Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Dirty Plates and Pristine Screens
The trick about memory is how often difficult events from the past get stacked high like dirty plates waiting for their place in the dishwasher. But I will ignore the stacked plates for the time being and just focus on the question.
My first computer was a Commodore. I also had a printer, I think. In my upper flat, I had a desk where the computer sat and then a long table, the sort of table the church ladies would use for a potluck, positioned at a right angle. I was in graduate school, so all my books, assignments, papers, and notes were on this long table. My desk was a work bench with a metaphorical vice and hammers of all sizes.
It was a very hard time. So hard. My life was messy, disheveled, and sometimes scary.
Like now, though, I loved my computer for its blank white page, its blinking cursor, and its open invitation to correct and revise. On my old Commodore from decades ago and on my current not very old Dell, I can create order, put words on a page, stitch them together just so, then rip out the stitches and start over. There are never any erasure marks. I love that.
There are still dirty plates, but I don’t let them get stacked up like I used to.
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Photo by Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash
Somewhere Down There is My Transcript
I filled out the application for the Gerontology program. Wrote my ‘essay,’ yes, I wrote an actual essay describing myself, my motivation, experience, and academic history. And then I hit the submit button.
But no dice. The application requires a copy of my transcript. Right away, I figure that someone at my alma mater will have to strap on a headlamp and trudge down two flights of stairs to the basement below the basement to the set of file cabinets way back against the wall holding the signed photos of Ike’s speech warning of the military-industrial complex.
This is when I learned that there is a company called Parchment that will send me my college transcript if I fill out a bunch of forms and upload my ID. Which I did and now I’m waiting for the person with the headlamp to excavate my transcript and take a picture of it with his phone.
The requirement for the transcript was my first, “Are you kidding me?” And I almost immediately decided that this entire gambit was more trouble than it was worth.
I clearly need to get over myself.
In other news, I missed a big demo downtown today, missed as in not knowing it was happening. This, after attending Wednesday night’s demo at the ICE headquarters along with a couple of good friends and my son who, some of you may know, is Hispanic. It was a big night for us because he’d overcome a lot of apprehension to go, ended up very much appreciating being with so many people in such solidarity, and was then interviewed by our state’s public radio station as we were leaving. His comments gave me goosebumps. Anyway, I feel crummy missing today, but I’ll be out tomorrow at our regular Saturday sign protest.
It occurs to me writing this that resistance to what is happening in our country takes a lot of forms. Showing up is so important, standing with hundreds of others at demonstrations, waving signs, contacting elected officials, the calls, the letters, being aggressively civically engaged. But another key part of resistance is having hope for the future. This means believing that there are reasons to plan and aspire, trusting that we are not done for, and that there are reasons to flower or seek to flower, in my case.
Let’s hope some courageous soul finds my dusty transcript and I can proceed with seeking to flower.
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Photo by Sidney Pitzl on Unsplash
Up in the Air on This One
So, the latest bright shiny thing in my life is enrolling in a graduate certificate program in applied gerontology. This is different from theoretical gerontology which is what everyone who isn’t old thinks they’re experts in/on.
Anyway, my alma mater posted a notice on social media recruiting people for this program at a pretty high-status school of social work which is conveniently located two blocks from where I am sitting. The pitch was to mid-career people who wanted to hone their skills in working with older adults. The certificate program is 18 credits, six 3-credit classes which, if I am accepted and enroll, would take me until I am very near, but not quite, eighty years old.
To lessen the shock when we meet on Monday to discuss my application, I tried to drop broad hints about my age to the program director. You know, telling her that I’m retired and that my last degree was awarded in 1986, stuff like that. I told her I was fashioning a new career as an advocate for older adults and that I would benefit from deeper knowledge, but I didn’t tell her that I had a goals/ambition jones that needed to be addressed right now.
She responded by saying: It sounds like the program would be a perfect fit for you.
The prospect of going back to school has perked me up. Until I had this uncomfortable realization.
You know what happens when you go to school? People judge you. They listen to your answers in class and read your papers and they give you grades. Am I ready to get graded? In the part of my brain that is insufferably arrogant and egotistic, I hear the words, “I judge. I am not judged.” And then I slap myself and remind myself of my heartfelt commitment to humility in my golden years. Learn and ye shall be learned and all that.
I’m obviously up in the air about all this.
The program director also advised me to apply for their scholarship which, when I look at the application, requires recommendations from former professors about my academic capabilities. But alas, as one might suspect, my former professors are pontificating from the clouds. There’s no one to vouch for me, you know, scholastically speaking.
They’ll have to take my word for it. Or not.
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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
Sometimes You Just Take Notes
I belong to a writing workshop that has a Monday morning Zoom check-in. It is a small group of about a dozen writers, most of them fiction writers, many of them published, and a couple of them famous. I have brief bouts of feeling inadequate in their presence and then remember that, sometimes, the function of being in a group is to take notes.
Last Monday, the opening topic was what we were all reading. This is always appropriate for a group of writers since the first piece of advice given to every aspiring writer is to read. One person after another rattled off the two or three books they had going, remembering perfectly the title and author of each. I got up from my desk and scurried to my bedroom to find my Kindle and see what the heck was the name of the book I was reading about women in the Resistance who’d fled a forced march from one Nazi prison camp to another at the very end of WWII. It is called The Nine: The True Story of a Band of Women Who Survived the Worst of Nazi Germany, written by Gwen Strauss.
I was glad to have something substantive to offer – I did, after all, spend most of 2021 reading all of the Outlander books, yes, all nine of them, huge thick, heavy books that I’d prop up on pillows while being buried under my old white down comforter and my sometimes crushing anxiety about Covid and my age and whether the latest thing my beloved dog ate would finally kill him. I consider it a sign of improved mental health that I’ve left the world of Jamie and Claire although the books stay on my bookshelf like the oversized box of Bandaids in my cupboard. I am prepared for relapse.
I said almost nothing at the last check-in after I reported on what I was reading. Instead, I listened to what others said. This is new for me and a good thing. I have for a long time, my whole adult life, positioned myself to be/sound/act wise and informed. I like being the authority, the person people look to to sort things out, but in this writers group, I am an outlier, writing in a way and on topics that are far from fiction and not destined for publication, except here, this sweet, safe place that is my blog.
My father used to say, I don’t know why, “you don’t have to say everything you know.” These days, with these writers, I often don’t know anything, so I am free from the struggle of having to restrain myself, hold back on my wisdom, cut short my critical analysis. Instead, I take notes. So many notes. It is oddly freeing.
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Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
Originally published in 2022
Drop Me a Stitch Tonight
Twenty-five years ago, our old beach house on Lake Superior burned down. It was January, bitterly cold, with snow so deep in our driveway that a front-end loader had to clear it before the fire engines could get to the house. Not surprisingly, it was a total loss. Still, when we came back in March to look at the ‘grave site,’ I found little snippets of embroidered pillowcases strewn about in the wet sand.
This made me all teary about embroidering.
So, I bought an embroidery kit that involved a lot of flowers and butterflies. I finished the butterfly and put the kit away. I’d not embroidered since I was a kid and then I was a clumsy one, my stitches thick and off kilter, nothing like my mother’s perfect sewing, each split stitch, each French knot flawlessly executed. She finished the edges with a delicate crocheted border. I could kick myself now, ten thousand years later, for putting her pillowcases in the washing machine. What was I thinking?
Lately, as recent events have me treading water in the deep end most of the time, I started looking over at the bookcase where I’d put the embroidery kit a couple of years ago. And in some weird, unexplainable way, I began to yearn to embroider.
So I sat sewing in my office last night while I watched the news on my laptop. I watched the new video of Alex Pretti’s murder and then the next new video and watched people standing with their sorrow at the place he was killed. I listened to the commentators and the experts and then noticed I’d missed the proper angle on the satin stitch on the leaves. My imperfections have stuck by me all these years.
I have no hope of ever finishing this which is fine because, what’s the point in finishing it? If I endeavor to finish it, then it becomes a goal and then an accomplishment and then it can be one of the other things weighing on me while I’m treading water in the deep end. Screw finishing it. Screw having the proper angle on the leaves.
I’m going to just keep embroidering purposelessly until run out of thread or the country has been set to rights, whichever comes first.
Last Night at the Meal Program
If I was an astute observer, erudite, I’d opine about the events of this morning in Minneapolis, but I have no words to bring to that supper, so instead I’ll tell you about the challenge of asking 68 people whether they wanted fried onions on their burger before I gave them a scoop (or two) of the macaroni and ham casserole, and passed their plate to the woman next to me who asked them about cheese on their burger and offered a potato concoction, revved up in the kitchen by Miss Pat, after some poor soul, helping out, opened dozens of cans of potatoes and drained them in a big colander for her to work her magic, but before that we sliced a dozen loaves of donated sweet breads, resisting the urge to pop the rugged edges in our mouths, and then emptied bags of carrots on a platter, and then so carefully chopped off the greying edges of celery stalks, an effort unnoticed by the long line of patient people fresh from the streets stiff with cold, one woman’s car double parked while she ate, the passenger side crammed full of bags and clothing and the other accoutrements of home.
Who is Helping Who Here?
I debated about buying wheat bread but only for five seconds. It’s not for me to decide that somebody getting a bag lunch ought to eat healthier, so I bought five loaves of white bread, sturdy white bread, bread that could hold up to a very thick slather of peanut butter and a small but impressive mound of jelly.
My PBJ’s are not lightweights in the sandwich world. Ever since my husband walked by several months ago and noted that the spread seemed a bit sparing, I’ve doubled, tripled the peanut butter. You can’t make the peanut butter stretch, I realized. You have to buy more peanut butter.
No to the stretch mentality.
In addition to PBJ, each of my fifty bag lunches had string cheese, chips, and cookies. I won’t win the healthy bag lunch prize, but it’s a lunch I’d eat happily especially with a glass of milk. Plus, none of this stuff goes bad or gets wonky if it freezes which it might tonight as the weather people flutter about warning us about the ‘massive cold front’ headed this way.
Fifty lunches to Street Angels. I hope they’re going to people ensconced in warming rooms tonight but know that some or all may be given to people still outside. There are those folks who just can’t bring themselves to go inside. In my early days volunteering with Street Angels, there was a man who lived the whole winter under several feet of blankets in a tent just off a major street. He’d reach his hand out to take a hot meal (and a bag lunch) and whatever other supplies he needed. Eventually, after several years, he came out of his tent and got into housing. He lived through it, not everybody does.
I am coming out of my funk somewhat. Making the lunches helped. Tomorrow I’m going with my younger son to volunteer at a meal program. There will be a lot of physical work, chopping and stirring, wiping tables, setting up chairs, dishing up whatever it is on to a hundred plates, and then cleaning up, mopping, a lot of easy camaraderie about the weather and the food. People walking in the door with their hands in their pockets to wait in line for a hot dinner. It’s a sad situation made warm by food and regard.
That’s uplifting all by itself. That’s what the moment offers and I’m taking it.
Hunkering Down for a Second Wind
We went to dinner with friends last night. I wore an enormous sweater, a sweater that could be a blanket in different times. My husband who usually says something nice when I ‘dress up’ was silent about the giant sweater. I took this to mean something but didn’t dwell on it. I wanted to live in my sweater forever.
It’s been a week of patting myself on the head and telling myself everything will be fine. I didn’t go to even one of the five anti-ICE demonstrations on Tuesday. I’m bailing on going to a big debate tonight – all gazillion of the folks running for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor in one place, anyone who’s anyone will be there. I’m going to watch it on YouTube (although it occurs to me that I could wear my massive sweater if I went).
Right now, I am watching video of ICE agents throwing canisters of some kind of chemical gas at Minnesotans who are yelling at them. This, of course, comes after a federal judge issued an order saying they couldn’t do such things. I have to have some armor about these things, or I will lose my mind. The sweater isn’t enough.
A picture of a four-year-old in a bunny hat pops up. He is being used as ‘bait’ by ICE hoping to nab his father. A man is pulled out of a car by ICE, and the car is left with its doors open in the middle of the street. And, of course, the man hauled out of his house, in subzero weather, wearing only boxer shorts and Crocs, a blanket thrown over his shoulders is an image that may stick with me for years. All of these hideous events unsuccessfully papering over the murder of Renee Good which, if I think about it for more than five seconds, will bring me to tears.
So, the cocooning. It’s temporary. Gladly, the weather is such that not showing up seems reasonable, wise, especially for, you know, an older person. All the well-meaning health department folks are telling us all to stay inside, especially seniors and other vulnerable people. I would fall into both categories at the moment, but I’m going to get my act together pretty soon.
Put my giant sweater on and get back out there.
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Photo by Spring Fed Images on Unsplash
In the Deep End of Aging
I look at myself in the mirror.
My bathing suit is faded and starting to sag. That is fitting, metaphorically speaking. Everything is sagging. Layering, folding, crinkling. It is pitiful. What do you expect? I ask myself. You don’t get to be this old and have no consequences.
I will feel different when I get in the water. I’ll glide along with my shortened breaststroke, sheltering my left shoulder with its frayed rotator cuff like the broken wing of an old sparrow. The water makes swimmers ageless. That is what I have always thought.
Another older woman comes out of the locker room. Her suit is new and fits her perfectly. Her legs are smooth, nothing about her is falling to the ground. She swims a swimmer’s best freestyle, a perfect stroke and a skim through the water that looks sharklike. I wonder what I should have done differently to be more like her and less like myself, to not be so falling apart.
There are two very young women in tiny bikinis. Of course, their bodies are perfect and while I float in the deep end, occasionally putting my arms over my head and submerging myself, I try to remember if I was ever perfect like that. If I was, I have forgotten.
Many years ago, my friend Karen convinced me to do leg exercises with her. The purpose was to prevent the formation of cellulite. I didn’t have any then. She often remarked about what good shape my legs were in, but she’s not said anything like that in a good while. I remember especially a time we spread out big towels on the Lake Michigan beach to do our exercises in the sun. Hundreds of leg lifts and dozens of downward dogs. It made me dizzy and hot.
I decide to buy a new suit. And maybe a new swim cap and goggles. Take the bull by the horns, as they say, reimagine myself. Floating, I decide to give myself a pedicure, use the deep rust polish with tiny sparkles. I’m not trying hard enough, I say to myself. I am on the dangerous cusp of not caring and I have to pull myself back to vanity and effort.
Aging is so challenging.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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