be very afraid

On the way to Niagara Falls will my ten year old Kyra, we had one very long day of travel. At noon we pulled off and I chose a Bob Evans restaurant - kind of a family restaurant, admittedly filled with grey heads. But it worked and we were off again.

In the middle of the afternoon we stopped at a rest stop in PA. As we parked a tour bus was unloading a hoard of elder on a trip to wherever, so I hustled Kyra into the bathroom knowing the line would quickly get long. When we emerged there were dozens of elderly women waiting to get into the bathroom. A small victory.

We got to Niagara Falls at 7, got our hotel, and went to find food. I chose a Swiss Chalet, which is a roasted chicken version of Smitties.

Suddenly Kyra's eyes got big and in a voice two octives higher than her

usual, and with undisguised concern, "Mimi! Those old people are

following us around!"

It was the best line of the trip.

on funerals of old ladies

Tomorrow we bury Eliza - a military funeral for an ancient old woman who was an army nurse in the second world war. Eliza, as I know her, was a wizened up old lady with brown creased skin and a scratchy voice. Now that she is dead I find out she was a beauty, a cover girl for the army nurse magazines. She raised her five girls after the death of a husband and lived well to the end.

I have this idea that when a person dies the picture in the paper should be of them in their prime, not their dotage if they have had the privilege of getting there. At death we are neither our old self nor our young self, so why not celebrate and remember a person as they were before decay insulted them?

Eliza will have a full military funeral. She will have her simple casket draped in a flag. Her death is marked by respect and notice, something she may have not known in many of her last years as she moved through culture.

We cannot know if our own death is thundering toward us or creeping stealthily from miles away. What matters, it seems to me, is that our inner landscape is livable. Sometimes we are tired of days and unbeautiful, and other times exploding with laughter and love. Sometimes we and our hearts are tired and find the world inhospitable, others we see a huge vault of treasure in each day. Whatever, this is life at any age.

One of the blessings of aging is that the possibility of becoming kinder and more merciful becomes a reality. It is a privilege to become old. Perhaps a gift of genetics, happenstance, economic privilege, and relationships ... perhaps an ordained state. Either way, I am thinking that to tend the inner landscape while the outer has lurches of deconstruction is a good way to live.

Here's to you, Eliza.

complaints from nature

This is a lament. I have three bites since coming home from Niagara Falls. And none of them is a love bite - I know, 'eeee-ew!'

I have spider bite on my rib cage - and it is vexing me terribly.

I have a mosquito bite under my right arm. Honestly, it is driving me crazy.

And I have another rather large mosquito bite on my left buttock. No - I did NOT say a mosquito bite on my rather large left buttock! (Be thankful I attached a picture of a mosquito and NOT a buttock...)

I must be a tasty treat to have garnered such attention from the bug world.

The bottom line - I am cranky! And itchy. And vexed. And peeved. All I can do is continue to spray them with Windex - which works despite all your rolling eyeballs.

And you - stop smiling!

so what's a ten year old got that I don't?

In the last week my ten year old granddaughter and I made a 2500 mile road trip to Niagara Falls. (And can I say, "this is not your father's Niagara Falls.") The falls are no longer a spacious verdant bound space of tranquility and awe. More, they are a carnival ground drawing visitors away from the spectacular falls and into dark halls of horror, drama and trivia. The ancient Canadian tribe, the Hucksters have their treasures on every corner. One coffee and an ice cream cone was nine dollars.

My granddaughter, being ten, as I said, made a most companionable escort. Let me speak of her charms:

• complete dexterity enabling her to make herself comfortable in a car, including but not limited to feet out the window, seat back and milk shake balanced on the arm rest or curled up sound asleep with head on the middle arm rest, one foot out the window and one on the radio



• a smile for everyone, especially anyone looking sad - including befriending a group of seven Hutterite (think Amish) girls who looked distinctly out of place and quite uncomfortable



• a joyful comment on every situation - 'see Mimi! everything that happens turns out good, even the bad things like me having to go to the bathroom as soon as we got a long ways away from a bathroom!'



• ability to suck the juices out of life - one afternoon we were sitting at a little table, surrounded by others and noise and food and life. We had laid out our water color paints and were painting the falls, and a musician was playing his guitar nearby. It was a peak moment. We emptied three boxes of Smarties (think M&M's only better chocolate) and lined them up according to color ... so we had rows of green and red and purple and brown etc. The girl could not contain her delight in the perfect moment. People stopped to see our rather amateurish art and she engaged every one with charm and joy



• no need to compete, with me or anyone. She is absolutely able to live bodily in the moment. I sadly know that in a few short years she will begin to doubt herself. Let it not be so, but our girls seem to be assaulted from within around eleven or twelve



• free of self consciousness. We bought a bright pink hat with hanging plush balls all around, which she proudly wore everywhere we went



• flexibility - when the plan changed and we did not do or see something she was completely agreeable

So... what could be more delightful? We tried to see all the real things (aka Marineland, Butterfly Atrium, Maid of the Mist boat, a few wild carnival rides etc) and avoid the crass entertainment (aka Hall of Horrors, Ripley's Believe it or Not, etc.) We saw the falls from all angles: from the cliff walk alongside, from the air (the Skyline Wheel), from the water (Maid of the Mist boat in which we got soaked to the bone much to her delight), and from a high bridge (Peace Bridge from the US).

Also noted is I taught her to 'petooohee' which is to spit your gum out through the open window on the opposite side of the car as you speed down the highway. (This last feat was the most trying, as I had to suffer several packs of gum landing, piece by piece, on my person, having not quite made it out the window.) These are the things only a gramma can teach. Leave the small things like grooming, coping with friendships, doing homework etc. to parents.

So I am home and stored deep in my grandkid is a good piece of healthy love for her to draw on. In the future I am going to try to be more like her.

going bananas

When my dad came to the end of a restaurant meal, it was not unheard of for him to ask for the menu so he could check that the prices he was charged were correct. We used to mutter under our breath, and remind each other that he had lived through 'the great depression' and thus, his penny pinching was understandable.

Today I saw three rotting bananas on the counter and felt compelled to make use of them before all those black spots finally came together and made one big stinking fly infested dead banana. It was waste I could not countenance.

Then there were the two bananas left, ones that were actually a little too green. But in my fit of banana-mamma kitchen prowess I made a banana cream pie - complete with whip cream and little chocolate chip hunks on top.

In a remarkable coincidence, I also learned today, that a mashed banana is the best lure to attract a skunk into a live trap. The banana will not attract and may repel the neighbors cat, and keep the target animal, well, the target. This I learned watching Corwin's World with my granddaughters.

So you see, it was a day of banana-ish enterprise. Quite a nice way to spend the second day of vacation. No one gets ulcers from bananas. A little personal growth in the matter of setting skunk traps - never know when that will be needed. And right now I think I will go and cut a large slice of that pie. No one ever got fat from a banana, right?

I am my age

"let me take advantage, then, of the warmth that is still in me and which may at any moment be chilled by the affirmities of age..." (Mariquise de La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, age 50).


About two weeks ago my very young staff workers laughingly plunked a fat hardcopy book on my desk. It had been gathered in by a book collection intended for schools in Africa. This book, "The Change" by feminist author Germaine Greer was deemed by them, not suitable for African youngsters, but apparently suitable for me. I laughed. Took it home. And started to read.

I did not read the feminist writers in their hay day of the fifties and sixties. I was a bit young for them. This book is published in the 90's. And I am eating it up. This book is about me. And it is about me when hardly anything is about me. In fact, recently I told my very young and nubile daughter that I wanted something to be 'about me'. About my feelings. About my accomplishments. About how life is for me. But I am in the invisible period of life. After all, what is interesting about a woman in her fifties?

Well. If you don't know, read Germaine Greer.

Just a taste, on 'the pressure to keep young and fit and beautiful if you want to be loved:

A woman has a duty to go on 'being attractive' no matter how fed up she is with the whole business. She is not allowed to say, 'Now I shall let myself go: letting herself go is a capital offence against the sexist system. (I did tell you she is a feminist.)

Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

Women should not have to masquerade as girls in order to remain in the land of the living.

Greer talks about the mid life change in women, from a productive to a reflective person, as a fascinating but hidden process. In part or whole it goes unseen, not because it is uninteresting or pitiful.

If there is a belief that nothing happens to middle aged women, it is only because middle aged women do not talk about what does happen to them. (At this point of reading my blog I know my daughter is cringing thinking, 'that's all we need - mom to be encouraged to talk more about what is happening to her!' :-)

If there is something to say, why not say it? I have lived fifty years. I have been a source of life, figuratively and in fact, and a manager of death, walking in where very few would go. My arms have held the body of a dead infant. I have walked as close to death as is possible with others. I have gathered the spiritual an psychic resources to not be afraid of either.

I heard Dr. Oz on Oprah - so that makes it authoritative, right? - say that people call the doctor not so much to get a solution and restore health, but to bring order to the situation. The doctor is not afraid of sickness and death, and thus, even when the situation really does not improve, we all feel much helped simply by his/her presence. I get it. And I can do in life what Dr. Oz is talking about.

I am fifty two. I do not look good in shorts. My years force idiosyncratic changes on me that I am not invited but forced to deal with. But my life is moving more and more away from anxiety and striving and into the deep waters of a gentle and peaceful potency. I am not afraid of life, finally, even as I serve tea to death more often.

Greer says the journey inwards towards wisdom and serenity is as long as the headlong rush of our social and sexual career, if not longer, but there are no signposts to show the way. She is right - if there are women beckoning the way, I don't know who they are.

So maybe I can be one of those. When I was in my twenties I looked around for older women (aka - late thirties, forties) who might be what I wanted to become. I could find few. So I decided that with God's help and my intention I would strive to become one of those for the women who come after me. It has been a lifelong goal.

Now in my fifties I see that my choice is to quit striving and begin to listen patiently to all of life, and in so doing, aim towards being someone who is, at least, not silent about this season. Sorry Rae.

I don't think what I will finally say will be the same as what Germaine would say. But I thank her for giving me a nudge to be me, right now, and enjoy this lively time of being a woman.

on slow motion

She told me she watched it happen in slow motion. She sits nursing her newborn and watches a bee fly like a drunken sailor toward her two year old. Buzz lands on the tender neck. Little girl picks at it. Buzz stings. Little girl screams. All slow motion.

This morning at 6 a.m. I am on the front porch having coffee, front door open to let the breeze through. A big ugly bug (such as only Kentucky can dream up) flys up and around the porch. As I watch, in slow motion, the bug lazily flys into my house ... where it will no doubt land in my gaping mouth in the middle of the night.

Sigh - I 've heard that accidents happen in slow motion. I've seen it on TV- the ball spins slower and slower and hits the lady on the head and she drops dead.

So as long as life is fast I guess it's good.

This blog has no hidden meaning. It is a blog and only a blog, and if it read in slow motion to you, then you had better watch out. It's not going to be a good day.