Sometimes the best vacation trips are just visiting old friends!

Sometimes the best vacation trips are just visiting old friends. At this stage of life, many of my friends are no longer doing long distance driving. Since we’re still able to do it, we’re the ones who have to reach out. We just returned from New England to visit old friends in Cambridge MA--Rick’s old friend from first grade(!!) Norman and his wife Fran. They have been living the past 40 years in a house in Cambridge crammed with books. Norman is no longer much interested in travel but through a world of books he is roaming the world. It raises interesting questions: who is the real traveler: someone on a packaged tour to China or Norman at home in Cambridge currently immersed in Chinese literature?

After Cambridge, we went to Vermont to visit an old friend of mine, Bob and his wife Susan who is now a good friend of mine and Rick’s.
One of the benefits of long term marriage is that my friends become Rick’s friends and vice versa. (Exceptions, of course). My friendships don’t go back almost 70 years like Rick’s. My oldest friends go back to the my college years and I’ve know Bob for over 40 years. He is still working and has a very demanding job, so it’s easier for us to visit him and Susan. They have a beautiful house about a half hour from Burlington VT with a pond, many acres of land, and a gorgeous garden which Susan designed.


I envy Susan her vast canvas that she can fill with plants. My garden has reached capacity and I can only cram in another plant if one dies—-which my plants obligingly do on a regular basis. However much as I love the beauty of rural Vt., I could not give up urban life. Trade-offs, trade-offs.

Is drinking wine the key to a happy marriage?

According to a recent report in The Journals of Gerontology: “Researchers found that couples who drink wine together say they are happier over time. Wives reported they were happier when their husbands drank wine and less happy when they didn't.” Wine, it turns out, could be one ingredient for a happy marriage.

I always believed this to be case but it’s nice to have scientific validation. Rick and I have been sharing a bottle of wine just about every night for the past 36 years. My guess is the reason it contributes to a good marriage is that wine forces you to slow down. You don’t rush through your meal when you are having wine with dinner. And that means you talk to each other. It’s an investment in your marriage.

I have seen couples over the ears immersed in their careers who thought they could tend to their marriage later on, but it usually doesn’t work that way; sometimes when a marriage is neglected there is no later on.

So Rick and I will keep drinking wine as long as we can, and when we are too old or sick, let’s hope there will be legalized marijuana for our old age.

My 2014 New Year’s resolution: Campa un giorno e campalo bene. Live for the day and live it well.

I have just one New Year’s resolution this year. No, I haven’t learned Italian. "Campa un giorno e campalo bene" was the recipe for happines--Neapolitan style-- which concluded a New York Times travel article on Naples.

I don’t have one of those sunny personalities which savors the pleasures of the moment. But it’s time to practice a little cognitive therapy on myself and try to live more fully in the present.

I am very happy with my life and love just hanging out with my husband, seeing friends, writing, working for social change. It’s a good life.

But at this stage in our lives, we can’t ignore the fact that some very difficult experiences may be not too far down the road. We’re both in good health now, but unlike the "young invincibles" we can no longer take this for granted.

I tend to think about this too much. But why spoil the present moment worrying about the future? I need to make every day count--"Campa un giorno e campalo bene"

Getting more citizens involved in grassroots politics!

During my working years I always hated January. The holidays were over and it was back to the daily grind. Now that I’m retired, January still means back to work, but it's work that I’ve chosen, work on my timetable.

One of the joys of living in a deep blue city with many progressive organizations is that there are many options for social justice work. Working for social change gives me some sense of being part of the future and having some forward momentum in my life. When I was teaching I felt that I was going round and round in the same groove I had been in for years. The thrill was gone.

My passion at this stage in my life is civic participation. For me and for many other progressive activists, Republican attempts to suppress the vote have been the galvanizing force--there are state wide groups working to overturn the Voter ID law and to make voting easier in PA. Also, the Voter ID law (slated to be implemented in 2013) has drawn attention to what has been a very low profile position—-the Judge of Elections. In each division, the Judge of Elections resolves disputes and makes determinations about voter eligibility in areas where the law is ambiguous. This has been an under the radar position with very few citizens actually running for the job. The Majority and Minority Inspectors also play an important role in ensuring fair, well-run elections. With the enactment of the Voter ID law, having a fair, knowledgeable election board matters more than ever.

The organization I care the most about,Philadelphia NOW, in partnership with Philadelphia CLUW, has prepared a handbook and is running a workshop on running for the Election Board ; at a later point we will hold a workshop on running for committeeperson. Thanks to a grant from Bread and Roses Community Fund, Philadelphia NOW did this in the past. Once again supported by Bread and Roses, we are running the workshop but we should be more successful this time. We are working in partnership with CLUW and we are also part of a broader movement, thePhiladelphia Democratic Progressive Caucus which will encourage civic and community groups to run workshops for their members to encourage them to run for Election Board and committeeperson.

So I am putting my energy into getting more citizens involved in grassroots politics, trying to make the Democratic Party more democratic , fighting voter suppression and making voting easier. If the people who came out in November 2012 had come out in 2010, we’d have a different congress and a different state legislature with major consequences for redistricting.

I think the only way to get more people to vote in mid-term elections is to make it easier to vote. People may be willing to wait in line for hours to vote for the President, but this generally doesn’t carry over to state legislators. And no citizen should have to stand in line for hours to vote!!! Many of our NOW members consider this a women’s issue as women are the ones most likely to be juggling work and family and having trouble getting to the polls—especially when their work place is far from their home.

I have friends on the left who question my focus on electoral politics and in particular the value of trying to reform the Democratic Party, but I’m convinced that for the rest of my activist life the only hope for progressive change lies in making it easier for people to vote and in building the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Growing Old On My Terms

Growing Old On My Terms By Margaret Guthrie, Cross-posted from Metropolis

One of the things that happens when you pass 75 -- and I am not talking about speed limits here -- is that you realize you could drop dead at any time. Dropping dead at any moment becomes much more real than it was at 30 or at 50 or even in your sixties and early 70s. As Dustin Hoffman once said, "The end is definitely in sight." As you pass through life, you might give occasional thought to your removal from the planet, to your participation in the recycling of all physical substance, but it doesn't occupy the forefront of your thoughts. The trick, when you're officially elderly, is to not let it occupy the forefront now.

Society doesn't help. Television is full of ads designed to scare old people into doing things that might not be in their best interest. For instance, there are those over-55 communities, which are basically beached cruise ships for the elderly. These places are full of organized activities like arts and crafts and high-school shop for the elderly and dining with 70 or so of your best friends, all of you basically ghetto-ized and awaiting the grim reaper, while you play bridge. Frankly, the idea of learning all over again how to make a magazine rack or napkin holder doesn't appeal to me. Plus, as I understand it, they have rules, like having to get permission to have your grandchildren visit you because they're under 55 years of age. Really?

I live on a block that has two young residents under the age of one, and a gentleman across the street from me who is in his 80s, lives alone, drives his own car and seems to be in fine shape. I believe he still plays the organ at his church on Sundays. There is a young woman next door to me in her junior year at St. Joseph's University, and next door to her is a young woman in her last year at Girls High whose sights are set on Howard University. Various parents, grandparents and others of all ages also live on my block. It's a microcosm of life in the city, and I would not miss it for all the "security" of living in a community where everything is taken care of for me. Sure, I have to rake leaves, shovel snow and haul the recycling out to the curb, but that keeps me moving. One thing you do learn about being old is how important it is to keep moving.

And then there are the ads for various drugs designed to ease or erase the physical effects of aging. The list of side effects can be nothing short of terrifying. I don't now and have never regarded either tuberculosis or death as a side effect. At this moment there is an epidemic of fungal meningitis loose among us, the result of careless manufacture of a steroid injection designed to ease back pain and related ills, as I understand it from the media. Is our medical system really out to help us, or is their only purpose their own enrichment at the possible expense of our lives? My own doctor told me it's his goal to keep me out of the hospital; I assured him it's a goal we share. My ultimate goal in this particular part of my life is to just go to sleep one night and not wake up -- but not for a while, please.

If my knees hurt, I'm supposed to let a surgeon who specializes in such things remove my knees and replace them with some mechanical device attached to the bones in my leg. No thank you. I would like to go into the recycling bin with as much of my own parts as I possibly can. I already have enough bridges in my mouth to make me competitive with Manhattan, and several years ago I had cataract surgery to replace the lenses of both eyes. I would like very much to hang onto the rest of me, as I figure at a maximum I have another 15 years. The more of actual me there is, the more I can enjoy the time that is left.

Life in the Rearview Mirror

Life in the Rearview Mirror By Margaret E. Guthrie Cross-posted from Metropolis

There are some pretty wonderful things about reaching old age that are little discussed; the disadvantages are far too well advertised to warrant further attention. I am officially old, I will be 75 in August of this year and learned recently that the "elderly" designation attaches when you reach age 72. So I think I have reached an age to be a reasonably good judge of the advantages of being old.

One of the advantages I like best is the ditching or overboard tossing. By that I mean certain things in your life that once seemed mighty important and now are not. Raising your children is one of these. By now, your children are middle-aged, have married or partnered well or not, are established in their career or profession or not, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about any of it. You have survived their adolescent years when you wondered whether either you or they would make it out alive. You have survived their twenties and early thirties when you despaired over partner and career choices, watching the light move across your ceiling as night turned to day and you still hadn't been to sleep. All of that is in the rearview mirror and good riddance. Your kids now are what they are.

You're also out of work or retired, depending on whose choice it was. In either case, you are no longer worried about the office, the shop, the restaurant. You no longer worry about the rogue co-worker, the super dysfunctional boss, the intimidating client. You no longer obsess over monthly sales figures, deadlines or annual employee evaluations. You no longer agonize over whether to change career in mid-stream, and if you do, what would be the gain and what would be the loss? All of that is also in the rear view mirror and good riddance to that as well.

If you're single, or divorced as I am, you also no longer worry about a partner, having one, finding the perfect match, dating someone younger, what your friends and family might think, etc. And then, having found someone, maybe, trying to find common ground, trying to build a new relationship that will not come unglued, that will last, that you can stand to be in, etc. All that, too, is now in the rear view mirror. And what a relief that is. No one to consult about what time dinner is or what it will be, no one else who gets a turn to pick the movie, or what to watch on TV or comment on what you're reading or wearing or doing. Living alone can be so liberating.

Now is my time. What I discovered is a new ability to focus as I have not done since I was a child and for the same reason. Children don't have the distractions that adults do, at least not in our society. Old people, having come out on the other side, don't either, and so can focus on whatever ignites their interest as they have been unable to do for years.

My focus has become food. First, I have become a member, through the Weavers Way Co-op, of Dining for Women. (www.diningforwomen.org) That organization supports women's groups in developing countries working to improve living conditions for impoverished families. Each chapter meets monthly at members' homes, bringing a covered dish. Each member contributes what she would have spent at a restaurant and that money is donated directly to that month's selected recipient. Since my chapter began, D4W has contributed to a women's cooperative in Mali granting micro-loans to women to start up small businesses, an organization working in Liberia and Sierra Leone to install composting toilets and water collection and purification systems in small villages and a women's cooperative in Guatemala that connects women weavers with designers in the US, enabling the women to feed and clothe their children and send them to school. So the gratification is immediate.

I am also hoping to join the board of a community partnership that is working to bring better food into the public schools in the northwestern part of the city and that operates a vegetable garden at a homeless shelter that usually houses 250 men, women and children. Anyone living in the shelter is welcome to work in the garden. The garden's produce goes directly to the kitchen of the shelter.

Finally, my next door neighbor, John, has surrendered his portion of our shared backyard so I can enlarge "our" vegetable garden. I try to grow enough so we can both live out of the garden all summer and early fall. I am learning something new about growing vegetables every day. Right now my downstairs, where I have large windows filled with early spring sunshine, is filled with peat pots containing small heirloom tomato and pepper plants. John loves the fact that he's the only one on our block with a gardener. I love that I have more than doubled production. There is something about watching nature at work that renews and energizes and when you're nearing the three quarter century mark, anything that energizes is fantastic.

Henry Ossawa Tanner exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts!

Before we retired, my husband Rick and I could never get it together to attend an exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum until the very last day. We were contending with huge crowds of procrastinators and we vowed that when we retired, we would make sure this didn’t happen. Unfortunately, we didn’t kick the bad habit in retirement. Last fall we went to a Rembrandt exhibit the very last day and once again spent time waiting in long lines and putting up with crowds. We once again vowed this will not happen again—after all, we’re retired; there’s no excuse.

I’m happy to report that we finally did it right with the Henry Ossawa Tanner exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

We went a few weeks after it opened on a weekday and were among the very few museum- goers. We really had a chanced to enjoy the exhibit. However much as I liked not having to deal with crowds, it was a little disturbing that this first rate exhibit was so sparsely attend. Sure hope it’s different during the week end.

From the the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts website:

The subject of this exhibition is the career and life of the artist Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937) - including the pioneering African-American artist’s upbringing in Philadelphia in the years after the Civil War; the artist’s success as an American expatriate artist at the highest levels of the international art world at the turn of the 20th century; Tanner’s role as a leader of an artist’s colony in rural France and his unique contributions in aid of American servicemen to the Red Cross efforts in WWI France; his modernist invigoration of religious painting deeply rooted in his own faith; Tanner’s depictions of the Holy Land and North Africa interpreted through comparison with contemporary French orientalist painting and photography; and the scientific and technical innovations of the artist’s oeuvre.

Henry O. Tanner was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1879 to 1885. PAFA is proud to organize this exhibition, and especially to elevate Tanner’s reputation through new scholarship and to bring his greatest works together for the first time in a generation.

See the slide show of Tanner’s paintings at the PAFA website to get some sense of the range of Tanner’s work. His portraits are really powerful and the portrait of Booker T. Washington alone is worth the price of admission. Don’t miss this one!

I enjoyed the holidays,but I’m so glad they’re over

I enjoy the holidays BUT there’s still that element of stress and I’m really glad they’re over. Two years ago, I wrote a post, No longer haunted by holiday depression. I stand by that post and now would put it more positively. Not only am I no longer “haunted” but I actually (for the most part) enjoy the holidays.

When I had a young child, the holidays were high stress. I wanted my son to have the “perfect Christmas” (whatever that is) and knocked myself out buying presents and putting up a Christmas tree, decorating the house etc. It was seriously high stress—especially with major marital problems that always worsened during the holidays. When the marriage ended, there was the tension of the joint custody years with all those negotiations about how my son would spend the holidays.

My life is so much less stressful now and the holidays reflect that. My son and my nieces don’t want presents—just checks-- which makes life easier, and I no longer feel any need to decorate the house. My sister still does that Christmas thing and I’m always taken aback when I see all the Christmas decorations in her house. My sister's house during the holidays:






Even the dog is in Christmas finery:


For me it’s just a poinsettia, but in a way I enjoy my sister's celebration of Christmas.

We had a great New Year’s Eve—an amazing party right in the neighborhood. It was a multi-generational event (which as an old person I really appreciate) with live music and dancing. I hadn’t been to a party like that for a while and I’d forgotten how much fun it is to dance. I was a little reluctant at first, but “Black Magic Woman" got me to my feet.

The only holiday entertaining Rick and I do is an open house on New Year’s Day. We used to have a New Year’s Eve dinner, but a few years ago after Rick had spent the whole day cooking a fantastic dinner, only 2 of our dinner guests showed. They were ill, were worried about the weather, uncomfortable about driving at night. We spent the next day driving around to deliver food to those friends who hadn’t come.

We decided that a lot of our friends were getting too old to be reliable New Year’s Eve guests so we switched to an open house on New Year’s day which has worked out very well. We don’t cook; we just buy hors d'oeuvres and our friends bring wonderful dishes. Some of the best pastry chefs in the city were there, bringing wonderful baked goods. (Thanks, Kathy.)

But there’s no way around it—-entertaining is stressful for the hosts. I fell down on the job and got so involved in conversations, I didn’t notice we had run out of clean wine glasses and utensils. Rick can deal with paper plates for hors d’oeuvres, but he insists on real glasses and utensils—which means monitoring the glasses and throwing some in the dishwasher if necessary. Fortunately some of my friends took up the slack and I found them washing glasses and utensils in the kitchen. I’ll never be the perfect hostess—too scattered for that.

So we got through the holidays and although I enjoyed them, I’m so glad they’re over and so happy to settle back into routine.

Nostalgia for the Light: worth all the money I’ve wasted on a largely unused Netflix subscription.

I thought when I retired I would actually use my netflix subscription instead of wasting money every month on a video rental service I never used. Well, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. A netflix film can still be around the house for weeks before I get around to it and the little Roku box I bought for streaming video has been used exactly once. Most nights I would just rather read.

But there are some things film can do that a book cannot and thanks to Netflix I have seen some amazing films from around the world. A visually breathtaking and deeply moving film I stumbled on last week was Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light. I’ve watched all of Guzman’s documentary films about Chile. I was inChile in 1972, a year before the brutal coup which destroyed Salvador Allende’s non-violent democratic revolution. Chile has had a hold on my imagination ever since— although my return trip in 2006 was something of a disappointment.

Guzman is still haunted by the horrors of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Set in the Atacama Desert where the dry air creates ideal conditions for astronomers, the film works on 2 tracks —the astronomers who describe themselves as archaeologists searching for the past in distant galaxies and the mothers of Pinochet’s victims also searching for the past in the Atacama, site of one of Pinochet’s concentration camps. The women wander the desert with shovels searching for the remains of their children. One says she wishes the gigantic telescopes looming in the desert landscape could also look deep into the earth and find her son.

The two strands merge in a young woman whose parents were killed by Pinochet and who now studies astronomy. She finds consolation in the stars; although her sorrow is not diminished, there is a measure of peace in seeing her personal tragedy in a larger perspective.

The shots of distance galaxies were astonishing and for the first time in my life, I thought maybe I would like one of those flat screen TV’s. (Rick and I are the only people we know who have yet to succumb to the lure of a giant flat screen TV.) Nostalgia for the Light was worth all the money I’ve wasted on a largely unused Netflix subscription.

Social Security Disability Benefits:No subsitute for Medicare!

I received some very thoughtful comments about my post, Raising the Retirement Age: Bad for the Old, Disastrous for the Young. Carol and Nance raised points I should have included in my post:

From Nance:

"I have seen so many teachers, social workers and nurses who are exhausted by the emotional demands of their jobs..." Count me among these. I loved my private psychotherapy practice, but there came a time when arthritis made long hours in the chair impossible and the long, slow accumulation of residue from years of vicariously experienced traumas had begun to declare itself.

When I retired, it was time. I was turning 60 in a job most folks would say you could do into your eighties. When I think of returning to it, I feel sick.

Everyone I've ever talked to who is past sixty has begun struggling with notable physical decline in some form and longs for the day they can change gears to meet their own physical needs.

From Carol:

I loved the column, but you should have mentioned that in our post-60's, health problems like diabetes, Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, etc. tend to kick in, so not only will older people working make it less likely for younger ones to get jobs -- but also it is inhumane for a society to expect people to continue working when they may be frail or battling serious illnesses.

The advocates of raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare usually counter that those older folks who are disabled can apply for Social Security Disability Benefits. I asked a couple of my friends who worked for organizations advocating for the elderly and they both said, “It’s not so easy.” Unlike Medicare, which we are automatically entitled to at age 65, and Social Security retirement benefits, for which we are automatically eligible (at a reduced rate, to be sure) at age 62, there is nothing automatic about Social Security disability benefits. To qualify, applicants must be severely disabled, and even then there is a very high rate of rejection; getting approval takes forever. The arthritis Nance described would not be sufficient to qualify.

An article in the latest issue of AARP Bulletin, Waiting for Social Security Disability confirms what my friends said:

About 60 percent of cases are initially rejected. Applicants can ask for review by an administrative law judge, hire an attorney and wait months for a hearing… By last fall, 840,000 initial applications were pending.

Part of the problem is the sour economy. Applications have soared since late 2007 as workers with disabilities lost jobs and couldn't find new employment. At the same time, more boomers — many of them unable to find jobs — have applied for disability benefits.

All told, about 8.5 million workers and about 2 million adult children, widows and widowers were receiving disability benefits as of August. The average age of a disabled worker in the program now is 53. No one gets rich from the program: The average monthly benefit is $1,070.20.

Social Security Disability can not be counted on as a fallback for the infirm elderly if the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security are raised. The idea that people who are not doing heavy physical work should be able to work well into their late 60’s and 70’s is cruel for all the reasons Nance stated. We can’t let this happen.

Raising the Retirement Age: Bad for the Old, Disastrous for the Young

It almost seems as if there’s a conspiracy to normalize the idea of working longer. Every time I pick up a newspaper, there’s another article about how we all have to work until we drop. Rather than dwelling on the familiar argument we just can’t afford to fund Social Security and Medicare, Edward Glaeser in his recent New York Times article,“Goodbye, Golden Years” puts a happy face on working well into old age.

Despite the current crisis in youth unemployment, Glaeser cheerfully tells us that“it’s counterintuitive, but the forever work life of older Americans may turn out to be a good thing for young workers.” He argues against what he calls the “lump of labor fallacy”-- that there are just a fixed number of jobs which the economy can generate:

If the economy needed only a lump of labor, the spectacular expansion of America’s female work force would have led to vast male unemployment. But it didn’t. In fact, the number of working women rose by 87 percent in the 25 years between 1975 and 2000, during which time total male employment also increased, by 41 percent.

However, the entry of women into the labor force occurred during a time of economic expansion (Yes, we had a recession in the early 80’s, but the 90’s were fueled by the dotcom boom.) Times are very different now as we remain mired in deep recession with increasing numbers of jobs out sourced to low-wage economies.

Not only does Glaeser downplay the grim reality of a jobs crisis, he paints a rosy picture of seniors starting businesses:

…by at least one measure, the elderly are often the most entrepreneurial Americans. Self-employment rises significantly with age. West Palm Beach, a retiree haven, has the highest self-employment rate of any metropolitan area in the nation… Self-employment is particularly natural for older Americans, because it provides so much more control over working hours and conditions. …Gradually, our image of 70-year-olds needs to change from Florida retirees to Florida entrepreneurs, who find ways to make a bit of cash doing something a bit more fun than their former work.

The message seems to be that, yes, we can cut their Social Security checks because they’ll be making extra cash with their small businesses. What makes Glaeser think that people who have not been entrepreneurs all their lives will suddenly develop this interest and talent in their golden years? How many retirees will be willing to gamble their nest eggs to start a business? The appetite for risk for most folks decreases with age. And finally most small businesses fail in their first year. Entrepreneurship among the elderly is not likely to compensate for decreased Social
Security checks and increased Medicare costs.

If our social policies force more elderly workers to remain in the work force longer, the greatest consequences will be felt by the young. Those young French men and women knew what they were doing when they were demonstrating in favor of retirement at 62. Don Peck’s article in the March 2010 Atlantic points out the consequences of long-term joblessness:

The effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. …If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well.

We need to spread the jobs around. Our society has been pushing workers to stay in the paid work force by gradually raising the age at which they are eligible for full retirement benefits and now policy makers are proposing raising the eligibility age for Medicare But either we pay more in Social Security and Medicare by encouraging older workers to leave the workforce or we’ll be paying more in unemployment compensation--not to mention the range of social ills resulting from a generation of young people who can’t find steady employment.

Of course, seniors who love their jobs and want to continue working should do so. But most do not, and it’s not just those with physically demanding jobs who long to retire. I have seen so many teachers, social workers and nurses who are exhausted by the emotional demands of their jobs but are hanging on for fear that there will be steep cuts in Social Security and Medicare. A social contract across the generations is sometimes discussed in terms of fewer entitlements for the old and more for the young. A better way to think about this is sharing what has become an increasingly scarce resource—a job and all that means for family and community stability.

I still haven’t quite gotten used to being the older generation at my family/friends, multigenerational Thanksgiving dinner.

I still haven’t quite gotten used to being the older generation at my family/friends, multigenerational Thanksgiving dinner. In some ways, Thanksgiving is a lot easier now. Rick and I used to drive to Rhode Island every year to spend Thanksgiving with Rick’s relatives. Rick and I for so many years were the middle generation. His parents are deceased and we now we spend Thanksgiving with my sister, her friends and their children; now we just drive to the Philadelphia suburbs.

My husband and I were the oldest people sitting around the table; next my sister, her husband and friends in their early 60’s: then the generation ranging from late 20’s to early 40’s and at last the next generation— beautiful 4 month old Evan.

My son Cris who has never been able to shake off the old holiday habits from those joint custody days of his childhood has two Thanksgiving dinners—one with his father’s family and one with us.
Cris after having eaten 2 Thanksgiving dinners


One of the really bizarre aspects of getting older is the way our sense of self lags so far behind our chronological age. When my brother-in- law kindly announced our arrival with “Here come the old people,” my initial reaction was, “Who me?” But as Rick says, “Get used to it.” At least we’re still here, and we have each other, and some wonderful folks to spend Thanksgiving with.

The Cataract Operation: The Acid Trip for Old Age

The Cataract Operation: The Acid Trip for Old Age

Last week my husband had a cataract operation. A few days later, we were in Valley Green Park taking in the spectacular fall foliage. Rick was looking up at the sky in wonderment, saying, “the sky is unbelievably bright. I’ve never seen a blue like that. It’s like everything is back lit. And I can see yellow, red, and orange leaves on that tree.”

I said, “You mean you can see different colored leaves on that tree?” All I could see was an orange blur. His reply, "Yes, I can see distinct colors.”

There was something weirdly familiar about his look of wonder and then it hit me. That was just how my crazy hippie friends and I would talk about our acid trips, marveling at the magical world of intense colors LSD and mescaline opened up for us.

My trips were a little less intense than most; I was a cautious "just a ¼ tab” person. I really didn’t like my brain playing tricks on me and with my small dose I got the heightened perception without the bizarre delusions. Kind of like Rick’s cataract operation!

My generation experimented with drugs and for most part did not pay a price; now people are serving long prison terms – simply for possession. I’ve always been bothered by this, but have never done much but publish an op-ed in Philadelphia's Daily News: From the article cross-posted at the Philadelphia NOW blog:

Many powerful and successful women and men in our society experimented with drugs in their youth. But their careers were not derailed; their families were not torn apart. Sadly, they are now willing to ignore the fact that another generation of women and men are being incarcerated in appalling numbers for drug-related crimes.

I can look back nostalgically at my (few) acid trips while right now there’s somebody rotting in jail for having had the misfortune to take drugs in a much less permissive time.

Another retirement challenge: keeping fear of crime in perspective

This week someone broke into my home and stole my laptop. I was upstairs at the time and had stupidly left the back door open. I’ve been careless about this for many years and have been lucky. We’ve only had one robbery in the past 20 years—-someone broke into our garage and stole a power mower.

Breaking into your garage is real different from having somebody break into your home. The sense of violation is hard to shake and especially so when you’ve come face to face with the robbers. I went downstairs and into our small sunroom which opens into our back yard and found the door wide open. Then I noticed the missing laptop and the disconnected phone. I locked the door to the sunroom, went back to the kitchen to get a functioning phone and then walked back to the sunroom and saw 3 teenagers at my back door. Obviously they had come back for more, no doubt hoping the door would still be open. I screamed and they ran away. But the image of the three of them ready to break in is something I can’t shake. I really wish I hadn’t seen their faces.

I think 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago I’d have had an easier time putting it in perspective. I’d tell myself—it was just a lap top. I wasn’t beaten up, they didn’t get my pocket book with all my credit cards, they didn’t go on a rampage and destroy the house. I would have taken more precautions and eventually forgotten about it.

But now that I’m in my 60’s I’m feeling more vulnerable. I spend a lot of time working in my garden and have never worried about personal safety, but then at this stage in my life I can’t run all that fast and I am certainly in no shape to fend off any teenage attackers. My garden is my refuge and now I’m not so sure I want to be out there when my husband is not home. And the days of going out in the garden and leaving the back door open are over.

And then there is the issue of fear of young back men. I don’t like that feeling and I know of course that the vast majority of young black men are not criminals. But as I live in a majority black neighborhood, the young men who break into my house are most likely to be black. If I lived in neighborhood adjacent to a poor white neighborhood my fears of young men wouldn’t be so focused on young black men. Since our neighborhood is just not rich enough to attract sophisticated career burglars, the people likely to break into my house will be teenagers and probably black teenagers. I want to resist looking at any young black man who comes to my front door with suspicion. When I was younger, I had a much easier time resisting those stereotypes. Now that I’m old and more vulnerable, that suspicious response is harder to resist. This feeling is just as unsettling as the sense of violation. I really wish I hadn’t seen their faces.

The Flowering Trees and Shrubs of Early Spring-- if only they would last longer

Carlesii Viburnum

When I was working, I was always desperately trying to catch the magic of early spring, but my job— those mountains of papers to grade—kept getting in the way. I thought that when I retired I could really savor early Spring and it wouldn’t seem to pass so incredibly quickly.

I missed that magical third week of April last year—the usual time for the great Spring awakening in the Delaware Valley-- because of our rescheduled trip to Peru. This year I finally had the time to spend just about every waking moment in the garden, but it still passed far too quickly. I felt that I barely had time to smell the viburnum. There's just no way to put this in slow motion.

Given the fleeting nature of Spring flowering trees and shrubs, the garden books always advise selecting shrubs and trees for multi-season interest. I’ve tried to do this, but there are some shrubs so magical for a brief period that I’ll put up with the fact that they are nothing special 51 weeks of the year. Carlesii Viburnum is a scraggly shrub with nondescript white flowers which tend to bloom for a short time the third week of April. But for those few days, they produce the most astonishing fragrance.

Redbud and Cherry Trees

The Redbud and cherry trees tend to bloom about the same time as the Viburnum. Redbud (Cercis Canadensis) grows wild in parts of western Pennsylvania and is a tough little tree with gorgeous purple flowers—which last about 5 days, but redbud does have multi-season interest and produces bright gold fall foliage

Sandcherry

The delicate blossoms of sand cherry ( Prunus Serotina ) another tough plant are also part of the mid to late April explosion. The flowers may not last long but the foliage stays deep purple all summer and turns bright red in the fall.

crabapple

By the 4th week of April, all these beauties are usually gone; then the crabapples puts on their show for a very brief period. The crabapple is one of those small trees recommended for multi-season interest; it gets Fall color and berries that persist throughout most of the winter. Supposedly, the birds don’t like them and only turn to the crabapple fruits when everything else has been picked clean.

Common Lilac

Then in the last week of April what I'm longing for most : the common lilac that has the most spectacular fragrance in the world. For (at most) a week of that fragrance it’s worth putting up with a raggedy plant that gets unsightly powdery mildew at the end of the summer.

Fernleaf peony

In the beginning of May the early peonies start beginning with the graceful fern leaf peony, then the spectacular flowers of the tree peony (so called because it doesn’t die down to the ground and thus provides “winter interest”). These are the most fleeting of all—-sometimes only a day or two if there’s wind and rain.

Tree peony

By the first week of May everything has leafed out, the pale green leaves of April have darkened and my garden already looks like a jungle.
If only I could slow this down!!!!

From Fran Waksler: What Should I Read Next?

From my friend Fran Waksler:

Retirement has brought me an abundance of time to read, certainly a welcome luxury, but one consequence is my now more frequent search for what I will read next. I try very hard to choose a next book before I’ve finished the one I’m reading so I won’t have that uncomfortable bookless gap during which I wander the house looking for just the right one.

As I wrote previously, I’ve been in the process of rearranging my bookshelves. Now I finally have space on the shelves of carefully alphabetized books I have read. I also have a place for unread books but, unfortunately, also have little outposts of them on various other shelves, interfering with my organizational plans. The solution I have come up with is to choose to read books that have been languishing on my unread shelves, neglected for no apparent reason except that the time to read them never seemed quite right. What pleasant surprises I’ve had, as well as some disappointments.

As part of this new approach, I first read Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book, (Virago) that I think I was avoiding just because it was very long and I’d never heard of it before. I can’t even remember why I bought it. I chose it now because I wanted space on the shelf where it was resting. I found the first half very good, showing a knowledgeable and detailed grasp of a child’s perspective; the second half got rather preachy but still, overall it was a worthwhile read. I found it reminiscent of Wilkie Collins.

The next book, chosen to make more room on my unread gardening bookshelf, was Elizabeth Lawrence’s The Gardener’s Essential Gertrude Jekyll, selections for Jekyll’s writings. Much to my surprise, I didn’t enjoy it and found it discouraging. Her goals for gardening are so lofty that she makes ordinary gardeners look stupid. I didn’t learn much of practical value. She raved about Funkia so I looked up their common name: Hostas—which I dislike intensely.

David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr.’s Strange Gods: The Great American Cult Scare (photo above), has been on my shelf for years and was close to being discarded a number of times. The bright orange cover and the artwork made it look like a sensationalist polemic. It turned out to be sociology at its best, with good description and sensible analysis of the way that the danger presented by cults has been exaggerated, primarily by distraught parents and deprogrammers with help from the media. It describes the dangers to religious freedom of dismissing and even persecuting cults and recognizes that many traditional religions began as cults.

I wanted something short and chose Florida Scott-Maxwell’s The Measure of My Days, which I expected to be interesting musings on growing old. I can’t say that it captured me at all and didn’t make much room in the bookcase.

Another shelf where I wanted a bit of room held Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle, a gift from my husband who knows of my interest in Darwin and in arguments over evolution. I can always trust the books he chooses; they are guaranteed to be well written. This book was a particular pleasure, showing Darwin as an exceedingly careful and hard-working researcher. He spent years at his microscope tracing the evolution of barnacles, knowledge that was fundamental to his theories later published in The Origin of Species.

I realize that in some ways I have been a lazy book-chooser, relying on familiar authors and topics and not taking chances. But I acquired the unread books on my shelves for some reason; perhaps I should trust what I chose even if I don’t remember why.

Nature Plays an April Fool’s Joke: Snow on April 1

This has felt like the longest winter ever. And waking up to snow on the first day of April was hard to take. My husband and a couple of good friends have been planning to go on regular Friday morning walks for the past few weeks and each Friday has been too cold, too rainy, and now too snowy.

We have had snow in April before. I remember my good friend Reni had tickets for a Handel opera in mid-April. She’s a real opera buff and lover of Handel, so she bought tickets for mid-April thinking she was safe and her plans would not be upended by bad weather. Well, we had a major snowstorm, the trains were not running, and Reni did not get to the opera.

So yes, it’s happened before, but I can't recall ever feeling this annoyed. When I was working I had another annoyances to deal with and less time to obsess about the weather.

Maybe April really is the cruelest month. On a grim April day, we English major types all have that refrain running through our heads, kind of like a pop song you just cannot get out of your mind:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with Spring rain

(I did not have to google this – the words are burned in my brain--although I did have to check for the line spacing.)

Oh well as Nance wrote on a comment on my last post complaining about the weather: "Spring has never entirely let us down, yet, so hang in there."

I promise: no more posts bemoaning the bad weather. As my husband said your blog is turning into a weather report.

The Great Spring Awakening has been put on hold.

Forsythia, not yet fully out

Since 1996 I have been keeping careful gardening records, noting the exact date each year when a plant blooms. There's about a 2-3 week range depending on how hard the winter, how cold the spring. The first species crocus can come as early as the second week of February or the first week of March.

In February and the first 3 weeks of March it’s easy to keep up with the record keeping. Then sometime in the last week of March or the first or second week of April there is a great explosion of bloom and I have trouble recording it all.

I thought we were on track for a late March awakening but for the past week we’ve had unseasonably cold weather and even a light dusting of snow.

The forsythia which is usually fully out by the last week of March isn’t quite there yet. And daffodils have been in a state of suspended animation, on the brink of opening for about a week.


I’m more impatient than ever this year—probably one consequence of retirement. When I was working, I was so burdened with grading student papers that I didn’t have time to obsess about my tardy spring bulbs.

Unfortunately, Spring comes a little later to my Mt. Airy neighborhood than to other parts of Philly. We are about 400 feet above sea level (or so an insurance adjuster once told us); in colonial times Mt. Airy was where folks built their summer homes to escape the oppressive heat and humidity of the Delaware Valley. When I get off the train at Mt. Airy Station in the dog days of August, it can feel as much as ten degrees cooler than in Center City. So our microclimate has its advantages.

But now when we drive downtown and see the River Drive carpeted with daffodils and the magnolias almost fully out--they're only in bud in Mt. Airy--I get a little envious.
Quince on the brink of bloom

Looks like I’ll probably have to make do with buds for another week.

The gardening season has begun!

The show has begun! My old friends are coming back: first the snow drops which have been blooming since late January, then the crocus which have been blooming for 2 weeks now. The little blue scilla have started and the first early season daffodil has finally appeared. I’ve always planted a lot of early season bulbs and early flowering shrubs. Late Winter/early Spring is when I really need it.

My Witch Hazel—a beautiful pale very fragrant variety, Arnold's Promise-- has been blooming for about a month now, the Winter Jasmine (Jasmine Nudiflorum) almost as long. My winter honeysuckle, an ungainly shrub, but worth a place in an out of the way part of the garden, has been pouring forth its astonishing fragrance for about a week now. Witch hazel--on its way out but still wonderfully fragrant.

Jasmine nudiflorum

We’ve had a few days of sunny, unseasonably warm weather and I am finally out there working in the garden! For me it’s the best therapy in the world: when I am in the garden I think of nothing else but the work at hand—-all negative, obsessive thoughts disappear.

Maybe this is the year I'll get it right. During my working years, I never had time to really get the garden in shape until the semester was over in early May.

My first year of retirement was going to be the year I would hit the ground running as soon as the soil could be worked. We planned our trip to Peru in late February and I expected to be home in time for the great Spring Awakening. Thanks to mudslides and avalanches our trip was postponed until the busiest time for a gardener: mid-April. I really didn’t want to get on that plane to Lima.

This year no trips will get in the way of the Spring gardening season. Just maybe I’ll manage to get it all done—-the clean-up, the fertilizing, the pruning.

And very soon my garden will be filled with daffodils, hyacinth, and early tulips!

A RETIREMENT PROJECT FINALLY UNDERWAY: ORGANIZING BOOKS by Fran Waksler

A newly organized bookcase (note my silver baby cup and teething ring).

In our exchange of emails, Karen sometimes suggests that I expand on one of my ideas for a post to her blog. Here is one such post.

I retired in 2008 and am just now getting around to one of the many projects that have been languishing at the top of my to-do list: making room for my books. Mark Twain was once asked why there were so many books piled on his floor. He replied that it was easier to borrow books than to borrow bookcases. My problem is not borrowed books; rather it is that I have no more room for bookcases⎯even if I could borrow some!

Now that my project is underway, it is clear that room is being taken up by books that I seem to saving for no apparent reason other than my hating to get rid of any book. Steeling myself, I have been undertaking the painful job of culling. Some books will be donated, but others belong in the trash. Do I really need textbooks written in 1985, especially those that I never used, didn’t like in the first place, and came unsolicited from publishers? I want to keep Broom and Selznick’s Sociology, 2nd edition, since it was used in the first sociology course I ever took, but I don’t think I need all the future editions. And do I really need TWO copies of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Wives and Daughters? Since the books I’ve read are alphabetized, I will no longer feel that I can only read books whose authors’ names are in the part of the alphabet where there is still room on a shelf.

I have to admit that I am enjoying the project (except for working on the top shelves, which requires that I stand on the highest step of the ladder. I do wish I were taller!) One bookcase is for unread books and, in culling some books and reorganizing those that have survived the cut, I have discovered some very interesting ones that I had forgotten about and will read soon: an assortment of sociology (Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy, Stanford Lyman’ The Seven Deadly Sins), anthropology (Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature), philosophy (Michel Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge), biographies (Barbara Goldsmith’s of Marie Curie, Marina Warner’s of Joan of Arc), and the occasional novel (Sarah Grand, The Beth Book).

I know if I only had e-books then I wouldn’t have this project to undertake. How much I would miss! I love remembering the books I’ve read, holding them in my hands, leafing through them, at times even calling up when I read them: this one on our vacation by the lake, this one that helped me through the flu, these that were presents. Scrolling through a Kindle doesn’t have the same appeal at all.