Old Age Day by Day November 15, 2010

I've been reading a book about Cahokia, the great ancient Native American city around St. Louis, Missouri. It makes me want to visit, and see the ruins and what has been excavated, even though most of the huge mounds have eroded or been removed. It was a site like Teothihuacan outside Mexico City, but during the Eisenhower years freeways and subdivisions were built over a lot of it. Americans think they have to get on a plane to see ancient ruins, but Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and many other sites are still preserved in the Southwest, due to dryness and lack of aggressive development, as is the case in Egypt I feel there has been subconscious vested interest in not seeing Native peoples here as having anything cultural to offer, because they the guilt of their decimation is lessened.

But we have these treasures in our own backyard, and we often don't respect our own history. History here didn't begin in the 1700's, it began over 10,000 years ago.

Old Age Day by Day November 14, 2010

Well, the Janecek opera last night, The Markopolos Case, was amazing. I was the only one who felt so. My husband, son and his wife were not riveted. It's dark and brooding, and has some big philosophical ideas stirring around. I like that. The music was sublime and the soprano was the whole show. I like that.

It took some of the sting out of my college team losing and the residual effects of seeing the movie Inside Job. Today is another glorious fall day, and I'm going to brunch at a friend's. And seeing an old friend of hers who is visiting.

My husband is having such back problems, and I feel so helpless. He's frustrated as only a man who's been super healthy all his life can be. He sees himself in pain for the rest of his life. He can't get past what is so right now, yet, in this case, some distracting thinking could remind him things change. I haven't experienced the pain he is, unless I count childbirth, and that has an end that helps you through to the other side. I'm his witness, and his sounding board, but I can't physically ease him.

So there is this balance in my body right now - somebody I love is suffering, but I myself am fine. How to be grateful for my own good day, without being insensitive to my partner, who is having a very bad day. Ah, the challenges of marriage!

Old Age Day by Day November 13, 2010

I saw Inside Job, the documentary about the housing bubble crash, and it was scarier than any horror movie. I went with my friend and her brother, who is visiting, and we had a great time, with my husband joining us for dinner. It's exciting to meet someone I've heard so much about for many years. And the dinner eased away the feelings that arose in me from the movie, until my husband later asked me if the film had upset me, and I realized the movie had dampened my mood, and I'd had a bit of a struggle to chat and socialize. Most of the information I already knew, so I think it was really about seeing these people interviewed and watching their utter lack of guilt or sense of responsibility.

The new part for me was how academics supplement their salaries with consulting fees from financial institutions, and then consult our government - without any awareness that they have a huge conflict of interest and ethical responsibilities to the people they teach and advise. It is horrific. So economics seems to be the study of how to accumulate wealth at the expense of whomever gets in the way. There is no morality. They are in fact insistent that there is no conflict.

But most depressing of all is that Obama's advisors are all the same people who declined to admit there was a crash coming, and reassured the American people that all was secure. They should all be in jail, but instead, they are at the helm of the current administration as well. In some third world countries, they might actually have been prosecuted, but not here. Here they are lionized and paid enormous sums of money for past failures. And we are ruining the lives of people in other countries by our recklessness. I am so ashamed.

Let's face it, this is gambling, these people are addicted, and they do nothing but harm, because our country has no restrictions on their behavior. And there are no consequences for them, just for us.

Old Age Day by Day November 12, 2010

My friend who has been on a trip for three weeks returned and we had a good old talk on the phone yesterday. We could have gone on forever, except I had chorus rehearsal. How lucky I am to have friends who still like to actually talk to me instead of reading Facebook, or emailing. I'm a dinosaur, but with other dinos around me.

I hope to meet another dinosaur's brother today. He's visiting and I've never met him. I'm looking forward to it.

And tomorrow is our last opera. Lots of lovely anticipation, and, in the meantime, a beautiful day and lots of choices for how to spend it. What could be better?

Old Age Day by Day November 11, 2010

Baby, it's cold outside! Beautiful sun, but I'm all sweatered up. My Spanish class is freezing, and I wore my coat the whole time last night. The classroom is actually colder than outside. But luckily, I was distracted a bit by attempting to learn the numbers. We played bingo the last half hour, so the next stop is undoubtedly whatever Mexico's equivalent to Las Vegas is. Counting money is muy importante in any country, to be sure. I once passed up a lovely pair of shoes in Rome because I thought they cost thousands of dollars. When I returned home and figured it out it was about forty dollars. So knowing numbers is crucial to the shopping and eating experience.

Our teacher taught us a little song about numbers, one he teaches to preschoolers, which is about our level. It's amazing how singing something you need to learn makes it delightful, when reciting it in prose would be deadly. I'll never forget Danny Kaye singing "Inch Worm" in the movie Hans Christian Anderson (how could I forget it, I own the movie and watch it at least once a year). Two and two are four, four and four are eight, eight and eight are sixteen, sixteen and sixteen are thirty two. Inch Worm, Inch Worm, measuring the marigolds, you and your arithmetic will probably go far.

I wanted to sing one of my Spanish songs for the teacher last night, but there wasn't time. Next week. Maybe I can fit all the words into the rhythm by then. Right now, I skip a few, as my tongue won't wrap itself around some words quickly enough. And then there are the Rs. That's never going to happen. I'm too old a dog to teach that new trick. Woof!

Old Age Day by Day November 10, 2010

Today is the 25th anniversary of my mother's death. She was younger than I am now when she died. She was a complicated mix of wounded child and responsible adult. She was brave about the many things she feared. She conquered cancer twice. Both times the doctors said she wouldn't survive. She smoked and drank and abused her body in that way a lot of people did in her era and by the time she knew they were bad for her, she couldn't stop. She was funny and kind, yet a gossip and judgmental. She had a big heart, and a soft spot for other people's suffering. She had trouble when visiting India, because of the poverty and people on the streets. She had lived that kind of poverty herself. She had no education, but many friends with degrees and charmed lives. There was something genuine about her that people were drawn to. She could do anything with her hands: paint, draw, sew, crochet, knit, needlepoint, upolster, arrange flowers and furniture. She looked like a millon dollars in her suits and cocktail dresses she made herself.

She loved a boy and he died in the war, then she married my Dad at nineteen, and they fought and worked side by side until she died. She never had a life of her own. She had worked up until she married, but never again. For her work meant a factory with cotton dust in her lungs and long hours with no holidays. Her beloved sister got trapped in that work for fifty years, then retired without a pension.

She loved us unconditionally - she used to say she'd love us even if we were murderers. That was a strange thing to say, but she meant it. When she got cancer the first time, she later told me, she decided she was not going to die because we were eleven and fourteen. And she didn't. She was written up in medical journals. She fought to be there for us. But she lost something in the fight - part of her heart, maybe some damage (it was a brain tumor and she had to have surgery, as well as radiation and chemo) that didn't heal - and she was often not her vivacious self afterward. Depression knocked her for a loop, and nobody addressed it. She got nasty when she was drunk, and her words were deeply wounding so we backed off, and in a way she lost my brother and me.

I remember her as a woman defined by her attachments to so many people. Her huge family, her countless friends, the younger people she mentored. She was at her worst with her children, often, and her best with her grandchildren. I wish she'd lived to see them grow up.

Old Age Day by Day November 9, 2010

I like seeing Obama in India. He looks relaxed and happier. He did live in Indonesia a couple of years, and maybe he is more comfortable in a sea of brown faces. India is young (the population, I mean) and on it's way up in economic power and prosperity, and so is Obama. His mother loved seeing and living in other cultures, and he thrives there too. He's a global kind of guy.

I wish more Americans had the opportunity to see other cultures, and get beyond bathrooms and modern conveniences, to experience what these places have to offer. The richness of their cultures and the amazing architecture force the mind to detach a bit from our consumer driven culture. The people are often open and friendly, and they are curious. Why aren't we curious?

How many Americans have even been to Mexico or Canada? Yes, we have a vast country, with many glorious places to visit, but we need to look beyond our own KFCs and TV Channels and listen to the music and language of our neighbors. We tend to insularity, and that impulse is a force for stagnation and rigid thinking. Other people of the world have things to teach us. Things that may turn out to be necessary for our continued survival, but certainly are essential to our well being.