Like all of us of a certain age, I do my best to make every moment count.  The United States Post Office (funded by your taxes) is a major obstacle in my effort to do that.

Allow me to vent. 

When a child, even if he is long-grown-up, needs an item from his mother mailed to him for his Halloween costume, and Halloween is less than a week away, immediate action is necessary.  So, when I arrived at my local USPO the other day at 1:50 pm directly after a class and not having eaten lunch, I decided that a line with six people in front of me was reasonable.

Sixty minutes later, I was invited to approach the one clerk on duty.  And it would have been longer except that some people in front of me were not on as important a mission as I was, and they had given up.

The one clerk had been helping a couple do their passport applications.  They were ill-prepared.  When they finally finished, she went on her “overdue” lunch break.  When I suggested to her replacement that perhaps passports should be a separate operation, he told me that the USPO does passports.  Period.

Mailing my package took two minutes.

End of venting. 

I have a love/hate relationship with my hearing aids.  Mostly hate. 

Let me say at the outset that I do hear better with them.  But we got off to a rocky start.  One of my ear canals is mis-shaped (who knew?) and that required all kinds of adjustments – so I had to plan extra preparation time if I had an appointment because it took me so long to get the hearing aid in my ear correctly.  And sometimes I just gave up.

However, after three-plus years, I’ve finally got it down to a science.  Even though I can pretend I am wearing those white ear buds that adorn most ears out in the world, I still would prefer not to wear them.

And I’m not alone.  The father of one of my children’s friends absolutely refuses to wear his hearing aids, and his son has accepted the reality that he must shout to be understood.

That father might want to reconsider, according to a recent article in The Boston Globe that says that those who need hearing aids and don’t use them increase their risk of dementia.  See:  https://tinyurl.com/26vwne8a

The somewhat prohibitive costs are coming down with the availability of over-the-counter hearing aids.

Can you hear me?

I expected 1997, the last year of my fifties, to be a monumental year in my life.  So I decided to keep a journal and I wrote in it almost every day. For years, that journal has been tucked away on a high closet shelve along with pictures of our ancestors.

Reading it this week was a revelation.  What a year!  Jeremy left to spend a year in Chile advising indigenous Chileans about how best to sell their empanadas; Seth left to start a new job in NYC.  Having had both nearby for two years, it was a huge loss for us.

But for me, even more than my transitioning to a challenging new position at my job that year, 1997 was the year of the wrinkle.  One day I wrote about looking in the mirror and finding that parentheses had appeared between my eyebrows.  Another time I wrote that the right side of my chin had “caved in”.  (Nothing compared to my current face)

Astonishingly, I had forgotten about serious women in our sons’ lives that year.  Long forgotten by me… I am wondering if the kids think about their loves of so many years ago.

Perhaps even more astonishing, I wrote a lot about losing sleep over challenges that I don’t remember.  I even wrote about Peter’s being mad at me for something.  In my memory, Peter was never mad at me.

So much forgotten.  So much fun to revisit. 

If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t change much.  I’d marry the same man, have the same children, etc.  However, I do have one regret: I have never lived in a foreign country.  

In just a week in Brazil, I got comfortable with hot water availability only in the shower.  In Seth’s little house, dishes actually did get clean with cold water and soap.  It took real concentration, but only once did I break the rule that says no toilet paper in the toilet itself.  In restaurants, servers bring a machine to the table that takes your credit card, so it is never out of your sight.  And there is no tipping.

I listen to Seth speak Portuguese like a native (Brazilians call his accent charming) while I can barely manage “thank you” and “excuse me”.  Seth’s friends welcome me (despite my being decades older) and mostly speak English when I am around. 

It is true that I’d rather my first-born didn’t spend half of each year 4,000 miles away, but I get why he does. 

Aren’t happy children what really matters?

If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t change much.  I’d marry the same man, have the same children, etc.  However, I do have one regret: I have never lived in a foreign country.  

In just a week in Brazil, I got comfortable with hot water availability only in the shower.  In Seth’s little house, dishes actually did get clean with cold water and soap.  It took real concentration, but only once did I break the rule that says no toilet paper in the toilet itself.  In restaurants, servers bring a machine to the table that takes your credit card, so it is never out of your sight.  And there is no tipping.

I listen to Seth speak Portuguese like a native (Brazilians call his accent charming) while I can barely manage “thank you” and “excuse me”.  Seth’s friends welcome me (despite my being decades older) and mostly speak English when I am around. 

It is true that I’d rather my first-born didn’t spend half of each year 4,000 miles away, but I get why he does. 

Aren’t happy children what really matters?

Americans don’t seem to visit Brazil much, or if they do, they head to Rio.  But, if like me, you have a son who lives in São Paulo six months of the year, Brazil becomes a recurring destination. 

This past week, in addition to visiting São Paulo’s, 35th Biennale, an enormous and powerful art exhibition, Seth and I spent four nights in the state of Minas Gerais, known for its colonial towns dating back to the 18^th century gold rush. With its brightly painted houses, on steep cobble-stone streets and its gold-bedecked churches, the area would be a must-see if they had the right tourist infrastructure.

To me, the highlight of our visit to Minas Gerais was a 345-acre park called Inochin. Located 60 kilometers from Bela Horizonte, (a one-hour flight from São Paulo), it is a botanical garden which includes a number of strategically-placed contemporary art museums plus many outdoor sculptures including a set of four multi-colored Volkswagon Beetles! 

A day and a half at Inochin was not enough to see everything.  I love art and I love nature.  But to have them both in the same setting caused me to run out of superlatives.  You have to see it to believe it. 

São Paulo is 4000 miles from Massachusetts so it is a serious travel commitment.  When I visited in October, 2022, I promised Seth’s friends that I would return in a year and I did.

It’s on my calendar for 2024.    

In my last post, I wrote about Outlive, a book that recommends a new approach to medicine that focuses on finding ways to stop killer diseases that may strike individuals before said diseases become unstoppable.

There is another part to this story as pointed out by Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, former health commissioner of New York City, in a recent NYTimes op-ed article.  Dr. Chokski reminds us that we should focus on not just how long we can live, but also on our “health span,” which means how healthy those years will be.  Rather than setting a goal to live to age 100, we should aim to engage fully in our lives while we can.  Other countries, such as Japan, Britain and Singapore are taking steps toward a better “health span”.  Why aren’t we?

My own experience is that primary care medicine has taken a huge hit.  Our general practitioners are undervalued and underpaid. Not surprisingly, there aren’t enough of them.  Changing that would be a step in the right direction.

I wish I knew what could make it happen.

When I picked up my reserved copy of Outlive, a non-fiction best seller, at my local library, I commented to the librarian that I don’t see how I can read a 400+ page book in the two weeks allotted for best sellers.  Much to my amazement, I finished it in a little over a week.

Written by Peter Attia, MD, the book describes a whole new approach to medicine.  To put it in simple terms, he believes we should be attacking our four biggest killers (heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction) before we get them.  He calls his system Medicine 3.0.

It’s a book about where Attia thinks medicine should go.  But it is also a book about his struggles with his own demons.

I couldn’t put it down.

It’s way too soon (and too expensive) to repaint my apartment.  Nonetheless, I didn’t like the scuffs on the walls from things like refrigerator deliveries and removals and over-energetic vacuum-cleaner-activity.  But the real incentive to act was the two-three-inch unpainted kitchen wall area exposed because my new refrigerator doesn’t stick out as far as its predecessor.  (I may have lost you by now, and I totally understand.)

My left-over paint was dried up, so I bought the smallest amount my hardware store would sell me, and I painted the kitchen wall and touched up the scuffed areas elsewhere with an old make-up brush.  It was so easy and soooo satisfying.

Sometimes the joy is in the little things.

It is the policy of The 80-Something Blog not to write about politics.  I leave that to Heather Cox Richardson or whomever you read for political wisdom.

However, like so many of us, I am more than worried about the state of the world today.  About the amount of hatred.  About our warming planet.  About the lack of respect for institutions of all sorts.  And the lack of respect for those who disagree with us.

I wish I had an answer.  I wish the inhabitants of the world would just obey the Golden Rule.

I feel we are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s a bad feeling.