Room service, please!

The experience didn't quite match my expectations.

There is much in life like that, isn't there? I remember the first (and last) time I rode a ferris wheel. Never mind that I was in my 30s. Leaving the ground seems like such a foolish thing for people to do. I finally got up the nerve and climbed into that basket that insisted on rocking wildly no matter how still I sat, and then I was facing a lot of empty sky as the wheel turned and carried me upward. It was even worse when I was going backwards. At least I did it once.

Early this month I took a cruise to the Bahamas. I used to live in the Islands so that part wasn't new at all. Being on a cruise ship, though....all of that is relatively new to me. And this time I did "my thing I've never done before" by ordering room service for breakfast one morning.

I've never had enough money to do  things like that, so just the idea was extravagent to me. Have someone bring my meal to me in my room, and I can stay in my pink fluffy robe to eat breakfast? Unthinkable. But on a cruise, your food is included in the price of your ticket. As much of it as you want. Whenever or wherever you want it. Heaven.

So, we put the hanging order form on the door knob before going to bed the night before. We even specified what time we wanted it delivered in the morning. And, sure enough, a knock on the cabin door woke us, along with hot coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon. And pancakes. Plus orange juice and fresh fruit. There may even have been a bowl of cereal with milk. Don't you love it?

I took the food-laden tray from the perky young woman who delivered it, turned around, and stopped. There was no place to put it except on the bed. These cabins are tight. Doors open and one of us has to flatten against the wall. Forget getting any privacy while you're in the bathroom. There must be about 50 square feet in the entire space you get along with all the food you want. Of course, you don't spend a lot of time in your cabin on a cruise, but even still, I needed a place to lay that tray down before I dropped the whole thing on the floor.

The only flat surface available was the bed. Have you ever eaten a whole meal in bed before? Two people trying desperately not to tip the edges of the cups and bowls far enough to slosh all over the sheets, the ones we needed to sleep in later that night. Not the experience I had envisioned, that's for sure. 

There is a first time for everything, and I'm having fun seeking new adventures out each month. Aging to perfection means being willing to step outside my personal comfort zone, stretching that zone far beyond what I thought was even possible for me.

Some I have repeated. Some have become part of my life.

Room service won't be one of them.

Room service? Send up a larger room.

Groucho Marx

 

Just kidding.....

Life is such a kidder. 

A year ago, my life was filled with unexpected magic, marked with a new-found love of ballroom dancing and I had work that met both my creative needs and my "making a living and paying the bills" needs. And although I wasn't looking for it, romance tracked me down, sat on me long enough to get my attention, and convinced me that I could have a relationship without giving up my independence. The moon and stars had aligned perfectly in my world.

Aging to perfection has taught me many things. This lesson has been a tough one, although I should not have been taken aback.  I've been through it before. We all have. Just when you think you have everything under control, the car needs new brakes (or some other tricky mechanical part that always costs the rent money for the next two months) or the dentist looks at your X-rays and sighs way too loud. A call from your child's school brings bad news that needs to be addressed before things really spin out of control for the whole family. We sigh and forge ahead, doing the best we can, as we can.

For me, it all started to unravel around March. My dance lessons were taken away from me (along with a couple of thousand dollars that would have paid for those lessons through the end of this year), as well as a huge void where trust in someone else had resided. My work (the one that pays the bills) got so busy that my creative work was put on the back burner, along with some of my sanity. And the one who enticed me out of my single-hood fell ill last week with life-threatening issues, too soon, way too soon.

The low-grade depression is back, the one that I have lived with much of my life, the one that is now dancing with glee instead of me. The smile that had taken up center stage, not only on my face but within my soul, is pretty much gone. I can pull it out when people expect to see it, when the social occasion demands it, but it's a sad replacement for the real thing. How can it be otherwise when all that is left is sadness?

And then I remind myself: Now I CAN dance when before I was so intimidated and awkward that I wouldn't even try. I HAVE work that I love, at a time when so many have none at all. And love found me when I wasn't even looking. Nothing is promised to any of us, and I have so much.

Robert Frost said, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.” And it is up to us how it goes on. 

So, I choose to keep on dancing on my own terms, whenever I can. I choose to scratch my words onto the paper as best I can, whenever I can. And I choose to love as long as I can, however I can.

And I'm not kidding.

Disguises.......

Once you embark on the road to “things you’ve never done before,” you find yourself skipping faster and faster from one new experience to the next. Kind of like Dorothy, minus the red shoes. Unless the shoes are new, too.

My journey into the realm of unique experiences began nearly two years ago, after I realized I was stuck in the mundane. And scared witless about turning 60. Since then, my life has been transformed as I learned to dance, cruised to various ports, surfed the Atlantic, and rode a motorcycle, to name just a few  once-a-month adventures.

One surprising aspect of all of this has been that I initially started out struggling to think of activities I had never tried, but once my mind (and body) finally realized I was serious, my world opened itself to the possibilities.

Last month ended with Halloween, a “holiday” I have never been particularly fond of. As a kid, it seemed my first major cold of every winter showed up around this time of year, and I had to stay home while everyone else went out begging for candy. Any costumes I had were assembled from items on hand around the house. I remember dressing like a “hobo” a few times, complete with dirty face and tattered clothes. A stick with clothes hanging on the end completed the outfit.

My all-time favorite costume was the year I transformed myself into a Boston fern, but that was hand-made, too. A store-bought outfit had always been out of the realm of my experience.

Until this year.

Halloween happened to fall on the same night a friend of mine sings in a hole in the wall bar each week, so a costume party was planned and the hobo thing is no longer politically correct, right? Without even plotting and planning a “new thing” for October, I stopped in at the costume store that popped up in a vacant store- front near my house.

For the first time in my life, I bought a Halloween costume. I transformed myself into Guinevere, complete with draping sleeves and flowing velvet train. Not only was the costume a first for me, but my escort became Lancelot for the evening. I was half of a couple, something that hasn’t been my experience often, either.

As I share this story with you, I’m cruising along the coast of Florida, with yet another new experience in the record book. They just keep coming faster and faster. But you’ll have to wait a while to hear that one.

Happy Halloween!

Hope and a lot of change.....

Let’s talk about change. Not necessarily hope. Just change.

The kind that collects in the bottom of a woman’s purse or a man’s pockets.

Periodically I empty all of the coins from my wallet into a smaller change purse I carry so that my wallet doesn’t look like a chipmunk preparing for a bad winter. I’m not sure what I’ve gained, though, since all that metal is still weighing my shoulder down. It does seem to help for some reason that I can’t explain, though.

Pennies have their own repository in a ceramic dish in my kitchen. When they start falling out of the dish onto the counter, I gather them up and make a trip to that noisy machine inside the door of my local grocery store that whirs and sorts and counts and then spits out bills at me. Who said a penny has no value?

Here’s the thing I’ve been pondering, though. I’ve noticed that “older” shoppers (certainly older than me) must really hate change. There are many levels to this statement—many don’t react well to new ideas or ways of doing things or they haven’t taken the plastic off their furniture in decades—but let’s focus here on the coins that are the inevitable result of buying things. That kind of change. It’s just going to happen.  You give someone a $5 bill for an item that rings up at $4.27 and boom—there it is. Seventy-three cents to add to the collection in your wallet or pocket.

But seniors must hate the stuff beyond all reason, because the next time they step up to the counter to pay, here’s how it goes. Their purchases total $16.63, but rather than hand over the $10, the $5, and 2 one dollar bills, they start digging in their wallets or pants to come up with exactly sixty-three cents to add to the $16 they have begrudgingly pulled out. (We won’t even discuss the oft-seen option of attempting to ferret out the $1.63 entirely in change. My heart won’t take it.) And heaven forbid they use the $20 bill they have hidden in there. Not going to happen.

In the meantime, we all stand patiently (or not so much) behind them, watching this archaeological dig, as the clock tick-tick-ticks away our perpetually disappearing time. And maddeningly, all this searching sometimes ends with, “Oh, here!” as they toss bills on the counter anyway. They give up the quest, and we all sigh in relief.

Maybe legal tender for those over a certain age should ONLY be paper money. No change allowed at all for them. I’m sure merchants wouldn’t mind, especially if they round up to the next dollar when they see white hair approaching. None of us would mind, either.

That would be a welcome change, wouldn’t it?

We can always hope.

 What I like most about change is that it's a synonym for 'hope.' 

Linda Ellerbee 

The LIST......

No one told me about this. There are just so many surprises as we age, aren’t there?

It seems that the day your Medicare card arrives in the mail, something else comes with it. I’ve never actually seen this list of “ ready-to-use after age 65” statements  myself, but I’ve been exposed to enough people in this category to surmise that it does indeed exit. It has to….why else would so many older folks use them on a daily basis?

You know the ones I mean, right?

“Look how fast he’s going!! What’s the big hurry anyway??”

“Only girls wear earrings. And he needs a haircut, too.”

“Look at all those tattoos! You know what they’ll look like when they’re our age, don’t you?”

“How do you carry that purse around? I’m surprised you don’t have back problems.”

“Why can’t they have paper towels in bathrooms anymore? I hate these blower things.”

And my personal favorite:

“Why are all these people out on the roads? Isn’t it a work day? I thought there was a recession.”

And each such statement is followed with a sound that I used to think writers made up, but it actually does exist. I’ve heard it myself:

Harumph!

But to make it all the more fun, EVERY time we drive an interstate or go shopping, or need to use a public bathroom or venture forth anywhere, the applicable statement is pulled out from their wallets (behind their Medicare cards where they hide it, I guess) and used as if WE are deaf and didn’t hear it the first thousand times or so they said it.

I know, I know. I’ll be there myself soon and should have more empathy. In all fairness, it does seem to take a few years past 65 before these statements are used regularly, but they seem to catch up with everyone eventually.

You’re probably right, I should be more understanding, but in the two years until that happens, I’m taking my huge purse and going shopping. I may even speed a little along the way.

And I’m sure I’ll hit a few bathrooms while I’m out (a topic in this category for another day), and I assure you that I won’t mind those hand blowers a bit.



 The older you get, the more you tell it like it used to be.
-- Author Unknown

 

 

 

 

Turn off that television.....

Who IS that person?

The one on the television screen with the deep creases etched along her mouth and all the crinkly skin bunched around her neck like a band of folded tissue paper. Discarded tissue paper at that.

Oh. As much as I want to turn away in horror, denying the truth, it's me.

We often speak in cliches, blithely, with no attachment to those words...until we are slapped with them on a personal level. Until they are describing us and not the old lady who lives down the street.

Like hearing your own voice, recorded and then played back. "That doesn't sound anything like me," we all say in astonishment. Except that everyone else recognized us instantly as that tape plays on.

Or, as in my case the other day, "Who IS that old lady?" I said. Everyone else called and emailed, though, saying how great I looked on a recent TV interview about my book, Nothing to Complain About. What am I to make of that? (How I looked, not that I AM complaining about it. I'll have to deal with that issue another day.) I saw myself on the screen and was shocked right out of my complacency. My internal life is so much younger than that face looking out at me, the one belonging to someone I don't even recognize. Not even a little bit.

My reaction since has been all over the emotional map, running the gamut from pricing face-lifts to wanting to crawl under the bed covers for the rest of my life. Certainly not to be seen on television. Ever again. I feel much like I did when I turned 60, the depression settling around my ears (at least ears don't seem to wrinkle...do they?), a low-grade angst residing in my belly like a rock.

As is often the case, our children can put us back on track, either by distracting us with all their shenanigans that we are required to deal with, or by simply speaking the truth without worrying about our reaction ahead of time. Even if they are adults, as is my daughter.

"I guess the important thing, Mom, is that you don't FEEL like an old lady," she said as I groused and complained (yep, I did it again) about my appearance on television. Well, let's be honest here....about my appearance period. She knows me well, this young woman who I raised as a a single parent for over 15 years. She knows that I take ballroom dance lessons, do interval weight training at my gym several times a week, undertake a new adventure every month (some of which she has been witness to), and write educational materials for teenagers to name just a few of the things that keep me busy....and young in heart and mind and (some parts of my) body.

No old ladies live in my house, that's for sure.She knows that and on many levels, I know that, too.

But just to be safe, keep those TV cameras away from me in the future, OK?

 A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.  ~John Barrymore

Bringing home the bacon.....

Murky, murky, murky. Life just gets less and less transparent as the years go by. Highly inconvenient, I must admit.

I might have thought....if I had thought about it at all.....that age and the accompanying maturity would lend itself to knowing the answers a litte faster or easier than when we clattered around in our 20s or 30s. Maybe even longer depending on some folks' inability to learn from mistakes.

I'm a very independent woman, a state that is a result of both my personality as well as the circumstances of my life. Raising children on your own will do that, believe me. You learn quickly that there are few people you can truly rely on, maybe even having the axiom, "If you want something done right, do it yourself" stenciled on your living room wall. In bright red.

But the longer you live within that bubble of self-sufficiency the less it appears that you need anyone else or their help for anything at all. Many women build walls that are strong and often tower over those (and I mean men, of course) who get too close, either inadvertantly or with good intentions of being useful.

Soon we begin to believe it ourselves, the fact that we don't need anyone, we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much, so everyone needs to stand back behind that solid concrete wall, that one that we erected over the years for protection.

But the problem is that we DO need each other in lots of ways that have nothing to do with one gender being "weaker" or "stronger."  It has to a lot to do with the undeniable symbiosis inherent in being human in our culture, and less to do with gender inequities that still exist whether we like to think so or not.

I can carry on successfully by myself.....if we're measuring success by dollars and cents. Our culture, though, sometimes traps both men and women into identity roles that we don't even notice after a while. We're so used to clutching either our independence or our deeply ingrained sense of role tightly to our chests that we miss each other completely. The fact that I could support myself was not the same as not needing anything.

I didn't need a man to pay my bills or "bring home the bacon" but I did need someone to support me emotionally. Life is hard, and it is nice to have a shoulder to cry on or a hand to hold as we face the storms together.

Rather than being constrained by the male/female roles of weak vs strong that still slither around the edges of our society, maybe we should just all relax and be human instead. I can ask for help without threatening my independence, and it can be offered without fear of being rebuffed as sexist.

I used to think this was all so clear.

"Limits exist only in the mind."