The Gero-Punk Project

Isobel, my sixteen year old daughter, ditched school today. As it is Election Day, she wanted to work the phone-banks at the Democratic campaign headquarters in Portland. When she emailed one of her teachers to let him know why she’d not be attending his class, his response was, “Well, what you will be doing is much more important than what we will be doing!” Another teacher let Izzy know that she supports her efforts but she’d have to come to school early tomorrow in order to take a make-up Anthropology test.  So it goes.

I mentioned what Izzy’s up to on Facebook and my friend Tash wrote: “I would have loved to see someone Izzy’s age volunteering at my polling place! All the workers were 70+ — in no way a bad thing, but reminded me that the next generations must step up.  That includes me….This may be an activity to pursue once I get settled into a more permanent living situation. Certainly an opportunity to learn from/interact with older adults.”

As I was getting ready to head to campus for meetings and my afternoon class I received a text from Izzy which read “Holy shit!”  I thought–What, are there early campaign results? Did the Prez of the US stop by PDX headquarters to thank folks for keeping the dream of democracy alive and kicking? Did one of the persons whom received her friendly call reminding them to vote take offense and yell obscenities at her?

Here’s what actually happened:

Isobel was on the phone with an older person who lives down in Ashland, and it turns out that the person was waiting for an ambulance to collect them as they were having a medical emergency.  But what was most concerning to them, in the middle of the emergency, was that they wouldn’t be able to drop their ballot at the proper place in time for their vote to be counted. As Izzy wrote to me, they “wanted so badly to vote!”  Thinking quickly, Izzy suggested to the scared and sad woman that she put her ballot outside her house, promising her that someone at the Portland headquarters would find someone at the Ashland headquarters to go to her house and pick up the ballot and get it safely to where it needs to go.

Izzy just texted again: “Someone is en route to pick up the ballot.”

Hooray!

I’ve been contemplating all day about the recent (and oncoming) weather events on the East coast and their ongoing reverberations in the daily lives of so many humans and other creatures. I listen to the reports on the radio about old people trapped in their 12^th floor apartments without electricity and water, and the strangers who assume the responsibility to help them stay alive.  I listen to the reports on the radio about the families who have flooded basements and no gasoline for their cars and are bracing themselves for the next storm and are making sure that their neighbors have what they need.  I listen to the reports on the radio about the enormous lengths to which folks are going to make sure that anyone who wants to has the chance to vote.

The confluence of Big Events of Consequence in the US— let me name only the aftermath of the major weather, and the uncertainty of the Presidential election –- remind me of how important it is to attend to that which I actually have some purview over: the wellness of my embodied mind; relationships; community; good work.

Someone on the radio this morning said that voting isn’t as crucial as having clean water to drink and food to eat and a warm place to stay.  But I’m not so sure about that. It sure feels to me like having the right and capacity to participate in the democratic process is about as fundamental as it gets.

Yesterday was the 100^th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in the great state of Oregon.  I can’t help but imagine that had Isobel been living 100 years ago, she’d have been fighting that good fight.

Several years ago I began hearing from some of my students and colleagues about this amazing woman named Velda.  Again and again I was told that I absolutely must meet this Velda person because she was an “older than average” student who had come to Marylhurst to complete her undergraduate degree and perhaps continue on with graduate studies.  The average age for Marylhurst students is somewhere in the middish 30s, so the older than average tease about why I should want to meet Velda didn’t seem terribly compelling—most of my students are older than average! Though when I heard that she was in her mid-80s I must admit to thinking that it was quite wonderful that the age diversity at my university was so wide – Imagine the potential richness of a learning community that has students representing different life course phases, from just out of high school to extreme later life!

Any way, people kept telling me: You must meet Velda. And: I started wondering why I must meet Velda….because she’s a cool person? Because we have things in common or new things we could learn from and with each other? Or…because she’s an old woman and I’m a mid-life gerontologist and that’s a match made in heaven?  (I wondered if folks were telling Velda: You really must meet Jenny, she’s a gerontologist!)

All of this got me to thinking—Was the allure of Velda her advanced age, and was her advanced age alluring because she embodied some sort of anti-stereotype, and if so, what stereotype about being an old woman was she countering? She was taking on near archetypical status, and I was growing increasingly curious about who this person was whom had so many admirers, so many classmates and  professors who seemed to genuinely love and admire her. Yeah, no doubt, it is pretty cool to grow old and keep learning but I kept wondering—is advanced chronological age a sufficient cause for becoming an elder “rock star”?

I needed to see this Velda with my own eyes, I needed to be in her presence, hop onto her vibe, suss what was what.

So I started asking those at the university who interacted with Velda the most to extend an invitation to her letting her know that she could feel free, if she wanted to, to stop by my office to say hello. By then I had heard a bit more about her, that she had lived a really interesting life in the U.S. and abroad, practiced the Baha’i faith, had a large and close family and social network, remarried in later life, and had some pretty big aspirations for her next-self.  I also heard from her advisor that she was writing her undergraduate senior paper on a “good old age,” laying the groundwork for what she hoped would be a future Master’s Thesis and, perhaps, a published (and wildly successful) book.  I became even more compelled to figure out how we could bump into each other, explore some ideas together, see if I could be of any support to her as she worked on her long-term scholarly (and, it turns out, deeply personal) project.

And then, and then, guess what happened?  Velda showed up in my spring term 2010 Women’s Issues in Aging seminar!

Tiny, white haired, sparkly-eyed, and very genteel, Velda quickly became the heart of our learning community, our touchstone, because she’d lived so much life and had been through so much and – and this is crucial – had reflected upon her experiences, good and bad and everything in between. Velda’s curiosity and commitment as a learner and generosity as a member of our learning community knew no bounds. She brought an open heart and mind to every class session, she took responsibility for her own learning and also communicated to me and her classmates about what she wanted to contribute, and what she needed from the rest of us in order to do her best work. (Velda could also be a rascal – When her ire got piqued, her equanimity might suddenly transform before our eyes into a kind of fierceness. She had the inner authority that comes from life experience, and she was willing to speak what she felt was the truth even if potentially transgressive.). The work she and her classmates and I did together in that seminar is some of the most embodied, holistic, and meaningful learning of my life.

After the term was over, I offered to be a sounding board for her as she worked on her undergraduate thesis. Velda accepted my offer, though she made it clear that she knew some stuff about aging and being old that the rest of us – me, the gerontologist, included—didn’t know, couldn’t know, until we, too, were old. She was suspicious – and continued to be for a long time, perhaps still is – about whether Gerontology had anything to offer her as a scholar inquiring after what constitutes a good old age, because, and she’s right, Gerontology is a field populated by mostly younger and middle aged adults who make aging, old age, and old persons the focus of their inquiry and practice. I told her that Gerontology may not have much to offer her as a scholar, though I thought it might, but I knew for certain that she had much to offer Gerontology, and that if she wanted to do scholarly work on aging and old age, she couldn’t completely ignore the academic discipline and field of study and practice that was devoted to the human aging journey. We agreed to meet in the middle.

This term, Fall 2012, I again have the wonderful pleasure of working with Velda in the context of the Embodiment in Later Life seminar, a collaborative inquiry course in which we explore through reading and discussing various kinds of theoretical and empirical work, and engaging in critical self-reflection, experiential learning practices, and hybrid forms of writing what it means to travel through the life course, especially the later part of the life course, with/in a particular body. Now in the second year of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies program, Velda’s looking toward her thesis project, which will expand the work she began as an undergraduate student.

In between the third and fourth weeks of our course, just when things were starting to get really juicy, Velda fell in a parking lot after doing grocery shopping, fracturing her hip and wrist. She had to be hospitalized, have surgery, and then rehabilitate at a nursing home for a couple of weeks.  Her classmates happily agreed to move our weekly sessions to wherever Velda was—at the rehab center these past two weeks, and at her home most probably for the rest of the term. Talk about embodied learning in context! Talk about the confluence between the personal and the scholarly!

There’s so much, so much we’re exploring together because of what has happened to Velda, but more to the point, because of the curiosity and grace with which Velda faces even the most extreme circumstances, and because she invites us into her life so fully that we get to accompany her on her journey, even when it isn’t terribly smooth.

You just can’t be near Velda without learning something essential about what it means to be a human being traveling through the life course on this particular planet, about what it looks like to engage in one’s unfolding as a human through thick and thin, for the long haul, ever hopeful, always dreaming.

Yesterday, Velda was discharged from the rehabilitation center.  Perfect timing, as today is her 90^th birthday and she’s having a huge party.

Happy birthday, dear Velda.  Much love and admiration. (Count me amongst your fans.)

Fall term I get to teach one of my most favorite Gerontology courses, Embodiment in Later Life. Last week’s session was remarkable for many reasons and I hope to write about it (in collaboration with the students in the class) more over the next couple of months, but for now, I thought I’d share about one of the juicy questions we explored together: How do we know that we are aging?

On the surface, this might seem like a pretty simple question with pretty straightforward answers.

Stop for a moment and ponder this question–what comes to your mind?

Grey hair? Wrinkles? A gradual change in one’s appearance that catches one by surprise? An abrupt change in one’s health or well-being that catches one by surprise? The death of one’s older relatives? Significant life-transitions such as a child going off to college, getting an AARP card in the mail, or being offered the “opportunity” for early retirement at one’s workplace?

What about:

The realization that one has perhaps reached the theoretical “mid-point” of their travels through the life course (which can only be known for certain after the fact)? The conviction that life is short even when it is long and that the time is now or never to really dive deeply into one’s own development as a human being and surface with treasures to share with others?

In actual fact, the question (How do we know that we are aging?) is a deceptively complex question that invites us into some pretty deep critical reflection and contemplation.  Why so? Because aging isn’t just about the changes that happen inside and on the surface of an individual’s body after they reach maturation (changes which are almost always seen as negative). Aging is a lifelong emergent soma/mind/spirit process.  Nor is aging a phenomenon that unfolds only at the level of the individual; it does happen at the level of the individual, but the individual is in context — relational, societal, cultural, political and historical. And these contexts shape how we experience our personal aging; influence our expectations for when it happens, how it happens, what it will be like; and even pre-determine how we engage with the question: How do we know that we are aging? (This is why I believe it is so important to cultivate an intentional aging practice!)

I ponder this question frequently and answer it in a multitude of ways depending on the day. Today my answer to this question has less to do with the personal aspects of my travels through the life course and more to do with the relational aspects,  specifically with my relationship with my daughter.  Isobel is 16, a junior in high school, and this week she’s done all of the driving when we are together in the car, including over bridges, on freeways, and at night. I’m still processing how it feels to ride in the passenger seat while my tiny girl drives our big vehicle. Over bridges. On freeways. At night (in the rain!). Yikes!

And this is the first Halloween ever that Isobel is not with me, or her grandmother, or her father for trick-or-treating or hanging around the house to pass out candy to the little neighborhood kiddos. Instead, she’s with her friend Hana –attending a party and having a school-night sleepover.  Izzy didn’t even carve a jack-o-latern this year, nor dress up in a costume  (though she wore a chic all-black outfit to school today, though she wears chic black outfits to school most days, so that’s not much of a costume.).

So I carved a pumpkin this afternoon, just a little one with a ghost face (whereas in past years we’ve carved multiple pumpkins with many different guises). And while I’m not wearing a costume this year I did do something festive to my hair. My sweet man is hanging out with me tonight so I won’t be all alone like a little ghost haunting my own house, unwilling to rest in peace. The bowl of candy is sitting by the front door, just in case wee creatures come a-haunting.

Tonight will be the first Halloween night ever for some of the little kids who come to my door for tricks-or-treats. Their parent or Granny will stand on the sidewalk observing and thinking about what a significant transition it is for the child, how it seems like only yesterday that they were a baby, and now they are a little vampire or ballerina walking on their own two legs, taking part in the yearly Halloween ritual.

Indeed, it does seem like only yesterday…