Old Age Day by Day February 14, 2012

My husband brought me my favorite flowers yesterday - daffodils, crocuses, haycinth and tulips.  All in a pot for planting later.  I'm going out searching for great licorice for him in a while, plus some chocolate for my foster granddaughter.  As long as I keep it simple I don't feel bulldozed by Valentine's Day.  In fact, we have a perfect record of never having gone out to dinner for Valentine's Day.  The minute you go there, the expectations rise, someone says the wrong thing, you're disappointed.  A card is the thing.  Anything beyond that gets tricky.  If the day reminds us to tell people all year round how much they mean to us, then great.  But as a vehicle for the economy to survive, I don't think so.

It's a beautiful day, and I have my foster granddaughter this afternoon, so I'm grateful for affectionate people and thoughtfulness and consideration.  Her mother shares her with me, and the love grows.  Yesterday I received a homemade card from my granddaughter who lives a state away, and my heart was eased at the effort she and my daughter made to think of me and send it.  We like to be thought of.  We all do.  And 44 cents is all it takes.

Old Age Day by Day February 13, 2012

We went to a neighbor's brunch yesterday and after a while, I began to feel strange.  Everyone else was traveling all over the world and seem to have an agenda for the next decade.  Maybe that is what retired people do who can't wind down.  I felt exhausted just contemplating the last couple of months of the neighbors:  jetting to Patagonia, India, Ohio, Rome, Oklahoma City and here.  I could feel the blood clots forming in my legs.  I think, maybe because they are doctors, their metabolisms are on speed dial.  Everything is hurried, rushed and they are calmly sorting through reams of information and data as they fly, drive, walk to see more and more and more.  I am not being sarcastic.  I just realized I live in an alternate universe.  I'm pretty happy being slowed down to the snail's world.  Yesterday my husband and I walked up the street with the dogs to see a flowering apple tree.  That was our big tour of the day.  And I'm proud of the days when I do not get in a vehicle of any kind. 

But listening to these other people made me feel like a quitter, someone who is making themselves old instead of rushing around like a thirty year old.  I don't have an answer to what the balance might be.  Yes, I love to see other cultures and places, but I feel like I've shored up so many memories and learned so much already that the drive to see more is muted these days.  We have three or four modest trips coming up:  my husband and daughter are taking a road trip to the Grand Canyon, I'm going to see the other daughter and granddaughter for three days, we are going two nights four hours north for our anniversary and then a road trip in April to see friends, our daughter and granddaughter, and my best friend.  The farthest away is two states.  Sounds boring, yet it is what we want to do the most right now.  Maybe we will get a hankering for exotic places.  I cannot say.  But right now, my own neighborhood is pretty alluring, and if anything is calling to me, it's daffodils and tulip trees.

Old Age Day by Day February 12, 2012

I read an article in the newspaper this morning about styles of relationships:  anxious, avoidant or secure.  Then I asked my husband to read it.  He decided he was anxious, and I thought I was avoidant, but then he announced we both must be secure, because we have been married almost 38 years.  We'd just watched the movie "The Last Station" about Sofia and Leo Tolstoy's stormy marriage (48years), and were disgusted about ways the movie simplified the complicated relationship they had.  I think maybe you enter a relationship with a certain style from growing up or experiences, and then you either make yourselves secure, play out old scripts or part and look for a new person.  But looking for the new person only works if you've figured out why you react the way you do, and come to terms with who you are.  So I would never buy this book, because it's like the diets where you don't have to stop eating candy or exercise - it promises a shortcut when pretty much everything in life is hard work, but especially relationships.

The second article I read was about marketing cosmetics to preteens.  Walmart and Target are on top of this, you'll be happy to know.  So your seven year old can now learn her makeup skills and paint her face with the best of them.  And the pressure, peer pressure and parental pressure in some cases, can begin earlier to be perfect, and sexy, and princessy.  Evidently, not enough people have read "Cinderella ate my Daughter" or don't care enough to boycott this manipulating of very young girls into valuing themselves solely by their looks.  These moms are sucked in by our culture of surface, and they are happy to share their obsession with their daughters.  Sigh. 

I guess I need to stop reading the newspaper.

Old Age Day by Day February 11, 2012

I was talking to my older daughter yesterday about the movie "Pina" by Wim Wenders, which my friend and I saw Thursday.  You know that expression "It took my breath away"?  That is how I felt after the film.  It is such a beautiful homage to a great choreographer.  I have never seen such dancing and pieces live as I saw on the screen.  And rather than having any biography of her, the narration was spare and unrevealing, leaving her dances, her artistic creations, to speak for her.  And speak they did.  Of a consummate artist in collaboration with her dancers, creating together an event shattering, joyous, soulful and as expansive as the gamut of human experience.  The audience was frequently making little sounds of shock and awe.  She pushed it out of us, this recognition and engagement.  I cannot recommend this film enough, because it amazingly manages to show us what we become when we let life flow through us and express something larger and grander than we feel we have the capacity for.  It is hope.  Hope of who we can be and forgiveness and understanding for who we are.

Old Age Day by Day February 10, 2012

Our younger daughter stopped by this morning before work to find a couple of pictures of herself as a child.  The teachers are putting up pictures of themselves as children to show the students.  There she was without hair and with ears we worried about, with waist length hair and freckles, in braids grinning with a tooth missing.  And now she's in her twenties and a teacher.  It all passes pretty quickly, and the photos remind us.

I have a mountain of photos, and I still prefer them to the computer albums.  I just do.  Of course, like everyone else I have a digital camera, but it doesn't feel "real" or right.  I'm so far behind the wave of technology that it ain't funny.  But I try.  And I enjoy the benefits of my computer.  I love Word and this blog, maps and Rosetta Stone.  I'm not so crazy about searching, except for movies, because I don't find enough in depth information.  And I don't read books online.  I like to hold a book in my hand.  I'm a old foogie, and I won't deny it.

Old Age Day by Day February 9, 2012

Oh, I miss my granddaughter!  I'd love to be close enough to share even silly little days like Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day.  I send cards but it's not the same.  I have the sense of time passing swiftly and me missing most of her years when she is most available.  Later it will be all peers, and I will seem a fossil, even if one who adores her.  But this is all clinging.  In the best part of myself, I am satisfied she is healthy and happy, and alive in the world.  And I do get to see her every few months.  So I am lucky.  But my attachment right now is so strong, perhaps too much so.  But there it is.  I must content myself with planning a weekend soon and a few days at her birthday in April.  We talk occasionally on the phone, but she is so busy, like all kids today, that it takes weeks each time to actually speak.  If this is complaining, I'm sorry, but it is the way we grandmothers often feel.  I know from discussing this with my friends.  We treasure each minute we have with them and wish for more.

Does this mean I'm not enjoying my life?  Hardly.  I have a fun and interesting life.  I have a practice that rewards me.  I have dear, dear friends.  I have a spouse who shares this grandparent love.  I am grateful for this life given me, so blessed.  I am afraid it makes me greedy.  I think that can happen, if one is not careful.  Each moment is precious, and in each moment she is in my heart.  As are my kids and foster granddaughter and friends and husband.  A full heart, I would say.  A Valentine heart.  Ah, I believe I've circled around to a little balance, a lot of gratitude.

Old Age Day by Day February 8, 2012

My foster granddaughter and I made valentine cards yesterday.  Then we played a mean game of UNO.  It's fun to be able to play cards with her.  At six, almost seven, she no longer needs to cheat and be "helped" in any way.  It's a big leap in maturity, and good for her math skills, I figure.  My parents played many a game with my kids:  Crazy Eights, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Canasta, Dominoes.  My parents had a game table in the family room, and when we were visiting it was usually occupied.  When my kids were really little, my mom would stack up dominoes and use them as blocks.  The kids never ceased to laugh uproarously when they would tumble.  My parents were major card sharks so their gentleness with the kids was noted.  My parents won contract bridge tournaments, and I remember when I was growing up they had a bridge night and my mother had several bridge lunches a week rotating in friends houses.  I remember the new decks, the card tables, the coasters for iced tea, the little sandwiches.  I loved the cute little notepads for scoring and tiny pencils.

When we were teenagers they taught my brother and I bridge and that was when I saw they had tempers over this so called game, and they'd get mad if we bid incorrectly.  I was torn between wanting to please them and prove I was smart, and wanting to just laugh and have fun.  It all ended when I hyperventilated one night playing with my husband and parents, and the ambulance came.  I begged off cards after that.  That wasn't, of course, just about the game, but everything disfunctional in my marriage and my parents' marriage.  For many years I wouldn't play bridge at all, and now I only play honeymoon bridge or easy card games.

But I've come back to remembering my girlfriend and I in Virginia, playing Hearts and Canasta for days on the porch when it was hot, drinking Pepsi and eating Moon Pies.  And Gin Rummy with her Grandmother and Aunt in North Carolina when we visited on the train.  It was fun, and we prolonged the game by helping each other out so it would never end.  When we finally quit, no one could tell who won or lost.  That was not the point.  The point was the giggling and teasing and passing the time in a world so slowed down that we could do nothing, and love it every minute, though we didn't know it then.