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Not Just a Car

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Racine bus by the train depot where I used to transfer to go to Sunday school. I loved the smell of stale cigars, with a hint of pee.

When is a 1992 Ford Tempo the grandest car on the road? When you are 48, and it’s the first car you’ve ever owned. Mine was black, and I was convinced it passed for a BMW with its plain grill, sleek lines, faux black leather interior, and silver trim. Every Saturday I’d drive it through the gas station car wash, then dry and shine every inch of it. I also didn’t drive it much because I was in graduate school and my bicycle was easier for getting around the U of Minnesota campus.

Growing up in Racine, Wisconsin during the 50’s, I never got a ride anywhere. If I asked my stepfather to take me someplace, he’d say, “No,” followed by, “If you want to go bad enough, you’ll figure it out.”

I did. I took the bus, rode my bike, or walked. Once a week, I’d travel by bus uptown for my music lesson at Gosieski’s Music Store. I had to transfer, and to deal with the boredom of waiting for that second bus, I memorized all the car makes, models, and years, so when I grew up and could buy a car, I’d know which one I wanted—a Chevy Bel Air or a Packard Patrician or maybe a Ford Fairlane? Someday I’d have a car of my own, and I’d drive everywhere—no more waiting at bus stops, bicycling, or walking home late at night, scared. And I’d give people rides, too!  I would not be stingy with my beautiful car.

As it turned out, I waited a long time to achieve my dream. In my undergraduate years, my main transportation was a Dunelt three speed (that precursor to Raleigh bikes now lists on eBay for $2600).  Then marriage. Though I finally learned to drive, I was usually at home with two young children because my husband needed our only car for work. But I wasn’t easily deterred. I quickly initiated my children into cycling, walking, or taking the bus. I remember standing on the side of the highway in Minnetonka Beach (exurban Minneapolis), next to the lake and across from St. Martin’s church with two young children to take the bus into Wayzata (a closer-in suburb) or the city. I never let a lack of transportation stop me from doing what I wanted to do.

We divorced in 1991, and in January 1992 I bought my first car, that snappy Ford Tempo. It spoke freedom to me, not having to wait interminably for a bus, not being dependent on someone else’s availability for a ride, or riding my bicycle after a long day. I could go where I wanted when I wanted. The American dream, finally accomplished.

My years of waiting and wishing and that Ford Tempo planted the seeds of a love for cars. Shortly after I bought the Tempo, I met my second husband, who convinced me to trade it in for a Mazda RX7—something sportier. I was off on my journey of newer, better cars—as often as I wanted. Now it’s the latest technology and design that catch my fancy—don’t you love the new powdery colors on the 2024 models—like “Cosmic Blue Pearl?”

So here I am at seventy-nine. When my husband suggests making do with one car or using the bus more, I am adamant: I spent nearly forty years riding the bus, walking, bicycling, or sharing a car. I want my car and the freedom it gives me.

But that fierce position is threatened—I am aging.  Although I feel sharp with good reaction times, I know I’m not the person I was in my 40’s—the age group with the lowest accident rate. Weaving in and out on a freeway often feels treacherous to me—more so since I was rear-ended by a semi a few years ago. So I stay in the right or middle lane and accept that I’ve slowed down.

When I looked up the average age that older people stop driving, I was astonished when one website claims that it’s 75! (The National Institute on Ageing states that is not possible to calculate this number). I read on to find out all the reasons people stop driving—arthritis, making it difficult to grip the wheel, eyesight issues, diseases and medications. I suddenly felt extremely lucky not to have these issues.

For all the hype about dangerous older drivers, The National Institute on Aging states that “Therefore, we must be careful not to judge the safety of one’s driving solely based on their age;”  it’s the millennial drivers who have the most accidents. The 75+ group has the fewest, although they are more likely to die from an accident because of other underlying conditions (remember Covid?).

So when should I stop my ongoing love affair with cars? I haven’t experienced the behavioral indicators, like stopping when there’s no stop sign, not following traffic signals, side swiping, etc., but it’s helpful to know these. Yet, contemplating not driving is almost as scary as being told I’ll have to stay home and watch TV the rest of my life—which is the nightmare I conjure up when I imagine what would happen if I stop driving.

All this aside, I don’t think society does much to help older drivers. Right now the push in Minneapolis is to get us all on bicycles – like the Dutch, who give up their bicycles only when they are consigned to a nursing home. I ride my bike recreationally, and I’ve started doing short errands on it. I want to be part of the solution, but I’m not sure that bicycling to the grocery store when I am 90 is realistic. As one of my friends put it, “It’s not if you fall, it’s when.” For now I’m happy that I’m driving and can still ride a bicycle— and walking, well, my knees don’t love it, but I subscribe to my stepfather’s words, “If I want to get there bad enough, I’ll figure out a way.”

Memory and Story

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Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past (William Shakespeare)

A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity…(Oliver Sacks)

Much is made of the way in which memory erodes among the elderly – a group to which I am beginning to concede that I belong. Memory loss is considered normal, and it is true that my ability to recall information – the name of a restaurant that I loved in New York in 1970 or even the names of some of my childhood friends – is not immediate.  Now, my husband and I say that we are lucky to have two brains, which allows us to come up with a missing piece of information sooner.  Sometimes I kick myself when it is some simple, common word that has, slipped my mind.  Slipped my mind – memory is such a slippery thing indeed.

Recent research suggests that the slipperiness that I (and most of my friends) are experiencing is not the whole story.  We may have mild forgetfulness, but we are actually wiser:

“Some brain areas, including the hippocampus, shrink in size. …These changes can affect your ability to encode new information into your memory and retrieve information that’s already in storage. On the other hand… connections between distant brain areas strengthen. These changes enable the aging brain to become better at detecting relationships between diverse sources of information, capturing the big picture, and understanding the global implications of specific issues.” Harvard Health Newsletter

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This may be comforting to some people, but memory is still important to me —  Not the name of a restaurant, but the people who were there, the conversations we had that made us laugh, and how the evening created a friendship and endured for years.  I want to be able to summon up not just the grief that I felt at my mother’s funeral and any wisdom that I may have acquired about how to anticipate and live within grief (wisdom?), but also to remember that my cousin Butch played “When the Saints Go Marching In”, what words were spoken by whom, and even what I wore.  I want both to feel it very specifically AND to connect it to other events of loss in my life.  But I can’t remember what I wore….yet. 

The older I am, the more memories I carry and the more I need to make sense of these past events, feelings and images in the context of my life today.  This is what the practice of telling our story, whether orally, by journaling, or in a memoir, is about.  Oliver Sacks argues that “Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” But given my capacity to invent a past out of whole cloth, I have to work hard to prevent my story from being fiction!  In addition to reconnecting with past feelings – anger, grief, lust, joy – I want to give them additional color, and come closer to something real, with specifics. 

Recently, Karen Storm and I attended a writer’s retreat, where we planned to spent a chunk of our writing time working on the Karensdescant blog.  Instead, I woke up before the workshop feeling unnerved and vaguely remembering events from decades ago. By the time I got to our idyllic hermitage, I knew that I had to write about it – but my memories were fuzzy and still unsettling.  Karen Storm came with a less clear idea of what she might want to noodle on in addition to the blog, but was struck on the first evening with two old memories of her own that called her. 

In the end, we never talked about Karensdescant.  But we both happened on something more important – something that those increasing, branching, interlinked dendrites in our brains – the privilege of being old – demanded we attend to.  We wrote like maniacs, multiple pages infused with both tender and crushing details about important events falling into our computers,  connecting past events and people and finding new links with our present lives.  We were recalling information, pulling out succulent details that were not immediately at our fingertips, and making new stories out of past circumstances. 

In my case, it was clear that my memory of a very old relationship was encapsulated in a very short story that that I repeated so often, both to myself and others, that it seemed to be as real as the door to a room or a book on a shelf:  “We met and loved in wonderful places.  But it was too complicated.  It ended.”  But there’s the rub:  when I open the door to a room in my mind, I am amazed at what lies behind it that is unexpected – or what isn’t there that I was sure that I put away a short time ago.  When I open a book to reread it, there are sections that I don’t remember, while others that I starred on the first reading no longer seem as important as they did.  Anna Karenina is like that for me – it has a different meaning in every decade of my life.

It is not that my memories about that particular relationship are especially elusive – it’s the details that I have left out because they were (deliberately?) buried, or seemed trivial, that demanded some major rewriting. The editing included dredging up more information, but also a desire to make sense of old, lost relationships in the context of the life that I have subsequently woven, together with many others who I did not know or were not yet born, in the decades since.

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

During the retreat, I wrote a different narrative that is much longer and has changed the way that I think, not only about that relationship, but all of my relationships with people  I have loved. This was not the Shakespeare of Sonnet 30, who descends into rather weepy nostalgia, but an urge to reorder my house to see that old things that still intrigue me are put into places where they connect with others parts of my life.  I can almost feel the dendrites communicating with each other. 

Friends who have worked with hospice patients talk about how they observe people holding on for a few more days to make sense of some aspect of their life that feel unfinished.  When I ask myself (or am asked) to remember more details, I find connections that I did not make in the past.  Or, I remember something that was said that changes the way I need to tell the story. What is different for many of us as we age is feeling a need to make sense of our lives more deliberately, with more care, whether we are writers, talkers, or scrapbookers.  When it comes down to it, we are all just trying to make a little more sense of this very non-linear project that is life.

‘Tis the Season: Graduation

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Last Saturday my granddaughter, Luisa, graduated from high school. She’s the youngest of my grandchildren, which reminded me of the passage of time, starting out as babies and now one out of college, two in college, and Luisa soon off to college. Thinking about graduation makes me realize what a shared rite of passage it is. Karen and I have skirted around the notion of rituals, probably because there are no well-defined rituals as we age—some people have retirement parties, but it’s not a given, and certainly a funeral is a ritual for the living, not the departed. Reflecting on the joyful event later, I noted the. . .

Changes in Our City and Schools      

Luisa is the only one who attended school in Minneapolis, so it was my first big urban school event. As we took our seats in the large auditorium, the first thing I noticed was the diversity. In fact, the school is 60.4% white, 21.3% African American, 9.7% Hispanic, 3.9% are of two or more races, 3.7% Asian, with 0.8% American Indian, and 0.2% Pacific Islander. The Somali families immediately stood out because of their colorful dress and larger families — grandparents, siblings including children and babies, and moms and dads. Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the US, with most of them living in Minneapolis. The women wore the traditional head scarf and the baati, a long overdress, and many men wore the macaawiis, a sarong, and the benadiri kufia, a cap. But that doesn’t do justice to the gold jewelry, glittering fabrics, sculpted make-up, and spectrum of colors. The women seemed to glisten with their beauty, and the men stood tall.

The Graduation

Once we were settled, the graduates marched in with the band playing Pomp and Circumstance. I teared up as I watched the students walking down the aisle and parents standing on seats to get a picture—aren’t smart phones wonderful! The trappings were all there — the school band’s terrific rendition of the National Anthem, the choir singing Stephen Paulus’s The Road Home, and the articulate student speaker, who was a young Somali woman.

Before awarding the 441 diplomas, the principal practically begged us not to make a lot of noise or to be in the aisles as each graduate’s name was announced. The silence lasted very briefly.  Somali names like Abdi and Ali clustered at the beginning, and the families were so excited to see their students walk across that stage that they went wild, jumping and cheering and blowing vuvuzelas—so much for quiet. I suspect that in some families these may have been the first high school graduates.  

I loved the excitement, though not everyone loved the ruckus, possibly because we live in a newly multicultural city, originally dominated by less effusive Scandinavians. I believe in honoring the different ways in which we celebrate. I also noticed that the cheering settled quickly and we could still hear the names. By the time Luisa crossed the stage, her brothers decided that it was okay to make some noise. Sitting on either side of me, they jumped and shouted. Ironically, on my video, you can only hear her first name being called; their celebratory noise blotted out the rest.

Intergenerational

After the graduation, the auditorium lobby was filled with families and graduates, everyone taking pictures. It felt like family because many of the graduates knew my son because he’d been their principal in middle school. It was joyful to see former students reconnect with him.  I was not left out: a former student of mine recognized me and gave me a big hug, telling me that his daughter had just graduated. The father and I also overlapped at the U of MN, when I was in graduate school, and he was an undergraduate.  When we met, walking across campus, he would say “You’re my inspiration!” What a circle; what an intergenerational experience!

Which brings me back to the roles that we play as young and old. Yesterday, struggling out of a store with a heavy box of kitty litter, my other granddaughter, Maggie, grabbed it, insisting that. “I can do things to help you, and you listen to me and give me advice and help me.” There it was, from the mouth of the next generation, how the generations support each other when we are not celebrating rituals. Sometimes I am sad about growing older, but her words reminded me that I would experience none of this without growing older. My older self is also a bundle of memories going back to post WWII, the 50’s, 60’s, etc. I have a perspective to share that can enrich everyone my life touches.

Through the entire graduation, I was awed by the stretch of generations, from grandparents in wheelchairs to babies crying during the ceremony—how we are all one, especially in the rituals that celebrate life passages. Luisa, too, reminded me of how generations stretch across the planet, because she was born in Guatemala. As her grandmother and a former teacher at the graduation, I represented all the grandmothers, parents, and educators throughout the world who love and support the next generation. We are all connected; we are all family.

Curiouser and Curiouser….

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–          Alice in Wonderland illustration by Arthur Rackham (1907) [Public Domain

Grown-ups never understand anything or themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them (Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince)

A few weeks ago, someone quoted from Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart: “Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty”.  Brown goes on to associate curiosity with discomfort:  “We have to admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn’t be asking.” Later, Brown links curiosity with the perception of an information gap that we commit to closing.   I immediately bristled – internally, since it would have been inappropriate to react to the nodding of heads and pervasive affirmation in the group. 

When I was a young child – and even when I was old enough to read them myself – two of my most beloved books were Alice in Wonderland and The House at Pooh Corner.  I read them joyfully to my children – and later to my grandchildren.  What I cherish about both of them is their exploration of simple, uncomplicated curiosity.  Alice hesitates only briefly before biting, although she knows that “one side will make you smaller, the other will make you large”, while the doorknob says “nothing’s impossible.”  Pooh looks at every day as a fresh adventure, whether it is confronting the loss of Eeyore’s tail or stalking the mysterious Heffalump.  While Alice sometimes bemoans a choice she has made, she quickly picks herself up and asks another impertinent question.  Pooh, on each day’s adventure, only hopes that there will be honey involved.

Curiosity may involve a risk, but it is not something that holds either Alice or Pooh back – more than momentarily.  Eeyore reminds us that worrying about not knowing – at least more than briefly – can be a path to cynicism and depression.  I took this lesson to heart:  Be curious.  Move on with the adventures.  Don’t do anything potentially life-threatening, but assume that the jams that you get in to will be temporary.  Don’t think about the “information gap” but move toward the unknown.  In other words, nurture the impulse to try stuff, and a full range of emotions that encompasses trepidation, but also the delight that comes with doing or learning about something new.

It turns out that Brown is talking to people who feel “stuck” in a comfort zone.  She covers all the research that says that we will be happier and freer if we respond to “I don’t really know” with curiosity. We all get stuck sometimes….certainly, retirement for someone like me, who loved going to work, meant that I had to allow myself to drive past the exit for my office without feeling lost and uncomfortable!  And although many routines nurture us (brushing our teeth, eating lunch, going to bed at roughly the same time on most days), it is easy to slip into ways of thinking and habits that constrain.  But getting stuck seems to be something that we choose more and more often as we exit adolescence.  With Alice, Pooh, and Thich Nhat Han as guides, however, we see that embracing vulnerability (which Brown endorses) is not a conscious decision to endure discomfort, but a practice of anticipating novelty and adventure – of embracing childish wonder and a Beginner’s Mind.  

And then there is the spiritual side.  One version of Genesis situates our humanness in “original curiosity”:  “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit…”  Albert Einstein echoes this, suggesting that “curiosity has its own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality…Never lose a holy curiosity.”  Julia Cameron also argues that curiosity is a spiritual path rather than a cognitive decision, and that it requires habits – she suggests random writing in “morning pages”, scheduled “artist dates” to explore a new esthetic, and regular walks that have no purpose other than to look deeply at whatever is in one’s path. 

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

I admit that I don’t do these as consistently as I once anticipated, but I have other habits that invoke the same opportunity to approach the world with a Pooh-like sense of wonderment.  Meditation – something that for years I thought that was beyond my capacities – clears my brain of monkey-mind, and creates space for hope that goes beyond ticking off items on the incessant to-do list.  Connecting every week with someone (or several people) who are willing to engage in authentic and vulnerable conversations about “big stuff” never fails to make me curious.

Of course, I take Brene Brown’s assertions about the benefits of curiosity to heart because it is particularly important as we age.  According to Henry Emmons and David Alter’s 9 Keys To Staying Sharp, curiosity comes only a few steps behind the basics of moving, eating well, and getting enough sleep in warding off mental decline.  Nor do I want to ignore Brown’s s admonitions against getting too comfortable and avoiding vulnerability.  If I am always afraid of falling, will I ever learn how to skip again?  However, I also note that as we age we can more easily choose to embrace vulnerability and become more playful, as long as we are willing to follow Shel Silverstein and  “grow down” (along with giving away our business attire and our mother’s china):

He got his trousers torn and stained,

He ran out barefoot in the rain,

Shouting to all the folks in town,

“It’s much more fun, this growin’ down.

 — Shel Silverstein