Month: January 2015

“Well, hel-­‐lo-­‐o-­‐o,” crooned the voice on the line from the past.

Roger sounded like he had when we used to talk on the phone in the 1960s. His voice, and I suppose mine for him, transported us to his green and white ’56 Chevy that stopped at Oscar’s for a burger and fries
when we had the money. We would insure the needed funds by putting just enough gas in the tank to get us through the weekend.

The radio gave us the Beatles when they were fresh, even revolutionary, with their mop-­‐top hair and suits with odd collars, singing, as teen singers always do, about love, imagined, real or lost. Their music annoyed our parents, raised on Big Bands, Sinatra and Dinah Shore, sustaining a human tradition of irritating one’s elders.

“She Loves You” still puts me instantly in the Chevy, cruising, singing along,
windows open, life so free.

“So how’s Wisconsin,” I asked in reply, confirming that I recognized the voice. And we were launched into catching up seasoned with memories.

Roger described his by-­‐pass, the value of stents, and his knee replacement. I countered with reports about radio-­‐active seeds in my prostate and torn retinas in each eye. We compared the frequency of periodic skin cancers, relics of days when the Chevy got us to La Jolla Shores for body-­‐surfing. No thought about sunscreen then; SPF was a random group of letters, not an advertising feature.

His new knee had roots in the ‘60s, too, a game of touch football on a Sunday when he should have been in church.

“God’s response to my playing hookey,” he laughed.

“Didn’t that cause you to flunk your physical for the Air Force?” I asked.

“No. That was my wrist.” Another game.

But not on a Sunday.

Roger was raised by a single mom, I was the son of a minister who never earned much a year. Our fun had to be free or at least low cost. The beach, listening to music on the radio, cruising, making fries last; they were the vehicles for bonding back then.

One year, I added a girl friend to the mix. Roger took the addition gracefully, and we became a threesome, all in the front seat. Remember seats like that?

Then came his girl friend. We found ways to earn money so that we could add movies to the mix of entertainment, preferably double features, a long-­‐forgotten
value. We accepted contributions from the girls for gas and weren’t above having them pay their own way into the show. We weren’t earning that much.

We married those girls. Still married.

Roger and I  liked the Beatles more than the girls did. Odd. When you hear tapes of their concerts, it’s the screams of girls that form the base over which “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” rises like a jet from a dusty landing strip.

Neither of us got Beatles haircuts—his mom and my dad would never have allowed that—and we had neither the money nor the fashion motivation to get suits with funny collars.

Maybe it was the Beatles’ shaking up of the status quo, the annoyance  of the older folks, albeit in the tamest of ways, that stirred Roger and me. Wannabe rebels without the courage, perhaps?

Roger’s life has surprised him. “Never thought I’d have done most of what has happened,” he said.

I agreed. “The unaimed arrow never misses, said Kimo on a T-­‐ shirt,” I said.

He laughed again. I remember that. We laughed a lot.

We talked for two hours. Like clockwork, the cell phone connection  between upper Wisconsin and Kapolei cut out after 50 minutes—twice. After the second time, we still took 20 minutes to close. Several times, there was one more thing to
recall.

He told me about driving the old neighborhoods on his last visit to San Diego. I told him I still do once in a while. We pondered what has happened to a few of the people who seemed so important to us in those days.

He asked to be remembered to my mom.

It would be fun to talk more often, we agreed.

I won’t have trouble recognizing the voice when that happens.

As Boomers unpack their parents’ houses, a question persists: what to do with the National Geographics?

Many of us have borne the responsibility for taking apart the home of a parent, perhaps more than once. The disposition of a collection of keepsakes and trinkets, photographs and furniture, closets filled with clothes from bygone fashions forms the task. Often, the experience is shared, with siblings, a remaining parent, spouses, or special friends. It is bittersweet, though often more bitter than sweet.

Perhaps on the dis-assembly team, there is a pack rat wanting to take anything remotely nostalgic, useful or not. With luck, there is a family historian who can recognize what should remain in the family because it has done for generations, or the photo that will help keep memory alive for descendents. For the sake of balance, having a person involved who can recognize what has value outside the family and no intoxicating memories attached and devise dispositions that will become cash to the benefit of a surviving spouse or the heirs.

A Dumpster Dave or Darla helps, too, providing a base line judgment of what has further utility and what is beyond its useful life or structural integrity.

Whatever the cast of participants, the task is the same; empty a house that has been a home.

Remember when National Geographic was just a magazine, trademark yellow on the edges and spine, decorated with stunning photography on the cover and inside? No TV Channel or “films by,” blog or Twitterfeed. Just a monthly delivery of knowledge and pictures. One could learn geography, anthropology, entomology, astronomy and so on. Medical frontiers might appear if they could be brilliantly illustrated.

A recent issue featured our Prairie Home Companion writing about the geography of his childhood in the twin cities area of Minnesota. We were there with him, just as much as we had been with the writer and photographer in New Guinea or Uganda. The same issue featured brain research, complete with photos of the routes of our neurological highway system, color-coded like any good map.

My wife and I have a National Geographic connection. Her brother’s cover photograph of a Jewel Scarab Beetle in 2001 announced the article inside about collecting and classifying some of Mother Nature’s most dramatic and beautiful creations. For professional photographers, a Geographic cover is the big leagues. This time, an amateur captured an object that reached out to those who saw it and lured them into the magazine’s net.

Growing up, my family subscribed to newspapers, news magazines, Sports Illustrated, and a couple of health publications. And the National Geographic. None of the papers or weeklies stayed in the house beyond the time it took for them to be read, usually by the next edition. A useful article in one of the health magazines might linger longer. The Geographics were piled in the study, in the storage area, in the garage. Tossing a Geographic was unthinkable, like burning a work of art or shredding a completed dissertation.

Which piece of furniture might begin its time as a family heirloom now? How many photographs of her at age six are needed to sustain memory? Which trinket is really an artifact, conveying the nature and personality of the one whose physical possessions are being parsed? How to decide?

Valuable things are easier, if there is a will involved, designating who gets what. Valuable things are harder, in the absence of any designation, and there are heirs particularly attuned to who gets what worth how much. Sometimes unpacking a house leads to unpacking a family.

My wife and I have moved household goods seventeen times in our 47 years of marriage. Seventeen opportunities to cull the collection, and still there is a large household of furniture, keepsakes and knick-knacks. In an ideal world, we will move to smaller digs as we age, maybe to a retirement community where limited space will force difficult choices, like the choices made by so many others before us.

We don’t have kids, so it is unclear to whom would fall the chore of unpacking our house if we were to perish together in a plane crash. In that ideal world, there wouldn’t be much.

We never subscribed to the National Geographic. At least they won’t have to worry over those.

About Aging

Depend on it! Barring tragedy or fatal illness, you will age into old age. What’s it like to get old?

Years ago, retired journalist Josephine Smith (Jo) wrote a column in the weekly Claremont Courier entitled “About Aging.” Jo would take any subject that struck her fancy and write about it from the perspective of one already past the Age of Retirement and moving toward Really Old.

Though in my 40s then, I found her musings entertaining and instructive. They revealed a point of view, one marked by time on the planet, one new to me. I think her column contributed to my comparatively calm embrace of the inevitable. I write in her honor.

Though our society benefits from the activities of many who count their ages in decades (Hawaii’s ex-Governor, for example, is in his eighth), we tend not to solicit the views of elders. Not a few older folks complain about retirement feeling like it is the onset of irrelevance in the minds of those younger. And the juniors often contribute to that feeling by dismissing as old-fashioned and outdated the views of their elders.

“About Aging” version 2015 seeks to be a voice from an age cohort that still often writes letters with pens and paper. They might or might not work in GoogleDocs or Drop Box. My voice is solitary but, I hope, perhaps, inclusive. I invite feedback by whatever means, including the social media, especially by letter or e-mail.

The voice will steer clear of partisan politics—there are enough voices in that realm already—and be, on occasion, curmudgeonly. The right to curmudgeon-ness is earned by the passage of time. But too much of it is tiresome; expect only small doses.

The voice will be affected by some of the gifts of advancing age: perspective, less concern about impressing others, perhaps even wisdom. Folks who share an age range seem also to share understanding that transcends gender or ethnicity, like knowing the “in” joke. Young folks might like to know that aging does not have to be a solitary activity.

My hope is that people my age (born 1947) and older will read “About Aging” and identify or relate and appreciate. I hope that younger readers will see the joy and possibilities still available for the taking even after one becomes Medicare-eligible.

A chance encounter with a nurse in her 30s underscored the potential value of “About Aging.” We were chatting about my mother, still in possession of a sound mind and contagious laugh at age 94.

“I don’t think I want to live past 85,” said the nurse. “Too many chances to be broken and not be able to get around.”

I was sitting in her exam room in the course of treatment for prostate cancer but I took no offense at her reference to being broken. Instead, I pointed out how much more likely her generation would be to live active lives into their 90s, given advances in medicine, nutrition, and understanding of the physiology of aging, etc.

“You should shoot for 95,” I said. I don’t think she was convinced.

Maybe reading “About Aging” would help her see her post-65 year old future in better terms. Maybe she would not read it at all, thinking it to be only about old people. Trying to have her see the wonders of life possible at every stage is a worthwhile effort.

Some people ease into years that really are golden. Others are dragged kicking and screaming into their 60s, 70s and beyond. That is not unique to the elderly, being dragged kicking and screaming through the ages and stages of life. My contemporaries regretted reaching 30 once upon a time. Few of us would choose to go back now.

Jo Smith lived into her 90s, writing her column until shortly before she died. Her friends turned some of her columns into a book. She was our village “auntie.” I can aspire to be a village “uncle” one day.

In the meantime, as we all age, we can use “About Aging” to talk story about what it’s like to grow old by looking at our world through the eyes of ones who have been around for a while.

Dan White

January 2015