Thought I'd Drop By ....

So.  For reasons simple and not, I've not posted here in four months.  Part of me dislikes even this much exposure (20 eyeballs reading a post) and to come back now is to get away with something.  It's akin to singing in the shower, dancing in your room, you get the idea, right?

But having defined myself as a writer; a writer has to write.

So.

I am in throes of my still wonderful job, and four classes away from student teaching.  I am working in a K-8 school for a few hours a week as I continue to process of "putting my money where my mouth is."  If things go as planned (cough) in a couple of years I will end my formal work life teaching in a school.  I will make a reluctant good-bye to my Yale colleagues and the work itself, and drew on everything I've known, been, studied, and attempted, and failed at to help some yet unmet children over the massive turnstile that is American inequality.  And then I'll quit that, too, and officially be retired.

I am finally thinking of life-after-work.  Don't want to travel.  Don't want to golf.  Ain't got no grandkids.  And a dream house is just another house that needs to be cleaned.  All I want, I confessed to a couple of friends, is to live long enough to use up my stash of material.

This is what it's like (at least for me) to round the corner to Official Old Age.  As usual, my physical body preceded my mind.  It's so damaged that even throwing off a duvet in the morning to get up to pee counts as exercise.  If a fire broke out in the morning I would be toast.  Just can't move that fast after having been horizontal for hours.  Oh well.  I'm still here.  And still committed to ameliorating what I've done to my body, and what my body has done to me.  That's a good sign -- it means that I intend to be vital longer.  But, if I've learned anything as I've aged, it is that to increase the odds of vitality one has to work (hard) at it.  It means that every day a significant amount of time is devoted to exercise -- for cardiovascular health, for strength, and for the cursed case of plantar fasciitis which began in my right foot and now includes my left.  (Pause for profanity.  Were I a quadriped it would be in all four feet, for sure.)  I am to get as used to those rituals as an insulin-dependent diabetic is to the needle.  Not that old age is a chronic disease, but as far as I'm concerned it must be engaged like one.  Daily effort; constant vigilance.

Between the last time I posted and today have been plenty of trials and tribulations, shoes dropped and so on.  At the turn of the New Year I took stock and although I hate to be made a liar by making resolutions on January 1st, I did it anyway.

This is the journey back.  Day at a, meal at a, task at a time.

When You Can No Longer Remember Shit ...

... make shit up.

As I see it you either turn 60 or you write a truthful memoir, but you can't do both.  Because after 60 (or after chemo and radiation or post-partum or terror or other life-changing extended sleep-depriving events) you simply don't care that much for accuracy.  You can't, it's an unattainable goal like having the body you sported at 20.

At first, this truth-bending shocked me and I would run down the street chasing some sentence that just popped out of my mouth, like, "Back in 1995 I was working for General Eclectic," hoping to tackle it and smother the inaccuracy before it embarrassed me.  And then, when my knees started barking and my hip throbbed in tune to the universe, I stopped and thought, "Who cares?"  Who cares if the year and the employer are wrong?  I'm tryin' to make a point here, people.  Whatever that was.  I don't lie with nefarious intent, I simply have decades of memory to sift through and sort out and stuff got mixed and matched in my head and if I waited for my internal fact-checker to get back to me the people I'm talking to would be gone, asleep or dead.

So, onto haiku and aphorisms, scrupulous truth be damned:

Spring in New Haven
Now that the snow has left us
bereft of complaint.

A Gaggle of Geese, A Year of Elegies

Whatever I was determined to write about last night when I decided to write at all has passed through my mind faster than the V of geese on their way north.  (Perhaps to escape an unusually cold Atlanta?)  What remains is evidence of getting older, not the least of which is these bouts of forgetting.  In answer to someone who asked if I used to dance I started talking about salsa -- which I love and haven't danced since my first years here -- and it's cousin, mambo, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what to call it except that it started with an m.  This was mambo I was struggling to recall.  The passion for which caused me to get up at the crack 'o dawn each and every Saturday for years and take the 2 or 3 to Harlem, exiting at the 135th Street station and then around the corner to the legendary Y, exchange street shoes for dance shoes and dancing my ass off.  In studios, on gym floors.  In clubs.  And every once in a while on the street.  I needed mambo like peanut butter needs jelly.  And yet I couldn't recall the word.

Moving on.  It will be that way, for the immediate future and perhaps even for the future future.  (Other than in grammar there is no such thing as the future perfect.)  I have never been a fantasist (or at least don't consider myself one) but since I'm not going to remember things, might as well make them up, eh?  Or, at least try to remember the broad strokes of a life lived so long that I can point to a 40 year old crown in my mouth that now makes contact with a 24 hour crown, both of which better last me forever.

A year of elegies, I call this.  My friend, Fred, is dying.  He, who I had designated as the executor of my will 20 years ago, will not live long enough to do me the honor.  He's leaving before me, a result of Stage 3B colon cancer diagnosed 7 long years ago.  He, and any honest medical provider would tell you the same, should not be alive in 2014.  But he is and it has been grueling, magnificent, humbling, lonely, relentless, stupid, exhausting, infuriating, and tiring all at once.  Throughout most of the odyssey he kept a journal, the Cancer Diaries, which was published as a book by Skyhorse Publishing.  Not everyone, with or without cancer, can read it.  Much of it is too raw, too painful, too indicative of a fate from a disease that seems to say tag! you're it!  And we are superstitious creatures wondering if I read this will I get cancer, too?  But if you want to know some of what it's like to fight to live through searing pain and depression and hopelessness -- well, this may be the ticket.  Anyone who knows Fred knows he is one tough motherfucker and if you've been his friend or colleague for more than a minute, chances are you've been on the receiving end of his toughness.  But, he is also one of the most honorable and loving people I know.

As anyone who's gone through this with a friend or family member, there is dying and there is dying.    Fred's in the former stage, not the latter.  Which means that the, if not quite zest, but will to live is very strong.  Very strong.  He and many others will swim up from, literally, the depths of despair towards any and every kind of ameliorative treatment so that one more day -- even if it's flat on your back poised for the visitation of the roiling pain that tumors poaching your life force is -- of precious life.  So, we go on.  A drug here.  An definitive answer there.  A nap.  

There are two processes, excepting c-sections and suicide, that take their own damn time:  birth and death.  Make plans if you want to, but don't expect them to be followed according to your wishes.  The body will do what it wants to do.  We must make the most of time.

This Just In ....

... I can not, repeat, can not do math.  Trying to do a quilting project that involves working on a 20" x 20" square.  Ya following me?  I measure, cut, and painstakingly stitch 1" strips of fabric onto the 4 squares that would be combined to make the aforementioned big square.  So far.  So good.  Strips go on.  Strips are pressed flat.  Four squares are combined.  I hold up the result.  Uhmmmm, I sez to m'self, this looks kinda small.  Being the genius that I am I measure the final product.  I had created a 11" square because I had originally cut 6" blocks.

Just shoot me.  Or similar sentiments ifya know what I mean.  How stupid can I get?  I don't even want to find out frankly.  Perhaps the only wise thing I've done in the past few weeks is to decide not to enroll in yet another mental labyrinth with no exit which is what higher level mathematics courses have become for me.  I need a respite from abject failure for a while.  I need to have time to screw up a simple sewing project or read a book before the local library sets a bounty for my arrest for late returns.  I need some time to take stock of a life that will certainly include death, taxes and replacing a major appliance or computer.  Life, in other words, I need some time for life.

Almost unbeknownst to me I have crossed a threshhold.  In a few months I will be on the other side of 60 but I feel it deeply already.  More friends than ever are telling me about the birth of their grandchildren.  I am amused, sometimes amazed at the changes in my body.  Unwelcome hair everywhere and always another test to take to rule out cancer or another serious disorder.  You learn, or you better learn, to live with uncertainty:  your body is more your antagonist than your glory, and you don't know when your ticket will be punched, but punched it will be.

So, get on with it, you tell yourself.  I spend a lot of time these days looking back.  The past looks more interesting than the future.  Gleaning my personal experience and others for answers, for guidance, for meaning.  And, now out from under the yoke of all-math-all-the-time, the imperative to write has surged in like water through an opened sluice gate.

All of this to say that at least for 5 months, I won't be whining (at least not about math) and there will not be any blood splatter on the monitor as I try to prove the infinity of ∏.   My plan is to do a self-study of linear and abstract algebra -- okay, I'll wait while you snort through your nose -- but like working out at home it's far too easy to jettison self-imposed deadlines and projects.  We all know it, but that's the plan.

Etc.

I knew about the wrinkles and the aches and the pains.  I even was prepared for one's big nose to get bigger.  The sometimes not-so-subtle decline in energy, the been-there-seen-that attitude towards everything.  But the beard and mustache?  The teeth that break while you're eating a hamburger?  Come the fck on!?!?!?!?!

Geez.  Louise.  I'm old enough to expect that every quarterly visit to my internist will be followed with a "Let's run some tests ..." remark sure to send me into an anxious frenzy about tainted blood and exponentially massing tumors.  But waking up in the morning looking like a Snidely Whiplash avatar?  I.  Did.  Not.  Sign.  Up.  For.  This.

 When did I get old?  All of which has made me consider how to best get into the classroom as a math teacher.  Thinking now that I'll work towards certification so that at the pace I'm going (one class at a time) I should be finished by 63 years of age.  (Driving around the other day in the big-ass Nissan Cuthbert bought, slowing down just enough for some 10 year old boys to get out of the street before they became human Mobius strips and one of them says, Hi Grandma!  I'm done.)  I am trying to keep soul and body together enough to be effective.  (This summer's sojourn at the Fitness Center has been a life-saver.  My blood pressure is astoundingly normal.  It's so low that that I take my pulse to make sure I'm alive.)  The semester begins in a couple of weeks and along with the premature September weather (except there's still August light) -- watch, it'll be followed by one hell of an Indian Summer -- and the V-wedge of geese I very much feel that the summer is coming to it's end.

99% of the grand plans I had for the summer remain grand, and undone.  I've been working on the same short story for 3 months.  I'm practically rewriting every sentence (with the ghost of Raymond Carver looking over my shoulder) yet it feels premature and illegitimate.  Like putting lipstick on a pig because I don't think the story is fully baked, but without this kind of cosmetic attention I don't know if I'll stay embedded enough to figure out how to fix it.  I am putting an artificial deadline on getting it done.  I cannot, can't even conceive of doing fiction and doing combat with my next class, Algebraic Structures.  (4 credit hours of begging the professor pull out my fingernails instead, I'm sure.)  Off goes the writer's beanie, on goes the mathematician's beret.  If summer weren't so hot I'd order another month, but 30 additional days would just be the Sword of Damocles over my head 30 days longer.  So, it ends when it ends.  The story and the summer.

There are 2 things that I did accomplish:

1.  Strength-trained myself into better shape.  Now when I raise my arms I don't cause a tsunami in Indonesia, and

2.  made quite a lot of progress on my Front Yard of Eden (notice the pumpkin taking over):

 

Crossing the Rubicon of Middle Age

This is one of my la-la-la posts.  It won't be peppered with anger about racism or shitty public education.  Or marriage and taxes.  All that is the background noise of life today.  (My NSA listener must be bored to death.  It's not like 2005 when in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend I'd gratuitously burp Fuck Bush and then continue with my conversation.)  What I wanted to mention is that for the first time in my life since I started to garden I hired someone to do some of the work.  The simple fact that somebody else's arms and shoulders were digging holes and turning soil and pulling bushes out by the roots seemed to inspire me.  I realized then as I watched J. work in the rain that the dread of going down on my knees was keeping me from turning the front yard (my patch) into a grass-free oasis instead of the weed factory farm it has been since the snow melted.

You may think that you are 30 but your knees and hips will tell you otherwise.  Now if I want certain kinds of physical work done I'll have to pay for it; either in cash or aching muscles.  Now that I think about it did Michaelangelo get winched up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling every morning after a mint latté?  Don't think so.

Enervation

There are those words, that no matter how careful you are, you can't shake the original incorrect definition your brain has latched onto for dear life.  Enervation is one of those words for me.  I cannot help thinking such things as joyous, lighter than air, ephemeral, light, and so on and so forth.  Instead it means (h/t to Merriam Webster):
 Definition of ENERVATE

1: to reduce the mental or moral vigor of

2: to lessen the vitality or strength of

— en·er·vat·ing·ly adverb

— en·er·va·tion noun

Examples of ENERVATE

1. <a lifetime of working in dreary jobs had enervated his very soul>
2. <the surgery really enervated me for weeks afterwards>

And that, Dear Reader, is what I feel today after my first full body workout after about 10 years away from the gym.  How could I resist?  The university offers a 3 month membership for $25 (although godknows I've paid for this many times over in all the  "registration fees" I'm assessed each and every semester I enroll in a class.)  And since I've gotten tired of the sound of rotating helicopter blades every time I raise my hands above my head (and yes, my age cohort female friends, I'm talkin' about us) I thought why not?  Why not indeed?  I drove my sorry ass home, took a shower, sat upright for a half-hour and then promptly went to bed with my clothes on.  Tomorrow I expect to be put in an iron lung.

I've been through this twice before -- once in my late 30's when my friend Shawn seduced me into going to the Harlem Y with him.  (I should have put a camera around my neck and pretended I was a tourist.)  After that I told everyone who'd listen that I felt like I'd just birthed quintuples and then got run over by a Mack truck.  Then the bout of fitness in my late 40's because the Brooklyn Y was 2 blocks away.  That's where I started to lift weights and loathe yoga.  Both times I grew to love the bodywork; wouldn't miss it the way some wouldn't miss church.  Now, in my late 50's I'm at it again.

The stakes are higher for sure.  So far this year I've got a 4 figure physical therapy bill to pay down, and every time I stub my toe I fear I'll be paralyzed.  It's time to preserve what I've got and if I'm lucky maybe go at this long enough to actually experience an energy gain and significant weight loss.  I am my own summer project.  But first things first:  how am I going to get out of bed tomorrow?!

This I Know About Getting Old

You gather around the radio on Saturday night to listen to "Prairie Home Companion".
And dress for it.

Everyone you meet you've met before.

The list of food and beverages you can ingest without doing serious harm to your body and mind is getting smaller and blander.

Never shocked, seldom surprised when you learn about the death of contemporaries.

 Almost every fantasy is nipped in the bud with the admonition, "That ship has sailed."

I've never been ashamed of my age.  Of course when I was a little girl I wanted to be a big girl; and when I was a teenager I wished I was old enough for some of the men who were buying me drinks, but ask me how old I am and I'll tell you the age I will be once I've reached my birthday milestone for that calendar year.

Except for now having sat in class for 2 semesters with 19, 20, 25 year olds.  Once again for the first time I'm in an environment where I'm simultaneously conspicuous and resoundingly invisible as an almost 60 year African-American woman taking a Calculus class.  I can see it from their POV:  She's almost dead; what's she doing here?  In some ways it's the Same 'Ol Same 'Ol -- girls good in math, African-Americans good in math, now it's competitive old hags doing math -- cognitive dissonance personified.

So, when one of my fellow students and I were chatting before class one day comparing notes about when either of us will be done I pulled my punches when I calculated out loud that I'd be about (cough) sixty-blah blah blah by the time I got my degree.  What a coward, I thought instantly.  All because I overheard a 19 year old ask a guy with a monk's tonsure how old he was and he said 36 and she gasped.  (You would have thought he farted in the elevator.)  I said to myself, they will not turn around and ask me.  They will not dare.  And they didn't.  Not to protect my sensibilities, mind you, but because even for the Facebook generation it would be TMI to know that that were taking a class with a 57 years old.  I mean that's like going bar hopping with your grandma.  Ewwwwwwwwwwww ...  One more class and I get to play with kids more my own age.  Or so I've been led to believe.