ageing

Ageless

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cat

By Elizabeth Speth

Today is my last day of being 48.

At least, I think it is. I’m a little fuzzy on the math, but I’m mostly sure that tomorrow I will be 49 and not 50.

Today, therefore, is the end of my relative youth (meaning that I am younger than many of my relatives). I’m only a whippersnapper for a few more hours, still officially in my 40s, full of pep and idealism. Mostly continent and arthritis-free. Practically a crazy kid.

After tomorrow, I won’t be young ever again, because 49 is nothing but a heart-stopping, screaming plunge into disappearing bone mass, uncooperative skin and suspicious-looking padding under my riding pants.

Tomorrow, I will be dragged, kicking and clawing, into the void of old age. Tomorrow I will stop buying lipstick because it’s all disappearing into the wrinkles around my mouth anyway, thank you very much, Revlon.

Tomorrow I will begin asking for senior discounts, giving unsolicited advice, and swinging my soon-to-fracture hips to the irresistible stylings of the big band era.

But today I think I’ve got to do something really, really special to commemorate the last little wisp of my viability as a human being in this crazy, youth-obsessed thing we call life.

Here are some suggestions I have submitted to myself:

1. Go on a crime spree
2. Go on a drunken crime spree
3. Get a tattoo (possibly of a smear of egg yolk on my chin)
4. Become famous
5. Start hoarding cats (better late than never)
6. Become a nudist (except for the adult diapers I will start wearing tomorrow)
7. Buy a motorcycle
8. Get filthy rich as a result of being famous (see #4)
9. Shave head and pierce eyebrows (or possibly shave eyebrows and pierce head)
10. Eat kale
11. Eat cheese, a lot of it
12. Join Weight Watchers
13. Learn clog dancing (check outYoutube tutorials, get distracted by teacup pig and monkey videos)
14. Start biting nails (but only my own)
15. Take a long nap, wake up grumpy and disoriented
16. Write my memoirs (make stuff up so they are interesting)
17. Re-enroll in elementary school and really pay attention in geography this time
18. Buy a car suggestive of a mid-life crisis
19. Have a mid-life crisis
20. Carry on hoarding cats, stowing extras in mid-life crisis car so no one realizes the extent of the problem

After careful consideration (and I did opt for the nap so I could sleep on it a bit) I have decided that I’m going with the kale and the Weight Watchers options, and, if I have enough points left today for alcohol, I will see if I can fit in a brief drunken crime spree. I know my neighbor leaves his door unlocked while he gardens, and I’m sure I could find something at his house to steal and then return tomorrow, after the adrenalin high has passed and I am an old woman taking stock of my life and making amends.

Alternatively, I will re-binge-watch Grace and Frankie on Netflix and clean the cat boxes.

It’s hard being young, I’m not going to lie. I can’t wait for tomorrow.

Hey, Kid! Let’s Do Lunch.

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By Elizabeth Speth

I am not a good parent.

This is not false modesty.  Do not rush to comfort or reassure me when I say this.  It’s the truth, and my children will likely confirm the fact.

I’m not petitioning to be arrested here.  I more or less understand the basics of childkeeping.  Minimally, you must feed them, keep them clean and teach them to be kind.  You get bonus points if you mostly refrain from embarrassing them, and help pay for college.

You don’t leave them unattended.  Bad things happen to unattended children.

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But the rest of it has really eluded me, though I have read countless parenting books and compared notes and rubbed elbows with my betters.  I have struggled and chafed mightily against my failings.  In the nearly thirty years I have wrestled and warred with parenting, the only philosophy I have managed to pull from the smoking wreckage is this:

Take your child to lunch.

I mean it.  Every chance you get.  In a proper restaurant, with napkins that must go in your laps, with a menu that demands deliberations and choices.  Sit across the table from each other, and relinquish your leadership role.  Be equals.  Be people out to lunch.

That’s right.  My only parenting tip involves parenting time off.  All  fun, and no work.

You don’t cook, clean, or assume responsibility for the enjoyment of the food.

You take a break from the heavy slog of molding, teaching, shaping, guiding, refusing.

Go ahead and place the pressure of parenting on your server.  Let her make conversation for a while.  Let him engage your child, find things on the menu to entice the kid’s mercurial tastes, figure out what is going on in that tiny, inscrutable head.

Let your child’s critical attention and fragile expectations fall upon that tray-carrying, apron-shielded angel of mercy.  Order yourself a cocktail, sit back, and sigh.

If the meal disappoints, if the experience is a bust, if the carrots are cut in the wrong shape and the fish arrives with an eye still in its head, the server is the jerk.  Not you.  See?  Win-win.  And still no dishes.

You? Are the good guy.  There’s a gratitude factor, however reluctant, that comes to you when you say:  ‘Order whatever you’d like!’  And you must do that. And you must mean it. Lunch is a no-holes-barred experience, a rarified world of exemptions and permissions.

And, really, how many other times in your life can you really say that to your child?  ‘Have whatever you want.’  Doesn’t that feel marvelous, rolling off your tongue?  How bad can the damage be?  It’s the lunch menu.

Go ahead, Kid! Have a virgin margarita with whipped cream that’s mostly sugar and comes to the table looking for all the world like dessert even before your cheese enchilada arrives.  I want you to!  Do I suspect you won’t like calamari at all, with its little squid legs still attached under that crispy coating and silky orange aioli?  Yes!  But that’s what takeout boxes are for, and, here, fill up on these fabulous chips with salsa!  Shall we order guacamole?

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The rules are simple.  Everyone eats as much or as little as they like.  The kids get to talk about anything.  Anything.  If they tell you they have taken to peeing in their closets, shoplifting, or skating off the steeply sloped roof of the high school cafeteria at night, all you are allowed to say is:  ‘Oh really?’

Pregnancy scare? Second thoughts about college?  Flag down that busboy for more butter.  If you are tempted to parent, take a sip of wine.  Blink, nod, order the cheese plate. Or a second sushi boat.  Or spicier curry so you can justify your watery eyes.  Later, when you have dementia and wear diapers and have terrible confessions of your own, they may return the favor.

Of course, there will be some inadvertent parenting that goes on.  Obviously, your child has to behave — you are out in public.  Insist upon politeness to all who care for you during your meal.  Please, and thank you, and eye contact are non-negotiable.  Teach them how to tip well — very well — so that it will be that much better when you come back.  Explain to them how hard the work is, this making happiness for strangers out of chilled plates and lettuce and baskets of bread.

You will of course tweak these rules and guidelines for yourself, but, I beg you, take your children to lunch.  Do it because they are here now (that won’t always be the case), and you are here now(the clock is definitely ticking on this fact), and don’t you have to eat lunch anyway?

Do it because of the lies they will tell you for the rest of your life.

I’m not talking about naughty lies.  I’m talking about all the times they will say things are fine when they are not.

Do it because they will go through terribly difficult things you will never have even an inkling about.

Do it because when they were first handed to you in the hospital, though you had carried them for months and months, you were shocked at how heavy and self-contained they were, and that’s when you understood you were truly separated, going forward.

Do it because you did and will make mistakes, and you were and will be impatient and short-sighted.

Do it even though they are hard on you.  And because only they know what the rhythm of your breath and the beat of  your heart sound like from inside your body.

Do it because you break their hearts sometimes, as much as they break yours.

You do.  You break their hearts too.

Case in point:  my mother was not the sort to take her children to lunch, or even the sort to provide lunch on any given day.  A mentally fragile and self-absorbed woman, her thoughts rarely entertained things like food, shelter and clothing.  She was consumed by her own disastrous love life, her endless quest for the perfect fad religion, and her conviction that she was a true ‘artiste’ in terms of temperament, if not exactly in terms of production.

It took me a lifetime to figure out that it wasn’t personal.  She was a bad parent, just like me.  But she did not want to be a mother, and I did. That was pretty much the only difference between us.

As a child, I was chronically lost track of, and as a result occasionally unfortunate things happened.  I did not bear up well, I admit it. An inevitable general haze of terror hung over the first twelve or so years of my life.  I was afraid of everything, although I mostly kept it a secret.

Our lives were transient, and chaotic.  Always there was a new place to live, a new classroom, a new man suddenly in a position of authority, new dangers to suss out.  This did nothing for my catatonic outlook.

One snowy morning in rural New Mexico, in the dark lull between Christmas and spring, my mother walked me to a new bus stop in a new neighborhood on a new first day of school, holding my mittened hand while I trudged beside her in wet shoes, my attention riveted on my constantly roiling insides.

The cold was ruthless.  It was wicked.  If I could remember the date, and researched it, I know it would have been some sort of New Mexico winter record low temperature.  Cows died that day.  Fingers and toes were lost.  Pipes burst, and I’m sure ballads and folk songs were written.

The bus stop was in front of someone’s house, and all sorts of children were running and shouting and doing unspeakable things to each other.  The woman who lived inside the house came out to her front steps, and called everyone inside until the bus arrived.  It was too cold, she said, for man or beast.

My mother was not a sociable sort of person, and so she indicated that I should go in, and she, presumably, would go home to thaw out.  I clung to her. “Please,” I said, terrified.  “Please don’t go.”

Go inside, she said firmly to me.

“Please come in with me,” I urged her, knowing she would leave me alone with all of the boisterous young strangers destined to be my future classroom tormentors.  “Please don’t leave me here.”

My mother got quite stern, told me to stop fussing.  But I wouldn’t let go of her until she finally, reluctantly, promised she would stay.  Outside. I was to go in.  She would not.  I knew it was her final, rock-bottom offer.  Heavy of heart and foot, I followed the others inside, and spent the next ten minutes watching her nervously through the window.  To my utter surprise, she stood sentinel there, alone, her back to the house, blowing out gusts of steam and occasionally stomping her feet.

The sight of her nearly broke my six-year-old heart with gratitude.  It just about brought me to my soggy knees.  When I could stand it no longer,  I scurried back outside to wait with her for the bus.  We didn’t say anything else about my being out there.  We didn’t speak at all.

I will never forget the incredible tide of sadness I felt that morning. I don’t think I’ve ever been as emptied out by grief.  Her parenting sacrifice was bigger that day than any of mine.  Even then, I understood that she did not want to be there.  She would rather have been anywhere else.

It wasn’t personal. I do understand that now. 

I take my children to lunch because they see my flaws, which are weighty things for them.  I take them out to lunch because sometimes parents are a terrible burden.

I take them to lunch because of my mother’s unexpected steadfastness in a sea of swirling snow, and her vulnerability, standing out there alone, waiting.

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It’s important to remember that people are vulnerable, and that’s most obvious when we eat.  Even mean people look vulnerable when they eat.

Look at the poor horse, a flight animal, whose only defense against predators is vigilance. Yet he must put his head down to eat.

Take your children to lunch because, if you must be vulnerable, you can at least be so together.

Pick your reason.  But do it.  Be people out to lunch.  Together.

 

 

The Ghost in the Gate

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gate

By Elizabeth Speth

This is a true story.  A ghost story.

It’s a story about a woman aged enough to have an old-fashioned name like Harriet.  Harriet was also old enough to have experienced losses in her life, some significant, some her fault and some not.

She lived alone — sometimes sad — far, far away from the city.  Her old house was a family place, built a century before on a grassy plain under a wide blue sky.

She had several cranky old horses, and a naughty barking dog.  Horses and dog destroyed the garden Harriet planted every year, greedily tearing up carrots and lettuces, trampling and digging, until she wanted to give up on the garden.

She was old enough to know about giving up on things.

But she loved warm, sweet tomatoes in September.  So she did not let the garden die.

Instead she built a fence.  It was crooked, loopy and drunken-looking, but it blocked the garden from those who would do it harm.

She found that she needed a gate.  So she bought an old one from a neighbor.  Rusted, bent and blistered, with a tiny metal plaque affixed to it that said in faded words:  “Black Hills Fence Co.  South Dakota” under a faint buffalo silhouette.

A gate is a point of entry, or it can be an impediment to the same.  So the woman brought home that old gate, bouncing around in the bed of her truck, watching it through the mirror as she bumped over rutted dirt roads.

With some difficulty, she mounted the gate to a wobbly post, smashing her thumb in the process.  No one knew about her smashed thumb, how it throbbed for days.  There was no one to share that information, to cluck over the blackened nail, or roll eyes when she complained about it too much.

The gate hung crookedly — it had been hard to hang by herself — but inexplicably it swung freely.  This pleased and surprised her.

The naughty dog, a small, fat, white terrier, dug a hole under the gate and passed smoothly through it like a chute, in and out of the garden at will.

But the gate kept the horses at bay, and the carrots, lettuces, cucumbers and mostly the tomatoes grew.

There was, Harriet saw immediately,  something strange about the vegetables.  Every morning, she came out to find the soil beneath them cool and damp, though she never watered.  The leaves stretched and grew and budded, and not an insect molested them.

Sometimes, she would spend the afternoon out in the garden, because she felt at peace there.  She would pick a few stray weeds — there weren’t many — and listen to birds.  Though there wasn’t the faintest hint of a breeze, and nothing else moved in the stillness, the gate would rattle itself at her periodically.

Not in a hostile way, Harriet thought.  It was more like a dog shaking itself.  She didn’t understand it, but it soothed her somehow.

One morning Harriet came out to the gate, and she found all the horses’ manure piled neatly in her wheelbarrow, the old pitchfork leaning up against the fence.  She looked around her at the clean pasture, as if trying to see who had told a joke.  The cranky old horses pricked their ears at her, a new friendliness in their eyes.

On another day, harassed by the heat, Harriet approached the gate with her arms full of tree branch trimmings.  She was tired and sad, and thinking of things she regretted, and her loneliness made a kind of hollow sound in her brain.  She didn’t like trimming trees, and the branches scratched now at her eyes and arms.  But she meant to stack them in the back of the garden so the horse wouldn’t get at them, eat them, and grow sick.

She drew a long, tired breath, preparing to drop the branches and open the gate.  But the gate rattled then, and the chain lock fell away.  And then it swung open for her, soundlessly.  Harriett was taken aback.

She was also deeply grateful.

Harriet began to notice other things about the gate.  On days the wind did blow, it coaxed a deep, moaning sound out of the posts, like lowing cattle.  Occasionally it sounded like a piano, warm, honey notes of a saloon ballad that plunked happily into the dust at her feet.

Her naughty barking dog stopped barking, though he was still fat and usually dirty.  Harriet watched him pass back and forth through the hole he’d dug under the gate, and the bottom rail scratched his bristly old back as the dog’s eyes half-closed in bliss.

On winter mornings, wind and rain brought the smell of coffee and bacon through the gate.

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Of a warm summer morning, the faint smell of baking biscuits lingered there.

In the evening, there was woodsmoke and whiskey, spiraling up into the sighing trees.

During thunderstorms or other catastrophic events, the horses gathered around the gate as if for comfort, and wild vetch twined purple flowers around its rusted corners as lavender bunched beneath it.

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And Harriet understood that her gate was haunted.  She also knew that all signs pointed to the fact that her ghost was a cowboy.  Not the young, firm-jawed, lean-hipped rodeo variety of cowboy, but rather an older version, with busted-up, poorly-healed bones, sun spots, and eyes the pale blue of soft, faded denim, hidden in wrinkles he’d earned staring past wide horizons.

He was the kind of old cowboy who opened gates for a lonely, tired woman, who kept gardens watered and manure picked up.  He convinced the dog to behave, and comforted horses with gnarled old hands.

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She knew that, though her cowboy was a kind ghost, he was not an angel.  She was old enough to know no good cowboy was ever an angel.

And so Harriet came to understand that people who have lived long enough to be sad, without hope of circumstances ever really changing — without a miraculous happy ending — can get through somehow.  They can learn to watch for moments of warmth and consideration.  She understood that not all good things can be seen.

She learned that she was not alone.

As I said, this is a true story.  A ghost story.

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Hot, Crowded, Hungry…and Old

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By Elizabeth Speth

midlife

Mid-life crisis? What mid-life crisis?

Recently, I had a birthday during an unseasonable wave of heat, against a backdrop of bad news.

Though it was supposed to be spring — the air soft and cool and green with possibility — Mother Nature had careened right past that season, screeching to a halt on a startlingly hot day,  the anniversary of the day of my birth.

Never mind which anniversary.  Suffice it to say I am getting close to the age of measuring in portions of centuries.  In most cultures, that is not something women feel like celebrating.

We become strangers to ourselves.  We grow speckles and spots.  We soften and spread.  We look like our mothers.  The older versions of our mothers.  Men stop behaving with gallantry toward us.  No one looks up when we enter a room, and what we have to say does not seem as riveting as it did when we uttered it through the rosy lips of youth.

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When we are young, our skin fits snugly and our clothing is loose. Now, of course, the opposite is true.

I know that there are three definite, terrifying signs that you are officially old. One is losing your memory.  I can’t recall the other two.

But that wasn’t the only bad news on my birthday.  Something else was dragging me down as I trudged sizzling sidewalks, wiped sweat from my newly creased forehead, wondered if the whole world was having a hot flash, or just me.

I was sluggishly digesting (that’s one more thing that fails with advancing years) a news story about falling rice production in my beloved home state.

California’s recent dry spell, it seems, is expected to have a dramatic effect on rice production.   That is a big deal, and not only because this state supplies virtually all of the nation’s sushi rice.  The other half of our crops are exported.

Economists say that, of all the food crops, rice is likely to be affected by the drought the most, and the California Rice Commission estimates that rice farmers will leave 100,000 acres, or about 20 percent, of their fields fallow.

This of course nudges prices up worldwide.  Which can be a tragedy, depending upon where you live.  For us, rice is a comfort food, a sticky pillow upon which to rest your sashimi.  Something to round out a meal.  But in other cultures, a bowl of rice can make or break your day.  Perhaps that is most of what you will eat in a 24-hour period, and now you can only afford half a bowl.

To complicate matters, with food stores in the pantry beginning to dwindle, a real crowd has just shown up for dinner.

California’s population grew by roughly 332,000 people in the last fiscal year — its biggest increase in nearly a decade, according to new California Department of Finance estimates.The estimated population rose 0.88%, exceeding 38.2 million as of July.

Most of that growth was “natural increase” — births minus deaths (all those young whippersnappers having babies, which used to be my job, minus old people at the end of their lives, which is what I am now).  The rest is immigration.

So let me put all the layers of the birthday cake together for you, so you can see it clearly.  (Hang on.  I will need to find my reading glasses so I can see it too.)

My world was suddenly hot, crowded, and about to be very hungry.

The sky seemed to narrow, its gaze hostile and unwelcoming.

The message I thought I might be hearing was, ‘Shove off, Grandma.  Move over.  Make room.’

In a time of contracting resources, like space and food and familiar climates, shouldn’t we defer to the talent, beauty and energy of youth?  Can we afford the luxury of a vast, aging population, sucking up sustenance and space, reminding us all that the end is coming, and it is wrinkled and grim?

Have I, at my advanced age, over-stayed my welcome?

My youngest child had become a legal adult the week before.  What would I do with myself now?  How would I contribute?  Here I was, your typical old folk, obsessing about  weather and crops and the fact that my joints, like today’s young people, are so darned disrespectful.

It’s enough to make you want to whack someone with your cane.

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As I usually do, I sought refuge and comfort in the gloaming of my horse pasture at evening feeding time.  I took comfort in the fact that I can still, for now, lift a bale of hay, and that I do still serve at least one purpose, even if it is only keeping the herd from starvation.  They need me.

I sat on the edge of a feeder and listed to the rhythmic munching of hay, and watched a feverish, fussy wind harass the tree tops.

I rejoiced as I felt one tiny tendril of cool breeze lift my hair, and then another.

I listened to the birds chirping to each other, telling stories about the day, and it did not sound as though they were complaining.  Small, colorful butterflies ignored the heat as they flirted with each other on the mustard blooms.  They don’t have a lot of time either, in this life, and they were getting on with the business of living.

I became aware of the drone of bees among the blackberry flowers and felt the world — finally, blessedly — expand.  As if drawing a breath.

Without realizing, I exhaled along with it, and the high, hot wind gusts finally quieted as the cooler breezes gathered momentum closer to the ground.

Because I had been thinking about rice all day,  I suddenly remembered something.  I remembered how many things can fit on a single grain of rice.

Grain-of-Rice-Art1Amazing-art-on-rice-grain

I thought:  If you can write entire verses — or faithfully detail the unique features of a human face — on such a small surface, how crowded are we really on this earth?  With the proper perspective, and appropriate tools, a grain of rice is enormous.

I looked around my familiar, large pasture, with its groves of trees, its seasonal ponds.

I thought, well, I have a little room.

I reminded myself that the hot weather I was finding so onerous of course meant the advent of the season of longer days.

That’s a few more hours in the day to get things right.  More time, if you will.

And my age has some benefits.  I can serve as a powerful cautionary tale, at the very least.  A walking, talking essay about things that should be done differently.

I am a living, breathing admonishment to:

— Wear sunscreen.

— Refrain from gluttony, because enough is as good as a feast.

— Live more outside of the comfort zone, even if it’s a bit terrifying, or become merely a collection of habits.

— Travel, or risk a mind that is fused shut.

— Accumulate fewer things.

— Glorify busy-ness less.

— Go ahead and get naked, because it’s only ever going to get worse.

Yeah.  That’s stuff young people aren’t born knowing.  Some unfortunate old person always has to demonstrate it.  I can do that.

Later that week, the oldest trainer in Kentucky Derby history, Art Sherman, 77, won that race handily with his horse California Chrome.  This duo — this perfect balance of very young horse and wise old man — also hails from the state of shrinking rice crops and swelling populations.  That made me feel better.

There was time, maybe, I thought.  Perhaps even for something amazing.

So, even though there is less and less room for me in the world, everyone knows people shrink as they age. I will take up less room. Well, vertically, at least.

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