Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Family, Holidays, Retirement

Happy Birthday. Giggle, giggle.

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

A red letter day here at chez Olson/Ellis.  Kate’s 66th.  She’s upstairs right now signing up for social security.

We went out for breakfast this morning to Pappy’s, a place that already has a place in my heart.  It reminds me so much of Indiana, a part of it that I didn’t know I missed.  As a gift, I gave her a photo album of her ascent to grandmahood starting with a pregnant Jen and running up to the present.   She liked it.

Being married to Kate these 20 years we’ve shared many birthdays and each one finds me more in love with her than the last.

We had a waitress at Pappy’s that had a Fargo accent and ended each encounter with a girlish giggle. More coffee?  No?  Giggle, giggle.  Here’s the check, pay me when you’re ready.  Giggle, giggle.  Creeped me out.  Like having too much sugar in your coffee.  Hee, hee, hee.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Lapsed Unitarian

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Lughnasa                     Waxing Artemis Moon

Oh, boy.  Just got myself into another situation.  Promising things I’m not sure I know how to accomplish.  I hope this goes with do one thing you fear every day, month, year–whatever time frame you can stand.  Cannot reveal details right now, but this could be a lot of fun for a lot of people or a complete bust.  Feels like the old days when I used to do this kind of stuff all the time.  Dream up something, contact a few folks, make it happen.

Still fatigued.  Kate says it’s my body still healing itself.  I hope so, because it feels like I’m still sick.

A friend the other day referred to herself as a lapsed Unitarian.  Lapsed Unitarian.  That made me wonder.  What are the spiritual and metaphysical consequences of falling away from the only faith named for two doctrines, Unitarianism and Universalism, in which none of its members believe?

I have come to see UU as a way station of sorts, a caravan serai for the pilgrim lost in the desert or high on a mountain and in need of refreshment, companionship.  Maybe a spiritual decompression chamber where individuals are brought safely back to their spiritual sea level.  It’s clear to me that my decompression is complete, has been complete for several years now.

Now, this is probably idiosyncratic, but I’m pretty sure it’s not unusual.  When we step away from a long time, culturally supported faith tradition like Christianity or Judaism, the lag time for decompression can be lengthy.  Not only do we have to unlearn one faith identity, we have to find or create another.  The UU movement is perfect for that time, for the initial time of confusion and disorientation and for the development, the constructing of a new faith.  Once that work is done however it most often results in a person anchored no longer in institutional faith, but in a place more like the world, the world of the human and the animals and the rock and the lake, a place where the spiritual moment is every moment and where the faith commitment may have an introspective, interpersonal, natural, and/or political expression, but not an institutional one.

So.  Perhaps lapsed Unitarian is the destiny of most of us no longer inside the Christian hermeneutical circle.  It still helps to have a place to rest along the way.

Aging, Friends, Humor, Woolly Mammoths

Tom’s Place

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Lughnasa                                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

Back from Tom’s gracious home in Shorewood.  He served corn on the cob, salmon, an egg salad and spinach.  Delightful.  A pileated woodpecker ate from his feeder just as I came in.  What a gorgeous bird.  We ate on the deck of Tom’s unusual housing arrangement.  These are homes with a connecting wall, though quite large on the interior with a long deck high above a sloping yard filled with maple trees and ending at a small pond.  The entrance to the homes are modest affairs with little lawn and a walk-way cum patio after passing through a small gate.  They open up once inside and have the decks facing the back that have complete privacy while fairly close to each other.

Tom, Ode, Scott, Bill, Frank, Warren and Charlie were there.  We sat outside on unseasonably cool August evening and discussed violence.  It was an interesting conversation.  I’m a little too tired right now to comment.  Perhaps tomorrow.

Ode brought me copies of the label.  Very cool, copies on label paper.  Gotta test the size of them on a honey jar and their stickiness.

I did hear this joke from Frank.

Tarzan, swinging vine by vine, comes finally to the porch of his tree home.  He jumps down onto the porch and says, “Jane, I need a scotch.  No, Jane, make that a double.”  He pauses, “No, make that a triple.”  Jane comes in with his drink, “Honey, you know alcohol doesn’t solve anything.  What’s the matter.”  “Oh, Jane,” he says, “it’s a jungle out there.”

Aging, Family, Health, Retirement

Eatin’ At Pappy’s

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Lughnasa                                       Waxing Artemis Moon

After the early work, breakfast at Pappy’s Cafe, a new fine dining experience in Andover.  I’m using the Apple Valley criteria for a fine dining restaurant, silver and real plates, but, no cloth napkins.  Close anyhow.  Pappy’s reminds me of those little places you pull into while on the road.  You know, the one in the middle of a now largely empty business district in a town with only a main street and two blocks worth of business space.

The food is good, hearty downhome fare.  We went to Pappy’s first a Friday or so ago for the the all you can eat fish fry.  Just like Wisconsin without the beer and schnapps.

The only disheartening part about Pappy’s is the general clientele.  It’s like he put out a sign that read, BMI 30+?  All you can eat!  I looked at the folks there bulging, slow to get up, slow getting down, busy at shoveling in pancakes or all you can eat fried fish and all I could see was a visit to the ER with chest pain, ruined backs and bum knees, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

(William Howard Taft would have loved Pappy’s.)

The stomach on this body is not what it used to be, not at all, and I understand the struggle to control spread.  It’s tough.  Still, when I see several kids who are large, I begin to wonder about our culture overall.  In fact, I asked Kate if she saw kids with high blood pressure?  Yes.  Due to weight?  Often.  Do you take blood pressure when you see kids?  Yes, from age 3 on.  It used to be the guideline was age 12, now we try to find it when we can still control it with diet.  OMG.

We also talked about this peri-retirement experience we’ve had while Kate recovers from her hip surgery.

She likes it.  “I can spend more time with you, we can just go somewhere.  I can plan projects, get more done.  I don’t feel like I have to get myself ready for work.  I didn’t have to do charts this morning for example.”

Aging, Bees

Movin’ On

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

This feels like the last day of this illness.  Kate thinks I picked up the original in the hospital, so its nasty behavior could reflect its origin. Wishing it gone.

Back to the garden, the Latin, the novel, Sierra Club work with a long stretch of here time.  Just waiting on the extraction equipment to arrive and then we’ll create a true honey house.  I plan to turn Mark Odegard’s design for our honey labels into a metal sign for the honey house.  I’m also thinking t-shirts and baseball caps.

A quiet time bee wise, just waiting for the bees to finish doing their work in the supers.  Saw one gal working today on the Russian sage.  Each time I’m out there and a bee is there too; it moves me, a true companionship with the natural world, with insects, of all things.

We paid my annual premium for long-term care insurance.  To talk about “my” long-term insurance feels a little creepy, even if it is sensible.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Dreams, Humanities

So. You’re Undead. Now What?

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Lughnasa                                   New (Artemis) Moon

What is it with all the vampire stuff around right now?  Those terrible Twilight movies.  The much better Vampire Diaries and the Gates on TV.  The Passage, which I just finished, written by a “literary” novelist.  Not to mention the background of Anne Rice and all those undead erotica books, I don’t recall what they’re called.  Is it about the outs and the ins?  Is it about the saved and the damned?  Is it about the need for mystery and wonder in an increasingly secular age?  There’s even a BBC series called Being Human.

I’ve not read or seen a really good vampire story, I mean really good, since Hammer Films “Horror of Dracula” with the exception of True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I enjoyed the Anne Rice material, her stuff about the Mayfair witches, too.  I also liked Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.  True Blood, the HBO series is among the best ever in my opinion, right up there with Buffy.  I’m not sure what it says, either, that the ones I enjoy most are on TV.  I’m a literary and movie guy at heart, but the small screen does allow for character development and multiple story lines.

There’s a lot of media studies and cultural studies ink that has been spilled about the fascination with vampires.  I’m sure many of you who read this find them quite beside the point.  My guess is that they give us a way of exploring the notion of an afterlife without having to get to close to it.  The evil nature of the vampire prevents idolization, though much of contemporary vampire fiction plays with this received wisdom.

Even so, we wonder, what would I do if I had all the time I wanted?  What would I do?  What would I become?  If the only answer is, feed blood lust, well, that turns out to not be very interesting after a few dead bodies, but the question of love between an immortal and a mortal, that’s juicy.  What about power?  Would you seek wealth and control if you had eternal life on this earth?  What might you do if you loathed the thing being a vampire made you?  Self-loathing is a favorite distraction among teens and adults alike.  This question drives a lot of today’s Dracula derivative stories.

Whatever it is, and it’s probably each of these and more, there seems to be plenty of energy and money for turning out vampire stories.  Even bad ones.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Memories

Memorable

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

Katie slipped her hands around my arm and stroked.  Then stopped and put some pressure on.  Then stroked some more.  Katie was my birthday present from a thoughtful wife.  She learned her trade from Sister Rosalind and the Sister’s school for massage.  I’m feeling knot and kink free.  Massage clears out the mind as well as the muscles.  As Katie moved around my body, memories came flooding back.  Mom’s hands on my neck when I had polio.  The Alexandria 4-H county fair.  That afternoon in Bangkok when I let a tiny Thai woman loose on my just ruptured achilles, not knowing what it was.  Steel fingers and pain.  Lots of pain.  Then the night I stepped in the sewer grate while my body moved forward and my right foot stayed in place.  Body memories, unlocked by Katie.

Memories have a fluid, slippery existence, just like Katie’s hands as she followed the process of my spine from neck to tail.  As I write about Mom and polio, an image of stuffing tissues into hardware cloth followed.  The float for homecoming for my class, seniors at last.  Being pulled away from that by who?  I don’t recall.  Then I was in Anderson, 9 miles away, at St. John’s hospital where my mother had been taken after collapsing while serving a funeral dinner.  After that the sculpted green plastic and aluminum tubing of waiting room furniture at Riley Memorial in Indianapolis.  Mom on a gurney, now 7 days after stroke, me riding with her as they took for an operation.  She reached away from me and said, “Son.”  The last words I heard from her.  The painful early morning talk with my father, should we remove the life supports?  Yes, we both decided.  Yes.  Then the funeral.  And the days and weeks and months after where I failed to integrate mom’s death as a powerful life lesson and instead took it as an emotional blast that rocked my very foundations.

Bangkok, stumbling away from the 7-11 and the amulet stand in front of it, hurrying to get to the ATM.  Traffic making me anxious, not careful.  Blinding pain, yet running anyway because of the traffic, the cars.  All the traffic and the cars.  The night air humid as the flashing neon of Chinatown bathed the sidewalk in alternating colors, like the northern lights.

As I know, we change our memories each time we access them, so all of these events, crucial as they are to my story, may not represent the truth at all, at least not the veridical, the actual truth.  But, in a more important way, they are the most truthful of all since they are the truth that has shaped my response to all these things and the thousands more accreted over the years of my life so far.  Even my account of the massage, who knows how close it is?  Yet the feeling lingers.  Good.  Feeling.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Gnothi Seauton

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Lughnasa                             Waning Grandchildren Moon

Came back home from the Black Forest tonight with the moon roof open and both windows rolled (ha), electronically pushed, down.  It was humid warm evening and it reminded me of similar nights in Indiana, nights of driving with the windows down, Radio 890 from Chicago blasting out the latest Beatles or Stones or Dave Clark Five, dust from gravel roads flowing in contrails behind our family’s 57 Ford.  A night for nostalgia, for reentering old places and memories of cows upside down in the road, corn stalks talking in whispers, a moon too big for the sky illuminating it all.

Got on a line of thinking.  I don’t listen to much these days on the radio or lectures, I just drive and think, or just drive.  In this case the matter of religion floated to mind, as it often does for me, this time in relation to the way other Woollys are in the world.  It’s so easy for me to wonder why I don’t have the compassion of Frank or the commitment to my body that Stefan has to his, or the serious way with which Warren approaches his reporting and his care taking for his parents, or Bill’s detachment.

How this related to religion in my thinking was this.  It dawned on me that religion depends on taking who you are already and changing it, molding it this or way that:  away from desire, toward your neighbor, making duty to family or state most important, making rituals done right critical and the list goes on and  you know the others.  Don’t sin.  Do justice.  Meditate.  Retreat.  Don’t do this or do that.

Then, this thought crossed the frontal lobe.  I’ve had a major struggle just becoming who I am.  I want to become more of who I already am, not what another person has made themselves into over time.  The last half of this is not a new thought to me, but the first, that I want to become more of who I am rather modifying myself in some way, is new.  It’s fine that others have valuable aspects to their personality that I don’t have.  I need to have the ones I have, to be who I am, as well as I can be.  This means accepting parts of me that I would prefer to push away:  impatience, diet, elitist thinking, racist attitudes.  Please note:  accepting them doesn’t mean endorsing them or not attempting to undo their harmful effects, it just means not beating myself up over who I am.  Who I really am.

The oracle at Delphi had “know thyself” and “nothing to excess” inscribed in the forecourt of the temple of Apollo. To know thyself means owning the strong and the weak, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the uplifting and the degrading within ourselves.  That is, I believe, enough.

Aging, Garden

A Two-Person Garden

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Lughnasa                                    Waning Grandchildren Moon

Kate and I have shifted our bedtimes and risings to 6:30.  This allows us to get out to work in the garden when it’s still the cool of the day.  This morning Kate continued to restore the original look and feel to the orchard while I finished up the mulch in the front, moved her growing mound of pulled weeds and gathering lettuces and kale for today’s meals.

There was, too, the matter of the original guild plantings in the orchard.  Guilds complement each other and, in this case, the fruit tree under which they grow.  Over the last two years we’d let the clover go, after a two year effort prior to that eliminating what Paula, owner of Ecological Gardens, called, “…that damn quack.”  The good news:  no quack back.  The bad:  clover all over.  In the process we lost some of the plants in the guilds.  I know what they are now and will replace them over the next couple of weeks.

It was also weed identification day, so I spent time in the orchard, my “Weeds of the Northeast” in hand, shuffling through the pages trying to find a match.  The ones I could not identify I have concluded for now are plants that have a place.

We’re now going to work an hour to two in the mornings together.  That should be enough to manage.  I used to be able to care for our perennials in an hour a morning, but our various plots have grown beyond that.  It’s a two person yard now and Kate’s wonderful recovery has added her back to the team.  Yeah!

Today perennial bulb orders to go in, too.  Over the vegetable and bee years, the ramping up years, I’ve pretty much left the old perennial beds to themselves, only occasionally working them and then  usually when the situation demanded, rather than requested, me.  Now we’re a bit further along with the orchard, the vegetables and the bees and I want to return some attention to the bulbs and perennial flowers that I love.  Bulb planting happens in October when the rest of the garden has died away, so there’s little conflict in time for that chore.

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

How to Use Time Well

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Summer                                       Waning Grandchildren Moon

Once upon a time a young man, now turned old, began again to consider a quest that had eluded him, eluded him since those days long ago when he left the small village and went off to school.  The quest had always seemed simple.  In each day given to us there are 24 hours.  8 or so of those find him occupied with sleep and dreaming, low focus and imaginative connections.  Another number of hours, maybe 3 or 4, give him nourishment through shopping, cooking, eating meals.  2 more hours pass by in exercise to keep the now older body able to handle the rigors of advancing age.  Maybe a half an hour, 45 minutes, finds him at a mirror or working a toothbrush, showering.  This is 15 hours allowing for things the young man now turns old under estimates as he is wont to do.

That leaves 9 hours, barely more than a third of the 24 hours for creative work, political work, artistic work the kind of things that all that maintenance related activity undergirds.  The quest is this:  how to use time well.  How to get the most out of hours and minutes allotted each day.  This fabled question has befuddled lots of folks over the ages, and it is one the young man now turned old seems not to be able to answer.

The journey has begun again.  As it has and as it will probably yet again, too.  Reorder.  Rethink.  Try again.