Old Age Day by Day June 30, 2010

I admit it! I've been playing with the dollhouse on the dining room table. If this isn't a sure sign of mental decrepitude, I don't know what is. I've rearranged and moved pictures and rugs and people around. It beats lugging heavy furniture in the real world. It is as if I'm playing out reoccurring dreams I have about fixing up an old house, going room to room and the stuff keeps multiplying. This may save me thousands of dollars in therapy.

One of the next to-do items on my list is to get the eight hours of cassette tape interviewing my father transferred to CDs for my kids. I've been meaning to do this for several decades, but I had to find the darn things first. They were sunk in the abyss of the basement but now are found, kind of like saved sinners. I'm looking forward to hearing his voice again. It's the only instance I have. In the olden days people didn't record and video themselves and there were no answering machines. Home films were not my parents' cup of tea. So there are just the still photos and some of their possessions, like driver's licenses. I found my mother's Pan Am travel book with her name inside it. It's touching in it's hope and datedness. The world has changed and countries have disappeared and been created.

Maybe I'll get around to this moment again, but right now nostalgia is what's happening, and I figure it's for some kind of reason. Grief doesn't heal itself all at once, it takes it's time, and bobs up like a float signaling a fish on the line. It would be a shame not to reel that fish in and see what I caught.

Old Age Day by Day June 29, 2010

Wow! I couldn't access this blog for couple of days, and it was most disconcerting! My younger daughter's boyfriend rescued me, and I'm back in business, boys!

I had a delightful phone discussion with a bud, all about the greater meaning of Toy Story 3. Only crazed grandmothers would tolerate such a topic, but we had fun. Now we've plans to go see an adult movie tomorrow night - with Tilda Swinton, so it's bound to be weird but perhaps wonderful as well.

It's summer, and I didn't wear a jacket all day. Yippee! I'm in cowgirl mode because we saw Puccini's Girl of the Golden West Sunday with Deborah Voight riding a real, live palomino, and it was delightful. All the good arias are the tenor's, but she was wonderful in her hat and gauchos and rifle. Annie Get Your Gun, before Betty Hutton. I adore that musical. Anything you can do, I can do better, I can do anything better than you. I especially like - can you bake a pie? neither can I.

And in Puccini's opera he gives a little song to Minnie's Indian servant. The only other time I've seen an Indian in an opera was John Adams' Dr. Atomic. Why not do Sacaweja the musical? Or John Ross, the traitor? There are some mighty good melodramas in Native American History. In fact, for tragedy, you just can't hardly beat us! But we're laughing now. We didn't get exterminated, and we can overcharge for vision quests and jewelry. It's the American way.

Old Age Day by Day June 26, 2010

Well, the basement is organized. After heroic effort, there are still mountains of stuff, but in labeled plastic boxes with lids. I found the tapes of my father being interviewed, his wallet and bible, my baby book, the kids baby clothes and toys, and matchbox cars, baseball cards, and letters, cards and posters. Now, if I get sick of the stuff, I know which boxes to hand to whom. My daughter and her boyfriend were amazing. I took them out to lunch and dinner! Now if my husband can get rid of old computers, we'll really have some room.

If I had done this a few years earlier, it might have been more painful, but now I know the stuff doesn't matter. Whatever the kids do with my parents' memorabilia, it will be okay. It really doesn't matter. I have powerful feelings for certain objects, but that is me. Whatever they do will be right for them. I had a lot of fun seeing jeans jackets I'd embroidered for the kids when they were tiny, their favorite stuffed animals, and washing up doll clothes for my granddaughter. The most fun of all was the three of us putting together my daughter's doll house, and then arranging the furniture and tiny people. Her boyfriend was into it as well. And now when my granddaughter comes - what a treat! The problem is where to put it. Right now it's on the dining room table. I have a strong feeling I'll be moving things around for a while.

Moving things around is what I do a lot. When I vacuum, when I receive a new picture from one of my kids, when I give something away. What a lot of time this moving stuff has taken up in my life. It's good exercise, I guess, but what more does it mean? A way of controlling my environment? The illusion of order? I don't know. But like the years I've slept away, there must be years I've moved the objects of my life around.

Old Age Day by Day June 25, 2010

Today I am tackling the basement, with the help of my younger daughter and her boyfriend. I've had stuff on the stairs for six months, but each time I thought of the job, I felt faint and nauseous. But it's got to be done, and it's summer now and if I don't watch out, it will be fall and rainy and cold and then I won't be able to do it until next spring. So I'll be sorting through the kids' old toys, artworks and stuffed animals, papers from my parents, and millions of legos. I want to clean up the Playmobil house and pirate ship, for our granddaughter, and see if the Breyer horses can be cleaned and boxed up. Then there are no doubt bags and bags of stuff for the trash. I must be ruthless. Show no mercy. Or the basement will still need a bulldozer to get through to the back.

My parents were the opposite. They held a few things of mine under the house for a couple of years after I left for college, but when I married, at nineteen, it was all disposed of. I have a feeling there was some anger involved, but I didn't realize it was gone until I had my daughter, and searched for dolls I'd saved. Long gone. It was the same when my father died. Everything had been cleaned out except a file cabinet with tax copies for the estate. No personal stuff, no letters from us or cards or dresses or baby shoes. All gone. There was one small drawer of photos, all mixed up. I kept their drivers' licenses, passports and anything I could find with their handwriting, but it wasn't much. They were not sentimental about objects.

I have to think like them today, and see what is actually useful to save or give away, and what no one will want to sort through when my husband and I are gone. It's a tidying up. But am I such a messing being, I have a feeling the basement will be pretty overfull when I'm done. But organized in plastic containers from Target, and labeled. It's a start.

Old Age Day by Day June 24, 2010

I went with my music teacher to see Gounod's Romeo and Juliette last night at the movie theater (Met Simulcast). Here we were eating salads, sandwiches and popcorn, spilling soda on our laps, and there was THE great love story passionately before us. Both voices were sublime, effortless, full of emotion. They were gorgeous and sexy as well. A prolonged bed scene was quite the surprise. And yet there was a detachment I felt, given my age, with their love. It was the height of folly, impulsiveness and hopelessness. But Shakespeare's message still resonates. We have not changed, and the romantic vision of true love without obstacles makes you feel the villains are the families and their idiotic feuds. Yet, beyond what you feel in the theater, there is the knowledge that this physical passion might have spent itself quickly, and the mismatched pair might prove mismatched in more than last names. I admit it. I'm relieved to be of an age where biology is not yanking me around on a chain. They are so young, this pair of lovebirds, and the largest force compelling them is not the parents.

That is why I, and many of my friends, joke about going back to high school being the seventh circle of hell. Because now we can see our hormones were in the driver's seat. Many of us crashed and burned a few times, and none of us listened to anyone older attempting to reason with us. It's painful just to be a parent watching your kids as teenagers. You pray for luck and that they survive.

So I'll take my aged marriage and mature love, perhaps less exciting, but so deep and so safe, that the horse and buggy ride feels like a blessing.

Old Age Day by Day June 23, 2010

The other night we ate in a tapas place owned by a man clearly from Spain. It was yummy food, and reminded me of our hunt for food when we've visited Spain in the past. We couldn't get the hang of the schedule there, and we were often on the train at times when cafes were running, and then we'd get to the station and be starving, and nothing open. A couple of places we stayed had room service, but that turned out to mean from 5-7 or some impossible time, and when you called, they were never actually operating. We succumbed, and ate a huge lunch at noontime, even though the courses were daunting, waddled around in the hot sun to see cathedrals and palaces, and then ate tapas at a bar in the evening, because waiting for dinner meant 10 pm or later. We were too jet lagged to stay awake until 4 am.

Recently, I read that the Spanish government is trying to convince Spaniards to stop the clubbing and late night revels, because work productivity is abysmal. Evidently, the opening of shops and offices from 4 or 5 until 8 pm leaves employees overstuffed and drowsy from lunch. Tell me about it! If I were younger I'd immigrate, as I am the perfect early morning person to reorganize their schedules. Spain needs me.

I love their cafe con leche, and I discovered marzipan can be delicious, if you get in in Spain. I love the South of Spain, and Granada and the Alhambra. But Toledo, Madrid, Barcelona and other places ain't bad either. I am most fond of the Prado, my favorite museum. I worship all Spanish painters, especially Velasquez, Goya and Ribera. I love anything Moorish. I'd be in heaven. All I'd have to do is open a guesthouse which had 24 hour room service, or a cafe open all the time, and I'd clean up. The tourists would all be American though, and that would be a drag. How would I ever practice my Spanish? Ah, perhaps it is too late for me. But I can dream...

Old Age Day by Day June 22, 2010

I'm reading a memoir Jean Renoir wrote about his father, the artist. Jean himself became a famous film director. I'm just in the beginning pages, but the tenderness of the tone of the book is engaging. I've been interested in Renoir the man since reading another book which portrays him as compassionate. During the first world war, although he hated war, he refused to have another man take his place and die, so he volunteered for the ambulance corps, and later ended up in charge of the cavalry horses. He tried the keep the horses from going into battle. He was kind to all beings. Many a time he helped Cezanne, who was probably schizophrenic, and who scared most people, but Renoir treated him with dignity.

Anyway, at my age memoirs have quite the appeal. Maybe it's because the summing up is what many of us do at this stage. We want to see what a life means. What has value. Yes, leaving great art behind for the ages is a great gift, but perhaps Renoir's nature was even more valuable. And, on reading these accounts, I realize that everyone's life is complex, with episodes that are embarrassing or worse, and high moments when we surpass ourselves and do something generous and brave and life altering. Everyone alters others' lives. I like that fact, though it implies a huge responsibility. We cut a swath across the world, whether wide or narrow. It's a good thing to remember, and give us pause before we act.

We're all equally important, artists or not, because our interactions have effect. And though only a few of us get written about, all of us have similar experiences. Perhaps Renoir's grandson Claude, to him, might have seemed like the most important event in his life. I like to think he was that kind of man.