The Gero-Punk Project

Big things have been happening this summer in my neck of the woods. In addition to the gigantic new house erected on top of Fred’s garden across the street¹, our neighborhood park is undergoing a huge transformation that will take the next several months to bring to fruition. Our familiar, beloved landscape is less and less recognizable as the pond is transformed into waterfowl-friendly wetland and the stream is rerouted. Also, the big-kids’ playground is temporarily gone and will be relocated to another part of the park and there’s a new basketball court though it isn’t open for access yet. The route that Happy-the-dog and I usually walk and run has been halved in size and there’s only one bridge across the river that’s still open. I feel a bit disoriented now when I’m in the park. In between me and the water-fowl are six-foot-tall cyclone fences. There’s equipment and materials strewn about (though I rarely actually see persons working in the park) and I haven’t seen some of my old park-friends – Dave, Peggy — for several weeks. Maybe they feel as disconcerted as I do and have found new places to walk.

If all of this wasn’t enough to disrupt a gero-punk’s sense of routine and order, guess what else?  Three weeks ago to the day,  I sold our 12-year-old used Mitsubishi Montero, which was rapidly burning through its 9^th and last life, for $100 and, thanks to a bit of good fortune (a combination of borrowed and gifted funds), I bought a used Toyota Prius!  That’s the good news. The other news is that out of the twenty-one days since obtaining said Prius, I have actually possessed and thus driven the cool new-to-me car a total of – and I’m being generous — five days. The possessor and driver of said car for the remaining sixteen days is – you guessed it!  — My 17-year-old daughter Isobel.  It makes sense, actually, that Izzy would use the car more than I do right now. After all, I’m working from home most days this month on writing projects and she’s babysitting, doing an internship, and enjoying her first summer romance. Please don’t misunderstand–I’m not complaining, just reporting.

If when I return to school in the autumn I am asked to write a report about what I did during my summer “vacation,” the main theme I will explore in my report will be transition. This summer is the summer of Big Transitions.

Because of the temporary though disruptive situation with the park and because I am for all intents and purposes for the time being left to my legs for transportation, I’ve been walking a lot.  I come from walkers on my mommy’s side of the family. My maternal grandparents were famous walkers, and so is my mommy (and recently, my brother Jeremy is, too). By “famous,” I mean that they walk(ed) for pleasure, exercise and transportation at least once if not more times virtually every singe day of the year, for almost their entire travels through the life-course. And they dress(ed) for walking no matter the occasion – sensible shoes, comfortable clothes, maybe a hat, and certainly a nap-sack. As I said, I’ve always been a walker, too, but this summer I’ve been walking more than usual (for example, today I walked almost two hours total) and, what’s more, I’ve been walking new routes.  An unexpected result is that I’ve rediscovered my sweet neighborhood.

This morning, Happy and I walked through the half of the park still open for business, and then we headed west uphill on Bybee Street into Sellwood proper, then south through the neighborhood.

I saw this gorgeous fig lying on its side in the gutter, only partially eaten by a bird. I was deeply offended! Why steal a fig only to discard it?  I looked around for the specific tree from which the fig was plucked. Ah—there it was! I pretended to be a bird and quickly plucked two figs from the glorious tree (not as small as my fig tree is, not as big as Fred’s fig tree had been). I gobbled one fig and carefully placed the second one in the palm of my left hand to carry home.

I eavesdropped on chattering creatures – humans and birds and dogs – and I peeked into gardens and yards, making mental notes about plants and landscapes and colors and smells I might like to replicate in my own yard.   I pondered whether there’s a difference between being aware and present to the world and eavesdropping and peeking.

As I ambled along with Happy, I remembered the small, old Asian woman at the train station this past Sunday when I was waiting for my mommy to return from her trip to Seattle to visit my brother Jeremy. The woman had a curious manner of pacing back and forth the length of the large waiting area: hands clasped behind her lower back, bright eyes scanning the room, and a strange gait which involved with each step picking up her foot as if to clear it over the top of small plant or animal.  For half a block I attempted to walk in this way. I felt like I was engaged in some strange combination of marching and stomping; when Happy veered suddenly to the right I almost toppled over. I wondered how the woman had come to this style of walking, whether she’d been walking this way her entire life or perhaps had assumed this approach more recently in her later years. It didn’t work so well for me, probably because rather than clasping my hands behind my back my left hand held the fig and my right hand held Happy’s leash.

A few blocks from home, after we’d turned left and headed east, I decided to cut a long south-eastern diagonal path toward my street. I hadn’t consciously planned it, but at the end of my trajectory was the neighborhood poetry post. Happy and I stopped so I could read the currently featured poem. As if I needed any further confirmation of how completely splendid and magical this life is, there on the poetry post was the perfect poem to celebrate my walk through the neighborhood, and, perhaps, this entire summer.

***

The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver²

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

***

If you invited your future older self over for a cup of tea (or a lovely glass of wine), what would the two of you talk about?

***

At least twenty years ago, I began to cultivate an intentional relationship with my future older self.  I invited my future older self to visit me whenever I felt like it. The first time I met future me was during a process of guided visualization and contemplation, and I was stunned by the solidity and clarity with which my future older self materialized in my mind’s eye. I recognized my embodied old self  — there was no mistaking me! Though I recognized myself, I must admit to being quite surprised by and curious about certain elements of my imagined later life, and especially tickled to discover that my future older self quite likes herself and her life as an old woman. Over the years, as my future older self has continued to make appearances in my imagination (both at night and during the day, while asleep and awake, invited and not), I’ve made it a practice to attend to what changes and what abides in the time-travel story I’m living.

Perhaps you’d like to catch a glimpse of my future older self? Check me out:

I am preparing to go out and about – perhaps to dine with friends, or to go to a meeting, or maybe I am giving a book reading or presentation. Standing as close as I can get to the large oval mirror in the front hallway of my beach house (Hooray, I live at the beach!), I’m carefully applying deep red lipstick and checking my eyeliner.  My hair is bobbed and shiny silver; I run a brush through it to smooth the top layer and wonder to myself if I should wear one of my many cool hats. After I make certain my make-up is just right, I slip my thick glasses back on and step away from the mirror so I can take in as much of my image as I can. I’m wearing a cool black skirt and boots, dark purple sweater set, and a chunky silver necklace. I look sharp! Now at the beginning of my 9^th decade  (I’m in my mid-80s), I’m a couple of inches shorter than I was in my middle years; as have other women in my family, I’ve grown smaller and shorter as I’ve grown older.  Though I have some arthritis in my knees, hips and shoulders, my back is straight; I’ve always had pretty good posture and because I’ve continued to exercise throughout my life course – walking, yoga, and occasional kayaking have replaced running, cycling, and rock climbing in the past couple of decades – I can still get around pretty well on my own two feet. My vision has continued to grow worse over the years, though, so to someone observing me as I amble along I may seem a bit tentative, even clumsy sometimes.  But I’ve been running into doors, tripping over sidewalk cracks, and holding the railings when I walk up and down stairs since I was in my early 40s, so what’s new?  My hearing has also been growing worse, and now I must wear hearing aids if I want to be able to participate as fully as I can in conversations, or to enjoy a presentation, movie or concert. I am excited by my many projects – research, writing, and activism, as well as bird watching, cooking and gardening.  I don’t have many financial resources, just barely enough to make my daily life work out okay and still be able to save some resources for the time when I might need in-home caregiving or perhaps must give up living independently in order to live in a communal setting.  I also have a little bit of money put aside so that I can visit my daughter and her family or invite them to join me on a family trip every couple of years.  I continue to be excited by the discoveries I’m making about the human journey, specifically about later life, old age, and being an old woman.  Despite decades of working in the field of gerontology, thinking and writing about adult development and aging, hanging out with old people, and contemplating my own aging, I am totally stunned and surprised by what it is like, now that I’ve arrived in this land of old age. It turns out that what a couple of old persons told me when I was a younger gerontologist is true:  you can’t really know what it is like to be old until you are old, and despite the “feast of losses” most of us experience as we travel into the later reaches of the life course, there are experiences I’ve had as an old woman, things I’ve thought, feelings I’ve felt, ways I’ve become more me that would have been impossible had I not made it this far in my life journey.

***

Would you like to invite your future older self for a visit?  If so, here are some questions to contemplate:

• When you attempt to visualize your older self, who and what do you see?
• What age is your future older self?
• How far into deep old age are you able to travel in your imagination?
• When you try to imagine your future older self, how do you feel? What sensations do experience in your body (and where are the sensations located?)?
• What are your hopes for your future older self (and what are your fears)?
• How will you live fully in your older body, no matter the condition of your older body?
• What are ways in which you can experience enjoyment, freedom, and passion…in your aging body?
• Who are your co-creatures in later life?  With whom do you spend time and enjoy life?
• What is the quality of mind that you bring to your aging experience? To being an old person?
• What do you see as your purpose in your later years?
• What new things is your future older self learning and experiencing?
• What changes in your thinking and acting do you need to make in your current life in order to have the embodied old age you envisage?
• What does your future older self want to tell your present self?

***

This is what my future older self tells me every time she comes for a visit:

The aging journey is the human journey, aging is living, aging is a lifelong process, and old age is its own wild land. Embrace your aging journey, wherever it may take you, whatever you may experience along the way!

I began the habit of swaddling myself this past December when I experienced an unexpected crisis and needed a way to sooth myself. (Or perhaps I resumed a practice that my mommy used when I was a wee baby. I’ll have to check with her to find out.).  I don’t remember intentionally deciding to swaddle myself, I just did it spontaneously at bedtime on the first day of the crisis. Since then, I haven’t been swaddling myself every night, just on the nights when I’m feeling smaller than usual, careworn, or sad.

Here’s how I do it: After I’ve crawled in between the flannel sheets and pulled the down comforter which is ensconced in its ruby-red duvet cover over me, and once I am situated on my back and I have adjusted the pillows just so under my neck and head, I tuck the top layers around my body as tightly as I can.

Here’s how I feel once I am swaddled just so: I feel like a protected, loved, nurtured “Baby Creature,” a description that comes from my colleague, the writer Jay Ponteri*. “I’m Baby Creature and you’re Baby Creature,” Jay writes. And I add: We are precious, new beings muddling our way through this beautiful flummoxing life. Muddling alone, muddling together.

My youngest friend just turned 8 a few weeks ago. I will turn 47 this coming December. Despite the chronological gap between us we have quite a lot in common right now. We’re both Baby Creature and we are both going through growing pains. Life is asking a lot from us and we are struggling to rise to the occasion. Sometimes we have trouble falling asleep at night.  As she told me yesterday, her legs fall asleep but her mind doesn’t. Sometimes we are like toddlers who need naps — there’s no gap between trigger and melt-down.

Swaddling is the ideal caring practice for a tender Baby Creature during the colder months of the year. However, as the temperatures begin to rise sometime around the beginning of July (yeah, I know, I live in Oregon, but the temperatures do rise!) the down comforter will need to be replaced by a lighter bed-spread.  My summer bed-spread is quite handsome: pale moss green, old-fashioned puckered fabric. But as much as I admire my fair-weather bed-spread it isn’t very well suited for swaddling.

Do you remember the inside experience of being 8 years old? Can you conjure up your girl or boy self and invite them for a play-date? Can you reconnect  with the embodied experience of being a little person confused by what your body is doing, what adults are asking or expecting of you, what the thoughts you are thinking might mean? Whatever age you supposedly are now, do you ever feel like an overly-tired toddler who needs a nap or a snack (or time alone, or time not alone)? Do you ever feel like a precious little baby who needs to be swaddled or rocked or hummed to?

Jay remembers and reminds: “I’m Baby Creature and you’re Baby Creature…let’s shield one another from the cold winds of things we think we know, let’s let the mystery draw us to look more closely, to listen more carefully, to imagine what we cannot see and hear…”

I remember and remind: We are each of us a particular age, all ages, and no age at once. We are each of us traveling through the life-course, alone and hand-in-hand.

Let’s help one another embrace this mystery.

*From: “for my students on Thursday May 9, 2013, around 3:30 pm pst, invocation,” by Jay Ponteri, Marylhurst University