Aging – Patricia Wild

Knitting Up

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

At eighty one, I still feel such gratitude for my public-school music teacher from fifth to eighth grade. Young, pretty, with dark curly hair and warm, brown eyes, Mrs. Stasiw nodded, smiled at me as our class sang together, picked me to perform at school concerts, chose my artwork, inspired by the intriguing records she played for our class, to hang on her wall. (Trust me: that never happened before nor since!) That I also still carry one jarring, harsh, seemingly-racist memory of her has been one of those mysterious and puzzling cognitive dissonances I’ve pondered over the years; definitely an upsetting learning experience. (One of her colleagues, my odious eighth-grade homeroom teacher, routinely used the n-word. So in the late fifties, such uglinesses happened in the Fayetteville-Manlius school district, an affluent suburb outside Syracuse, New York.)

The incident occurred sometime during the Calypso Craze. As I remember it, one day Mrs. Stasiw made disparaging remarks about calypso singer, Harry Belafonte. Who’d seemingly become a superstar. Overnight. She’d been quite put out by his much-photographed bared chest. His gorgeous, dark-skinned, bared chest. Her point being, as I recall, that music was not about a performer’s physicality or sexuality but about, you know, music. More damning though: Belafonte’s dark skin was somehow offensive, questionable, it seemed; dangerous, perhaps? That’s certainly what I thought she was telling us.

But an obituary in yesterday’s Boston Globe makes me now question how I’ve remembered that nasty incident. Because a world-famous Trinidadian calypso singer, Slinger Francisco, better known as “The Mighty Sparrow,” had died, his obituary offered a brief history on calypso music. Which, I learned, was and still is protest music. As they’d engaged in the back-breaking and dangerous work of producing sugar, the enslaved people of the West Indies plantations sang sly, disparaging calypso songs mocking their oppressors. (And if you listen to The Mighty Sparrow’s lyrics, calypso is all about the sexual prowess of its singers, too!)

So is it possible that Mrs. Stasiw, perhaps a musicologist as well a gifted choral director, was actually trying to tell our class something about that history? And her disparaging remarks about a gorgeous man-of-color musician weren’t about his dark skin but more that Belafonte prettified a raw, unvarnished, transatlantic slave trade story?

There’s A Story There

Had a miracle happened? Is this forlorn and neglected Somerville corner actually a holy place? Like Lourdes, had a disabled pilgrim been cured? And gratefully left behind their no-longer-needed crutches? Or could it be that those awesome folks stealthily posting “Board of Peace” notices all over the city decided to add those poignant props to their anti-war message? “Remember?” those crutches demand. “Those daily headlines about ‘Strikes in the Middle East’ result in death, maiming, injury.” Who knows?

Guess I’ll just let the Mystery be.

Here’s what I do know. I’m about to need crutches, myself. (Actually, post hip-replacement surgery, I’ll probably be using one of those two-wheeled walkers, instead.) So it’s not mysterious that of all the detritus we city dwellers encounter daily, guess what I noticed. Yes, to put this into Quakerese, they “spoke to my [literal] condition.”

The real Mystery I’d like to solve is this: What am I not seeing?

“Waiting”

Arlo: “When’s my [fourth] birthday?”

His mother: “In two weeks.”

Arlo: “It’s waiting for me.”

Besotted yet a long-distance grandmother to this exalted, goldilocks child, I often wonder how his growing-up-in-a post-COVID-world mind works. Our connectivity maintained by Saturday morning FaceTimes, for example, sometimes he “feeds” me some little breakfast treat. I make suitable munching noises; praise whatever I just “ate.” We both know this isn’t real. One of us still marvels at the technology required for this shared moment. One of us doesn’t.

But both of us wait. Both of us, clear-eyed, see the horizon. His is about a party, cake, candles, gifts. And mine is about mid-term elections, upcoming surgery, wondering, hoping if I can live long enough to witness a future I’ve spent most of my life working for and now must simply pray for without ceasing.

Light Dawns Over Marblehead

September—and early fall—upon us, I slept with my bedroom window open last night. At dawn this morning, three voices woke me up. Pre-coffee obviously, it took me a few moments to grok what I was hearing; conveniently, the still-undetermined creatures just outside my window repeated their call-and-response long enough for me to decode: a young man and a young woman encountered a turkey and the turkey and the young woman were having a moment.

Some background to this groggy moment: Like the bear invasion in Vermont, like coyotes gobbling up the household pets of more leafy greater-Boston communities should those pets wander outside, turkeys now share my densely-populated Somerville neighborhood. Well, actually, just like those intrusive and insouciant and fearless bears and coyotes, turkeys don’t “share.” Ask any impatient driver who has hooted at a mother turkey and her offspring as they slooowy cross a busy street at rush-hour. Or the unfortunate young man in Harvard Square sent to the hospital recently because he’d mistakenly thought turkeys were like seagulls or a pigeons; you could just shoo them away. Um, nope.

More background: Like many women, should I hear a male’s and a female’s raised voices, I am instantly on High Alert. Do I need to grab my robe, noisily and dramatically open my front door, phone in hand, be a sudden and stern presence? (It’s happened.)

But this is what I want to write about: despite how confusing this scenario had been, and how half-asleep I was, happily and joyfully I knew that I knew. Yes, male voice, strident, loud, blustery, yes, female voice, more gentle, soothing, appeasing. So, then, yes, of course! Grab my robe. But then, hmmm, that third voice, that back and forth between the female and the whatever. Who, what was it?

It was that unseen woman’s mollifying tone and how she’d repeated a one-syllable call that called up a memory. (Eventually. First I had to foggily conclude that the third voice wasn’t human.) Like my neighbors, I’d heard that third-party’s sound before. Lo, light dawned over Marblehead: That’s a young woman who knows not to mess with a turkey! That’s a turkey actually responding to her call!? (Later I learned, that sound is known as a cluck.)

There are so many aspects to getting old that suck. Like, as a friend and I agreed just yesterday, watching dear friends get old, frail, confused, too. But, oh, the joy to realize that over the decades you’ve learned a thing or two.

When It Seems Too Good To Be True, . . .

It could have been so wonderful. In a flash, I saw just how perfect it might be. After all, this “Sharon M. Torres” so obviously, so exquisitely, so sensitively got me, got Strands! And “she” wants to promote my book?! (Even now, even after discovering that “her” adoring email’s first sentence is a scam classic,* I struggle to use those quotes; I still cannot fully accept that “she” isn’t real. Somehow I feel uneasy; as if I’m betraying a kindred spirit?) What a joy it would be to work alongside such an insightful and thoughtful woman—who writes so well!

It’s odd: At eighty-one, mostly I feel as though I’ve weathered a spectrum of feelings over the years; life’s thrown me enough curve balls that, mostly, I’m “Oh, that again?” But as if I were some benign, Other-Me poised a few feet above my desktop as I read “Sharon’s” email, I watched myself, as my sister would say, be torn. At my age, I have had plenty of disappointments, of course. I am no stranger to cynicism; to mentally sneering “Yeah, right!” So, immediately, I told myself: “This is obviously too good to be true.” But how thirsty I was, apparently, how much more desperate than I’d actually understood or acknowledged I’d been to be so thoroughly seen, understood, lauded! I watched myself sneer as I read—yet drink in and linger over every AI-generated syllable.

Sigh.

* In case this happens to you, here it is: I hope this message finds you well, and perhaps even finds you smiling, because I have just finished Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, and I have to tell you: it stayed with me long after I put it down.

“My Cup Runneth Over”

“This is not a referendum,” I told myself the day before. “I know I am loved.” Not said out loud: There’s Honk! There’s Indigenous People’s Weekend; folks are out of town. There’s a nor’easter coming, terrible weather is expected. This is a crazy and hectic and hard and overwhelming time—who wants to come to a book reading about grief and loss? Nobody. That’s who.

But just as the rain and wind began Sunday afternoon, the Friends Room at Friends Meeting at Cambridge and its D-10 screen began to fill. Estimates run from forty to seventy people, both in the room and on Zoom, attended the reading. But as Wonderful Man as he is known in Strands (or “Birthday Boy” that day) joked: “Cambridge police reported twelve!”

Looking out at that loving and supportive and beaming crowd of dear, dear friends, teary and overwhelmed, I found myself repeating what I’d said maybe forty-five years ago, the very first time I found myself on my feet, my heart pounding, at a meeting for worship: “My cup runneth over.” For surely goodness and mercy have followed me all my life.

Looming

Oscar season, this week I saw “Boy and The Heron,” a Best Animated Feature nominee. Instantly, this rich, episodic, allegorical film makes clear it takes place in Japan during World War II—so like many other viewers, I’d instantly anticipated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Spoiler alert: Hayao Miyazaki, the film’s director, goes in very different direction!) But we, seated in a darkened movie theater, don’t know that yet, do we. So we wait, already sensitized, already alert, already prepared to mourn. Every scene—and there are a lot of them—become that much more rich, more precious. It’s an experience not unlike reading The Diary of Anne Frank, isn’t it? We know the horrific fate of the gifted young writer we’re reading and so appreciate her every word, her every sentence that much more fully, don’t we.

Also this week: I discovered I have a sinus infection, am now on antibiotics, and feel almost like me, again. Looking back, I realize many of the low-grade yet affecting symptoms I’d had for almost two weeks—fatigue, mild depression, sensitivity to cold/chills—I’d assumed were because I’m getting old! (My sense of smell had also been affected, it seems, although that loss never registered.)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki did happen, didn’t they. Old age happens, too. Poignantly aware that, looming, changes will happen to my body that amoxicillin won’t cure, may I fully appreciate this extraordinary, present, rich gift of Life. All of it.

Your Cup of Tea?

English novelist Barbara Pym is not everyone’s cup of tea. Slyly hilarious, her emphasis on cosy (British spelling) and the seemingly dull, drab, poetry-reciting, aging women who people her novels are not to everyone’s taste. But when “the world is too much with us, late and soon,” I will grab one of her books—and get cozy.

Long-accustomed, I think, to close-third writing, Pym’s revelation of multiple characters’ interiority is so skillfully done that for years I never noticed. (Her liberal use of adverbs never registered either. Until it did. And was forgiven.) Nor did I adequately appreciate how she’d created female characters like “Jane” in her Jane and Prudence who, I finally realized after multiple readings, deserve my compassion and not the scorn their creator ruthlessly heaps upon her badly-dressed and wretched-cook women! Professionally-thwarted women like Jane—whose thin volume of essays written before she’d married could have been the beginnings of a successful writing career! Discounted women. Lonely women. Women seared by their war experiences and the privations that followed. Like I said: Barbara Pym is sly.

Best of all, while exploring those women’s interiority, she’ll write something like this (The context is World War II in an air raid shelter, at night, as Nazi planes fly overhead on their way to Liverpool):

“It’s so terrible,” said Laura helplessly, wishing there were something adequate one could say. But there was nothing. It was of no consolation to the bombed that the eyes of women in safe places should fill with tears when they spoke of them. Tears, idle tears were of no use to anyone, not even to oneself. This oppressive sorrow could not be washed away in the selfish indulgence of a good cry.

As I grieve for Gaza, as I grieve for the dear ones I’ve recently lost, as I grieve for the pain and suffering surrounding safe-place me, I, too, know my tears are of no use. I, too, know oppressive sorrow. Yet how elegantly Pym captures this enormous, endlessly confusing and confounding dilemma of consciousness! (I would quibble with that still-upper-lip “selfish,” though.)

One lump or two?

What Am I Called To Do (with asterisks)?:

To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure

and discovery may be almost the greatest service

one human being ever performs for another.

Douglas Steere

As my father got more and more frail and his children and grandchildren had begun to take on the major responsibilities at family get-togethers, leaving him with nothing to do, he’d say, “Never mind. I’ll just sit in the corner and drool.” He didn’t drool. But sometimes a younger family member would pull up a chair, sit down beside him, and listen to his stories. Which were wonderful.

As I and the warring, climate-disrupted world we all inhabit get more and more frail, asking the Universe: “What am I called to do?” seems an existential/spiritual question with some asterisks:

* at almost-eighty.

* that doesn’t add to my carbon footprint if I choose to witness/show up/minister.

*that would actually make a difference yet which I, on a fixed-income, can afford.

(You get the idea.)

Lately I have been pondering some ways we potential droolers might be useful in this unimaginably challenging time. Let me count the ways (so far):

Like the wonderful Steere quote, we can listen as others share their grief, their fears, their suffering.

Like my father, we can share own experiences; we can offer a long-view perspective. No, let’s be clear, there has never been a time quite so fraught (my dad’s word) as this. Yet surely our stories contain some nuggets the present generations might appreciate? Dare I say learn from? (Some buy-in’s probably required. Someone willingly chose to sit beside my father. Someone needs to ask us to recount the time when . . ., right?)

We can speak to the non-binary-All because we, too have suffered. We, too, have experienced unmitigated joy. And here we are. Our breath of experience adds more to the spectrum of What Being Conscious Is About, the All of it, its spectacular, wondrous, terrifying, maddening, unlimited array of experiences.

And, finally, this: I have seen what Love can do. Love is thoroughly embedded in that All; Its all-embracing power continually takes my breath away. It feels naive—silly—to write that, now, as wars wage everywhere. Everywhere! Yet over a lifetime, in the midst of conflict, when I remembered to speak or to act from a place of Love, everything shifted. Improved. Softened. This I know at almost-eighty.

Where is Love in Gaza? Where is Love in Ukraine? Yemen? The streets of Haiti, the streets of vandalized San Francisco? That’s impossible to say. What I can say is this: some of us along Elder Path may want to listen to your grief, your rage, your fears. Grateful to be able to experience this “greatest service one human being ever performs for another,” we can hear you with Love.

Moving Day

Years ago my Mets fan son-in-law, he and my daughter toying with the idea of leaving The Big Apple to live in Boston, did a really smart thing: he rode the T.*

“Nope,” he declared, when he finally made it home.** “Too many young people.”

He wasn’t wrong. With its 64 colleges and universities, greater Boston’s demographics are definitely skewed. Some MovingDay/Labor Day weekends, when thousands of people under the age of twenty-five return to this part of the world, I celebrate our region’s abundance of youthful energy. Some years: not so much.

This year, for an abundance of reasons, I teetered. (Pretty sure that our planet’s burning up has made me a little cranky.) But Friday, aka Moving Day, in late afternoon, as I walked in my neighborhood, its sidewalks strewn with all the stuff—like dish drainers and books—no one could deal with after a long, hot day of hefting boxes and furniture, I overhead this:

She: “So how was it?”

He: (Blustery, upset): “It was. . . ” (Stops. Considers; calmly) “I had an experience.”

She: (Pauses; warmly) “Right.”

*The T is what we greater Bostonians call our (ancient, ailing, maddening) public transportation system.

**Did I mention slow, too?

“Wait! What?”

Tom Jones, who wrote “The Fantasticks” book and lyrics, died this week. This news means something to me: In 1966 after graduating from college, I’d lived in Greenwich Village and a block from the Sullivan Street Theater where “The Fantasticks,” the world’s longest-running musical, played for forty years. So I saw it of course. And throughout my twenties I’d probably listened to its 1960, Jerry Orbach-as-El Gallo (the “Our Town”esque Stage Manager) soundtrack at least once a week. “Try to remember“*? Vividly.

Or so I’ve always thought. But this week, learning of Jones’ death, I listened to that original-cast album for the first time in years. And was gifted with a sixty-year old “Wait! What?” memory, aka a cognitive dissonance moment. (Are more of us thinking about this phenomenon after seeing “Barbie”? I know I am.)

My brain-scrambling, illogical moment happened when El Gallo sings “It Depends On What You Pay.” Which is a song about rape. (El Gallo argues that while “attempted abduction” is a more fitting description to what is about to happen, rape is “short and business-like.”) Wait! What? Up to that moment I’d loved everything about this charming, cardboard-moon-hung-on-a-tattered-curtain production. So why was I suddenly so disgusted?! And confused? Yet still in love?

At twenty-two, twenty-three, I had no language to explain my swirled, internal processing to myself. Any more than at that age I could have explained why I, whose grandmother had died of lung cancer, still smoked! Nor did I know enough to ask that all-important and all-clarifying question: Would a woman have written such a paean to sexual assault? Sixty years ago I had little to no understanding of another polysyllabic word: patriarchy. Nor know that I would continue to feel vaguely uneasy each subsequent time I listened to the LP. And that my uneasiness would eventually feel normal.

“Deep in December,” I know a little more about myself and my species. I now have two fancy words to explain my all-too-human self to myself—no, three. Because the patriarchy hasn’t exactly disappeared, has it.

Could I extend that same generous spirit to, say, someone who, despite all the compelling evidence/multiple indictments, still plans to vote for TFG?

Yikes.

*Try To Remember

Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen life was slow and oh, so mellowTry to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen grass was green and grain was yellowTry to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen you were a tender and callow fellowTry to remember and if you rememberThen follow, follow

Try to remember when life was so tenderThat no one wept except the willowTry to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen love was an ember about to billowTry to remember and if you rememberThen follow, follow

Deep in December, it’s nice to rememberAlthough you know the snow will followDeep in December, it’s nice to rememberThe fire of September that made us mellowDeep in December, our hearts should rememberAnd follow, follow, follow

Thank you, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

[“You are Star Stuff” by Betsy Roper]

Like many aging people, I sometimes struggle with insomnia. Anxious, depressed, fearful; it’s dark night of the soul time for sure. Over time, however, I’ve gleaned how to manage these gnarly sessions. Somewhat.
Lesson Number One: Never ask myself why I might be anxious. Because there’s always something to be anxious about, right? But if I choose to give this free-floating feeling a place to land, whatever situation or challenge I mentally name will not just land—it will colonize. And there goes any hope for sleep. No, better to give my gnawing brain something to chew on besides, say, a bumpy conversation with a dear friend that day, and maybe what I should have said was . . .
Once upon a time, repeating the lovingkindness prayer over and over on behalf of family and friends had worked like a charm. “May X be/feel safe. May X be happy. May X be healthy. May X live with ease,” I’d whispered over and over. My heart rate slowed and, enveloped in love, I’d fall back to sleep. Sadly, though, like a medication that over time loses its oomph, this practice is losing its efficacy. (Not that I’ll cease to send out lovingkindness into the universe. I have merely stopped expecting a different outcome.)
But recently I began to wonder if, like the lovingkindness prayer, focusing on something love-based might work. What if, during those tossing, turning moments, I considered my “All my relations”? And the “peace of wild things“? What if I reviewed the previous day to recall moments of wonder, moments of connection with something not anthropocentric, moments when I felt a part of the Whole and aligned with All?
Great idea, right? Two small problems, though. I live in a city. And it’s February!
But even in February, even in over-developed Somerville, such moments are possible. The five or six goldfinches who daily alight in the top branches of the tree across the street so easily visible as I write in my journal; how they glow in early morning sun! Or how the scraggly, messy, strangely beautiful native-plant garden bordering a park near my house warmed me on my cold, brisk walk. Or how . . .

Early days into this new practice, on Wednesday and Thursday, the nighttime sky provided such wonder; the passing of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). Let me be clear: I experienced that wondrous, last-time-this-passing-happened-was-50,000-years-ago comet. I didn’t actually see it.

No: I mindfulness-nessed it. I stood in my back yard, faced north, and, like sending off the lovingkindness prayer into the universe, I sent off my awe, my gratitude, my alignment with Wholeness in that green-tinted comet’s general direction—before scurrying inside to get warm.

And slept well. Both nights.