We went to a movie Saturday night with our good friends Meg and Joe.  Everyone in the audience was in their 70’s (or older).    We’re used to seeing an all silver-hair crowd at classical music concerts, but at the movies?

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is about a group of British retirees who end  up in Jaipur India—one (unhappily) married couple and a bunch of singles who didn’t know each other before setting out.  The film has a colorful location and a great cast of misfits who eventually fit in. There are some lines that were quite funny to us, but might not amuse anyone under sixty-five.

A movie for the geezer generation.  Who would have thunk it?

But wait, that’s not all.  A movie about an octogenarian husband and wife facing their mortality won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last Sunday, beating out twenty-one other films.

Fellow 70-somethings, we’re on a roll!

On April 12^th, I got an email from a casting director (I’ll call her Ann) asking me to appear in a TV “docu-series”.  She had read in my blog that I found a half-sister I had never known about and she wanted to use my story in a documentary she was making about family secrets.

Once I figured out, thanks to LinkedIn, that she was a legitimate professional, my inner “ham” took over and I agreed to participate.

I worked with Ann for more than a month.  I persuaded my half-sister and other family members to participate.  We had two long Skype interviews to make sure I was a reasonable candidate for TV.  Finally, we set Tuesday for the taping to take place in New York at my 95-year-old sister’s apartment.  Ann advised me not to wear all black, all white, prints or stripes. 

 On Monday, eight days before the taping, Ann sent me a release to sign, scan and email back to her.  Well, it was a busy day at work, and I didn’t get to it. 

That evening, my half-nephew called.  He and his wife were going to participate in the documentary, and a film crew was flying to Minnesota the next day.  He asked me if I had signed the release, and I said I hadn’t got around to it yet.  He advised me to read it.

The release included phrases like:

            I expressly waive any and all moral rights I may have in connection with my appearance…

It also said that they had the right to reveal information about me that was

         …defamatory, disparaging, and/or embarrassing… 

Needless to say, there were no rights for me.

I immediately sent Ann an email saying that I couldn’t sign the release.  The producer called and said the release was standard and that I shouldn’t worry.  She said that the lawyers would not change a word.

And so, thanks to the lawyers, it will not happen.

I felt very sad for the next 24 hours.  And then I felt better.  My sister and I have made plans to get together this summer to make up for the television-taping-that-didn’t-happen. 

Our son Jeremy was in a wedding last weekend.  He knew the groom from General Mills, his first employer after business school.  He knew the bride from college.  He claimed to know more people at the wedding than anyone else, and he was probably right.  Even better, Grady, our five-year old grandson was the ring bearer.  The videos and photos bear testimony to what must have been one of the best weekends ever.

I, too, had a great weekend.  The weather was perfect.  I went shopping for clothes, an activity I have grown to hate.  But I ended up with a wonderful saleswoman and seven items of clothing to shore up my pathetic summer wardrobe. I also bought a highly recommended new gluten-free flour mix called Cup4Cup that is only available at the up-scale kitchen store, Williams-Sonoma.

Anyone who has had to give up gluten knows that there is no substitute for the elasticity that it adds to baked goods.  Further, wheat flour substitutes have an after-taste I dislike.  So I have learned to live without some of my favorite foods.

Peter got up before me on Sunday and made a batch of scones with the new flour. Peter’s scones were flaky.  They were not grainy.  They tasted a lot like my memory of scones. Those scones made my whole day.  In fact they made my weekend.

Jeremy and I both had great weekends.   His weekend was “great”  by any standard.  Mine, on the other hand, was great for someone who is 70-something.

Our son Jeremy was in a wedding last weekend.  He knew the groom from General Mills, his first employer after business school.  He knew the bride from college.  He claimed to know more people at the wedding than anyone else, and he was probably right.  Even better, Grady, our five-year old grandson was the ring bearer.  The videos and photos bear testimony to what must have been one of the best weekends ever.

I, too, had a great weekend.  The weather was perfect.  I went shopping for clothes, an activity I have grown to hate.  But I ended up with a wonderful saleswoman and seven items of clothing to shore up my pathetic summer wardrobe. I also bought a highly recommended new gluten-free flour mix called Cup4Cup that is only available at the up-scale kitchen store, Williams-Sonoma.

Anyone who has had to give up gluten knows that there is no substitute for the elasticity that it adds to baked goods.  Further, flour substitutes have an after-taste I dislike.  So I have learned to live without some of my favorite foods.

Peter got up before me on Sunday and made a batch of scones with the new flour. Peter’s scones were flaky.  They were not grainy.  They tasted a lot like my memory of scones. Those scones made my whole day.  In fact they made my weekend.

Jeremy and I both had great weekends.   His  weekend was “great”  by any standard.  Mine, on the other hand, was great for someone who is 70-something.

When Peter and I bought our empty-nester house in Cambridge, we hired a graduate student in landscape architecture to help us plan our backyard.

He recommended a blue spruce to anchor a corner of our small lot.  The tree he brought from the nursery was about three feet tall and a foot-and-a-half across.  I remember asking him why he didn’t plant it closer to the fence.  He explained that it needed room to grow.

Last weekend, Peter and I were having a glass of wine on our patio. We were celebrating seventeen years in our “new” house.  “Where did the time go?” we asked.

I pointed out how much our spruce tree had grown.  I walked across the yard to stand next to it. The tree that had come up to my waist when it was planted is now a good thirty feet high and twelve feet across. 

What else has changed while we weren’t looking?

When the main course is change, uncertainty and stress are the side dishes. We’ve just had a restructuring of sorts at work. There has been a lot of talk around the water cooler.  People want to know what this change means for them.  A new boss?  New responsibilities?  Longer hours?  Different routine? 

Not so for this member of the 70-something generation, who has seen it all before.

One of my younger colleagues (actually, they are all younger) told me in a moment of extreme frustration, that if she were in my shoes, she would take a gold watch and quit. 

I explained that it doesn’t bother me so much.  Been there, done that, still here, the good so outweighing the bad over the years. 

Something you just wouldn’t know if you weren’t 70-something.

Normally, a glass of wine with dinner is a treat that I save for weekends.  I often work (or write this blog) on week nights, and wine can make me less productive.  

Also normally, I am a compulsive consumer of health information. 

Recently, my health information began to conflict with my wine policy.  Experts seem to agree that, for women, a glass of wine a day has serious health benefits, including, perhaps, denser bones, less arthritic inflammation, and less likelihood of heart disease.

So last Sunday, I began a daily-glass-of-wind-with-dinner routine.  Not a big glass, mind you, but maybe two inches worth.  The good news is that I have not noticed that I am less productive.

On Thursday morning, I mentioned to Peter that I had slept extremely well this week and wondered if that was due to my new wine regime.

Thursday night, I did not sleep well.  I should keep my thoughts to myself.

Questions about the value of a college education have been all over the news lately. Is a college degree the only ticket to a successful career? Will anyone without sizable means be able to afford college?  Will the home bedroom replace the college dorm room in cyberspace universities?

This flurry of news prompted Peter and me to contemplate what the college experience will be like for our grandchildren a decade from now.  I asked him what he would change if he had a chance to do college all over again. He said that he would study science rather than philosophy.

He asked me what I would do differently.  I was surprised by my response. “I wouldn’t change my political science major, I replied, “but I would be a different student now.  I would go to college knowing that I have a love for learning.”

Too bad we don’t get a second chance.

No matter what your political persuasion, you have to admit that Bill Clinton is impressive.  So when I had a chance to hear him speak to a group of 300 people recently, I grabbed it. 

Admittedly, when he kept his audience waiting for forty-five minutes, there were grumblings about his disrespect for our time.  (OK, it was me grumbling.)

But when he  arrived, he said a few things that resonated with me. 

1.  Do something to change things, even if it is a small thing.

2.  Get satisfaction from knowing that you are on the right side of the struggle.

3.  Even though you don’t like being around people who don’t think like you, do it. Someone you don’t agree with now will help you some day.  Look for people who disagree with you who are open to discussion.

4.  Admit that you don’t know something.  When Clinton turned 65 last year, he decided that every day he would say he didn’t know something or that he was wrong. 

5.  It is important to be around young people.  He said that of the 400 employees in his foundation,  only a handful are near his age—the rest are in their twenties and thirties and they energize him.

He was worth waiting for.

We spent last weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina at the wedding of our niece Debbie.  We haven’t been great about keeping in touch with her, so we were surprised to receive an invitation. 

It was one of those weddings that involved a lot of ex’s.  Debbie has been married before. Her ex-brother-in-law was there, and he was going to baby sit for her children while she and her new husband had a short honeymoon.   Debbie’s parents (her father is my brother) are divorced and remarried.  Her mother, my ex-sister-in-law, and I were high school classmates, but never great friends.  There were some awkward moments, especially since Debbie’s mother doesn’t talk to her ex-husband, my brother.

So it was complicated, and Peter and I were expecting some challenges.  Despite all of our concerns, things worked out well.  The new bride and groom were on Cloud 9 and that raised everyone’s spirits.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen happier newlyweds.

My brother and his wife appreciated our being there to support him, and we were glad that we could.  These are the times when…

Family matters.