I am sitting, in the quiet of a lovely Airbnb home, by myself. Traveling to attend a memorial service for a dear friend's mother, I flew solo, as this has been a summer of trips already, and James, especially, needed a weekend at home.
I miss the boyos, of course, but it is a treat to have quiet contemplation time. And this morning, having recently celebrated the last birthday in a monumental decade, I am contemplating aging—aging in this general place and at this general time.
I call the decade monumental because when I started it, I was what is jauntily called a 'junior senior'—just one of the youngsters in a very large cohort.
A kid, one might say.
And now, as I look toward the end of this decade and the start of a new one next year…well, now, I am just one of the many anonymous members of that vast group, Aging Americans.
Old: I think that's what people call us.
In between the onset of this decade, and the onset of becoming an oldster, life changed.
I retired. Mark retired.
We both went back to work: Mark to his same job. I went to work for the Straker Foundation, a job unlike any other I've ever had, an infinitely satisfying job in so many ways, and one that challenges me to exercise new muscles and learn new skills.
Good things happened for our boys in the last ten years, and hard things happened for our boys, and, older and more contemplative, I think we reacted differently than we would have even fifteen years ago. I don't know if that is good or bad, but I know that it's change.
And change—it comes with aging.
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One day, maybe six weeks ago, James and I took a ride to a wonderful ministry that provides all kinds of services to people in poverty in our little city. I pulled up the driveway to the new clothing barn. The driveway was new, too, beautiful cement, and on either side, there was a bit of a drop.
I got out and rang the bell, and a friendly volunteer came out to help us. While she turned to grab something, I went to close the driver's side door, and I executed one of those moves that earned me the title of 'Amazing Grace' from my high school PE teacher.
I mixed my legs up; the wrong one slipped into the drop, the other one stayed on the cement, and I went down, flailing and crashing.
It was comical, really: the volunteer turned to talk to me and said, "Where'd you go?"
Jim got out of the car and said, "Mom? Mom, where are you?"
I got up thinking that the next time I went to the doctor, I was going to have to say 'yes' when they asked me if I'd fallen in the last six months—one of those questions on the Old People Inventory.
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We dropped the clothes off that day, did a little shopping, and went home, where I discovered I had the mama of all brush burns on my knee. I don't think I've had a brush burn for well over 55 years, so it felt kind of dramatic. I had to load up on jumbo-sized Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment. It seemed like it took a long, long time to heal, which I think is also probably an age thing.
Finally, it's all healed up, but I notice this: that knee is not as happy as it once was about climbing downstairs or, please forgive, hopping up off very low toilets. I may go ask the doctor if everything seems to be okay in that knee, and maybe get some anti-stiffening exercises to do.
But meantime: sheesh.
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The toilet thing was the basis for a conversation I had with same-aged women not too long ago. One has a young relative who recently bought a home, and the toilets in that home are low to the floor. It's not easy to arise from that low height, says the related woman, and it almost makes her not want to go visit any more.
We agreed, too, all of us, that public restrooms offer very low seating, and that they ought to offer grab bars, too.
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That's a thing about aging: one can have a long, serious conversation about the height of toilet seats.
Or sleeping: like, why is it so easy now to catnap in the afternoon (well, being honest: afternoon napping was always one of my superpowers) and so hard to sleep at night?
These are the mysteries we contend with as we age, along with assorted aches and pains and invasive medical procedures that become a regular part of regular checkups.
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But not everything about aging is negative. And I should note that it's a privilege to be able to experience aging. I wish Dennis had been able to grow old, and that Kim and Terri and John could have grown old, just to mention a few who walked with us for a while, but not for nearly long enough.
Think of the things just those four brilliant people might have done, have contributed, in later years. And multiply that by all the others we, collectively, miss.
I am lucky to be here. I have an obligation to make the most of these 'golden' days.
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Because James, who is 34, just graduated from Zane State College, I have been thinking about what our society calls "late bloomers." I got a book on that concept, in fact, Rich Karlgaard's Late Bloomers, and I have been reading it (it's my 'morning/nonfiction book') a chapter a day, with growing interest.
Karlgaard categorizes himself as a late bloomer—not a great title to bear in a culture that deifies whiz kids. He had a slow start, Karlgaard did, after graduating from Stanford with a decent but not stellar GPA. He worked dead-end jobs for lots of his twenties, but then he was in the right place at the right time, and he helped a colleague develop a magazine for the tech industry. The publication was a uniquely presented success.
And here's one of the reasons it did so well: Karlgaard had the idea of modeling it after popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. (Other tech magazines, I surmise, were text-heavy, illustration-skimpy, and not too exciting.)
The reason Karlgaard knew so much about Sports Illustrated was that, as an undergrad in the campus library, he would study coursework for a few minutes, give it up, and spend the rest of his time reading back issues of Sports Illustrated from the periodicals stacks.
Back then, he knew he was just goofing off, wasting time.
Later though, that wasted time, that intimate knowledge of what a popular magazine looks like, helped him co-launch a publication that quickly became very popular itself.
That led Karlgaard to other great opportunities—writing for Forbes, for example—and he has had a rich career, thank you very much, after what some might call a slow start.
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Karlgaard shares a lot of science about aging. Our brains, he says, aren't fully developed until at least our mid-twenties—and often people reach 'brain maturity' later than that, mid-thirties, maybe.
And it's only when that maturity truly happens that a person can fully, wholly, embrace who they are, what they do, how they move in the world.
And from that brain-complete starting point, as we age, we continue developing traits that whiz kids do not yet have the physical ability to tap into.
Karlgaard offers these characteristics in particular that those of us in the 'oldster' cohort have the opportunity to develop and refine:
- Curiosity
- Compassion
- Resilience
- Equanimity
- Insight
- Wisdom
I think about that, and I realize he's right. I am not a genius at any of those qualities, but I'm a whole lot better at exhibiting them than I was when I was twenty-five.
And the nice thing is, these are the years I can keep refining them.
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One thing I might add to Karlgaard's list of qualities earned with tenure is perspective. For a long time, I looked back on stupid stuff I did in my teens and twenties, and I absolutely cringed. (There was the time, for instance, that I went to a diner for wings after the bars closed. There was a guy in there mouthing off about the 'Equal Rats Amendment.'
I was a dismayed observer of what was happening with the Equal Rights Amendment, and I got into it with him, loudly and verbally, and thank goodness, before it could escalate, my patient friend and the diner staff separated us.
I was allowed to stay if I promised to shut up, and I ate my wings in silence, fuming, and after that I would see strangers out and about and they'd say to me, "Aren't you the Equal Rats girl?")
Now I realize that the Equal Rats fight and a lot of other stupid, stupid events I participated in—or, worse, engineered—happened because I didn't have the skills at the time to see another path.
Now I think, "That poor young woman! I wish I could go back and tell her everything will be okay. Or, if not okay, exactly, then better. SHE will be okay."
Perspective: another gift of later years.
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I remember being pregnant and being really annoyed because people treated me as if I had a health issue. I find a parallel path with aging. We are so youth-centric, we treat Aging Americans as if they are Diseased Americans. Or, at least, Debilitated Americans.
That point of view is so pervasive that I think some of us in the cohort sadly and reluctantly start to believe it ourselves. And that's too bad, because, far from being ineffectual, I feel we can use these bonus years to do some of our best work—whether that means nurturing a grandchild, volunteering at a worthy cause, painting a masterpiece, or writing a great American novel. Maybe we'll master the art of cooking a cuisine or of organizing amazing road trips.
Maybe we'll explore and find new things that we're good at, things we never thought we could attempt before.
It is good, and a privilege, to be where I am today. I'm making myself a vow not to spend all my precious moments in front of a backlit screen.
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Anyway. Back from the memorial, which was a beautiful, warm, family-centered event, that's' what I am thinking—in a rambling, disorganized kind of way--about aging. Milestones push and prod our thoughts like that.
I hope that, whatever days you are in, they are good days.
And I hope you live into a long, healthy, and productive old age.
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