The Gero-Punk Project

By Guest Essayist Helen Fern

The last few days I’ve been remembering dad’s death.  I see him lying in the bed but gone.  My heart begins to ache and I cry for my loss. I loved him so.  But today, thanks to my friend Jenny and her keen ability to report her observations of the world around her, I am thinking about his life.  He loved life.

He grew up in Cicero, Illinois during the 1930s.  He spoke only Czech until he was about 12 years old and, from the stories he told, was a rather curious and bold child, setting a fire or two in the basement of their home.  He met my mother while they were in high school and married shortly after he joined the army.  He spent time in Korea and Japan during the Korean War.  He didn’t speak much about the war.  On a few occasions he talked about his “adventures” there, but rarely about the ugliness of war.  His best friend stepped on a land mine right in front of him.  It was not a memory he wanted to recall.  My sister, his first child, was born while he was away.

I came along about five years after my sister and eight years after that my brother arrived.  As a father, to me, he was the best.  I wanted to do everything with him and he made me feel like I did.  We danced, we hiked, we built plastic models, we cooked, camped and more.  He sang to me when I was sad and he sang to me when we were happy.  My heart was always joyful when he was around.  Even after I grew up and moved away, I treasured my moments with my dad.  And I still sing.

My mother died suddenly and unexpectedly when my dad was still a young man.  Mom was a year younger than him and she was 51 when she passed.  Their marriage was wrought with problems, but they fought to keep it going.  I think dad was wrenched with mixed emotions – happy times and painful time – and all gone so suddenly.  He grieved for months.  But he still loved life.

Those were the days I did bar hopping with my dad.  My sister and I moved in with him after mom died.  My sister’s husband had been killed just one month before and it was a time we all needed each other.  We cleaned and cooked during the day, taking care of my brother and my niece and nephew.  During the evenings, dad took us out.  We sang at piano bars.  I’ll never forget his face the time I sang Captain and Tennille’s “Do that to me one more time”.  First he said with pride, “That’s my daughter”; and as the words sunk in his face turned to that fatherly look and he replied, “HEY, that’s my daughter!”  We went to German oompa bars and polkaed the night away.  He even dated a bit until the lady that became obsessed with him and started to stalk him!  That was the problem, my dad was a catch and they all wanted him!

He met Freide a couple of years after mom died and they moved in together shortly afterward.  I have to laugh when I remember telling him I was going to move in with my now husband without being married.  I thought he would be disappointed.  He just smiled and said, “Freide and I have been living together for months”.  I was shocked!  My dad?  Living in sin?  But they married shortly after and stayed married for more than twenty years.  Freide’s death took a toll on dad.  He had out lived two wives.

He packed up and moved to a retirement town in California.  He joined the Hemet Elks, Moose, Eagles and Veteran’s of foreign wars lodges.  He made so many friends it seemed like everyone knew him.  He partied, traveled and met a lady.  He and Marge stayed “friends” until her death shortly after he moved in with my sister.

That move was hard.   Dad was always independent and now he had to depend on someone else to take him out to do the things he loved.  As his health declined he battled with this spirit.  As Jenny calls it, his “embodiment” became his struggle.  He was still vibrant, laughing and full of life on the inside; his body simply chose not to cooperate anymore.  And finally, it gave out.  I miss him.  I miss his voice, his laugh, his total embodiment, and I cherish the life I was blessed to be a part of.

I went in search of soup.

This past Thursday, on the first day of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, I woke up quite sick.  When I say I “woke up” that implies that I had actually slept the night before, and if I did, it wasn’t for long and it wasn’t restful. I never like being sick, I often struggle with my embodiment, with my inherent physical frailty  (whether from the normal stuff we all face as humans – cold, flu, sleep deprivation, etc. – or as the result of my own peculiar injuries and conditions that have composed my bodily history over the past forty-six years). But being sick when I’m essentially alone and far away from home (and have work to do) isn’t my favorite scenario. By which I mean: It sucks.

In the early afternoon – it took me a couple of hours to get myself showered, dressed, and stabilized physically enough to leave my hotel room– I went to check in for the conference, and then I went in search of soup, because the only thing I could imagine eating was some hot brothy soup. I didn’t feel up to leaving the hotel and walking around lovely St. Petersburg searching for soup, soaking up some Florida sun (a sun that seems quite different from the Oregon sun, though I know they are actually the same sun experienced in different contexts. Interesting.). So I went to the hotel restaurant instead.

As I was shown to my table by the restaurant hostess – She was wearing a bright orange linen suit and peep-toe sling-back heels! Welcome to Florida! — I noticed that all of the tables in the back part of the restaurant had placards on them indicating that they were “reserved.” I wondered if perhaps there was a lunch meeting associated with the conference and I’d get to see some of my colleagues as they wandered in.  I asked about soup options and there weren’t any I could eat so I ordered some grilled fish with red peppers and some tea. I tried to peruse the conference schedule, realizing as I did that in my viral daze I had misremembered the day of my presentation – I didn’t have until Saturday to pull myself together, I had until Friday morning, less than 24 hours. Yikes.

As I sat drinking my tea I felt just underneath my slightly fevered skin the jangly energy that signals to me that I’m starting to panic. When the hostess passed by my table I asked her if I might have a glass of the house white wine – a pinot grigio, I think I’d over-heard someone else order – and decided that I’d treat this first day of the conference as if I was vacationing: I’d have a glass of wine with lunch, take a long nap in the afternoon, and  spend the evening watching a movie instead of working (I’d have rather gone to a museum, taken a long walk on the shore, and attended the opening plenary session for the conference).  I also did the trick that I sometimes have to do when I begin to feel nervous, anxious, not up to what life is asking of me – I shifted my albeit wavering focus away from myself and on the other creatures around me. 

What happened next is that a large pack of older Floridians came pouring into the restaurant. I watched smaller clusters and pairs of them wind their way through the reserved area, scoping out the perfect seats. I estimate the size of the pack to be around 45 or 50. Would you be surprised to hear the pack was composed mostly of women? I think I saw at most five men, and all but one appeared to be partnered with a woman (I overhead the hostess make a joke as she showed a gentleman who came in late to the only open seat at a table quite close to mine where three women were already sitting: Oh, ladies, how lucky you are to have this handsome gentleman join you!). I tried not to eavesdrop too much and even if I wanted to I couldn’t really do so as there was quite a happy din, so much excited energy in the room. I was surrounded by layers and waves of laughter and chatting. 

By now I’d almost forgotten to feel sorry for myself and my woeful state as my curiosity was growing about who these folks were, why they were eating in the restaurant, whether they lived in St. Petersburg or were just visiting, and whether they were part of a retirement community or club or…. I didn’t want to infect any of them with the virus that’d overcome me so I decided to forego wandering over to their side of the restaurant to say “hello” and ask them what’s what. So instead I just enjoyed sipping my wine and, in a relaxed (and hopefully unobtrusive) way, observing the various sorts of embodied human energy represented in the pack.

There were two women in particular who arrested my attention because of how they looked and what they were doing.  The first was tiny, had short red hair and dressed in jeans, cropped linen jacket, and stylish but comfortable shoes. She moved quickly and confidently; from the back she looked like a pre-adolescent girl and from the front a great-grandmother. She flitted nervously from the front of the restaurant to the back and from table-to-table. She seemed to be checking on how things were going and making sure everyone was having a grand time as they waited for their gourmet hamburgers, club sandwiches, French fries, iced teas and coffees.

The second woman, who came to the luncheon late, tottered and swerved a bit as she walked slowly and tentatively past my table. She was quite stately—tall and willowy—and had an incredible deeply lined face and spiky dyed black hair. Her outfit was spectacular (I was envious!)!  She might as well have been just coming from or going to a rock concert: tight jeans, black boots, leather jacket, lots of edgy jewelry.  She really stood out in that room, at least to me.

I found myself fascinated as well as jarred by these two women’s externalized identities. I found myself wondering about the complex semiotics of their “looks,” their costuming and comportment, old bodies adorned with clothing and accessories associated in popular culture with youth, not maturity.  I wondered about the degree of intentionality on the part of these two women—for whom were they dressing?  Were they continuing in old age to dress in the style they’d always dressed as adult women? Or were these styles adopted in their post-work, post child-rearing years as statements of personal agency? How might their outsides connect to their insides?  In other words, what about their singular selfhoods were they trying to convey through their costuming?

When the waitress came to my table to check on me I asked her if she knew the back-story for the pack of loud and rambunctious elders. She gleefully said she’d sleuth for me and report back soon. In the meanwhile I finished my wine and continued to absorb as much as I could as I watched tablemates lean into each other during conversation, one woman’s face so expressive and signaling curiosity and interest, another woman’s face mask-like, expressionless. I noted to myself that to a person the pack’s style of dress communicated leisure and affluence (though no one was as edgy as the rock star I described previously): men in the ubiquitous golf shirt, chinos and sturdy shoes combo, women in dark rinse jeans or light slacks, flowy sweaters or deconstructed linen jackets. Like beacons signaling me, I detected several silver or white heads-of-hair, but mostly I detected the fine work of professional colorists.

Soon my co-conspirator came back to give me the scoop. The pack of elders was from Sarasota and visiting St. Petersburg in order to attend Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the Mahaffey Theater. They had come to St. Petersburg on a tour bus and their trip to the museum was preceded by lunch at the hotel restaurant, as the hotel is right across the street from the museum.

I’m not a terribly good judge of the specific chronological age of another creature, but quite possibly had my co-conspirator not had to work as a waitress in the hotel restaurant she would have been a member of the pack of elders about to go to the Titanic exhibition.  I also thought about my mommy who longs to (and deserves to) “retire,” to have a post-work period of her life course, a time of leisure not labor. I was too sick to go much more deeply with my analysis, beyond acknowledging to myself that I was watching in real time the enactment of different outcomes in later life,  outcomes associated with – often determined by—gender, marital status, class, race, education…time/place/space…and good (or not so good) fortune.

Despite feeling quite puny, hanging out at the edges of the pack’s luncheon, taking some time do engage in gero-punk observation and reflection, gave me a shot of inspiration for my impending workshop session.

One of the guiding questions for the collaborative inquiry session I facilitated the next morning was: What is it that we think we are doing when we are “doing” gerontology?  More specifically, I asked, given the wide variety of interests and activities and academic disciplines and professional fields represented just in educational gerontology alone, how might we conceptualize and make sense of what it means to be a “gerontologist”?

I also asked: What shared commitment dwells at the heart of our work?  A particular fascination with and curiosity about age, aging, and later life (Such, for instance, that we spend an hour observing a pack of elders eating lunch in a hotel restaurant?)? A special interest in the complex and various ways humans travel through the life course and enact old age? An unshakable commitment to working to ensure that old age is good for everyone despite who they are, where they live, and what they have? That all humans have the conditions for and chance to fully develop and flourish in later life, whatever that means to each individual?

I went in search of soup. Instead I got the scoop on a pack of old Floridians with whom I had the great fortune of sharing an hour of my life simultaneously forgetting myself and remembering why I came to St. Petersburg to begin with.

I was thrashed the rest of the weekend but I have to be honest and admit that I had a hell of a time this past Saturday night driving four of my daughter’s speech and debate teammates back to Portland from a two-day tournament at the University of Oregon. Usually when I am a parent driver my passengers are Isobel and teammates whom I know. But my passengers for this very late night drive were four boy-men whom I’d never met before.  Three are freshmen, one is a sophomore, and all are in their first year as team members. To a one, I found them to be irreverent, charming, hilarious, smart, and respectful of but also playful with me. 

I love driving teenagers around, especially at night, because sometimes this weird thing happens where they forget I’m Izzy’s mom and that I’m not in their cohort. I come in and out of their awareness. I’m both a witness and a participant. I try to listen more than I speak, and when I speak I try to do so naturally and with a bit of restraint so as to hopefully avoid seeming too enthusiastic or giving off the vibe of trying to be cool. But sometimes when the topic is music or food or something else I care a lot about (or have strong opinions about!), well, all bets are off.

So, all bets were off, because during our two hour drive we discussed music (pop and classical) and Tarantino films (which lead to a discussion of old school versus digital film-making, which lead to a discussion of vinyl versus digital music recording, and also a discussion of how Tarantino is almost unwatchable and arrogant but doing something no one else is doing) and gaming (they lost me here though I asked a provocative question about their embodied experiences when their avatar in the game is mauled by a tiger or alien) and food and books and comics.  This wasn’t a linear, orderly discussion but a layered, improvisatory, emergent free-for-all. I think I held my own and even scored some points, which is saying a lot when you are brawling with debaters (Though I lost some points when I claimed “Age trumps youth”; I thought it was better than saying, “I know more about ‘80’s music than you do because I was actually alive during the ‘80’s.”).

These four boy-men were so fascinating, simultaneously weird and precious.

On music: They love the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s that their fathers exposed them to—The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. They love ‘80s music from my high school and college days: The Smiths, The Cure, The Clash, Sonic Youth, REM, and U2.  And I was delighted to discover that we were simpatico when it comes to adoring Nirvana, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Radiohead (though they were admiring but not gushing with enthusiasm, as I was, about The Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam). When I asked them about current alternative pop music they admitted to being “unimpressed” and “unenthusiastic” about bands that I think are pretty special: The Lumineers, Mumford and Sons, Grouplove.

(One of my fellow-travelers, W., spoke with me at length – though we were interrupted multiple times by random comments from the other guys – about Beethoven symphonies and pipe organ music.)

On gaming: They regaled each other (and me) with tales of virtual destruction and mayhem.  In answer to my question about their embodied experience of seeing their avatars ambushed by an alien or gobbled up by a tiger they described their visceral and emotional experience in great detail. We made some interesting connections between how they feel when they are immersed in certain kinds of computer games and while watching a Tarantino film. One of the passengers, H., engaged in a long rhapsody about how in one game he made his lifelong dream come true — he built and lived in a sandcastle!  He lamented that his sandcastle lasted only a short time because it was destroyed by aliens, to which his friends replied, “Duh. What did you think would happen if you built a house out of sand?”

As we approached the southern outskirts of Portland, after we’d left the topics of gaming and food and returned to music for a bit, the pace of the conversation began to slow down, the energy in the car became more subdued. We were all tired – it was well after midnight – and the boy-men began talking about what they were going to do when they got home (Some of which is unrepeatable! Remember what I said earlier about how in a dark car full of teenagers I can sometimes fade from their awareness, becoming a witness?).  Someone, I’m not sure who, out of nowhere began reminiscing about Calvin and Hobbes comics, how important they were to his childhood and suddenly the car was once again full of laughter and sweetness and excitement as all four boys shared their memories of Calvin and Hobbes, most especially the last strip ever published. Not as familiar with Calvin and Hobbes as my traveling companions, I asked about the last strip, about which H. kept exclaiming “It is so wonderful, just wonderful!”

He looked up the strip on his iphone to be sure he got it right, and then told me the last panel of the strip is the boy and his pretend friend Hobbes heading out to play in the snow, Calvin saying, “…let’s go exploring.”

For the rest of the drive—fifteen minutes or so—the conversation turned to traveling through the life course, and not because of anything I said, but because the four teenage boys started reminiscing about what it was like to be a little boy, how they missed going on adventures, being wide open to the world.  I asked questions about when they felt they had changed in their orientation to the world, and why they thought the change had occurred. I also pondered aloud if perhaps they could recapture or create anew their attitude of wonderment and curiosity.  I went out on a limb and shared that I was still growing up as a person in my mid-forties, and that I was discovering in my own life that growing up didn’t mean getting more serious and less playful, but could actually involve the opposite and that perhaps a trick to having a hell of a time as a human for as long as we are alive is to continue having adventures. 

To live in a sandcastle. To play in the snow.

I don’t know what the four boy-men thought about me and the stuff I said. But I thought they were totally cool and if the future is in their hands and the hands of Isobel and her friends, well, I feel rather good about that, whatever the future may hold for all of us living on this planet.

By the end of the drive I wanted to ask them for their addresses so I could send their parents thank you notes for the honor of hanging out with their sons.