On Being 70

 In a few days I will begin my journey into the 70s. Not the 1970s, the ages between 70 and 80.

It sounds so old!

I don’t look in magnifying mirrors anymore. Not that I ever did. I had no use for them. But they truly don’t reflect who I am. I’m not just a set of wrinkles, under-eye bags, dark circles, and a scar here and there. Those things are the result of weight gained and lost, sleepless nights and being clumsy.

And I am clumsy, both in movement and the things I say.

When my husband and I were first dating, I mentioned that I tend to fall up the stairs. He laughed and said no one does that. A few weeks later I did just that, and he never again doubted when I said something that didn’t appear to make sense on the surface. I can also trip over nothing.

I’m clumsy in conversation, too. While not everything that enters my brain falls out of my mouth, occasionally that happens, and I think, “Did I say that out loud?”

While I generally engage brain before opening mouth, sometimes something I want to say sounds fine in my head, but when it comes back and hits my ears, I realize I didn’t phrase it quite right. Or it sounds insulting or rude when that wasn’t the intention at all.

Sometimes someone will take offense at something I’ve said, and even if they tell me they’re offended, they never bother to tell me what offended them. Usually, that’s something written, and when I look it over, I can’t find a thing that would be offensive. But perhaps that’s because I know what I meant, and I get the intention even if it’s not on the page.

I’m especially bad at written word multi-tasking.

I spend entirely too much time checking in on Facebook. Occasionally, either something to do with my computer or with Facebook causes things to stall. If I’m in the middle of something, I know I’ll never be able to find it if I simply close the window and start over. So, I leave the window open and open another window with Facebook on that as well. 

Sometimes I completely forget about the first window, but I have been known to go back and forth between two. On a few occasions, I wrote something on the wrong thread.  That’s embarrassing. Once, I even wrote something on one thread, thought I pushed the send button (I may have, but it was an evening of glitches, so it apparently didn’t go through) and went to the other window. I typed a reply to what was going on there, hit send and closed that window. Unfortunately, the second reply didn’t go where it was intended, but was merely added onto the first reply. When I hit send, both answers were on the same comment, and went through as one. That happened to be the window that closed. It turned out that the snarky comment meant for the second thread, went onto the first thread, but because the window was closed, when I returned to Facebook, I couldn’t find it anywhere. A whole bunch of people reading the thread between me and someone they don’t even know, got offended. Some of them never ever comment on what I write.

They did that night, and some haven’t spoken to me since. People tend to only see the offense and never the apology or explanation afterward.

That’s one of those things I think, if I could go back and undo it…

Needless to say, I no longer try to multitask on Facebook. I also don’t worry about people who unfriend me – especially the ones who have to make a big announcement to make sure I know.

Regrets, I have more than a few.

I think my clumsiness in what I say is the reason I have had many friends disappear throughout my life. I’ve watched a few people get twitchy when I say things like, “I’ll be friends with most people as long as they let me. Then they leave.”

Friends and acquaintances fall into two camps. One group thinks I’m very quiet. The other wonders if I ever shut up.

The ones who think I’m quiet are either those who don’t know me, or people who talk over me.  Why do I think they do that? No idea in the world. Rudeness, maybe? Or perhaps I’m just invisible.

The second group are usually people I know well. We have commonalities. If the conversation is something I’m passionate about, like books or being left-handed, I can go on and on. It can be quite noisy in my head, what with the ideas I have cooking for novels, blogs or what I’m planning for a vacation.

In a group, I often find myself trying to fight my way into a conversation. I’m there. I have an opinion or something to say about the conversation, and I’m supposed to be part of it, but it’s often like trying to learn how to jump in when other people are turning a jump rope.

I’ve only recently realized I do this – slow learner, I guess. Now, when I recognize it happening, I just stop. They just don’t want to hear what I have to say, so why say it? Unfortunately, when I withdraw from participation, I have difficulty continuing to follow the conversation, and I start thinking about something else, like what I want to add to whatever story I’m currently writing. If there’s a paper napkin around and I have a pen, often I’ll jot it down so I don’t forget. This is when people usually tell me I look bored. I’m not. I’m just not where they are.

I’ve tried in the past to make up my mind beforehand to just remain quietly on the sidelines unless someone directly asks me a question. Often, when I’ve decided to do this, it somehow opens the floodgates and I end up talking. A lot.

I admire people who can be laid back and calm, taking in things and then being able to quietly deliver non-judgemental, pithy observations. I think of them as hippies. Some people are just so sedate. I used to think you eventually got to that point when you got older. I’m still waiting.

I’m more like the bull in a china shop when it comes to self-expression. It’s not that I’m forcing my way in to conversation where I don’t belong; I simply tend to verbally knock things over while I’m waiting my turn.

When I do express myself, the hippies often “maturesplain” things to me as if I couldn’t possibly see the other side of the subject. I see it. I also know that, just like them, I am entitled to my own opinion. Their explanation usually begins with the words, “You don’t understand…”

I hate that. Generally, all it means is, “I don’t agree with you, so let me tell you what to think.”

No point in arguing. They don’t want to know. So I go back to my mental conversations with my characters.

Still, I keep trying to improve myself. I would like to be that calm person – without being condescending to people they don’t agree with.  It’s just so hard to pay attention when you’re not part of the conversation. And I’m usually not calm.

It’s difficult to sit still. I’m the one in the crowd chewing my pen top or bouncing my foot. I’m not impatient. I usually don’t even realize I’m doing those things. Often those things are all that stand between me and falling asleep.

My 10 year (assuming I live that long) goal is to learn how to be the calm person, the one taking it all in – which I’m usually doing – but not commenting – which I’m usually not doing.

Well, that and losing the 40 pounds I gained when I changed careers.

Thanks for the Memories?

 

 

Memory is a funny thing.

I have very clear – if few—memories from when I was three and four, albeit long ago in a village not-so-terribly-far-away, but I don’t remember the 1990s.

I remember clearly all of the intervening decades, but the 1990s – indeed the first decade of the 2000s as well – escape me.

Don’t interrupt – at this point in every story, someone interrupts with a fact that I know. Just wait.

Yes, I remember that near the end of the 1990s Princess Diana died. That’s my “Do you remember where you were when” moment. The people who eventually bought our townhouse came to see the house during the televised funeral.

Overshadowing the keen desire to move out of a townhouse and move into Oz – I mean Hopewell -- was the week or so of news video of the crash, theories of what – or who – caused the crash and my personal surprise of, wow, she was dating? She dated that guy? I never heard of him, but no matter how rich, I think she could’ve done better. Shows how little I paid attention to rag journalism.

But that death is simply a reminder that I do remember the ‘90s.

I met my husband at the beginning of the ‘90s. We married mid-‘90s, and Diana died at the end. But what I actually mean is I don’t remember the music.

Music has always been important to me. My earliest memories are set to a background of my mother singing Doris Day songs while she was doing housework or “Baby of Mine” when I was sad. She had a beautiful voice, and her relatives often said they had expected to hear her sing at Carnegie Hall one day – if only the depression and her working class upbringing hadn’t made that impossible. (Not to brag, but I’m the one who ended up singing at Carnegie Hall.)

I remember once rounding up my relatives, who were at our house for some occasion, and singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, and basking in their applause when I finished. Not bad for a shy four-year-old.

The bottom edge of the ‘50s and pre-Beatles ‘60s were musically all about Ricky Nelson for me, as well as “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Then there was the British Invasion in my formative eight-year-old brain. Figuring out math problems and learning to spell were set to the music of my youth.

I relied on the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits to keep the psychedelic late ‘60s music away. When I learned that the Monkees introduced the world to Jimi Hendrix, I was furious. How dare they? Of course, Jimi, Janis Joplin and the Doors, etc., were the worst thing that could happen to music as far as I was – and am – concerned, although, oddly, I liked Jefferson Airplane.

I’ve always considered the ‘70s as the worst decade of music, starting as it did with the drug-induced psychedelia, and ending with disco. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t all bad.

I liked folksier aspects of ‘70s rock: Three Dog Night; Peter, Paul and Mary – and no matter what anyone says, “Puff the Magic Dragon” was a song about a dragon, not drugs – Crosby, Stills and Nash; Carly Simon; Joni Mitchell; The Moody Blues and Dan Fogelberg made the decade worth living in for me.

I also discovered what was being called alternative rock: Emmerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, David Bowie and Renaissance, among others, and love it.

Of disco, the less said, the better. I did like the Bee Gees, but I liked them before Barry Gibb discovered his falsetto.

For me, the ‘80s came as a relief. Bell bottoms, body suits and leisure suits went away – as did the acid rock performers – well, many of them died of drug overdoses.

Music exploded into the kinds of songs I craved: OMD, Duran Duran, The Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, The Fixx, Wham, and so many others, especially from the UK, that it was basically a second British invasion.

People would say my music should be ‘70s, since those were my high school and college years. While I liked the folk and alternative of that period, I liked the ‘80s music better.

Although I graduated from college in the ‘70s, the career I’d trained for failed to materialize under the guise of Catch 22 – you can’t get a job without experience, which you can’t get without a job. So I experienced a rather elongated adolescence,working in my 20s in jobs my peers had done in high school.

As I worked on a variety of short-term jobs for which I was desperately overqualified, my peer group became increasingly younger. My interests simply didn’t correspond with my married-with-children friends from high school, and my wages weren’t even enough to allow me to buy a decent car.

By the late ‘80s, I’d held most of the jobs I said I never wanted to do – except become a parent – and I returned to college to train for a career that I was not that keen on, but that I could actually get upon graduation, and make a decent salary into the bargain.

Having just emerged from a 2-year course of study that caused me to lose track of most of the music from the final two years of the ‘80s, the ‘90s appeared.

Yes, stuff happened in the ‘90s. I returned to fencing, joined a writing group for the brief few months that it lasted, met my future husband, and got my first computer. I know there was music, but I was still listening to the ‘80s stuff I’d so loved.

There was also a lot of personal chaos for me in the ‘90s. I discovered there was no dearth of backstabbers and gas lighters in my job, making me feel constantly on the defensive.

On top of that, I had to dodge blind dates. People tried to convince me some guy I wouldn’t have shared the answers to a quiz with was “perfect” for me. Translation: you’re single; he’s single. One girl told me she personally thought the guy she introduced me to was a jerk. (I guess I learned what she thought of me!)

Fortunately, I met my future husband when I wasn’t looking (well, I was looking. It was across three feet of steel, and I managed to get the fencing touch while he was posing in his lunge.) Until a few weeks before he proposed, I hadn’t entertained the idea that he ever would.

 Of course, people asked all the preposterous questions based on my age at the time. What marriage was this for me? (First, last and only. If it didn’t work, it would’ve been the universe’s way of saying I shouldn’t be married.) Why did you wait so long? Geez, I married the first guy who asked!

But through all of that, while there was music, I’m not sure what it was. There wasn’t a British Invasion. There was no singer I combed gossip magazines for pictures of. There was nothing to hang the music on. Instead, I began following certain actors' careers.

There was one song: “All for One” by Sting, Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams. It became our song. Why? It was the theme song for a swashbuckler film. My husband I are fencers, and we both like the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods of history.

So, wracking my brains, I’ve come up with artists I think were from the ‘90s: The Manic Street Preachers, Tokio Hotel, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Five for Fighting and The Goo Goo Dolls.

I could be wrong. They might be from the early 2000s. I’m not sure. I’m no longer on the cutting edge of pop music. I know I have their CDs, whenever they were.

Maybe it’s just that current music doesn’t interest me. Most things seem to be (C)rap, hip-hop or Cher sounding like she’s singing under water (“Do You Believe”). The couple of Taylor Swift songs I’ve heard are pretty good.

So, I guess I’ll just go back to my ‘80s music and try to figure out what, exactly, Simon le Bon is singing in “Union of the Snake” and leave the next era of music to someone else.

Parents

 

It’s often said that teenagers think their parents know nothing, and suddenly, when those teens reach their 20s, their parents become intelligent again.

That was not my experience.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who got into trouble. Most of my school friends didn’t live near me, so I didn’t get to hang out with them. Those who did live near me had jobs. I couldn’t get a job, even after I got my driver’s license because people didn’t believe I was old enough. In those days there was no photo on the driver’s license. When I was 16, most people thought I was about 13, if that.

The people I spent the most time with were the other people who were in the church guitar group with me. We had an adult who ran the group. We met at the church on Tuesday evenings to rehearse. Occasionally, we went somewhere afterwards, or had a Saturday afternoon outing. In those cases, the leader told the parents and gave them a time to expect us home. On school nights, other than Tuesdays, I was home, doing homework or watching TV.

I wasn’t terribly burdened by peer pressure. I didn’t do things simply because someone else did it. Smoking was one of those things.

My father smoked. There were ashtrays in nearly every room of the house. The stench of smoke was usually somewhere, except in the daytime, when my father was at work.

Whenever we went to Philadelphia for the day by train, we would meet up with my dad, who worked in the city, and after dinner, take the train home. Traveling with him meant spending the entire ride in the smoking car, with its persistence of concentrated smoke that not only clung to clothes, but also burned the eyes and made breathing difficult.

I’d had summers filled with getting cigarette ash blown into my eyes and onto my clothes when my father flicked cigarette ashes out the window during drives in a car without air conditioning.

In addition, every morning I awoke to the sound of my father coughing long enough and hard enough to make me expect to hear a thud on the floor from his fall, bereft of breath. That it never came was a daily wonder to me.

My eldest brother was exposed to the same thing for longer than I had been. That he had started smoking himself at 14 or 15 was beyond belief.

His friends smoked. They all thought it was cool or sophisticated or simply grown-up. While my friends and I pretended to smoke when we were given those disgusting chalky mint flavored candy cigarettes at the corner store, I never would have considered ever taking up smoking. And I made that decision when was only seven or eight.

While this was the early ’60s, before the Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarette packets, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that weeds wrapped in paper, lit on fire and the smoke inhaled into your lungs wasn’t going to be good for you. That was an eight-year-old’s conclusion. What was wrong with the adults?

My parents had forbidden my brother to smoke. He was apparently not able to figure out that he would eventually have the same cough as my father. Or that my mother, who didn’t smoke, could smell the smoke on his clothes and his breath. It apparently never occurred to him that if he was going to sneak smoking, he should at least use mint gum or mouthwash to hide the fact. He thought he was getting away with something, even though on at least one occasion he was careless enough to leave a lit cigarette on the windowsill in the bathroom. I found it.

My mother tried bribing him, promising that if he didn’t smoke and waited until he was 16, she would buy him a pipe.

I never understood what was so magical about waiting until age 16, or how a pipe was any better than a cigarette. A more treatable cancer, perhaps?

My father eventually overruled my mother, perhaps recognizing that my brother was simply sneaking cigarettes and lying about it. Why else would he suddenly be interested in walking the dog every night?

When my brother was a few months shy of 16, my father told him he could smoke. It took him until his mid-60s to finally succeed in quitting.

When my peers tried to pressure me into smoking, I said, “No thanks,” and made no secret of how stupid I thought anyone who smoked was.

At the cusp of my teen years, I had two friends I chose to let go. Each, at different times demonstrated that they thought shoplifting was cool. I was not about to be a party to that. Even though I wasn’t participating in the theft, I didn’t want to be caught with either of them and be tarred with the same brush. In each case, the girl wouldn’t listen to me, so I walked away, and that was the last time I had anything to do with them.

I wasn’t some goody-two-shoes. My non-smoking brother and a friend had decided several years earlier to try stealing something out of the local grocery store, just to see if they could get away with it. They, of course, were caught.

In those days, the store manager called your parents rather than the police. I well remembered what my father had done to my brother once they got home, and assumed it would go worse for me if I ever tried it, having not learned from my brother’s mistakes. Besides, both girls’ behavior was so far from my moral compass that I didn’t think they were worth remaining friends with.

Where my parents and I were at odds during my teen years was my not being allowed to do things they let my brothers do, for no better reason than that my father had failed to give me a Y chromosome. The double standard rankled.

What I didn’t know when I was a teen was that women in the U.S. at the time didn't have a lot of rights. They weren’t even allowed to own their own credit cards. Married women had to have their husbands co-sign for credit cards, and banks could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman up until 1974, the year after I graduated from high school.

While I was still in college, I was sent an application for my first credit card, which was, I believe, from Macy’s. I applied simply because I could. Once I received that, I had my entre into the world of the credit cards I actually wanted.

I was always good with finances. I didn’t spend simply because I had plastic. I only bought what I needed and could pay for.

My parents tried to instill fiscal responsibility in the three of us kids. They succeeded with two of us. The other, not so much.

My parents didn’t buy us just anything we wanted. If one of my friends got something I dreamed of having, I might ask for one. We generally only got gifts for birthdays and Christmas. It was rare, indeed, if I got some inexpensive toy if there was money left after the grocery shopping was done. First of all, such toys were often cheaply made, and wouldn’t last. Secondly, we had no reason to expect a gift if it wasn’t a birthday or Christmas. There were poor children whose parents could only afford such toys, and they should really be left for them.

If I pointed out that one of my friends had something I wanted, my mother would flippantly suggest I go live with that child’s family. My other option was to save up for what I wanted.

In our family, once we started school, we were given an allowance. At that age (6) I received 25 cents a week. My brothers were older, so they received more.

Allowance was originally meant to be a payment for doing specific chores. My mother never ended up liking the way I did any assigned chore. I made too much of a mess washing dishes, didn’t dry the silverware sufficiently, and did a dreadful job making the bed. She didn’t trust me to dust her breakable knick-knacks, and I always ended up setting the table backwards (cutlery on the wrong sides)because I was left-handed.

My incompetence in chores I wasn’t interested in doing wore her down. Eventually, none of us did chores, but we still received our allowance. My parents wanted to teach us how to handle money.

I remember the excitement every four weeks when I could exchange my four quarters for a dollar bill.

We each had a Band-Aid tin to keep allowance in, in the top drawer of the buffet in the dining room. Each was slightly different, so everyone knew their own. My parents had zero tolerance for thieves, so no one had to worry about anyone touching an allowance box that wasn’t theirs. 

For those who think I'm giving too much away, my parents are both dead, the house sold, the furniture elsewhere. I don't even have a buffet in my dining room, so you won't find money there if you come to rob me.

We each had piggy banks in our rooms, and I don’t know why our allowance wasn’t kept in those. Mine was a silver plated pig given to me for my Christening. I kept money that other people gave me in that, but never my allowance.

If we wanted something our parents weren’t going to buy us, we could save up for it.

I’ll never forget my first allowance purchase. I was six. There was a doll in Woolworth’s that I wanted. I asked my mother if I could buy it with my own money, and she said yes. It was $1.97. By my reckoning, I needed $2, and I’d get 3 cents change.

I had to save for two months.

Each time I was in Woolworth’s, I’d check to see if the doll was still there. Fortunately, it wasn’t a popular doll, a no-name in the age of Barbie.

Finally, I received my eighth quarter, and begged my dad to take me to get the doll. (My mother didn’t drive at the time). It was Friday night. I’m sure he was tired from working all day, but he drove me to Woolworth’s.

When I got there and claimed the doll, I took it to the cashier. I was excited. I had the self-control to save for something I wanted, and this was my first big purchase.

I put my money on the counter while the cashier rang up the sale. I was all set for my three cents – maybe some penny candy? – when my world fell apart.

“Two dollars and six cents,” the cashier said.

What? The sticker said $1.97! Why was she charging me more? Was it because I was a kid? My dad was right there.

I turned to him, tears starting in my eyes,

“I don’t have enough money. She charged me extra,” I said.

He chuckled. No one had mentioned sales tax.

He could have made me leave without the doll, but he’d made the trip. I’m sure he didn’t want to make it again the following week for six cents. After all, no one had explained sales tax to me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some spare change. He handed the extra six cents to the cashier and I went home happy, even if feeling as if an injustice had been done.

“They charged me extra,” I said once we were in the car.

On the way home he explained about taxes. I still didn’t think it was fair, but I had my doll.

My next project was saving up $10 to open a savings account. I had to save for nearly a year to do that, but I was determined, and when I opened my first bank account, every cent was mine.

When I wanted to do a semester abroad in college, my parents couldn’t afford to send me. They told me I’d have to pay for it myself if I wanted to go, so I got a job in the dining hall, and squirrelled away the money I made for two years.

My mother surprised me by giving me the money she normally would have paid the university for my dorm fees, since I wouldn’t be in the dorms that term. She still had to pay the tuition because of the way the program was set up. But the dorm money helped tremendously, and they’d taught me to work and save for what was important to me.

Even though most of the students I went abroad with had parents who could afford to send them and give them a summer in Paris as well, I knew mine couldn’t. I never thought it was unfair that I had to save my own money. My brothers had never been given trips to Europe, and I had no reason to expect it. All I ever asked for was permission.

I had friends whose parents bought them brand new cars when they graduated from high school. My own parents never owned a brand new car themselves, and wouldn’t have been able to give me a used one – nor did I need a car in college. When I graduated, my gift was a set of suitcases so I could get my clothes back and forth to college. Those friends had gone to public school, so perhaps what they saved on Catholic high school tuition allowed them to be able to afford cars.

Still, those friends didn’t get to experience the accomplishment of doing things on their own.

My mother and I had the usual mother/daughter skirmishes of teen life, but I also tried to improve her life.

As a young teen, I tried to convince my mother to wear miniskirts and more makeup so she’d be trendy. I was unaware until years later how ridiculous she would have looked had she taken my advice. But I was trying to modernize her and make her look pretty so people wouldn’t think she was old. She explained why she wouldn’t do that, but I thought she was just being stubborn.

I suppose I’m lucky that I was able to mainly get on with my parents and not lose respect for them. I didn’t say the things about my parents that I heard some of my peers say.

Of course, having always expected my parents to be the wiser heads, at least in most things, it was a shock when, at the end of her life, my mother was unable to make choices that, a few years earlier, would have been obvious to her. The ravages of some diseases are far more disrespectful to parents than some teens can be.