers apart, not cut them, as a sharpened felling or limbing ax will do.  That results in ax blades sunk deep into the log.

Besides, as often happens, the splitting maul wedges itself in the wood, allowing for a secondary maneuver which involves lifting maul and with it the log into the air, then bringing both down on whatever solid surface you’re working with, in this case a chunk of the elm formerly in the vegetable garden.  The more slender handle of a felling ax is not designed for the force generated by this action.  The splitting maul, however, has a plastic handle that absorbs the blow and keeps right on working.

Here’s the completed work, which consists of two cedar trees blown over by a windstorm aIMAG1081 couple of years ago.  They used to be beyond our deck, between us and the vegetable garden.  I still miss them.  Well, this is actually about half of it, but you get the point of what splitting accomplishes.  It creates a surface that more easily catches fire; and, if it were an issue, which it isn’t, makes them easier to put in a fireplace or stove.

Anyhow, after lifting the maul and the occasional log in the air and slamming them back down on the elm, I was glad I do regular resistance work.

Aging, Humanities, Latin, MOOCS, Third Phase, US History, World History

Anco Impari.

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon
T. S. Eliot       Little Gidding V

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The hurry of last week has receded and today is an outdoor day, raspberries and fertilizer. It’s chilly out there, but physical labor adds its own heat.

The end is in sight for both MOOCs, Modern/Post Modern with only two more weeks and ModPo with four.  Like the course I took last year on Greek Myth both of these have been excellent.  The interactive discussion forums and the video lectures in small, accessible chunks work well for the at home classroom.  The reading in all three has been challenging, definitely college and post-grad level material.  Did I mention that they’re free?

The Great Course’s cd and dvd classes, taught by professors of proven teaching ability, are excellent, too.  The lectures in these courses are longer and in more depth, but I have not found the spur to do the reading as I have in the MOOC’s.  That’s me, of course.  And, there is no interaction at all.  An advantage is that you can do them over any time frame and in multiple venues.  The MOOCs require a computer screen.  These are not free.

Though I am at heart an auto-didact and can develop my own reading plans, I appreciate these compressed experiences where an expert in a field alerts you to current issues and literature.  They’re a quicker way in to a broad foundation in a discipline and for an overview of what might have additional interest.

Over the years I’ve pursued in particular the history of ideas, ancient history:  Rome, Egypt, China, mythology, philosophy and literature.  In literature I’ve tended to focus on the classics and on the classical tradition.  These broad areas have fascinated me for a long time.  I plan to challenge myself over the fallow time with calculus.  Kate’s promised time as my tutor.

I suppose I could gamble or drink or run naked through the streets, but, hey.  Each to his own?  Right?

Aging, Asia, Friends, Latin, MOOCS

TGIF

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Fall                                                                     New (Samhain) Moon

Rain washing away the drought, ushering in cooler, more fall like weather.  Gray skies and a general chill in the air.  Familiar to anyone from a temperate latitude.  I like it.

Busy day today.  Up early and out in the garden in the cool before dawn, working with my hands spreading fertilizer, raking it in to the top couple of inches of soil.  Back inside to write my 2nd essay for ModPo, this on a William Carlos Williams poem, identifying its imagist qualities.  After that, a nap.

Greg and I took my creaky Latin back onto the track.  I pumped the handle hard, but the little car moved pretty slow.  We set some goals per two week period, 60 verses per through next May.  If I can go faster, I will.

Immediately after Latin over to Kyoto Sushi, an all you can eat Japanese restaurant in Maple Grove just off Weaver Lake Road.  Bill and I had lunch and he passed some bio-till to me along with some reading material.  As old guys sometimes do, we also discussed hearing aids.

Back home for a second nap.  Back up and two lectures on Emerson, Self-Reliance and Experience.  Emerson as a proto-Nietzsche and Baudelaire influence as well as a post-Kantian precursor to the modernist critiques of the early twentieth century.  Whew.  That confused me, too.  Basically, he emphasizes active personal experience, moving forward into the future, letting the past be the past and your self be its Self.

Workout.  OK. Time for TV.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Our Land and Home, Writing

Yet Another Late Learning

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Fall                                                                        Harvest Moon

Another late lesson.  Or, perhaps better, a lesson only incompletely grasped, now more fully understood.

Learning, difficult learning, excites me and keeps me motivated.  But.  The brain only has so much patience for stuffing new things in before it tires, eyes glaze over and a slight headache develops.  At least for me.

(Peasants harvesting crops, by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel)

Over this growing season I’ve discovered that taking a work outside break, a work with my hands or my back break, releases the tension and I can come back to my work refreshed.  I have also found that I enjoy the work outside much more when I understand its value in the total rhythm of my day.  So there’s a virtuous circle here.  Work hard at the desk, then get up and accomplish something manual garden work or changing light bulbs or organizing the garage.