The 70-Something Blog

Wardrobe

While biking to work on Friday, I saw an 80-something woman going for a walk.  Good for her, I thought.  But those clunky leather tie-shoes and old-fashioned shorts framing legs that might have been great at one time but should be covered now, got me to thinking about my wardrobe.

 Summer is pretty late in these parts this year, and since most of my winter and transitional clothes have been cleaned and put away, getting dressed for work in the morning has been a challenge.  Peter, of course, cannot relate.  In the winter, he puts on a long-sleeved shirt and trousers; in the summer, a short sleeved shirt and trousers. If it's a bit cool, he adds a sweater.  For the most part, he wears the same pair of shoes. 

 One rainy day earlier in the week, I decided to wear a white suit.  Of course I would have to cover it with rain paints and jacket for my bike ride, but I thought it would be an upbeat thing to do on such a dreary day.  My white suit is cotton pique.  It is a Calvin Klein.  Mostly, Calvin Klein clothes are youth-oriented, but when I bought it last year, I thought it looked pretty good on me. Of course, standing in a dressing room and looking in the mirror is not the same as walking, sitting at a desk, going up and down stairs, just living your day.

When I wore it to work the first time last year, I realized that the pants were really low-waisted and the jacket barely touched my waist.  The black top I wore was form-fitted and 50% spandex.  Are you beginning to see my problem?  When I bend over or get out of a chair, no matter how quickly I pull down the shirt it is impossible not to have a look at a few inches of my lower back. 

 I asked Peter for his view of this matter at breakfast that rainy morning.  Looking up briefly from his newspaper, he said, "You have a really nice lower back."

 I wore the suit.

Searching for Muriel, Part II

Today I found my friend Muriel. Actually, I found one of her daughters thanks to my membership in Linkedin, a website for professional contacts. I left her a message at her work, and heard back within minutes. We talked a bit about how hard it had been for me to find her—a change in her email provider from AOL to gmail was what tripped me up. Then I asked about her mother. I closed my eyes and held my breath as I waited for her answer.

Muriel is alive, she told me. She will be celebrating her 85th birthday at the end of this month. But her life is not great. She is in the early stages of dementia and has poor short-term memory. She is living on her own in the assisted-living complex where she had lived with her husband. But it is only a matter of time until she is unable to live that way.

Her children have a plan, and she will have good care as long as she needs it. She is fighting against getting more help, even though she is aware of her problem. Without her husband, it seems, she is losing the will to carry on.

But her daughter assures me that Muriel is still beautiful and still has her marvelous sense of humor. Although she was always petite, she is even smaller now. It is so hard for me to picture a diminished version of this person who was so important to me for so long.

I asked if there was some way I could see her and if she might remember me. Yes, I was told, she would remember me—it is the short-term memory that is seeping away.

Perhaps one day her daughter will take me to see Muriel, and we will take her out to lunch. I think I would like that.

Yet I know it will be hard.

Searching for Muriel

I met my friend Muriel in 1972. I helped get her a part-time job at the place where I worked.

She was in her late forties at that time, a strikingly beautiful woman whose smile lit up the room. We started walking together at lunchtime on the days we overlapped at work. There weren't chic walking shoes then, so we both left a pair of clunky Wallabees in the office for our two-mile route. When we started, I had a two-year old and a newborn. She had raised four children, and she had seen everything. Needless to say she was an endless source of advice.

Muriel came to value my advice as well, and we became fast friends. After eight years and a few pair of Wallabees, I took a job elsewhere, but we still walked when we could. When she retired and moved to the Cape, she would take the bus to Boston and stay with me overnight. Her pajamas and a tooth brush were always waiting for her in our guest room.

Her overnight visits stopped after a while because her husband wasn't doing all that well. Eventually they moved to an assisted-living facility, and I heard little from her, until after her husband passed away, perhaps two years ago.

Recently, I've heard nothing, so I decided to investigate. I started with her eldest son whose phone number I actually had. The number was not in service. So I tried the online white pages and found a couple of people with his (not-unusual) name who lived in that area. One person's phone was out of service, but I did leave a message for the other even though his voice didn't sound familiar.

Sure enough, the guy called back. No, he wasn't Muriel's son, but he had met him a couple of times. No idea where he was now. Of course I tried the other three children, one of whom I actually knew pretty well, but the email address I had for her didn't work. I also failed to find either of the other two.

I tried calling the office of her retirement village, but could only get the voice mail of the sales department, and I am not so sure they would tell me anything about her anyway.

So today, I called the number I had for Muriel. I had hoped to talk to someone in her family first to see how she was doing, but that didn't work. I was anxious as the phone was ringing. I heard a computer-generated voice say. "Hello. No one is here to take your call. Please leave a message." I don't know if that number is still hers, but I left a message anyway.

I still miss her.

The Visit

My friend Suzanne looked a little sad when she came to work this afternoon. She had just dropped her 12-year old son off at overnight camp. I know that sadness. Both of our boys went to camp for years, and I always had that empty feeling in my stomach that comes with giving responsibility for your children to someone else. However, the thought of eating all the fish we wanted for four weeks helped.

Now things are different. We can have fish all the time. Our kids have lived elsewhere starting with college. But except for Jeremy's year in Chile and Seth's semester in France, they were never more than a short plane ride away until Seth moved to Brazil.

Luckily for us, one of his best high school friends got married in Montreal this past weekend, and he visited us on the way there and back. We had three great days with him. We talked a lot. We cooked his favorite dinners, he took his father to lunch as a late Father's Day present, and I took a day off from work to shop with him for his birthday. We watched some episodes of "In Treatment" and some Red Sox together.

After supper on his last evening here, I did my best to not feel sad. He left at 7:30 the next morning.

I am getting good at not crying, but my stomach ached all day.

Traveling with Friends

We've been traveling with our friends Christa and Gordon for twenty years and, except for a few days in Paris or Rome on our way somewhere else, we haven't been to the same place twice. Until this year.

We decided to return to the Hudson River Valley in New York State because we missed too much on our first visit. Gordon didn't have enough time at the Franklin Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park; we never got to nearby Eleanor Roosevelt's home or the Vanderbilt Estate. As for me, I had to go back to the Culinary Institute of America because they served me just-baked gluten-free bread. We had been on bicycles for our last visit, so this time we wanted to hike along the Hudson River. We also wanted to revisit the outdoor sculpture garden at the Storm King Art Center.

We managed to do it all in four days (although this required leaving Gordon on his own at the Roosevelt library while we went off hiking).

Our highlights:

The Culinary Institute of America: On a beautiful site overlooking the Hudson River, the campus includes three gourmet restaurants. Graduating students cook, serve and clean up under the supervision of their instructors. Many go on to become famous chefs. The head chef at McDonald's is a graduate.

Storm King: About a forty-minute drive south of Hyde Park on the other side of the Hudson, the Storm King Art Center is set on five hundred acres. The sculptures are by internationally-known masters. Maya Lin, whose Vietnam Memorial graces the Mall in Washington, DC, has a new installation called Waves, built on eleven acres that were formerly a gravel pit.

 

 

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Any trip is even better when you share it with good friends. We like to travel with Gordon and Christa because we know them so well. We know that they usually sleep a bit later than we do. They always have coffee after dinner and we don't. If the rooms where we are staying are not equal, we flip a coin to decide who gets first choice. And wherever we go, we can count on Christa to find wild raspberries by the side of the road.

One great thing about being old is old friends.

P.T.

Healthcare reform is in the headlines again (or should I say still?). I don't know if Congress will come up with the cost-saving reforms we need, but I have one strategy to recommend—less surgery, more physical therapy.

I had to quit a game of badminton with my son Seth five years ago due to a sudden shoulder pain. A physician assistant in orthopedics looked at my X-rays and saw a partial tear of my rotator cuff. He recommended two orthopedic surgeons and told me to choose one;

When I asked if physical therapy (PT) was an option, he said I could try it, but would end up having the surgery and then have to have more PT anyway. I opted for physical therapy alone, and my rotator cuff has been fine ever since.

About six weeks ago, I started to have serious hip pain. Every time I was on my feet for an hour, I couldn't even step up a curb without help. I was sure I needed a hip replacement. I decided that I would ask our personal trainer Kathy about it at our next session. (Kathy is a physical therapist as well as a trainer.)

When I explained my symptoms to Kathy, she asked me to sit down cross-legged. Normally, with a hip problem, this is very painful to the groin, according to Kathy. It wasn't painful for me. She thought my back might be the problelm (so much for my self-diagnosis) and gave me a bunch of new stretches to add to my routine. She suggested that I try them for a couple of weeks, and if there was no improvement, get an X-ray of my hip and back to see what was going on.

It's now almost three weeks since her visit. I have stretched and stretched. I now have no pain after being on my feet for an hour. Kathy solved my problem, and in the process, saved my health insurance provider some money.

Imagine the savings if more people tried PT before surgery.

Passport

My passport expired in March, 2006.  I’ve had my new one for three years. 

As part of my “what do I need this for?” crusade, I decided to throw away the old passport.  But not before I looked at every country stamp.  It was like a travelogue.  There were stamps from France, Spain, Denmark, Switzerland and New Zealand, all places where we had bicycled, first with groups and once we figured out how to do it, on our own.  There were stamps from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana where we took our grown-up sons to celebrate the start of a new century and two important birthdays. 

We visited Czechoslovakia and Germany one summer after biking in Switzerland.  We went to Mexico.  We spent some time in Chile to visit our son Jeremy who lived there for a year. We rented a flat in England for a week one March, and met a friend there on his way back from climbing Kilimanjaro.  On that trip we ate an outrageously expensive birthday meal at a restaurant that I had to call a month ahead in order to get a reservation.

When I got that passport in 1996, I had no idea that I would visit all those amazing places.  Turning its pages now brought a flood of wonderful memories.

I couldn’t throw it out.

 

 

Toast

I've been to a lot of farewell events in my career. People move on, and change is good. These events usually are scheduled at the end of the work day. I try to drop by at the beginning because the toasts can get long, and they tend to be quite predictable. If I arrive early, I can often slip out before the speeches begin.

But this week, it was my boss who was leaving, and the speaker was his deputy director-- me. We did his farewell a little differently. We had it at breakfast. We invited only the people in our department—about 50. And knowing how much he dislikes being praised in public, we limited the toasts to one-- mine. I spoke for all of us, but my speech was only 93 words long. I was emotional, but controlled. I gave him a memory book in which we had all written our good wishes.

He made a gracious, and also short, response, giving us all the credit for his success.

He is a class act

Bad Think/Good Think

I used to have a bright red double-breasted wool suit with gold blazer-type buttons. I wore it year after year because it looked great on me (or so people said). One spring when I was putting it away for the following winter, I had a frightening thought. What if I would not be alive to wear it in the winter? That is the first time I remember acknowledging that I wasn't so young any more. It did not feel good.

That was eight or ten years ago. The suit is long gone to Goodwill, and I'm still here. But reminders of mortality come more often now. I call them bad think, and I try not to dwell on them.

Here's another example. We have a lot of possessions. I hope our children will want some of them. But I've been thinking lately that the kids shouldn't have to go through all of our useless (to them) belongings after we die. So occasionally, I look in a closet or a file drawer to see what I can get rid of to make our stuff less a burden for them. Is that bad think or real-life think?

In our back yard, we have two huge Japanese lilac trees that bloom in alternate years. Right now one of them is blanketed with cream-colored blossoms. It is a breathtaking sight. Today I became concerned about how many more times I would see that tree bloom so gloriously. That's bad think.

Instead, I should think about how fortunate I am to see it blooming right now.

I Can’t Slice a Cantaloupe Straight

There are some things I do well. Some things I am OK at. And some things I just can't do. For example, I have a slice of cantaloupe every morning for breakfast. It's delicious and good for me. You would think after all these years, I could cut it right. But my piece is always lopsided. Even if I start at the right spot on the top, my knife just doesn't follow the curve of the melon. It's a mystery.

Music is another thing I'm bad at. A few days ago, I read about Stanley Drucker, who is stepping down as principal clarinetist from the New York Philharmonic after 61 years and 10,200 concerts with the orchestra. I never got beyond playing "On Top of Old Smokey" on the ukulele when I was a camper, and even then, I couldn't carry a tune.

I am also a complete failure when it comes to keeping my emotions to myself. I cry over Hallmark commercials and Mother's Day cards. I could go on and on about my shortcomings, (and my family could probably add plenty) but I won't.

Now that I have passed 70, I have decided that it's OK for me to limit my singing to the shower, to give up trying to be Barbara Walters and to have forgotten how to solve quadratic equations.

But not being able to slice a cantaloupe straight…I have to work on that.