Mother-Daughter Selfie: Mom didn't realize she was supposed to look at the phone
I'm just back from three weeks of packing up my mother's sweet little apartment. After many falls and much forgetfulness--except for knowing precisely what time Dr. Phil and Family Feud come on--Mom is going to live with my sister and her family. Sally has done her best to make a cozy room for Mom, including a nifty recliner and a big screen television. All the better to see those favorite Sunday church programs.
While Mom protested that she wasn't ready to move yet, it soon became apparent to me that she'd been lucky not to have broken something when she tumbled. Within two weeks, she had several "woozy spells," as she called them. I called them scary, because she suddenly had to be helped to sit and would go blank for a few minutes. Not a stroke--I know the signs--but some type of fainting episode. There was no way she could continue to live by herself.
Then it was time for her to shower.
There we were. Roles reversed: child helping the parent get clean. I laid out fresh pajamas (Mom spends most of her days in cozy flannels.) and underwear. Turned on the water and checked that it wasn't too hot. Set out clean towels.
Then it was time to get undressed. Awkward? Not at all. I pulled her top over her head. She held on to the sink while I helped her step out of her bottoms. "Watch your step, Mom." as she lifted a foot to go into the shower. "Sit down and use this spray nozzle. Call me if you need help." With the false pretense of giving her privacy, I left the room...and stood outside the door, peeking through the open crack.
Her body is soft now, with lumps and bulges that come with becoming inactive. Her skin is getting thinner and sags in a certain 87 year-old way. No amount of exercise will ever change it. It's sweet, just like an infant's skin. In fact, I helped her put on baby powder after I got her dried. "Thank you, Sweetie," she said. I wanted to bawl.
A long time ago, she did exactly the same for me. In a moment of clarity, I realized what a gift it was to be able to help the woman who always believed in me; sewed my prom dresses; never said "I told you so" when I got divorced; and then gave me the money to win a disturbing child custody battle.
Her father was killed in a coal mining blast when her mother was three months pregnant. She always claimed that she was lucky and blessed because "I never saw my father. He guides me from above." She still says that, as she settles into what will likely be her last place of residence. And starts her second novel.
But I felt I was the one who was lucky and blessed.
In a week I travel to help sort through my mother's small apartment and then move Mom into a bedroom at my sister's. Two years ago, I did the same thing--that time it was moving Mom from Henderson, NV, to Gwinn, MI. She has a cool converted storefront apartment which would cost a fortune to rent in any place other than Upper Michigan. She has loved it there, but now says in a sorrowful voice, "I guess it's time to move in with Sally."
Some of you are ahead of me on this. Sadly, both of your parents have passed away. Some of you still have both parents around for holidays, celebrations, and everyday chit-chats. Some of you share my current situation, one parent gone, one now slipping. Your counsel is welcomed.
My father died thirty years ago, at age 56, from what his internist called "bad luck cancer." He was a hard worker, often shuttling between two jobs. If you ever went to Hans' Gulf Station, in Lombard, IL, back when men pumped your gas, there's a chance my father helped you. That was his part-time job. He always wanted to travel, and his dream was to retire in Las Vegas, near his brother. He and my mother had finally started to go a few places when he got sick. Diagnosis to death was only took from Spring to Fall. Shit.
My mother is plucky--she went ahead and moved to Las Vegas by herself. She got a job at the DMV, bought a condo, took dancing lessons, and met her second husband, Ray. She started to write a novel, but then put it aside to care for Ray. Ray had been the sole survivor of a WWII plane crash, landing in German territory and spending several years as a POW. His severe injuries hadn't been treated; he would suffer from disabilities and constant chronic pain for the rest of his life.
After Ray died, Mom remained in Henderson. She bought another condo and took up ceramics. She returned to her book, which she declared would be a "blockbuster." She was certain that Dr. Phil would be interested in having an 85 year-old author on his show. She finished the book in 2014 and self-published "What Shapes Our Life," a family saga featuring Nora, a young woman in Southern Illinois after WWII. Mom was especially proud that she wasn't uncomfortable writing the sex scenes. (Lots of heavy breathing and passionate kissing.)
Evelyn Dugger Beavers Tartaglia--Author!
After her triumphant debut--although Dr. Phil has not called--she thought she might like to tackle a sequel. But she started taking tumbles in her apartment. She fell, sometimes during the night, and would lie on the floor until she could phone my sister. Sally would take her for a few days, until Mom would insist on returning to her own home. "I like my own company," she always says. Then Sally noticed that Mom hadn't reordered any of her numerous prescriptions. She couldn't remember if she had taken the ones that were still around, despite Sally's efforts to keep the pill reminder boxes up-to-date.
And so it goes. Apparently she was writing generous checks to a few charities each month. Forgetting to eat, and thrilled at her sudden ability to lose weight. Taking all day to read the small local newspaper...several times. Falling more frequently; we're amazed that she hasn't broken a hip. She's failing and she knows it. "I'm not great and I'm not terrible," she answered when I asked how she's doing. She wants to go to the funeral home when I'm there, to make arrangements. Sensible, yet unsettling.
How much longer will she be with us? It's sad to realize that parents aren't going to always be around. That we will step up and be the oldest generation. That we will fall. That someone will take care of us.
Full Moon in Puente La Reina: Inspires an attitude of gratitude!
When you walk for 500 miles, your life is temporarily housed in a backpack; you don't need much money; and your only job is to cover a reasonable distance that day and find a bed.
You end up with lots of time to think.
During my 38 days on the Camino de Santiago, I mostly walked alone, by preference. I loved starting out early so I could have the night sky to myself; it was completely dark and I could see stars all the way to the horizon. The Milky Way was straight overhead. There were two glorious full moons during my pilgrimage. Because the route is always westward, the moon pulled me towards her each day. She gave enough light to leave shadows. It was peaceful before sunrise, the perfect way to start a fresh morning. And give thanks.
Spectacular sunrise…pilgrims must turn around to see it each morning. We were always walking westward towards Santiago de Compostela.
I'm not going to get into the details of how anyone should give thanks or to whom or what the thanks should be directed. You all have your individual beliefs and methods, which I totally respect. I'll just tell you what worked for me. I started out with a review of the previous day and, sure enough, there was plenty to be grateful for: the delivery man who chased after me at 6 a.m. to return the wet sock that had become untied and fallen off my backpack; the time I thought I'd left my iPhone charger behind, and was rescued by Mary, who lent me hers; then finding the charger; getting the last lower bunk; the two fishermen who turned me around the day I had taken a wrong turn.
There is always something to be grateful for. Every. Single. Day. As I walked, I remembered my Gratitude Journals. I hadn't thought of them in years...about twenty years, to be exact.
On the Meseta, with just-harvested wheat fields on both sides. Grateful for a flat path…and the chance to be alone so I could reflect.
In my early 40's, everything went wrong, all at once. I became divorced, got a mortgage, bought a house with a killer yard, seriously teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, changed jobs, took a second job, worked 80 hours a week because I refused to let my credit rating drop, fed the kids, and struggled to hold everything together. I don't recall how I learned about Gratitude Journals. Maybe even from Oprah, because I was still an Oprah fan back then. It doesn't really matter. The universe delivers what we need, when we need it.
It's simple enough. Everyday, you write a page on something you're thankful for. The idea is to remind us that no matter what, there is always, always a reason to be grateful. So, I went out and bought my first journal. I picked a small size, thinking I wouldn't have to write so much. I wrote in the mornings (still do) before the day got busy. And I made one rule for myself: No repeats. Ever. Each day had to be something different.
In the beginning, I did the usual: grateful for my children, my health, my job, a car that started. Food, heat, water, a lawn mower that started. You get the idea. That lasts for about a month. I ran out of the obvious, so I had to start to pay attention to the subtle. Then came the good stuff. Forced to find something new, I'd go through the day, noticing. I'd choose one thing that had made an impression, and save it to record the next morning.
I did it for a thousand days.
Here's the miracle: At some point, I became authentically Grateful. All day, I would register what was good. And there is so much good! After three years, I stopped the Journal, because I didn't need to write it all down anymore. I could recognize something, acknowledge it, and be glad to have witnessed one more reason to be thankful.
I tell you all of this because travel takes us to a different place, with a different ability to see our lives. It can be surprising to spend time alone and rediscover ourselves. It may sound corny, but I really did return with an attitude of gratitude.
Grateful for the cairns that helped guide us. In the absence of yellow arrows, someone would make a cairn to point the way. Pilgrims who went before me took time to build these little works of art for those who followed. I added a few stones along the way, too.
Day 1: Climbing the Pyrenees. The white spots are sheep. It would take me almost nine hours to get up and down the mountain pass.
Walk the Camino de Santiago and you will come away with lessons. In fact, the Camino refuses to let you be a slackass about learning. It actually gets to be interesting. Okay, what will you teach me today, Camino?
Consider the experience to be a life-in-miniature, start to finish. The conception and birth of your Camino plan. The childhood of learning to take care of oneself; the sweet freedom of adolescence; the importance of discipline in adulthood; the wisdom and satisfaction of perseverance that come with maturity. The bittersweet ending. The memories of what was.
Today I write about two obvious lessons, delivered by a slow awakening...the “aha” moments.
Day 1: Already making progress! It was a hot, hair-plastering day. What I notice about this photo: how bright my shirt is! By the end--38 days later--it would be a paler "pilgrim" orange. And my water would not be in such an inaccessible place. Another lesson!
Lesson One: Step by step.
Google a map of the Camino Frances, all 500 miles. A pilgrim’s only job is to manage a dozen or so miles each day. Even knowing that, I had a hard time believing that all those small segments would actually add up and move me across a country. But they did. And about the time you feel like you’re really getting the hang of this pilgrim thing, it’s over.
Out the door of the albergue in the morning, with nothing more planned than the day’s proposed itinerary. Sometimes it was easy: A good night’s sleep, an anticipated landmark, or a cool breeze was enough to set the day in motion. Sometimes it was tougher: A touch of tendonitis, a weather forecast of over 90 degrees, another day of climbing...which always meant another day of wicked downhills. I never wanted to quit, but there was a serious string of days in the first couple of weeks when I honestly wondered why I ever thought the Camino was a good idea. It was harder than I expected, my knees hurt from the descents, and walking in the rain was not romantic.
But just like real life, there isn’t a choice. No opting out. The only direction is forward, and we must make the best of it. Great days. Days to simply endure. Horrendous days. The sweat from heat or from wearing a poncho. Fatigue and boredom. Then...sunshine again. A rainbow. Pure contentment. Always, the question of purpose. Always.
The surprise and beauty of rainbows after a storm. If we look, sometimes a double rainbow is our reward for walking in the rain.
It's the same for all of us--only without the backpack. A week flies by, then a month. Another round of holidays, and it’s time for New Year’s resolutions. School, job, family. We finally start to get the rhythm of being a productive adult. Then, wham! We’re facing retirement and a new identity. How did that happen?? Day by day, steadfast readers. Step by step.
An "easy" descent. Lots of rocks and furrows, which always require attention and put stress on the knees. But the view ahead? Pure motivation!
Lesson Two: Someone is always ahead of you and someone else is always coming up from behind.
At first, I would be discouraged by the tiny figures of pilgrims who were ahead of me. Sure, the younger folks could move like gazelles, but how did that couple from France get way up there? They were still sleeping when I left. For awhile, I wouldn’t look ahead; some people were so far in front of me. It was going to take me forever to make it to the top of that hill. It felt a bit like failure. I was a bad pilgrim.
Then, slowly--aha!--it didn’t matter. I would get there, too. And those who were following me would see me at the top of the hill...and know that their turn was coming. We were just moving at our own pace. Some like to dash ahead, some like to stop often for breaks or to take photos. Some like to just sit, eyes closed. Each of us was different, spending our day as we should, and as we wished. Most of us would end up in the same town that night, and nearly all of us would arrive at Santiago de Compostela within a few days of each other.
So. The lesson? There will ALWAYS be someone who seems to be sailing ahead, while another plods along behind the pack. A thousand reasons why, but none really matter. It's organic, always changing. We will all end up in the same place. And hopefully, we are pleased with our journey.
Day 38…Step by step
That's how humanity moves. In a line. Generations, always some ahead, and some still starting out. We will travel the same path called life, but in different ways. Different tempos. Different timeframes. Same twenty-fours hours, differently spent.
It's your life. Your pilrimage. It's not a race.
The line of pilgrims at the Peregrino Office, waiting to register for their official Compostela. Some walked, some rode bikes. Each has a unique reason for the pilgrimage, time spent, as well as experience.
Can there be a better Mother's Day gift than to know that Mom Jeans are back? And they're cool!
A mere five years ago, I wrote a Blix about Mom Jeans. When my blog was picked up by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the post drew 4,000 readers the first day. Clearly, I had discovered a topic that was begging to be discussed. At the time, they were a fashion disaster made even more so by the Saturday Night Live skit with Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and Maya Rudolph. Who can forget: "I'm not a woman any more...I'm a Mom."
Urban Dictionary defines Mom Jeans like this: "Worn by the 40+ crowd. The butt will be compressed so it doesn't stick out. It will instead be pushed to the sides, making it look far wider than it really is."
That was then, this is now.
Topshop--you know, where Princess Kate hangs out--has declared Mom Jeans to be stylish. There is an entire line of the high-waisted, long-zippered pants. Stretch fabric out, soft denim in.
Erica Hanks, a wardrobe sylist, calls the Topshop jeans--ready?--"A hipster take on the new trend. It's their cheeky way to name a high-waisted boyfriend jean." Or...perhaps women are tired of squeezing into skinny jeans, battling muffin tops, or exposing their butt cracks to the world. Perhaps they want to be comfortable again.
Here in the USA, you can find these comfy classics at Urban Outfitters...with or without the rips and holes. About $70. You can probably also wander down to your local resale shop and pick up a vintage pair for a couple of bucks. But you better hurry--they have been discovered and will soon be swept up by adolescent fashionistas.
If Miley Cyrus is wearing them, the trend is clear.
As I wrote in my first Blix on Mom Jeans, mothers never get enough credit for their splendid sartorial sense:
"...Face it, mothers, and sensible women everywhere, have always been the unsung fashion divas. Who discovered that flats were more comfortable than stilettos, could be downright stylish, and didn't cause foot paralysis? Who pioneered the chic layered-look, donning thick sweaters over whatever they were wearing, albeit just to stay warm? Who carried the prototype of today's enormous handbags--I believe they went by the unglamorous name of "totes" and didn't cost $900--back in the day, just so their children could have a steady supply of snacks and Matchbox cars? And when the current low-slung, skin-tight jean phase reverts to one of comfort--and it will happen!--who will likely not receive credit where credit is due? It won't matter, moms will already be on to the next trail-blazing trend. Let the young-uns think it's their idea. Fine, that's what females have already been doing with the men in their lives since before the discovery of fire. Feed them the concept, let them run with it, applaud their cleverness."
Yes, in 2009, I predicted this would come to pass.
So, go ahead, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chloe Sevigny, and Anne Hathaway. Strut your stuff in your Mom Jeans and let the world think you've discovered something new and glamorous.
I've been thinking a lot about the future lately. A few weeks ago I posted a Blix about writing a letter to yourself in the future. (You did that, right?) A way to remember or remind yourself about something. Or to check in with yourself to see how those goals are coming along. It's a nifty concept, although it will probably feel weird when the email arrives...from the past me.
Today, let's talk about knowing your chances of dying in the future. Say, within five years.
This is not science fiction. Researchers in Finland and Estonia have identified four biomarkers (molecules in the blood that can identify a disease, condition, or risk) that correlate with death in the general population--not just people who are already ill.
The study involved over 17,000 people, ages 18-103. Both Finland and Estonia have health registries; medical records and lab results are available for many years. Groups from each country were randomly selected to represent the demographics; 106 biomarkers were tested. The Estonians went first, 9,482 of them. Over five years, 508 died of various causes. Then 7,503 Finnish subjects stepped up; 176 passed away.
Being good scientists, the researchers did statistical analyses to control for factors such as smoking, alcohol, cholesterol levels, and pre-existing conditions: cancer or diabetes. This levels the playing field. After that, the common biomarkers of the deceased were examined.
Four biomarkers prevailed among those who had died within five years. For the medical geeks: alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, albumin, very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particle size, and citrate. (Click here for the study.) A person with a biomarker index in the top 20% of the range was 19 times more likely to die within five years.
It's going to be a while before your internist will be ordering this test along with your routine blood work. The study needs to be validated--duplicated with similar results. Clinical implications factor in here, as well; the biomarkers don't give an underlying cause. They're just saying, "Heads up!"
And let's not forget the ethics of this kind of testing. Does everyone get it? Should people have a choice regarding whether or not to find out if they have the biomarkers? What happens to the folks who get the bad news?
I first heard of this test while listening to a recent podcast of one of my favorite radio treats, from WGN Chicago 720 AM, The Kathy and Judy Show. (Podcasts free on iTunes) Usually the hilarious duo tackle lighter topics, but this idea brought out some thoughtful comments. Overwhelmingly, callers wanted to know the results. Although they tended to joke: "I'd start spending!" "I'd quit work!"...the message was the same. "I'd live in the moment. I would enjoy life now."
Isn't that what we hear, over and over? No matter what life-changing event takes place--a near-miss on the expressway, a biopsy is negative, a relationship turns around--people have an awakening. The realization that it all could go away in a heartbeat. And that we're not done yet. There are children to hug, trips to take, gardens to grow. Wisdom to gain...and share.
One of my favorite colleagues, Chuck Corr, a retired professor from Southern Illinois University and an expert on end-of-life issues, told me about a study he had done. He asked the question: "Would you rather die quickly, without much pain, or more slowly, possibly with pain?"
Younger people overwhelming chose the quicker route. If they were going to die, they wanted it to be fast and easy. Not so the mature folks. They understood that it might be uncomfortable, but they wanted to have time to do a few things, settle their affairs...and to say good-bye. They didn't like the idea of not being able to say what needed to be said and to finish up on their own terms.
All this brings me back to the "Biomarker Profiling" study. Would you want to know? What would you do? What would change?
"If you give a girl a monkey"...which Jane Goodall's father did when she was a child. She named the toy chimpanzee Jubilee, and thus began her fascination with animals. And Africa. Jubilee still sits on Jane's dresser in London.
Wow! Last week it was Gloria Steinem, this week--April 3--it's Jane Goodall's turn to celebrate her 80th birthday. 1934 is certainly giving us some remarkable people. And it's only April.
Imagine knowing you want to work with animals--primates, to be specific--but you have no scientific training. None. (Although later, you will be "fast-tracked" at Cambridge.) All you know is that no one has really studied primates in their natural habitat. So, at 18, you take a job as secretary, and a second job with a documentary company, to save for a trip to Africa.
We all know what happens. Here's a link to her amazing biography, from the Biography Channel. Take a minute to refresh your memory: 45 years in Tanzania; two years before the chimpanzees were comfortable enough to let her get within 30 feet; the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society.
"When I look back over my life, it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me--from the little girl who was so passionate about animals, who longed to go to Africa, and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth."
These days, Jane--at 80!--travels 300 days a year. She is an outspoken advocate for ecological preservation, animal rights, and a vegetarian diet.
"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with people who are doing something you don't believe is right."
This is NOT about feminism; or how you feel about the woman who took care--full-time-- of her mother for six years before leaving for college; or the fact that breast cancer is neither liberal or conservative; or that love can eventually happen, at age 66; or that a spouse's death is neither liberal or conservative.
Instead, celebrate the brave and the passionate, whether they are male or female. The world needs these people--whether they are Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein…or Gloria Steinem. They know they are different and go about their lives doing what they do best: Being Themselves.
"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." That's not such a radical quote, now is it?
If you missed it, here is the Op-Ed from The New York Times (March 22, 2014)
ON Tuesday, Gloria Steinem turns 80.
Do not bother to call. She’s planning to celebrate in Botswana. “I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’ First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.”
Very few people have aged as publicly. It’s been four decades since she told a reporter, “This is what 40 looks like.” Back then many women, including Steinem herself, fudged their age when they left their 20s, so it was a pretty revolutionary announcement. A decade later she had a “This is what 50 looks like” party at the Waldorf for the benefit of Ms. Magazine. Steinem, who has frequently said that she expects her funeral to be a fund-raiser, has been using her birthdays to make money for worthy causes ever since. Before heading off to Botswana, she, along with Rabbi Arthur Waskow, was feted at a “This is what 80 looks like” benefit for the Shalom Center in Philadelphia.
Ever the positive thinker, Steinem composed a list of the good things about starting her ninth decade. A dwindling libido, she theorized, can be a terrific advantage: “The brain cells that used to be obsessed are now free for all kinds of great things.”
“I try to tell younger women that, but they don’t believe me,” she said in a pre-Botswana interview. “When I was young I wouldn’t have believed it either.”
Her famous hair is colored, but otherwise, there’s been no outside intervention. She likes to recall a friend who proudly reported having rebutted the feminist-got-a-face-lift rumors by announcing: “I saw Gloria the other day and she looked terrible.”
Actually, she doesn’t look terrible at all. She looks great. She looks exactly the way you would want to imagine Gloria Steinem looking at 80.
Steinem occupies a singular place in American culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, the whole concept of women’s place was transformed — discrimination was outlawed, hearts and minds were opened. In the history of our gender, this might have been the grandest moment. There were all kinds of reasons that the change happened at that particular time, and a raft of female leaders who pushed the movement along. But when people think about it, Gloria Steinem is generally the first name that pops up. She’s the face of feminism.
“It’s a big gift to be recognizable as part of something that matters to people, but that’s not the same as being responsible for something,” she said mildly.
There are two reasons that Steinem turned out to be the image of the women’s liberation movement. One did indeed have to do with her spectacular physical appearance. For young women who were hoping to stand up for their rights without being called man-haters, she was evidence that it was possible to be true to your sisters while also being really, really attractive to the opposite sex. (An older generation tended to be less enthusiastic. The Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire once called her “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.”)
“I think for her as an individual, in one sense aging has been a relief,” says her friend Robin Morgan. “Because she was so glamorized by the male world and treated for her exterior more than her interior.”
But the interior always mattered. The other thing that made Steinem unique was her gift for empathy. Women who read about her or saw her on TV felt that if they ran into her on the street, they would really get along with her. And women who actually did run into her on the street felt the same way. More than a half-century into her life as an international celebrity, she remains stupendously approachable, patient with questions, interested in revelations. When she goes to events, young women flock around her. All celebrities draw crowds, of course. The difference is that when Steinem is at the center, she’s almost always listening.
Ruchira Gupta, a journalist and activist, recently toured India with Steinem to publicize “As if Women Matter,” a collection of Steinem’s writings repurposed for an Indian audience. The lines of people wanting to take pictures, ask questions and share stories overwhelmed Gupta, who is 30 years younger. “I would say: ‘I can’t do it, Gloria. This is too much. Why are you giving so much time?' ” Gupta recalled. Steinem, she said, told her: “This is the only opportunity you might have for human contact with this person. So how can you not engage?”
Steinem still spends most of her life on the move. (The word “still,” she said wryly, now has a tendency to enter into conversations with some regularity.) Today Botswana, tomorrow India, Los Angeles a week from tomorrow. Gupta says there are new invitations for book tours in Bhutan and Bangladesh. Steinem has never taken up sports and gets her exercise, she says, “just running around airports and cities.”
MOST of what she does involves moving the movement forward. Speech to meeting to panel to fund-raiser. She frequently travels alone but it’s not lonely, she says: “On the plane I have my flying girlfriends, who are called flight attendants.” (Flight attendants play a large role in Steinem’s life. Sometimes they get her first-class meals when she’s flying coach. We will now stop to contemplate the fact that Gloria Steinem is 80 and still flying coach.)
She has a network of friends around the world, some of whom she has known from the early days on the barricades. “I’ve noticed that we all of us sort of cling to each other more,” says Robin Morgan. “We say ‘I love you’ at the end of conversations. We call to say, ‘It’s very cold out — did you wear an extra scarf?’ There’s a lot of tenderness.”
Photo
From left: Betty Friedan, Elinor Guggenheimer, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Gloria Steinem, among the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus, in July 1971.CreditDon Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Her intimate circle is mainly female. But in her good-things-about-80 list, Steinem wrote about the advantages of turning former boyfriends into friends: “Your old lovers get to be your really old lovers, and you can’t remember who broke up with who, or who got mad at who — just that the two of you remember things that no one else in the world does.” But she’s not planning on adding to their number. Recently, she recalled, she met a young man in her travels and thought, “If I was younger, we’d have had a great passionate affair for two years and been friends the rest of our lives.”
It wasn’t a wistful thought, she says. It was an observation. “I didn’t regret it. That’s the advantage of shifting hormones.”
She has no bucket list of unvisited countries. Asked if there are any people she’s always wanted to meet, she pauses, thinks for a while, and suggests Marleen Gorris, a Dutch film director, and Sven Lindqvist, the author of a book on genocide. Many women, if stumped, would just blurt out something like George Clooney. “That’s funny you mention that,” she said. “I just talked with George Clooney yesterday.”
“Fifty was a shock, because it was the end of the center period of life. But once I got over that, 60 was great. Seventy was great. And I loved, I seriously loved aging. I found myself thinking things like: ‘I don’t want anything I don’t have.’ How great is that?” But, she added, “80 is about mortality, not aging. Or not just aging.”
IT’S a challenge she’s actually wrestled with before. One of the interesting things about being Gloria Steinem is that so many of her casual musings are transcribed by reporters. It turns out that on her 70th birthday she told Time, “This one has the ring of mortality.” Obviously, she got over that and it’s very easy to imagine Gloria Steinem being interviewed at 90 and saying that turning 80 was stupendous, but now it’s time to get seriously serious.
Robin Morgan sees Steinem at 80 as a continually evolving work. “She is a better organizer now than she ever has been. She’s a better persuader. She’s a better writer than she ever has been if she’d give herself the time to sit down and write.”
That last — Steinem’s longstanding battle with writer’s block — weighs on her. She’s been working for more than a decade on a book about life on the road, and it has resisted all her efforts to get it finished, including four stints at a writers’ colony. When asked whether she has any regrets, Steinem says: “Well, actually it’s not so much what I would have done differently. It’s that I would have done it much faster.”
Steinem has always been such a positive cheerleader for the future that we really do expect, on one level, to hear her come up with some strategy for standing up to mortality. She’s always had a victory in mind, a vision of a better tomorrow where there would be no hierarchy of gender or race or income, where life flows as seamlessly as it seems to do in the stories she tells about the early Iroquois or Cherokee.
You do sort of count on her having a plan for the next stage. “We’re so accustomed to narratives, we expect there’s going to be a conclusion, or explanation or answer to the secret,” she said. “And probably the answer is, there isn’t.”
What would you say to the Future You? A year from now, or two, or ten, what will you hope to have gained? What will you have left behind?
What memory do you want to share with yourself?
What was special about Today?
Steadfast readers, I have stumbled across a marvelous place that lets you send an email into the future. To yourself! I'd give you the website URL right now, but I'm afraid you will dump me...which affects my Bounce Rate, in blog-speak. (The longer you stay on my site, the better.) First, let me tell you a little more.
We've all done the "What would you tell your 20 year-old self?" exercise. Or some other age: 30? 40? 50?... Sure, we're a zillion times wiser now, so that's not exactly a toughie. It's incredibly simple to look back and see where we turned left when we should have turned right...or, in my case, married waaaaaaaaay too young. Before I got to Paris. (THAT would have changed everything.)
Besides creating frustrating reminders, nothing can be done about the past. Regrets and lessons are part of being human. If you don't have any, contact me immediately: [email protected].
BUT--the future is still being planned. It's open and waiting. A blank canvas, ready for you to step in and decide again: Left or right? North or south? Stay or go? It's kind of exciting to think about. Maybe even a little scary.
Imagine sitting down this afternoon and asking yourself: "Where do I want to be a year from now?" And then you write to your Future Self, explaining what should occur. Maybe you're more sentimental and want to remind your Future Self of how much you love someone, and how you hope he/she is still there twelve months from now. Or possibly a habit to you want to break. Or a reminder NOT to repeat a certain experience.
It's funny how insurance and drug companies are more aware of the fact you're turning 65 than you are...
Sometime last summer, my mailbox was suddenly flooded with letters, brochures, flyers, offers, reports, and announcements heralding the fact that I would be 65 years old on January 1. At first I was mildly amused. But as they kept coming, it felt a little creepy. Who were all these people, anyway? And how dare they badger me about something I'd rather keep private?
Those of you who are now approaching the Medicare years will understand. Those of you who lag by a decade or two need not worry your pretty little heads...yet.
I mean, could they make this Medicare thing any more complicated?!? I think I'm a fairly bright person. I daresay I even know a thing or two about health care. But it was pure mumbo-jumbo, all this Part A, Part B, Part C, Part D--oops, there is no Part C. Well, actually, there is a Part C, but then you have to give up Parts A and B. If so, you might or might not need Part D. Parts A and B do require Part D, at least if you want a whiff of prescription coverage. There are also Plans--not to be confused with Parts.
Recent Comments