Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Garden, Our Land and Home

The Chain Saw

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Beltane                                                                   Full Last Frost Moon

Instead of opening Ovid this morning, I opened the garage doors and took out the chain saw.  Checked the chain oil, thick almost like grease.  Added some.  Filled a measured quantity of oil in a squeeze bottle, poured into the one gallon gas can, added a gallon of fresh gas, shook the can and put the gas oil mixture in the chain saw.  With the choke out full, I put my toe through the handle, pressing the saw firmly onto the driveway, grabbed the pull and yanked up.  Sputter.  Pulled again.  Nothing.  Pushed the choke half way in, yanked again and that ear-splitting racket that pierces homes and exurban silence whined to life.

With the exception of one cedar trunk I’ve now downed, limbed and cut into smaller sections all of the damage from last November’s early, heavy snow.  The large cedar tree just off our deck is the only tree I’ll miss.  We nurtured it from a small shrub into a magnificent tree.  Though I’ll miss its 17 year journey with us, it does open up a lot of sun for the vegetable garden.  It would have been strategic to cut it down years ago, but it was a friend.

When I finished limbing the first cedar trunk, my arms grew tired.  I quit.  No using chain saws when tired.  Flesh and bone pose no obstacle to these tree fellers.

Aging, Garden

An Old Cannabis Farm, Right?

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Beltane                                                Waxing Last Frost Moon

A long, 3 hour, nap, perfect for a gloomy, chill spring afternoon.  Then off to the grocery store.  With Mark here there are items on the list peculiar to him like Raisin Bran, lots of bread, more fish than usual (a good thing) and a greater quantity of fruit.

The same kid from Anoka/Ramsey Garden came with the pocket sized dump truck, navigated it through our gate and dumped the load right in front of the orchard, saving several steps with a heavy wheelbarrow.  He remembered our place, “An old cannabis farm, right? Not as much up now.”

Yep, during WWII the government wanted more rope so hemp farms were common in Anoka county.  The weed grows everywhere, will get 8-9 feet tall if allowed to mature and has a stem at maturity that is so thick a machete takes two or three whacks to bring it down. It laughs at weed whips.  And, no, its THC content is too low to be any good.  It made rope, not laughing teen-agers and college students.

True story.  When we first moved up here to Andover, back in 1994, we were the only house in the development.  A white car pulled up on 153rd about two hundred feet from our house and two young kids popped the trunk and hopped out.  They busily pulled hemp plants from the lot across from us and threw them in the car, not even bothering to shake the soil off the roots.   Someone, we think it was the developer, Harvey Kadlec, called the police.

When they arrived, the kids were still at work.  Oops.  The police impounded the car and gave the kids a lift back to the Anoka County Jail.

Kate always tells this on me, so I’ll just go ahead.  I had laced several hemp plants through our chain link fence, reveling in the fact that the forbidden weed grew wild on our property, a sort of dream lot for a sixties kid.  When the police came, I went out through our back garage door and pulled the plants out of the fence.  Can’t be too careful in these circumstances.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

At Peace

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Beltane                                                                    Waxing Last Frost Moon

Woke up this morning feeling the week past.  Intellectually and physically tired.  Gonna take a day off to play, sleep.  Maybe go to the Walker, which I haven’t visited in far too long.

We have a large truck gate in the front section of our 6 foot high chain link fence.  It opens to ten feet wide to allow delivery trucks, mobile lawn mowers and other wide things into the back where the orchard and the garden are.  It’s open today because we’re having five cubic yards of mulch delivered.  To open it, because it’s used infrequently, I had to dig out the accumulated soil in front of the two panels that create the gate, just so they could swing out.

Being tired, in a good way, with things done, matters accomplished gives me a feeling of peace.  I like it.

Aging, Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

What Get’s You Up In The Morning?

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Beltane                                                         Waxing Last Frost Moon

Several years ago, maybe twenty, I sat down with my friend Lonnie Helgeson at the Walker cafe, a table overlooking downtown Minneapolis and the Sculpture Garden.  Lonnie, I said, I could die now.  I feel good about what I’ve done with my life and would have no regrets.

Lonnie looked at me, thought a moment, then asked, “But Charlie where’s your passion?”

Oh.  Yeah.  A passionate man would not declare he was ready to die, he’d be asking, what’s next!

Now, at 64, I can honestly say, “What’s next!”  Not sure what was going on at that moment in my life, but I think I’d hit a caesura, a pause in the melody of my life, a rest stop on the way.  While there, I mistook the rest stop for a destination, rather than a place to catch my breath, consider what direction my path now lead.

Older now and several caravan serai of the soul moments later, I welcome those times when life ceases to press with urgency, when the TV or  a novel or a long vacation beckons.  These are moments of consolidation, a time perhaps to welcome the god Janus for a good look back and a strong gaze forward.

It feels like one may be coming.  Last night I finished my literal translation of Ovid’s story of Diana and Actaeon.  The legislature ends this session (we think) on May 20th or so.  The touring season begins to loosen as schools close down for the summer.  Then I’m left with the bees and the gardens, the novel, too, of course.

These kind of moments when the pacing changes dramatically often yield breaks.  Often, as I’ve looked back over my life, I’ve responded to these breaks with melancholy, a drifting down, moving into a sense of purposelessness.  What do I do now?  I might die.  That would be ok.

Probably where I was that afternoon long ago having lunch with Lonnie.

The melancholy is ok, too.  It’s an old friend, one I’ve come to appreciate as a gathering in, a time to be with myself, in myself.  The melancholy slows down my appetite for life, forces me to pay attention to subtler, inner things, so when I reemerge, I’m ready for another road on this one-way trip.

So, if you talk to me a month from now and I seem a bit distracted, maybe a little down, you’ll know I’m really just resting, getting ready to come out of my corner.  Again.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Health

That Old Achievement Bugaboo

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Beltane                                                                Waxing Last Frost Moon

Deciding to take a gamble on the weather, with the aid of the forecasters, Kate planted some frost sensitive plants today:  coleus, especially.  She also planted artemisia, Jacob’s Ladder, alyssum and purple wave petunias.  Mark weeded.  Meanwhile I was in St. Paul doing my next to last session with Leslie.

Tonight was Tai Chi.  When I arrived, there was no one else there except the first teacher I encountered and an advanced student.  Nobody else showed up, presumably due to mother’s day.  That meant I had a personal class with two teachers.  It was a revelation.  This teacher, the one I met the first night of class, has a style that connects with me.

She spoke about learning Chinese, listening to the words at night before she went to bed and in the morning before class and recommended, again, since she had done the same thing at the one class she taught, that I practice morning and night.  Just immerse yourself, she said.  We come to these things with such an achievement orientation and we have to jettison it, let go of mistakes, think of them as occurrences, concentrate on the process.

Tai Chi has 13 different moves, a vocabulary of movement, a style of movement rooted in another culture.  I’ve learned 5 of them so far.  Well, sort of learned them.

It was a good class. What I needed at this point.

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Knocking on the Door

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Beltane                                                                             New Last Frost Moon

There are times and this is one of them, when death seems behind every door.  My friend Bill has learned that his wife’s cancer is stage 4.  A grave diagnosis with a grave prognosis.   American’s exult in the streets over the death of Osama Bin Laden.  A friend sent out a quote from Martin Luther King* that expressed my feelings.  Today Vega, one of our younger dogs, tested positive for Lyme’s disease.  Not a big deal, treatable, unless the kidney is involved.  Hers may be.  If it is?  Difficult to impossible to treat.

Since I started today already in somewhat of a funk, all this darkness hovering around has reinforced it, made the day two or three shades grayer.

Death does not surprise us.  It lurks beside us all our born days until the last one.  Its reality, its starkness, its finality, especially that last one, passing from the quick to the dead, still strike heavy hammer blows to the heart.

Death’s most severe wounds come from the source of our greatest joy, love.  Without love death counts only as an incident, something happening to someone else, an event of little consequence.  We know this each day we read the obituary pages.  Even the death of someone we have known, but not loved, does not shake us at our foundations.  When, however, death comes to call for one close and important in our lives, the very bound of love lacerates the heart, accelerates our fear, amplifies our sense of loss. Continue reading Knocking on the Door →

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Health

Uh-Oh

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Beltane                                                           Sliver Bee Hiving Moon

Bees check this morning.  Colony 1 is queenright.  Colonies 2 and 3 were not queenright because I had improperly handled the indirect release.  The queens were in the cage still, being tended to by the colony so I direct released both of them.  At the next hive inspection, I imagine they will be queenright, too.  Pollen patties were not depleted, nor even used for that matter.  There was still honey in the frames from last year’s hives, so all looks good right now.   The bees were calm.

Had a last hurrah with the Titian show, docent colleagues who’d toured it showed up.  We discussed how we’d handled certain paintings, noticed things we hadn’t seen before, fun to rehash.  Afterward we went over to Rinata’s and had their $20 Sunday evening meal.  Tasty.

After that, tai chi, just down Hennepin five blocks.  Was I not ready for what happened tonight.  I positioned myself on the end of the line and, being alone, totally lost my place, forgot moves I knew well.  I’d practiced and practiced this week.

Dropping the moves out of my consciousness created a sense of panic, one I know well.  My brain tells me:  leave, leave, leave.  It’s a sort of red klaxon at work.  A tight chest.  I don’t like to fail.  At anything.  And this is for stress relief?  Well, not for me.  Not tonight.  I calmed myself down, changed positions and tried to keep my head in the class.  It was hard.

Afterward I talked with teacher.  She reassured me.  Told me chaos often proceeds a break through.  Told me that she was totally confused in her first ten weeks.  That she’d get me confident.  I felt flushed and embarrassed when she told me I had to concentrate on keeping my hips together.  I though I had been.  Again, I don’t like to be doing something poorly.  There is of course motivation here, yes, but there’s also fear and avoidance.

On the drive back I just drove, listening to Wolf Hall, a very good novel about Henry the VIII, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell.

Aging, Memories, Politics

Women. Still Advancing.

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Spring                                                          Waning Bee Hiving Moon

During my first years of seminary the women’s movement, already rolling when I left college in 1969, had begun to pick up a solid head of steam.  Half of the women in my class (one), went to consciousness raising with the wives of male students.  By the time I graduated from sem in 1976 the entering class was mostly female.  At some point in the 1980’s there was actually a junior (first year) class that was all female.

Kate is a pediatrician only recently retired. My ex, Raeone Loscalzo, runs Women’s Advocates, the nations oldest provider of shelters for abused women.  In terms of traditional marks of male success both of these women have out achieved me by a long way:  more money, more prestige.  This would have been strange and aberrant when I grew up; now, I’m happy to say it only reflects the increasing ability of women to lead lives based on their ability and not limited by sexist stereotypes.

Among the many cultural changes our generation has nurtured, none was more wrenching and more life changing than the women’s movement.  It is a great joy to me, at this stage of my life, to see the advances women have made, really in a short time.  It is testimony to the hard work, the steel will, the insightful analysis and the dogged persistence of women at all ages and stages of our culture.  It is no easy thing to leave the cocoon of stereotyped safety for the responsibility of life on your terms.  But look at the huge number of women who have achieved it.

That’s why this excerpt from a news article reveals only the present crest of this still moving wave.

WASHINGTON – For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids.

Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

Aging

Life

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Spring                                                     Waning Bee Hiving Moon

I have a much more plastic week ahead, one with more time here at home, space to plant vegetables, care for the newly hived bees.   Weeks with a lot of activity like last week wear me out, I begin to feel frazzled, as much from too much people exposure as physical weariness.  Without weeks like that, though, I feel disconnected from day to day life, so I need them, but it’s nice to have a more leisurely pace the next week.

Translating Ovid gets left behind in those weeks since it requires a block of time for concentrated effort.  The same thing is true with Missing.  I have allowed my life, again, to become ragged in its rhythms, often a sign of vitality in my docent, Sierra Club, Woolly world, but a sure barrier to the creative work of writing and the detailed focused work of translation.

Mark and I were coming back from getting the bees and he asked me if I had any regrets.  Up until a couple/three years ago I would have said, “Yes, I didn’t get a Ph.D.”  Now though I have let that go, a part of my past, not regretted, not celebrated.  Just a part of my past.

What good are regrets?  They chain you now to things you didn’t do or wish you had done differently in the past.  There’s no going back there to change them, no way to erase or re-do.  Instead, I have the life I have, one I’ve chosen, sometimes with sound, well thought out choices, sometimes with impulsive, creative choices and sometimes with stupid, petty choices.  It is though, my life, and it is the synergy among all those choices that makes me who I am.  So, no, since I do not regret who I am, I cannot regret.

Have I lived a perfect life?  Far from it.  Two divorces, a struggle with alcoholism, estranged from my father, not the hallmarks of a perfect life by any means, yet at this point it’s the life I have, complete with mistakes, bloopers and bone-headed errors.   Gotta say I’m fine with it.  A life I’m proud of at this point and that I hope to extend as long as the flesh is willing.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths

Grasshopper, You Are About To Be A Grandfather

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Spring                                                                           Full Bee Hiving Moon

Men.  Emotions surprise us, batter us into consciousness, wake us up.  Hello, grasshopper, you are about to be A GRANDFATHER. Huh?  How did that happen?  Of course, you know exactly how it happened, but it still reaches inside and turns on the amazement switch.

Some old man, dimly known, shambles out of your past and you say, “Could that be me? That old fella?”

“Nah, I’m too young,” you say.

The event comes to pass and there you are with Ruth or Dave or Holly or Ava, a tiny pink wonder, yet, too, the most common event of all among us, a baby, a fledgling human, vulnerable, needy.  Somehow ours.  Somehow not ours.

Shaken but perhaps not yet stirred a gong sounds somewhere, a genetic clang or a cultural bong, but whatever deep, resonant, compelling and there you are at the door reserved for Elders Only.  This door, this torii, guards the pathway to the future, a divided path on which your grandchild will walk as a living memory in one direction while you stride resolute toward our last great journey.

Here’s the joy.  We can walk along this path a ways, maybe even a long ways, together.

What’s the nature of this walk?  Who knows?  One grandparent, one grandchild.  A unique way, created by the two, reserved for them alone.  Another grandchild, another way.

We spoke of these things tonight at Tom Crane’s house.  Mark, brother Mark, went along.  Warren, Charlie, Bill, Scott, Tom, Frank, Mark, Stefan were there.  We remembered our grandfather dying in front of us at four, of grandfather’s disappeared by distance and alcohol, of grandfather’s willing to play along with a silly joke, a grandfather who drank and drank and drank, having his last jug delivered the day after he died, of a grandfather with green flannel underwear that buttoned, puzzlingly, in the rear, who poured coffee into a cup, then a saucer and drank from the saucer, who made syrup from water and sugar, of grandfathers in the house, there to talk to, to go to, grandfathers abused by fathers.  We spoke of all these things nestled inside our own hopes, our joys, the wonders of our own journey through the torii of  generation.

Men wonder about these things, dream about them, hope for them.  See themselves with a tiny hand in theirs, walking along, picking dragons and mermaids out of the clouds.  Whistling.