Back to school

This morning my 16-year-old (for one more week) told me he graduates from high school in nine months.

This ‘revelation’ kind of took both of us aback.

He’s ready for school to start, ready for senior year, ready for what lies ahead…college...and beyond.

Me, I think I’m ready for the nursing home.

Also this morning I had a routine appointment with the surgeon who did my foot surgery last summer.  Earlier this summer I had a blood clot, most likely caused by hormones and a long car trip.  Since then I’ve been having shin pain, and the ‘good’ news is that annoyance isn’t  alarming. It just takes time for all the ‘vascular systems’ to return to normal after a blood clot.

But I also got some ‘not so good’ news. The nerve damage in my other ankle has worsened. Deep down I think I’ve known this as I limped along on my daily hour-long walks. Fortunately, I inherited my mother’s high tolerance for pain.

Unfortunately, high tolerance notwithstanding, this needs to be taken care of surgically so I can continue to be active into my declining years.

Which quite frankly have felt like this summer.

Now a disclaimer…

None of this is life threatening (well, except for the blood clot), it’s just annoying and depressing. Recovery won’t be nearly as extensive since I’m not having toes pinned, etc. as I did last summer. But the bottom line is I’ll still be inactive for a longer period of time than I’d like.

Exercise makes me happy. It keeps the endorphins flowing and prevents me from being pudgier than I am.

My ‘baby’ graduates from high school in nine months, and it took me ten years to lose the worst of the baby weight.

Another disclaimer: My mother says the statute of limitations is up on that area of blame.

Exercise also gifts me with excellent cholesterol numbers, keeps me off high blood pressure medications, and staves off the diabetes which runs rampant on both sides of my family.

So…if I want to be able to keep exercising I have to take time to have surgery and recover.

Time has a way of passing quickly though.

After all, in nine months my baby graduates from high school.

On Aging

"The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion." -- Doris Lessing

Earlier this week I paid five bucks for a small cup of black coffee at a local bakery café. No I don’t live in Seattle or New York City. The caffeine actually only cost me a dollar, but I left the change in the tip jar.

Somehow the adorable 20-something barista and her sweet-as-pie 30-something co-worker and I got on the subject of age. Twenty thought I was her mother’s age and thirty concurred, which would put me roughly a decade younger than I am. No, I didn’t ask them if they needed new glasses, but I did leave a 400 percent tip. Made my day, even though I am still skeptical about their eyesight.

Part of it is the gene pool. My maternal grandmother smoked, drank, and sunned and didn’t look ravaged by age. My mother doesn’t smoke or drink. She has an aversion to garlic and eschews the sun. A waiter once asked her, quite seriously, if she was a vampire. She’s not. But she does look younger than her chronological age.

My chubby face helps I guess, but lately I’ve spent a lot of time peering closely in the mirror. Fine lines are etched around my eyes, freckles (age spots?) have appeared where none were before (I spend a lot of time in the summer walking in the sun), and then there’s the gray hair.

I stopped dyeing years ago, preferring gray to the black or brownish-orange hues that always resulted. When I started the process of un-processing, one of my friends was horrified since silver telegraphs a person’s age much more loudly than dyed tresses do.

When it comes to ‘maintenance,’ I’m low or no, a trait my husband appreciates (and which helps make up for some of my less…charming…characteristics!).

When I was approaching 50, the one person who could console me was my 90-year-old great aunt. You really can’t complain to someone her age that 50 is old.

My late Grandpa Rock would have been a century plus one on Thursday. He died when he was just sixty and I was ten, setting off what seems like a long pattern in my life of people I love and adore going way before their time.

So I’ve decided to spend less time on narcissistic nose-pressing against the mirror, and more on aging, if not gracefully, gratefully.

Pity Party…table for one…

So this month I’ve hardly been able to stand my own company. After being felled by severe stomach pains on Halloween and undergoing an endoscopy (that landed me in the ER with a bad reaction to the anesthesia) and an ultrasound on my gallbladder, I’ve been wallowing in self-pity. Like big-time major wallowing.

My gallbladder is at the ‘upper range of normal,’ which means…nothing. In addition, to step up my exercise routine I recently worked out on weight machines and ended up at the eye doctor with more aging eye ‘issues.’ Can you say fireworks ‘exploding’ in my eye? Then there’s my late grandmother’s foot…reincarnated on me….spooky.

For the past year, I’ve endeavored to make a lifestyle change by ramping up the exercise and eschewing dieting in favor of the aforementioned change.

But hadn’t quite counted on the aging process ‘processing.’ Silly me. And even as I whine incessantly, I know I have nothing to complain about. Seriously. Don’t even want to travel down that road of friends who’ve gone way too soon. That would necessitate finding a new box of tissues for my office.

Just this morning I heard an upbeat story about an old friend’s health scare and a sad, sad story about another old friend. Makes my ‘problems’ seem like a hangnail.

With me, it’s always about the subtext. Why did I think getting older would elude me? I vividly recall my mom telling me at a Christmas Eve service when she was about 50 that she still felt 25 on the inside. Some days I feel 15…the age of my youngest son. Other days I feel…old.

And very happy to be alive to feel old.

Cancel the table for one.

School Daze

It seems like only yesterday husband, younger son and his grandma and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about how many days til the end of the school year.

But it wasn’t yesterday, it was mid-May. Suddenly mid-August has rolled into town, offering a reprieve from the blistering 90-degree heat just in time for the start of school tomorrow.

My younger son, Andrew, was conveniently born 15 years ago today, his birth allowing his father to miss an all-day faculty retreat. I was glad at the time baby and I could accommodate him.

Tomorrow said son starts his sophomore year of high school. Thirty-five years ago I was a sophomore in high school. Today in the frozen yogurt shop I experienced a moment of sheer horror. It dawned on me I was closer in age to the elderly gray-haired couple at the counter than I was to the two sweet girls who looked like they could be Andrew’s classmates.

As I scrutinize my neck (a la Nora Ephron) for loss of elasticity and peer under my eyes at the fine lines staring to web out (apparently visible only to me, according to my husband, but there nevertheless!), it has occurred to me I’m missing the point.

Especially lately.

Time marches on. We wouldn’t want it not to. I’m think I’ve forgotten my central theme here, that of holding on and letting go.

Not only do we have to let go of our children, we need to let go of our youthful image of ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we have to become stodgy. Some of the most youthful people I’ve ever known have numbered many in years. Conversely, I’ve know those younger than me whose attitudes were ancient.

We have to treasure each moment and turn a myopic eye to the mirror.

End-of-the-Week Musings

My Aunt Judy is still in ICU in a Kansas hospital, having indeed suffered a stroke followed by a heart attack. I’ve been thinking a lot about family and friends and feel truly blessed in both areas. I’m grateful that three weeks from today, our eldest flies home from Germany.

The sun is shining, the snow is slowly melting, the bitterly cold temps are last week’s news.

On Wednesday, I finally went to get a flu shot. The friendly receptionist said to me: “Your birthdate is 12/26/, correct?”

I waited for her to say the ubiquitous /59 that always follows. But she didn't, and I commented on it.

She said she was trying to be discreet about my age, which made me laugh. I told her that was fine, I’d come to terms with it.

I promised no more fifty talk, but….

Aunt Judy and my mother’s father, my amazing Grandpa Rock, had his first heart attack at 50. A trim man, he was also a heavy smoker. He stopped and lived ten more years, until his fatal heart attack at 60.

Grandpa Rock would be 100 on February 10^th.

This week, I’m cherishing 50 as the beginning of mere middle age.

Fifty is an Even Bigger Number

One can take a multitude of approaches toward aging.

There is the poetic and profound:

The Young Man’s Song by W. B. Yeats
I whispered, "I am too young,"
And then, "I am old enough";
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair,"
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

Oh, love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away,
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

There is the concise:

As we grow old…the beauty steals inward. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is the tongue-in-cheek approach, such as this one for soon-to-be-empty nesters:

The best way to keep kids at home is to make the home a pleasant atmosphere...and let the air out of their tires. -- Dorothy Parker

I’m rather fond of this folksy truism:

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. -- Mark Twain

Finally, I derive comfort from the following:

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you. -- Agatha Christie

Fifty.

Anyone who’s been within close proximity, literally or cyber-ly, to me this fall knows I’ve been moaning and groaning my way toward fifty. Dear Husband and I went the other day to order the cake for Saturday’s birthday pasta party (if the ground blizzards and fitting 50-mph winds don’t keep even in-towners away!). The bakery manager, a cancer survivor and recipient of a two heart stents, told me she’ll hit that number in July and embraces every birthday. She reminded me to do the same. When I wasn’t begging my husband to tell me I looked much younger than her, despite the gray in my hair, he gently pointed out cancer will age a person.

Personally I think the stress eating I’ve done this month has plumped me out so much a wrinkle won’t show until the spring thaw.

But enough about me.

Or at least about this blasted birthday. So I didn’t lose the ten pounds I wanted to, instead managing to find a few. I will, I always do. Beginning now, I’m a full-time free-lance writer, my childhood goal. And for the record, I’m glad I’m not Mrs. Donny Osmond or Mrs. David Cassidy (like there ever was a chance).

And the best piece of advice about this birthday came today from my Great-Aunt Lou, who turns 90 in February.

“It’s just a number, don’t sweat it.”

Thank you poets and scribes and Aunt Lou.