Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Memories, Travel

Going Home

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Back To School Moon

Ah, well.  It seems the bug has won.  A cold.  Again.  After two years of relative health, I’ve had three colds in as many months.

My 45th high school reunion, for which I purchased tickets and made hotel reservations a month ago, has shifted a bit.  Early notices said October 2nd, but the bit about homecoming, it turns out now, falls on Friday, October 1st.  I’ll change my plans if I can since riding on the float with the other members of my class was part of the attraction for me.

At the seminary last Thursday night I walked past the Steckel Learning Center to get to the new chapel.  Earlier that day I had seen Clyde Steckel, after whom the seminary named it.  Clyde taught psychology and pastoral counseling.  He’s in the junior docent class that is in training now.  We chatted a bit after the docent luncheon.  Turns out he was in Anderson, Indiana, his home, for his high school reunion just last month.  I’d forgotten he was from Anderson.

His dad worked at Delco Remy and thought, Clyde said, “That it would go on forever.”  Delco made starters and batteries for all the GM cars.  In the 50’s and 60’s Delco and Guide Lamp employed around 25,000 people working 3 shifts.  Now they’re both gone.

There are plenty of chores to get done here before I go, but I have to go into St. Paul right now to hear Leslie preach.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Politics

Moving From the Theoretical to the Concrete

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Lughnasa                                            Waxing Back to School Moon

Kate has had a nasty cold since Monday and I can feel it trying to claw its way up my esophagus, making my throat scratchy.  My hope is that the recent two time bout I had with some bug in July, then August has revved up my immune system.  With rest I can pound this sucker down before it takes hold.

Starting back on Latin today.  I took part of July, all of August and the last couple of weeks off with the bees and the vegetables and the orchard.  Thought I’d get work done on Ovid, review, but in fact I got very little done.  An old student habit of mine, if it’s not pressing, it’s not getting done.  I’m looking forward to the weekly sessions, building toward enough confidence to tackle Ovid and others on my own.  It’s a project, like the bees, that keeps the gears turning, not giving them a chance to rest.  Best that way.

A few years back it was the MIA docent training.  Then the move into permaculture and vegetables and fruit.  That one’s still underway as I learn the complicated dance of seasons, cultivars, pests, harvest and storage.  The MIA training, for that matter, only gives you enough legs to get into the books and files yourself, training you to look and think about art, but each tour demands specific self-education on the objects and the purpose of that tour.

(Minoan Gold Bee pendant from Crete, circa 2000 BC)

Part of my impatience with the seminary experience is that I’ve moved so deeply into more concrete endeavors.  Art has the object as an anchor, then its history and context.  Latin has words, grammar and literature as well as Roman history.  Vegetables and fruit have real plants, particular plants with needs and products.  The bees have the bees themselves, the colonies, woodenware, hive management, pest control, honey extraction.  This is, probably, the world I was meant to inhabit, but philosophy and the church lead onto another ancientrail, that of the abstract and faraway rather than the particular and the near.  It’s not that I don’t have an affection, even a passion for the theoretical, I do, but I find my life more calm, less stressful when I work with art, with potatoes and garlic, with conjugations and declensions.

I now have almost three decades of life devoted to the theoretical, the abstract and the political so I bring those skills and that learning to my present engagement with the mundane, but I no longer want to live in those worlds.  They are gardens others can tend better than I can.

Aging, Bees

Jax

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Lughnasa                                     Waxing Back to School Moon

After a nap, I headed out again, the second of three busy days.  This time I went to Jax, a return to the 1950’s with dark wood paneling, a lovely buffet table and Jean-Marie’s jax-matchbookmilestone birthday.  Happy Birthday, Jean-Marie matchbooks, the whole Jax touch.  I met Jean-Marie’s daughters and spent a good bit of time chatting with her oldest who until recently was a graduate student under Marla Spivak, the bee goddess of the UofM.  She and Jim of Nature’s Nectar, whom I saw later, convinced me to try and keep my old parent colony.

The elegance of the Jax setting made for a dignified tone.  Other docents came in and I spoke with Joannie Platz, Toni de Lafour, Marilyn Smith and a few others.  I saw Allison as I left.  She has a very fashionable red knee brace.

A long drive out to Stillwater to Nature’s Nectar to pick up Apiguard, Fumigilin-B, shims, hive stands and corks.  Jim’s a knowledgeable guy and easy to talk to.  He gave me some good advice about the parent colony.  He requeens every year, so the need to eliminate the old parent colony is not so high.  With tests and assays I should be able to keep on top of the mites and other diseases, too.

The drive back from Stillwater was in pouring rain; the first time I’ve driven in really heavy rain this year.  Back home now and dry.

Tomorrow is the docent lunch at noon, then the UTS event at 6:00 PM.

Aging, Dogs, Travel, Weather +Climate

A Kick-Back Day

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Lughnasa                                        Waning Artemis Moon

A fine kick-back watch the blue sky and the white clouds kind of day.  Sunshine.  Not too hot and not too cold.  A late northern summer day or an early northern fall day.  As good as weather gets, anywhere.  We’ve not done much today.  I took Kate out to lunch to thank her for help with the honey extraction.  We took a nap.  I got out our passports so we could see if we needed to update them.  Kate’s is a year out of date; mine’s good until 2018.  Walked the fence line to be sure last night’s barking hadn’t occasioned a digging frenzy on our Rigel’s part.  No.

A college football saturday.  Even though I didn’t and don’t particularly enjoy college football.  Gotta work out.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Humanities

Sitting Back

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Lughnasa                                       Waning  Artemis Moon

The big push on honey extraction, preceded by the push to mulch the orchard and the vegetable garden, has left both Kate and me happy the weather has soured.  She sews, now in the room right above my study, and I tap tap tap away following this lead and that down the cyber rabbit hole.

After reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Blind Descent, I’ve veered off into fiction, a sort of relief has taken my reading and I’ve plowed through 2 1/2 novels this last week +.  None of it so far is noteworthy, just pleasant diversions.

Worked this last week on a project for the office of Learning and Innovation at the Museum.  It involved responding to a new exhibition of heads and masks to be installed in the hallway in front of the antiquities galleries.  It’s part of the Art Remix concept.  Thinking in this way, finding connections between the new installation and other parts of the museum, stimulated me, shot off a spark or two.

Aging, Family, Retirement

Eternal Tru Luv

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Lughnasa                               Waning Artemis Moon

Kate’s at work.  Two months almost to the day after her hip surgery she has returned to the Allina Clinic in Coon Rapids for her last four months of full time practice.  I anticipate a successful evening and final four months for her, having seen a remarkable recovery in terms of her day-to-day pain.  The hip is wonderful, the back’s pretty good, the only clinker right now is her bursitis on her left hip.  Still, compared to the awful weeks just prior to her surgery, she’s a different woman and it’s great to see.

Having her home full time, practice retirement, helped us see the possibilities in the next phase of our life together.  We’ll manage our gardens and our orchard and our bees with greater ease, two persons engaged from the start of the growing season.  We’ll have time to go into art galleries, out to lunch, just wander around more.

Other people must find the one who gets them, around whom they can be their authentic selves, I’m glad to say I’m among them.  And that the experience is reciprocal.

Eternal tru luv, as we used to say.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Retirement

Shame, Guilt, Fear

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Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.

Aging, Garden

An Aging Bull Moose

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Lughnasa                                    Waning Artemis Moon

Easton and Ray, both soon to be seniors at Andover High, worked this morning, moving wood chips, laying them down on the paths Kate and I cleared of weeds yesterday.  Both fit and energetic they kept at it, moving 9 cubic yards of wood chips with a wheel barrow.  That’s minus the maybe one cubic yard I moved to mulch some parts of the further away vegetable patch.  The orchard looks great and completes a job started by Kate a few weeks ago, one she saw through to a beautiful conclusion.  The orchard looks its best ever.  Right after Ecological Gardens finished the installation now 3 years ago, it looked pretty good, but the trees were small and the  plants in the guilds around them were also young.  Now the trees have begun to bear fruit, the guild plants have matured and the place looks like a real orchard.  Pictures tomorrow.

Working alongside the boys made me oddly competitive.  I wanted them to see me as an old man who could really work.  Not quite sure where this came from but it felt like the aging bull moose in the presence of young, high testosterone males.  Instinctive rather than even subconscious.  It passed, though.

Now, after a day and a half of physical labor, I’m weary, in need of a nap.

Aging, Asia, Family

The Buddha

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Lughnasa                                   Full Artemis Moon

No.  Not that Buddha.  A small, bald, slightly pudgy baby Buddha.  That was what we called my sister when she was still an infant.  Mary had an inscrutable baldness going for her.  Now she lives in the land of the Buddha, the oldest Buddhism of all, Theravada, and has long since shed her Buddha appearance.  She’s traded the robes, or the diapers, of the Buddha for academic regalia, Indiana for Singapore, North America for Asia.

She’s been over there a while now, a long while, living a good part of her adult life on the Malay Peninsula, first in Kuala Lumpur and now in the Air Conditioned Nation of Singapore, a city state like days of old.

The life of an ex patriate had no texture, no reality for me until first Mary, then Mark ended up in Southeast Asia, both spending at least two decades there, plus a little.  That left me the only stay at home, still rooted in the Midwest.

As things go, however, I developed an ongoing interest in Asia art and from that Asian history and, in particular, Chinese philosophy, so we all share a common fascination with the Far East, though mine is more bookish and museum oriented while theirs is everyday life.

Mary has gone faraway and built a life in a land with lifeways and assumptions often very different from our own.  It’s an impressive achievement and as she nears her 58th birthday I wanted to acknowledge it.  Happy Birthday!  Dr. Sis.

Aging, Cooking, Dogs, Family, Health

Feeling Better. Me. Dwindling. Hilo.

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Lughnasa                                    Waxing Artemis Moon

Ah.  It seems the nasties have journeyed on to other warm bloody creatures, leaving me in peace for now.  I hope my body now recognizes and will fend off these creatures that live only to replicate and in so doing make us feel bad.  But they don’t care.

Groceries this morning.  Filled up the cart with fruit and vegetables and turkey burgers, soy milk and slim milk, Sharps and Diet Cherry Coke, a bit of feta cheese, some sliced turkey for the dogs, a few cheese curds, some peanut butter, oops, just realized I forgot the cereal, chicken breasts.  You know.  The stuff of daily eating.  It was church time while I shopped so I suppose we were all heathens in there, except for those righteous Catholics who went to Saturday night mass.  Grocery shopping has a soothing quality.  It combines shopping with a genuine need so the selection of items reflects not so much consumer driven behavior–though that does rear its head–as it does animal needs.

(The Mexicans do mercado better.)

Hilo has, as Kate says, the dwindles.  She’s becoming very thin and tentative.  We believe she’s lost the better part of her sight.  Last week she seemed frightened, wide-eyed and jittery; this week feels different.  Perhaps a resignation of sorts.  It’s sad to watch her fade away, but she still lives her life.  Napping with us this afternoon, going outside to wander around the yard.  Eating a bit now and then.  Live until you die.  That’s what I want for me and for her.

The sewing machine is on its movable platform, the wind-up reels for the cloth are in place, we attached a high-tech stitch regulator and a laser pointer to the apparatus that allows Kate to guide the needle.  Now it’s RTFM, a couple of extension cords and she’ll be ready to practice.  No more taking pieced work out for quilting, now it happens here, right in our lower level.