Author: Bev

I’ve said it before that we’re aging from the minute we’re born so if you can’t identify with any of these H-words of aging, wait for it….  Ha-ha and Hallelujah.

In our crowd, instead of showing off our hip and happening lives, there’s increasing talk of hip replacements and how is that working out for you?  We’ve learned that it’s just courteous to ignore the obvious sprawling hips from years of sitting, or just years.

Hair is a concern, as in wash away the gray or you can’t get it to go away, from all the wrong places.  Or you don’t have enough of it.  Hair can be a problem either way.  In all of our years of accumulated wisdom, we know that one lives through one heartrending hairdo-fail after another and we have pictures to prove it.

Hernias and hemorrhoids appear out of nowhere when you forget to lift with your knees.  Then there are knees which need supplemental oiling or you begin to move like the tin man.  Get this, when exercise is the treatment for knee pain but in order to do the exercise, you need pain medication.  Go figure.

Home improvement is no longer about decoration so much as it’s about making it an easier space to live in.  We’re adapting our habitat to suit the new us.

Even if you’re not a “hugger,” those of us at both extremes of the aging spectrum, grandparents and little kids are the best at giving hugs.  We know the value of a good hug. It’s helpful to hug.

History can be problematic.  Who of us hasn’t got history?  But remembering it is when it gets tricky.

Hysterectomy.  It’s okay, ovaries and uterus are just extra baggage and obsolete at this point, probably the feminine appendix of aging.  Why bother?

Instead of a brilliant but sneaky internet thief, a hacker seems to be one who has the persistent cough from heretofore unclaimed mystery allergies.  Or having been hacked, is the telltale sign of an aging Facebook user.

It has been noted that one’s hands and neck cannot lie as to your age.  Rings no longer fit over problematic knuckles and scarves become our friends. Do you remember the beautiful Doris Day singing, “Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera.?”

There are still hoops to jump through.  But now I realize it’s not my circus and I’m not your clown.

Hinky is when the whatsit goes wrong.  And you don’t get to your age without trying to right a whole bunch of wrongs which have gone way past hinky.

Habaneros and heartburn go hand-in-hand, but throw caution to the wind and spice up your life a bit.  After all, Arnold Schwarzenegger said in Kindergarten Cop, “it’s not a tumor.”

A hullabaloo isn’t so much a type of groovy dance move, as the dance we do when trying to talk sense to a customer service rep on the telephone.

Honey-trap?  I don’t think so.  I could probably get over the temptation of sweets if I could just have salt.  But no such luck.

Speaking of luck, some folks don’t believe in it, unless they’re Irish.  Every detective I’ve seen on television has said at one time or another,” I don’t believe in coincidence, “or happen-chance.  But, the first cousin of happen-chance is happenstance and that is my middle name: random occurrence.

I believe in random.  In fact, I’m a big fan of Matthew 5:45 – God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust, alike.  I also understand, I Peter 5:9 – Stand firm in your faith and the knowledge that your siblings throughout the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering as you are.

Home is where the heart is as well as heaps of housekeeping.  Dirt happens, especially in the entry portals of aging amateur horticulturists, which most of us have become as we’ve aged.

Humility is easier when you no longer need to impress anybody.  And honesty is the best policy because when you’ve aged a bit, remembering a lie, like a spy, is too complicated.

Hash can be a ground up meal, a kind of psychedelic drug, the re-working of old or familiar material, a symbol on a keyboard which was substituted for the word “number” or even “pound;” but now facilitates the search for a topic of interest on the internet (as in hashtag #).

“Get your motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure, in whatever comes our way” (Born to Be Wild 1968 Steppenwolf). A highway can be called a motorway, byway, or freeway, but most of us call it a road and we all go down one, on our way….  And, we don’t go halfway down that road and turnaround; for us it’s all or nothing.  We’ve habituated to this path and we’re taking it to its limit (reference Eagles 1975 Don Henley/Glenn Lewis Frey/Randy Meisner).

Back in the day, “heavy” was a cool and groovy word for deep, now it just means overweight or a crap spot on the BMI index.

Hindsight is what we wished we had our whole lives while waiting for wisdom to kick in.

Headlights nowadays are lower on the chassis and shaped funny but we’ll get used to them.  It’s all a blur at night anyway, thanks to halogen.

“Happiness is morning and evening,” or so goes the Charlie Brown Happiness Is song.  So, whether you’re in the morning or the evening of aging, happiness can be your signature.

What with the State of the Union speech by our President rebutted by the progressive branch of the President’s own democrat party and Russia invading the sovereign state of Ukraine just because it wants its resources, and the U.S. importing oil from Russia with price’s skyrocketing when a couple of short years ago we were energy self-sufficient and exporting oil….  Oh my.  What is this state of affairs?

As a person who thinks dream interpretation is interesting, I can’t help to get a giggle out of the place my brain goes when analyzing our state of affairs.  Speaking of interpretation, that’s what our Supreme Court is tasked with doing to our Constitution – interpret it.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that the President addresses Congress periodically with the State of the Union.  After 1913, the speech became a platform for disseminating the presidential agenda.

The State of the Union speech does not necessarily reflect the state of affairs.  A state of affairs is “the way things are,” or “the facts of the matter.”  The State of the Union is as the President sees it, or more succinctly, his wish-list for Congress.

I remember acting alongside my friend, Steve, in a high school play called, State Fair.  The play was set clearly in “another time” in history.  It was 1946 in fact, at the Iowa State Fair.  The plot follows a heartland farm family to the State Fair, with the parent’s intent on winning some blue ribbons and the teenagers maneuvering the midway, focusing on coming of age.

So, in 1946 people had hopeful expectations for postwar, post Great Depression, “better days ahead.”  The microwave oven and the first car phones were invented.  Today, we’re supposedly in those better days, and it’s a rare home that is without a microwave oven and humans without mobile/cell phones is nearly unheard of.

It was the start of the baby boom and the first meetings were held of the General Assembly of the United Nations.  Donald Trump was born in 1946.

And here we are.  Today, the permanent members of the UN Security Council include China, Russian Federation, France, UK and the US.  What’s wrong with this picture in view of the state of affairs in the world?

Recently I wrote in my journal, “I need to get back to putting my effort into what’s presented to me each day and not try to control what’s next”.  Part of Jesus’ most famous sermon, Matthew 6:34 tells us just that.  “Don’t worry about tomorrow, each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Tomorrow may very well be a different day than I expect, from today’s perspective.  It usually is, in my experience.  But remembering this is not an easily acquired skill for some of us.

“…Each day has enough trouble of its own…” – Years ago I cringed a bit when I read this.  I mean, my faith wanted to banish the thought of trouble in the life of a believer or in a nation of believers.  That Jesus verily predicted trouble, even trouble every day, didn’t sync up with what I wanted to believe.

The title line from The Beatles song, “Get Back,” rang through my head.  “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.”  Without getting into a whole bunch of music history, suffice it to say, that for me, Get Back means to release my dreamy expectations for big things, and get back to my mundane but “happy place.”

Sometime, somehow, I fell into a pattern of striving, “kicking against the goads,” – an exercise in futile and pointless resistance that is both a hopeless and losing battle, in the short term.  The very connotation of anxiety is anticipating a threatening, difficult, or dangerous future, mostly the near future.

One of the most effective techniques to combat anxiety is to live or get back to living in the now; to pull yourself out of that foggy future into the clear and present moment.  In fact, I wonder if the happiest people are those who live moment by moment, those who get back to the present.

But then again, Vladimir Putin wants to “get back” in another sense.  He would like to emphasize another Beatles song, “Back in the U.S.S.R;” including the lyric “…the Ukraine girls really knock me out…”

In order to get out of this state of affairs, or the state of our union, do we really want to go back?  We’ve forgotten those past days of trouble and we’ll soon forget today’s.  How about we look forward to better days ahead?  Cheers to a peaceful state of affairs that we can all settle into.

 

 

How many times in your life have you been shot down?  Or, if you’re like me on some days, how many times a day have you been metaphorically beaten down?

Maybe your work just wasn’t up to par.  Or maybe you can’t hit par, the real par in your golf game.

Perhaps everything you tried, failed or was rejected.  Or try as hard as you can, you can’t make headway, or worse, fall back a peg.

We’ve all been knocked down and had to get back up again.  It’s about the proverbial get back atop the horse after you’ve been thrown to the ground.  Or who hasn’t fallen off of their bike, only to get back on the saddle again.

I grew up going to the roller-skating rink and in the process, we learned that you fall down periodically and you just get back up and do it all over again.  I think I benefited from that experience of falling down and getting back up.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from trauma.  Studies over the last fifty years show that the most significant factor in how resilient you are in the face of difficult situations is how loved you felt as a child.  That’s something to ponder.

I’ve known some people who’ve faced unimaginably difficult situations and bounced back seemingly quickly.  Then there are others who, after years, even decades, can’t seem to fully recover after a relatively minor psychological or physical boo-boo.

As an adult hiker, I’ve had my share of fall-downs.  As a middle-old adult I realize that falling down isn’t the end of the world.  It might hurt sometimes more than others, but eventually most of us recover, to do it all over again.  We don’t stay down.

How many rounds in terms of the fight, does a fighter get knocked down yet gets back up to fight some more?  Being knocked down seems to be on a continuum from the life knocked out of us or our family members or friends, literally, to getting the wind knocked out of you for a few seconds.

Some of us have been knocked out of a job that we dreamed of.  Or, we’ve been knocked out of a relationship that we thought was ours and it failed, died or was stolen.  We’ve had our health knocked out of us, to be cured or cared for so that we can recover our get-up-and-go.

I realize that the same circumstances that knock me out may not knock you down and vice versa.  The thing that we share, however, is that we both got back up, in our own way, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

I wonder if a sort of resilience is built into our humanity?  I’m guessing we all have the capacity to learn how to get back up and do it all again after being knocked down.  But some of us have and some of us haven’t developed the skill.

In 1314, Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland said to his troops shortly before walloping the English at Bannockburn, “If at first you don’t succeed try, try and try again.”  It’s best, we’re told, not to fear failure but rather fear not trying.

Andra Day sings in her amazingly uplifting song, Rise Up, “You’re broken down and tired of living life on a merry go round…. And you can’t find the fighter, but I see it in you…. All we need is hope, and for that we have each other….  And we will rise up, rise like the day, rise up, rise unafraid…. We’ll take the world to its feet and move mountains…. We’ll rise up, high like the waves, rise up, in spite of the ache….” 

As with each day the sun rises anew, we’re endued with the hope that we too can rise up to face another day.  You never know what this day will bring, let’s rise up and check it out.

 

From the moment we’re conceived, growth and development never cease.  We’ve come to expect that the transitions from infant to toddler, tween to adolescent, and so on, throughout the growth cycle, will present certain stereotypical challenges and behavioral changes.  But we assume that the psycho-social growth of older folks stops with their physical growth.  Au contraire, mon ami.

Lest you think your particular age-stage is more difficult than your neighbor who’s in a younger or older stage, every life-stage has its growing pains.  Even a “good” transition to something new, different, or changed can be stressful. Sudden wealth syndrome – “what a shame,” we might think.  Adapting to success, what?

Older people continue to grow and develop as well as their younger counterparts.  The literature on psycho-social changes in older adulthood is fraught with a number of telling descriptive alliterations which include: adapt, adjust, accommodate, and attitude.

I believe it’s an old military slogan to “adapt and overcome.”  So, maybe it’s truly a battle to grow older.

“Youngsters” in their twenties and thirties have joked for years about “adulting” being a strange new world that they’re not all that elated about entering.  Was it Pat Benatar who sang, “love is a battlefield?”  Well so is developmental change.

By the time we reach middle-old at around sixty-five, we’ve become more resistant to change than ever before.  Thus, the stereotypical phrase, “stuck in our ways.”

The tasks set before us from middle-old to old-old, directly challenge our uncompromising existence.  It’s not unheard of for someone in their “terrible-eighty-twos” to stomp their feet and exclaim, “I’ve always done it this way, and I’m not about to change now.”  Or, when told that we have to accept assistance, we might be heard to resist with, “I’ll figure it out myself.”

Sometimes I think I’m growing more complex over time and with effort.  Other times I just think I’m growing like a weed.  Weeds aren’t much liked by most people.  In fact, the modifier, noxious – often accompanies any mention of weeds.

I’ve grown quite fond of many weeds.  Dandelions are beautiful if you look closely at their blooms, with an open mind.  Their greens are bitter but edible if prepared artfully by trendy culinary newbies or their country cousins who’ve been eating them with bacon dressing, forever.

Thistle blooms are untouchably delightful to behold.  Bamboo is a wonder, and the speed to which it towers and spreads mimics its grass cousins.  Its uses are manifold, but like Purple Loose strife, bamboo is considered by plant experts to be a noxious or nuisance weed.

I think the most prevalent explanation for human hatred of weeds is our perfectionistic, obsessive, or controlling need to dominate, subdue, civilize, or wipe them out.  Few of us can co-exist with weeds and just appreciate them, and those who do are frequently, if not openly, ridiculed for being lazy, untidy, or slovenly about their landscape.

Weeds grow rampantly.  The whole weed-thing, as a metaphor, fits many of us in the middle-old stage of growth.  Some of our thoughts are contrary – just like weeds, to the acceptable fundamentalist rural culture that many of us live in.

Fundamentalism would have us believe that personal growth means you’ve grown higher, better and above other folks.  A more gracious perspective of growth is that it is circular rather than vertical or hierarchical.

It’s likely that a fully-grown adult will be a person of a certain age, with perhaps a relatively vast base of lived-experience. From this point of view, a “grown-up” has developed in terms of depth rather than stature.

Because I’ve grown up or might even be considered mature, doesn’t mean I’m better than you if you haven’t grown so much.  In fact, it’s possible that my growth means I’ve experienced a much larger share of adversity, and opposition than you have and been humbled into an unassuming, content, weed-patch.

Then again, some of us grew through adversity into loud, obnoxious victims of circumstance.  Maybe it’s time to judiciously pull some weeds?

Oh, my goodness, have you observed many grown-up politicians in America lately?  Apropos for these times in politics is the prophetic Scripture, Isaiah 3:4 which says in various translations: “I will make youths to be their leaders, and babes shall govern them.” 

I wonder if their power cancels their growth, as we’ve ended up with metaphorical babies leading us.   It seems that many of those baby-rulers haven’t grown nor stretched when they encountered opposition, challenge, resistance or trouble, but morphed into victims.

The developmental fight of the mature among us, is in the seeking not the finding. Growth achieved through inner wanderings is manifest in a personal style of open-ended seeking to “be all you can be,” another classic military slogan.

Discovery is fuel for the journey, not the final destination.  This makes my spirit leap within me like that of a fully-grown adult soldier, flowering like a weed.

I was once terrified of even the thought of giving a speech or presentation.  Simply put, I didn’t know how.  I had never been given the tools to speak publicly.

As it turns out, Speech 101 is a college requirement.  I put off signing up for that course as long as possible, and registered for it in my senior year.

I think I was holding out for just the right teacher; Mrs. Cook was her name, I think.  She started us out with the easiest of speeches, a demonstration of something you know how to make or do.

I chose baklava, the Greek pastry of phyllo dough, nuts and honey.  We were married students, living on a budget and we lived on Uncle’s extended farm property.

My husband had just completed a Penn State Extension course in beekeeping so we had our own honey.  We collected black walnuts from the environs of our isolated abode, and piled them on a gravel driveway to dry.

A local band of frugal squirrels nearly depleted our collection of nuts. We found most of them stored, in a hollowed-out tree trunk next to the garage shed.  We were, however, able to recover enough to hammer open for the baklava.

Long story short, I earned an A grade on the demonstration and Mrs. Cook narrowly escaped a broken tooth on a black walnut shell.  But importantly I was well on my way to becoming a confident public speaker.

Another assignment from that speech course was the Interview.  We were asked to interview someone whom we wanted to get to know.  I chose a Funeral Director, as I was curious about his work.  Truly wanting to know something is a handy tool with which to begin an interview.

Feeling much like Oprah, equipped with well-prepared notes, a microphone, and my husband’s new Superscope tape recorder fresh from his ethnomusicology field work, I set out on my first interview and earned another A grade.

Those A grades really should have gone to Mrs. Cook.  She was a gifted teacher and taught this student an invaluable life skill which I have applied in my own teaching of sociology and anthropology to quite a few young college students.

The best precept I drew from Speech 101 and my learned application of it, is a version of Fredric’s advice to Jo in Little Women, “write what you know.”  Speak about what you know and your speaking ability will shine.  Stick to what you know.

I, for one am eternally grateful to the good teachers who have taught me life lessons that have stuck.  For example, Miss Mummert taught me to type like lightning, with few errors, and believe me I treasure that skill every day.

I had few memorable college teachers, or they were memorable in the “don’t sign up for his class, he’s crazy and everybody got a D on the first exam,” kind of way.  But Mrs. Cook made up for all of them, put together.

I hope I gave Mrs. Cook a good evaluation, come the end of that academic year.  As a college teacher myself, I remember some of those anonymous evaluations. The majority of my student evaluations were positive and as I recall, a few were downright uplifting.  I’m saying publicly today, in case I didn’t back then, “thank you Mrs. Cook, your teaching gift made a difference in my life.”

If you feel so inclined, tell a teacher “Thank you.”

If you were to hear something like, “I would estimate that we won’t bring the car home from the shop for under $500;” or “My best estimate is that I will gain no less than five pounds over the holidays,” most of you would understand that I am giving an approximation of a figure that may be lower or higher when all is said and done and the task is finished.  Time will tell, eh?

In a previous column I wrote about the broken ice machine in our refrigerator.  Well, the estimate I signed for repair was exorbitant but compared to a new refrigerator, it seemed the more frugal of our immediate options.  The labor estimate was equal to the parts portion of the job.  But, for all we knew it may have taken the technician an hour or hours to install the parts and re-calibrate the freezer panel; so, we’ll see, I thought.

A week hence, two dinged-up boxes of parts arrived and the technician was scheduled to install the hopefully undamaged parts.  Matthew, the no-nonsense technician seemed unfazed by the nasty boxes which contained several hundred dollars’ worth of parts.

Matthew worked for twenty-two minutes and we trusted the shiny new panel would say it enjoyed producing ice cubes and crushing said cubes upon our request, in twenty-four hours or so.  When I asked Matthew if they would adjust the labor costs of the estimate since it ended up being pretty much what I I would describe as a “plug-and-play” job, he said it wasn’t within his purview to deal with that, but I should call billing; he just tells “them” what parts are needed.

So, we were happy with that, and enthralled with our fancy new-like ice-maker and freezer display panel.  Who was it who first said, everything is temporary?  Our happiness waned when we got the bill.

It appears that the Service Center felt that their Estimate was the bill, whether the labor time took three hours or five minutes, the labor cost was “estimated” by job code not time spent working.  It was their argument that since I signed the Estimate, I am bound to pay the amount estimated.   

More than once and to more than four folks on the “help-line,” I wanted to shout, “don’t you understand the definition of the word, estimate?”  “But you signed it,” they repeated like automatons. Honestly, I could have been saying in Swahili, “I love dandelions and there is a meteor coming toward my house,” and they would have said, “but you signed the estimate,” in response.

I learned a new word, presented as word of the day on Dictionary.com.  It’s inspissate, and means to thicken or make or become dense.  I like this word; I think mostly because it has spiss in the middle and somehow that sounds like a venomous but neutral retort fitting for a telephone help-line representative who helps you not.

I can satisfactorily envision myself saying to one and all, “must you be so inspissate about this whole estimate-thing; IT’S AN ESTIMATE, an APPROXIMATION based on the unknown, until you KNOW, then you can adjust the price accordingly!”  I know that using that word that way, stretches its connotation, but they don’t know that and my fantasy vent helps me to cope with the injustice of it all.

My age has mellowed me as to arguing about customer-service type rip-offs, to an extent.  I still retain a little bit of fight in me as to “the principal of the thing.”

So, my calm and final effort to help this “service” company see sense as to their misinterpretation of the word, estimate, was to send an email with my argument laid out in plain, English, step by obvious step.  By the way, it took me about three calls, not counting several transfers from one department to another, to get the correct email in which to send my dispute.

Approximately three weeks, hence, after receiving no reply to my well-thought-out, reasoned dispute, what I did receive was a new bill from the billing department with the expectation that I pay the estimate in its entirety.  After all, I “signed the estimate.” 

I suppose I could retain an attorney, but the principal of the thing can be quite expensive.  In fact, a friend and colleague who was owed an amount in the six figures was advised by his attorney not to pursue it because legal fees would obfuscate the amount owed.  Wowzer.

So, as the due date approached, I had to come up with a few justifications in my brain for how to be okay, dealing with the injustice that seems to be the outcome of this repair cost.  But once it’s paid, I’ll probably forget about it, until the next time something major breaks in my house.

The next time, will I remember the lesson?  And what was the lesson in all of this?

DIY and eBay or YouTube videos?  A different service company?  I think I’ll go with option number three, my son-in-law.  He’s brilliant at everything to do with remodel and repair, but I don’t like taking his time and we refuse to do “family rates.”   I don’t know for sure what I’ll do, but I’m telling myself, “Better luck next time.”

 

There’s often more to the story than meets the eye.  There’s a great mass underneath the visual tip of an iceberg.

I don’t know for certain when I learned the word, paradox, but it has enlightened my life.  So much in life is contradictory.  Unless you dig deeper, look further, or exercise your curiosity, the surface will be the sum-total of your life.

“What you see is what you get” is admirable in the sense that one has no hidden agenda, but in another sense, it is a parody.  There is always something hidden below the surface. 

As the Titanic demonstrated, or any divorced individual will tell you, what you see is not always what you get.  That house that you bought, “as is,” isn’t what you thought it was.  Straightforward, might be straight and it might go forward, but underneath it all  there are unknowns.

After looking in the bathroom mirror recently, I was startled with what I saw for the first time as an asymmetry in my eyes.  My right eye socket is smaller than my left.

I immediately shot off a text to my daughter, “why didn’t you tell me I’m a freak of nature?  I never noticed that my right eye is smaller than my left eye!”  I’ve long known that the universal perception of beauty is based on symmetry.  Since I now know that I missed the symmetry-boat, all of my illusions have been dashed.

Years ago, my sister, Dee said, “You so have Dad’s eyes.”  I think I was startled by her observation, so I looked closely at my eyes.  I hoped to recognize what she saw; Dad’s eyes.

Upon close examination, I discovered something. I’ve never seen my eyes in a mirror!  Isn’t that extraordinary and weird?

I’ve worn make-up since I was a teenager, eye makeup included.  But, until I had to include my eye color on a driver’s license application back in the day, on which I reported, hazel – I had never seen what color my eyes were.

My grown daughter being my barometer, and my husband oblivious to nuances in color, I asked her what color she thought my eyes are.  When she quickly said “green,” I was a tad astonished.  Then, I looked closely to my eye balls – focusing as microscopically as possible, only on their pigment, I saw they are quite green.

This endeavor – my search to see my own eye color – brings to mind an incident many years ago when I taught a human sexuality course.  I had assigned an exercise to my class, to attribute colors to various developmental stages of their lives.

Some students charted rainbows of nuanced color to represent hiccups and highlights in their development, along with other symbols to describe the stops and starts of their lives.  One guy was the exception.  Quite troubled, he said, “I don’t know how to do this assignment.  My chart is all blue.”  He couldn’t conceive of life stages symbolically as color.

He was me, with eye color.  I just don’t perceive it.  From looking into a mirror at myself, to looking into the eyes of my loved ones – what do I see, if not their color?      

Scientists have identified multiple senses beyond the scope of the usual five identified first by Aristotle (sight, smell, hearing, touch, & taste); up to twenty of them, in fact.  There is no hard and fast rule and no real consensus among said scientists as to the number of available senses to humans, that cause some of us to perceive another world within the world of the five major senses.

It’s quite possible that I don’t perceive eye color because my perception automatically goes to the thing beneath, behind, or under the eyes, to the essence of life.  Everything we see with our eyes, everything visible, is a reflection of something hidden, a symbol or image of something invisible or unseen. “The visible is the invisible written down,” from The Roots of Christian Mysticism.

Not everybody utilizes their capacity of vision, but remain satisfied with their imagination lying dormant, in favor of preoccupation with what’s right in front of their eyes. “Yesterday I inhaled a cloud, and immediately my eyes started raining,” Jared Kintz.  Do you have eyes to see? 

What are you seeing in the mirror?