small change

charge

Not quite sunny, but not overcast exactly, not cold, but not exactly warm, this day certainly opened on an odd note, that was to develop into a strange melody with the passing of the hours. I had my coffee, but no breakfast, as I was headed for a mid-morning private yoga session with my teacher to work on headstand and to pick her brain about my sketchy plans to follow a course of yoga teacher training course leading to certification.

My teacher lives in an idyllic spot, all of it very conducive to the contemplative and restorative practice of yoga. Not surprisingly, my headstand studies went well, and there I was, upside down, feeling weightless and as if I could stay like that forever. In the end, though, the forever turned out to be closer to 10 minutes, plenty of time, though, to get things shaken up.

When the hour was up, I got in my car and feeling still weightless and floating in my own space of calm, I thought I would pull into the little shopping center on the way home and buy some groceries. I suddenly had plans for cooking a dinner that would much in taste that wonderfully satisfying feeling of weightlessness I just had.

Before going into the store, though, I though I would check my phone messages and emails. I have been jumping at any chance to play with my new Motorola DROID phone, and so I checked for messages and kept on checking and fussing with the phone all the way into the store. I then ambled around the aisles considering the offerings and resisting temptations – which is pretty much the same thing as considering the offerings, isn't it? I even called home to ask my son, off for the day from his studies, if he would like me to bring him home something special for lunch.

I went through the checkout line, gathered my groceries and reached for my car key in my purse, and when I couldn't find them there, I searched my pockets. No keys. Very odd. Odd enough to have it crash through my floating state like the proverbial ton of bricks.

There was only one other place to look for those keys. Yep, the car. In any place but Marin, I tell you, there would have been no car left to search. But here I was, in Marin, and there was my car, in the parking lot, the engine fully on and purring away, the radio blaring a piano sonata, and no driver inside – and no one around giving the spitting, vibrating, restless automobile even so much as a second look.

All the way home, I kept wondering if this was the first of many signs that old age has my number and is ready to take me down that fast slope of mental decline. Of course, that I had done this before in my 20s, when I wasn't standing on my head or getting obsessed with new gadgets, didn't seem to cheer me up.

Once I got home, it was time to give my son a ride to the auto repair shop to pick up his car that died on him yesterday. So off we go, with me at the wheel. I am still bummed about having forgotten the keys in the car with the engine going, when my normally taciturn son, with a tone of more-than-slight irritation chews me out for driving too fast. Ah, to go from being almost senile the hour before to driving like a reckless teenager … what can I say? Except that I was getting plenty ideas for a post in this month-long series of daily blogging.

Little did I know that the strange melody of this day was about to change keys on me again. Having dropped off my son, I was heading back home, and was almost at the turn off the main street when my car suddenly died. It lost power, without warning, without as much as even a small hiccup from the engine. And there I was, albeit in the right-hand lane, but still blocking traffic that kept streaming by me. I never had a car die on me in the middle of traffic before. But hey, these days, with AAA and cell phones, I wasn't to be there long, or was I?

I reached for my shiny new DROID, ready to call on it for once, for more than just play. I woke it up, gently, only to have it growl back at me with the message to plug it in because the battery power was running mighty low. By this point, whatever little lightness there was still left in the recesses of my skull from that marvelous headstand, was filling up fast with fear that sank my mood. Though I was stuck in the car in the lane right across a shopping center, with gas stations nearby, and only about 50 or 60 feet from the nearest turn off the main road, no one was about to stop and offer any kind of help. Of course, this is exactly why, just an hour before, my car parked in a shopping center with keys in it and fully running was never stolen either.

Luckily, I had placed the car charger for the phone in the glove compartment just yesterday, so I managed to plug the phone in and so make that call to triple A. And very nice young man showed up in 10 minutes, and in another 10 minutes the car was taken to the same repair shop from where I had just picked up my son. My son then had to come and get me in his freshly repaired car, all of which gave him an opportunity to give me a lesson in maturity by showing me what a cautious driver he had become. This from the kid who had done laps around the racing track in Las Vegas a couple of years ago and was dreaming of a career in the fast track. And, who also had more speeding tickets in his life then … let's not go there just now.

Well then, the DROID is getting juiced, the car is getting fixed, the sky is getting thicker with grey clouds and I am left to ponder the world and my place in it, once again, standing on my two feet, as I should have been all along as soon as I brought the very same feet down from their privileged perch in headstand.

flesh & bone

I dreamed I posted to my blog. It wasn’t much of a post, but enough to make a slight ripple in RSS feeds, like a pebble tossed lightly into the steely calm of a lake.

*

In another dream, I found myself in a gathering of women, some friends, others acquaintances, but most of them strangers. One of the women, who had just published a book, rose to give a speech in which she expounded on what she thought of stay-at-home moms, which I was for years. Her speech came to a thundering end with this: “Stay-at-home moms are really nothing more than just human fat.”

In waking life I am not given to public outbursts, let alone speeches, but in the dream, I rose to my feet and asked all the women gathered there to take a good look at me, because, as I explained to them, I happened to be just that nothing more “human fat” to which the speaker had relegated my past, those years of toil and worry, as well as of beauty, in moments lived that obviously can’t be measured in the muscled flexions of the flesh of finance.

*

While in the world of dreams I was growing lots of back bone, in this life of mine, apparently, I am losing bone mass. Though I am doing all the right things for bone health, it’s my past, that hefty pebble tossed so carelessly into the lake of the future, that is now rippling through the marrow of my bones.

scaling back

The spouse, who has a bit more mileage on his life journey than yours truly, has been put on a regimen of exercise and healthy eating by various doctors and health care providers. So, like a good partner and team player, I am doing my bit to ensure his success. This means going to the gym with him (in addition to my own regular yoga practice) and cooking old favorites of his in brand new – and healthier – ways. So, appropriate to our situation and the holiday of hearts, I went looking for the perfect gift: a magical kitchen scale that will not only measure the food, but also, will tell us just how healthy it is by showing its nutritional values.

True enough, there was just such a scale to be had (for a hefty price, too), promising instant digital readouts of whatever you weighed on it. Now, as a veteran of nasty cuts and scrapes of bleeding edge technology, I should have known better than to fall for this scheme by simply looking at the box. Forget the 15 minutes or so that I tried to learn how to use this thing from the manual – yes manual. I should have paid attention to the ludicrous and tiny LCD display next to the big round nothing of a screen that looks hauntingly like a well-lit portable DVD screen.

Memo to manufacturers forced to go after the money of an aging population: seeing is believing, so make it visible. Take a hint, maybe a chip or two, from the digital revolution and build a computer dedicated to the task of nutrition. Think different, and instead of imitating the Mac power button on the scale, but relying on phone technology for pushing buttons for letters (with that annoying delay), offer the option of a keyboard. And, here is the rub: make a screen that is visible in most, if not all light, and make it big enough to see not just by 12-year-olds or testers in a well-lit lab.

If you make such a scale, think of all the applications you could sell with it. From recipes to having your scale scour the Internet for the latest in nutritional studies, or check out your neighborhood for restaurants with the right fare for your fair appetite….

Until you do that, you can have your wondrous scale back. Which means that we have returned our purchase and exchanged it for a version that does nothing but weigh. Old fogies that we have become.

By the way, I made a chocolate souffle with egg whites, nonfat Greek yogurt and top quality bittersweet chocolate, a creation incredibly rich and complex in taste, in spite of the suggested poverty and simplicity of its ingredients!

when getting older is still news

Yikes… as 2009 gets well under way, I am finding myself sliding ever closer to the end of yet another decade of life. Not so long ago, or so it seems, when I started blogging in 2002, I thought of documenting the year that was to be my 50th. Since then, those impending indignities of old age I feared back then seem like child’s play these days. Child’s play because back then, like a child, I assumed all sorts of things about them. On the one hand, I believed there was nothing I could do about them. On the other hand, I assumed I had the power to change them.

I was wrong on both counts. There was – and is – plenty I can do about the ways in which the processes of aging affect me. And, there is nothing I can do about the facts of aging. Except be grateful that right now I have the option of being here (and in reasonable health) to complain about growing older. Which means that when I speak here I also have to stop hiding behind the cutesy transitional objects of children, such as stuffed teddy bears, and speak to and about and for the community that is my offline world, and which, online goes by the moniker of elder bloggers. No one has done more to bring to consciousness the processes of aging through a blogging platform than Ronni Bennett of "As Time Goes By" has. She has documented the processes of aging in direct ways and, in so many other indirect ways she has fostered a growing community of elders blogging about being elders.

Yep, I am an elder. It’s time to stop worrying about being hip, and start taking care of the hip!  It’s time to stop worrying about the stand I make in the world, and make sure that I can still stand in the world well into old age. It’s time to stop worrying about the changes aging brings and bring about changes in aging. That is, change the accepted wisdom about the powerlessness, the loneliness, and the infirmities traditionally declared the province of the old and marked as badlands territory.

I’ve started in small ways to do just that. Change, that is. True to my nature, I've been taking the first steps literally, so to speak. I am speaking of a new exercise regime, inspired by the book (and website) Younger Next Year, on the recommendation of my septuagenarian yoga buddy. As also true to my nature, I have been exploring several ideas on elder community living in a society that shuns the old -- not to mention community, in general. Since my nature is such that the ideas come a lot faster and more easily to me than the grunt work of deep research and the mastered and mustered skills of community outreach, these ideas remain just that. Perhaps these ideas can be explored further through the “small change” banner of this blog.