Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Writing

I Like Getting Old. Patti Smith

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Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

Something’s happening here.  What it is is not exactly clear.  At the end of this gardening year I feel like I’ve finally gotten it.  That is, I believe I now understand how to grow fruits and vegetables in quantity and of high food value. As Kate said, moving her hand in a low but upward swoop,  “Sometimes the learning curve is long.”  And it has been.  Over 20+ years.  Today though I feel good about my gardening skill.

On the writing front I’ve rounded up several agents to query when Missing comes back from its beta readers and has gone through the copy editing process.  I’m deep in the research phase for Loki’s Children, focused right now on the text, Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  No matter how all this turns out in the matter of publication, I’ve let the inner and outer censors go.  I don’t know how or why, but I freed them and they left.  So now the process is all good.  Research.  Critique.  Feedback.  Submission.  Writing.  All good.

The MOOC’s have retaught me a valuable lesson.  When I’m engaged in scholarship, I’m happy, in my element.  I hit flow most often while learning.  That means the work with Ovid, which begins again on October 4th, is another chunk of the same.  Happiness is a warm book.

Last night I had a dream in which a person ridiculed me for not being spontaneous, being disciplined to a fault.  It bothered me as I slowly rose to consciousness this morning.  Am I so focused on a few things that I’m missing life?  Has my willingness to change directions, chart a new path receded?  Been suppressed by all this?

No.  I don’t think so.  But I’m open to other perspectives.  To me my life is full, rich.  There are friends and family whom I see or communicate with regularly.  There is a creative life partnership with Kate here.  The dogs alone provide many spontaneous moments because dogs live only in the now.  In the past I have initiated change in the world through political action.  Now the action is more at home and in the family.  Seems just right for the third phase.

 

 

Aging, Dogs, Health

Dog Leak Source Found. Medical Positives.

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Lughnasa                                                            Honey Moon

I believe I found the egress. (see post below)  Wired it up.  I walked the whole perimeter, about half a mile, checking the bottom of the chain link fence for sign.  These include scuffed earth, bent or snapped off twigs or plant stalks, areas where the earth has been scratched.  Then, like the cowboys of old, I take out my wire cutters and my almost depleted roll of baling wire and anchor the fence to something solid.  The good old empirical method will tell whether or not I was successful.  Dogs in perennial beds.  No. Dogs in back.  Yes.

Also, forgot to mention here the good news about my shoulder.  After six months of sleep disturbing and task disrupting pain, my physical therapy has eliminated almost all the pain.  I would say I’m 95% back to normal.  The p.t. was monotonous and frequent, but over time it pulled me back to good health.  Worth it.  Much better than meds.

In addition, as far as medical good news goes, as some of you know, I’ve mostly cut out carbs, lost 16 pounds and upped my consumption of fruits and vegetables.  Just like your Mom was supposed to have told you, although I don’t remember those lessons from my Mom.  My new doctor did an A1c test which measures average blood sugar over a three month period and mine was in the normal range.  Barely, but it was there.  I’m convinced that the change in eating pattern walked me back from prediabetes.  I’ll stick with the new eating paradigm, healthier anyway.

One more piece of good news in the A1c’s trail.  My cholesterol numbers stayed in excellent ranges in spite of the fact that I’ve increased my carnivorous activity.  That’s all the good news that’s fit to print.

Aging, Garden, Our Land and Home, Politics, Third Phase

Living the Dream

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Lughnasa                                                                       New (State Fair) Moon

Life seems to run from one irony to another, offering a wry twist often when you least expect it.  This irony is not one of those.  It’s been building for about 19 years, but it has begun to peak.  The irony is this.  The U.S. like the rest of the world, continues to urbanize with central cities beginning to outstrip ‘burbs.  “In 2011, for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the rate of urban population growth outpaced suburban growth, reversing a trend that held steady for every decade since the invention of the automobile.”*

What’s the irony here?  Now I find myself willing to defend the suburban or, in my case, exurban experience.  Why is that ironic?  Because I spent 24 years living in Minneapolis and St. Paul deeply involved in all manner of urban politics, working as an urban minister and eventually in charge of urban ministry for the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area.  Though raised in a small town, I made the transition to solidly urban guy.  It was my profession, the city.

Cities burst with energy, offer sophisticated amusements, diverse places to live, a variety of foods to eat and the sort of jostling with others that sparks creativity.  They also make obvious the divisions in our society that a drive from the Northside of Minneapolis to Kenwood, directly south of it, epitomizes.  Even that last creates a juicy political scene with lots of different actors.  Fun.

And I love it.  Note the present tense.  I love it.  I enjoy being in the city and I love the kind of people who make cities their home.

Even so.  I now live in an exurb of the Twin Cities.  Only a couple of miles north of our home there are cornfields.  Surrounding our development is a huge truck farm with tractors and warehouses and rows and rows of carefully planted vegetables.  This is where the metro proper ends.  The MUSA line, the Metropolitan Urban Services Area, runs less than a mile south of our home. (see map)

Over the years Kate and I have made a life here that would not have been possible in the city.  We have a woods, several garden beds for flowers and vegetables, an orchard and a fire pit.  Our house has about 3800 square feet with the finished basement and we could never afford that much space in the city.  This combination of a large, relatively inexpensive home and land enough to create our own footprint has given us a rich and full life.

We have the suburban dream, that is, country living close enough to the city to access museums, orchestras, restaurants and political activity.  In my first days here I felt isolated and unhappy, far away from the things that had made me who I was.  As time passed though, I began to find a new person emerging based on what we had here.

It is, in some important respects, a narrower life.  Kate and I spend most of our time either outside or inside our home, but on our property.  In this sense the community oriented life of the city does not have a domestic equivalent here, at least for us.

Here there is silence.  Here we can focus on our creative activities:  horticulture, writing, sewing/quilting.  Here our life concentrates at our home.  This is similar to the farm life of millions of Americans prior to WWII.  Yes, it has its privations, but it also has unique benefits.

It remains to be seen how third phase life can be lived here, especially the waning years of that time.  We may find the distances too great for us, the isolation dangerous.  I hope not because I have learned to love this exurban spot as much I love the city.

 

 

*Time Magazine article, The End of the Suburbs

Aging, Third Phase

Third Phase Cinema

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Summer                                                                  Moon of the First Harvests

As the third phase filter got added to my lens, certain books, art works and movies began to pop up, unbidden.  They had been there all along of course, but now I see certain works as pertaining to this new moment of my life.

To Wit.  Wit, the long decline and death of the professor of English literature starring Emma Thompson raises many quality of life issues for chronically or terminally ill people and couches them in the poetic context of the metaphysical poet John Donne.  Definitely worth seeing.

Last night Kate and I watched Buena Vista Social Club.  It’s a 1998 documentary so you’ve probably seen it, heard the album and moved on, but from a third phase perspective it’s worth another look.  Ry Cooder, American guitarist and champion of American roots music as well as traditional music from another the world, went to Cuba in 1997 to record Cuban music.  When he got there, the folks who had agreed to play either couldn’t come (West Africans) or couldn’t be found.  So he began asking around and found musicians, many associated with the Buena Vista Social Club which closed in 1944.

The musicians he found were legends of the Cuban music scene who had passed into obscurity.  The group, which called itself the Buena Vista Social Club, put out the best selling album of the same name and toured, playing the Netherlands and Carnegie Hall.  Here’s the third phase connection.  Many of these resurrected musicians were in their 80’s and 90’s.  They had, most of them, given up music for one reason or another, i.e. too little money, arthritis, boredom.

Brought together they reignited in each other the passion, love and craft they shared, making music.  It is a remarkable story of gifts found, nurtured and revived, just as it is a story of men and women found, nurtured and revived.  What can we do, I found myself asking, to retain the gifts, the passion, the loves we have so they vitalize and revitalize us as we grow into the further reaches of the third phase?

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Being Human

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Summer                                                             Moon of First Harvests

The morning after.  The Woolly feeling lingers here, a gentle mantle over the back, around the fire pit where we gathered.  A primary, perhaps the primary, purpose of the Woollies is to see and be seen.  No invisible men allowed.  We have bum knees, wonky shoulders, weak legs, poor eyes and sore backs.  These are acknowledged, not for sympathy, but for recognition that we are each the sore back, the poor eyes, the weak leg, the wonky shoulder, the bum knee.  And that we are none of us only or even mostly our ailments, more and mostly we are the ones who have spent this 25 year+ journey together, time that included wholeness, able-bodiedness and now includes physical decline.

We’re not exactly a support group.  We don’t try to fix each others problems (usually).  We do go in for empathy, but not too much because too much focuses the group on one while the whole has been and is the most important.  We’re not a group of friends, or, at least, not only a group of friends, rather we are fellow pilgrims, traveling our ancientrails in sight of each other, calling out from our journey and hearing the other call out from theirs.

Though our ancientrails intersected less in times past, as we move into third phase life they intersect more and more.  How to make this transition.  How to create a life anew when work is no longer the primary lodestar.  How to look death in the face, unafraid, even welcoming.  No, not suicidal welcoming, but unafraid of what is common, ordinary, part of the path.  We look at each others hearts, hear the pulse of each other’s blood.  This is what it means to be human.

 

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Home

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Summer                                                       Moon of the First Harvests

Home.  Back in the early 90’s when we lived on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, I felt a sense of homecoming when I crossed Ford Parkway.  I had crossed into home turf.  It’s taken a long while for a similar feeling to take hold here in Andover, but now, as I turn off Highway 10 onto Round Lake Boulevard, that sense of homecoming greets me.

Yes, it’s marked by Baker’s Square, Wendy’s, Conoco, Burger King and a Holiday station, but, they’re our franchises, there for our use.  The feeling gets even stronger going up Round Lake and begins to thicken at Round Lake itself where the water is on the left and the peat bog fields of Field’s Truck Farms are on the right.  Those fields are the remains of an old lake, eutrophied completely, a process that has advanced a good ways in Round Lake.

As I turn onto 153rd Ave NW, our property shows up about 1,000 feet in and I see the 6 foot chain link fence we had installed because Celt, our earliest Irish Wolfhound, climbed the four-foot fences to go greet passers-by on the street.  This particular fence was put in place after a derecho felled a large poplar and destroyed the one we had originally extended from four feet to six.  There is, too, the truck gate, 10 feet wide that we had installed because we wanted to get trucks from nurseries and our own trucks back onto our property.

The trees have grown up, grapevines have covered them, the prairie grass has morphed over time but has a pleasing current configuration.  On the six foot fence itself, the border of the prairie grass, grows our wild grapes.  Wild grapes that we pick in the fall for jams and jellies.

The driveway, the sloped driveway that creates its own stories in the winter, goes up to the three car garage that makes our house look as if we live as an adjunct to the garages.  On the right going up is a rusted and unused basketball hoop, an emblem, as at so many homes, of a boy, now gone.  In the garage itself we have a unique five stall dog feeding set up that we used when our pack was at its peak and we had five Irish Wolfhounds at once.

Do you see what I mean?  Home has an accretion of memories, memories attached to physical things like lakes and peat bogs, fences and basketball hoops.  This is not somebody else’s memories but our memories, our family’s memories.  It is those memories, those thick layers of past embraced constantly in the present, that make a home.

Inside the house are the same layers of memories, of guests and friends and immediate family, of dogs and workmen, nights and days, meals and passion.  It is the thickness, the particularity of it all, that makes this our home and not someone elses.  After 20 years, we have laid down many layers of smiles, tears, hard work and love.  That’s why this is home.

Aging, Feelings, Friends, Health, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Watching As the Lights Go Out

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Summer                                                                        Solstice Moon

When we gathered last night at the Woodfire Grill, five of us Woollies talked, catching up on family, discussing current events, laughing.  Then, the talk turned serious and deep, as the fly fisherman said, “existential.”

A sister-in-law, a chiropractor, called one of us and told him she was retiring.  “Because,” she said, “I’ve been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.” That brought silence around this table where the youngest was 64 and the oldest 80.  As is his way, this one wondered how to be present to her, not to fix her, but to aid her in her present situation.  How might he stay present to her over time, perhaps learning enough to alert her children, who live far away when things become dire?

I pointed him to a website I recently added here, under the link’s title, Third Phase, called Watching the Lights Go Out.  Here’s this 68 year old retired physician’s description of its purpose:

“In September of 2012 I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This blog is the story of my day-to-day life with this illness and my reflections upon it. We tend to be scared of Alzheimer’s or embarrassed by it. We see it as the end of life rather than a phase of life with all its attendant opportunities for growth, learning, and relationships. We see only the suffering and miss the joy. We experience only the disappearing cognitive abilities and ignore the beautiful things that can appear.”

One of us has an obvious anxiety about this since he has a mother with Alzheimer’s and definitely does not want to place that kind of burden on those who would be his caretakers. What will I do, he asked, if this becomes me?

We turned to the writer who cared for his mother-in-law, Ruby, who tipped over into Alzheimer’s after open-heart surgery.  He has interviewed many Alzheimer’s sufferers and said that after a couple of years of sometimes intense existential dread, there comes a peace with the disease.

“But I don’t want to not care!” said the one of us who was anxious.  “That leaves my caretakers with the burden.”

This conversation continued, all of us trying to put ourselves in the situation of watching the lights go out.  It was not pleasant, but neither was it hopeless, because we had friends around the table.

A primary inflection of this whole conversation was readying ourselves to live into this and other dark realities that loom not far down the stair case of aging.

 

 

Aging, Health, Third Phase, Travel

The Shoulder

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Beltane                                                                                            Solstice Moon

Finished my p.t. visits for the shoulder.  When asked at this point what he thought caused this pain, “Rust.  Or, dry rot.” David Poulter said.  In this case some form of cervical impingement and possibly a rotator cuff tear.  On the likelihood of its return.  “If you keep up the resistance work, you’ll minimize it.”  But.  Since it is rust, the probability is that something, if not the exact same thing will happen again.  Hopefully not for awhile.

David also said that I had gotten in three weeks the amount of improvement it takes most folks to get in three months.  That made me feel good because it speaks well of my body’s continuing capacity to heal itself.  The key in this case apparently is steady work.  Which I’ve been doing.  I don’t like pain, but am willing to endure it to put it behind me.

David is an interesting guy.  His brother lives in Brittany and the time trials for the Tour de France are in Mont St. Michel this year, so he’s packing up and moving to Brittany for four months. He’s 54, born in Lancastershire, moved to Australia, then New Zealand and eighteen years ago to the U.S.  His sport is cycling so he’s going to ride the 35 miles to the time trials and generally hang out as a cyclist, a Brit who speaks bon francais, but who has a desire to become fluent.

Of course, Brittany is that oddity, the Celtic part of France, speaking a native tongue closest to Cornish.  David told me that Great Britain comes from the island, Britain, plus the little Britain, Brittany.  Further, that the French/English animosity comes from the Roman, then the Saxon, then the French invasions which pushed the native Britons (the Celts) into the peripheral countries of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, the Isle of Mann and Brittany.

(Brittany in dark blue.)

 

Aging, Friends, Third Phase

Lady Fortune Takes a Break

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

Fortuna shifts her affections.  I fear I’ve been late in my sacrifices to her over the last month.  She left me dangling near the bottom of the pack tonight at Sheepshead.  Balancing things out, I suppose.

(fortuna)

Of course, there were a few self-inflicted wounds that I can’t foist off on her.  But there were those really bad hands.  And, yes, that one very good one.

Had supper with friend Bill Schmidt.  We ate at Pad Thai on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, near Macalester College.  It’s interesting to note how perspectives change as age downshifts expectations and heightens other facets of life.  A factor we both gave a nod to is one little admired in our mobile culture, the virtue of inertia and of its sometime attendant virtue: rootedness.

The soul, I believe, craves constancy, needs some stability and a key way we get that is to put down roots somewhere.  I’ve talked about it elsewhere, but it may be especially important in the third phase.  This is not to deny the attraction of travel, even of picking up and moving somewhere else, but the decision to do so late in life needs, I think, to be carefully made, with an eye not only to what will be gained but what will be lost.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Writing

Rejecting Ariadne’s Gift

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Beltane                                                               Early Growth Moon

I skipped some steps in my life education.  And I did that post-college when I was hungry for intellectual stimulation and found the cheapest source for it in seminary.  Instead of noticing what had my full attention, studying scripture with the tools of higher criticism, I followed my radical political passions into the ordained ministry.

Following the 60’s slogan, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, I embarked on a decades long immersion in political work.  I believed and still do believe that political work is important and necessary, a responsibility  of a citizenry that would remain free as well as a corrective to social injustice cooked into the current culture.

But.  I also believe that when the creative life, the one where the Self you have been granted by the random, but highly particular thrownness you have experienced, finds its highest and best purpose, it equals the level of urgency of political action.  Why?  Because each of us are precious, unusual, unique and as a result need to offer the world what only we can provide.

This is at best a dilemma, at worst it can create paralysis or misdirection.  In my case I followed one path, political action, from college through my early 40’s.  That I did this through the church is only a happenstance, a function of the odd synchronicity of my time in Appleton, Wisconsin and a minister there, Curtis Herron, who knew United was, at the time, a politically engaged seminary.

My rationale for being in seminary, drenched in the zeitgeist of the 60’s, led me to pick up on all the threads that led through the labyrinth toward a political minotaur.  They were bright threads in those years, the early 70’s, and had the additional compelling flavor of righteousness, a dangerous route to follow, but one I pursued anyhow.

The threads I left lying on the ground, less bright and flavored not with righteousness but with tradition and imagination, came to me as I soaked up literary criticism, the history of the Pentateuch, the redactions of the gospels, the tradition criticism and form criticism so useful in the Hebrew scriptures, even the brief exposures to Hebrew and Greek.  Had I stuck with them, followed the literary and creative impulses they roused in me, I might have neglected some political work, but found my way to writing much sooner.

But I didn’t.  Now I’m in my late 60’s and, thanks to another lesson I’ve simply refused out of stubbornness and fear to learn, how to sell my finished work, have nothing to show for having finally picked up the threads less bright, yet the ones more in touch with my full Self.  Although it may sound like it, I’m not whining here, just observing the length of time I spent on one section of the labyrinth, not because I didn’t have help, but because I couldn’t discern the true help I did need.

Now, finally, I have all the threads in my hand, I’m following them to the end, aware that there is still ahead the Minotaur, a last battle.  When will it come?  I don’t know.  The labyrinth still has turns ahead and the way, the ancientrail, is dimly lit.