![]() I have been spending a lot of time in my recliner watching TV lately. I think it is an avoidance mechanism. I have been feeling like I just want to transport myself somewhere else for a while instead of dealing with everyday life. This is particularly ironic because I like to watch what is referred to as “reality” shows. Perhaps I like them because they are so far away from anything actually based in reality. Right now it’s “Project Runway” where fashion designers compete for a chance to show their work at fashion week in New York. It appeals to my Home Economics side. I like the sewing part and the fashion aspect of this show. As they get eliminated, Heidi Klum kisses them on the cheeks and bids them “Auf Wiedersehen.” A while ago I was fascinated by a show called "Married at First Sight" where three couples were matched by "experts" and married without even seeing their spouse before the wedding. I was like a deer in the headlights as I watched these couples struggle with trying to build a relationship based on nothing more than the fact that some supposed experts thought they were a good match. In some ways my life would make a perfect reality show. Various unsuspecting people looking for a room to rent are brought into the home of a “Little Old Lady with Cats.” It would be a more mature version of the MTV series “Real World.” I have actually had some TV worthy experiences with my housemates. I remember the woman who snuck a pot bellied pig into her room. I was asleep at the time it came in, but I have vivid memories of it squealing as it left, tucked under the arm of her boyfriend. Luckily she was moving out at the time. ![]() When I watch reality shows I surreptitiously experience things I am afraid to pursue in my own life. I can watch other people struggle and make mistakes and have conflicts while I conveniently avoid them in my own life. I hate making mistakes and I hate conflict but I am fascinated by the way people on reality shows deal with these things. Writing about this is good. It’s taking me out of my “Woe is me” place and making me realize I DO have a "Real Life" and I don’t need to be afraid to make mistakes. I have actually been willing to take some risks in the past and my willingness to share my home is a good example. I think it’s time for me to get out of my recliner and do the things I have been avoiding. As Tim Gunn on “Project Runway” says when one of the designers is having a tough time, I need to “Make it work!”
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When I was a child I learned about heaven and hell, but mostly heaven. In the Lutheran church there was not a lot of fire and brimstone. I learned that God is loving and accepting and we will all get together in heaven after we die. This really stuck with me. I have been thinking about what Dad has been doing since he died. The fact that I want to write about this implies that I believe in life after death. The truth is sometimes I’m not sure what I believe. I know what I hope. It is almost a year since my Dad died. I’m feeling sad and coming face to face with what “Life after Death” means to me. ![]() I hope my Dad went to heaven and was greeted by my Mom, my sister, and his parents, siblings, and friends. His death happened one month after his 101st birthday and just days before my Mom’s 101st birthday so I hope they had a big party with balloons and cake. I hope it was a cake big enough so that they could divide the top in half and put 101 candles on each side just like they used to do for my twin sister and I when we had our birthday parties. I suspect you can do things like that in heaven without being afraid of burning the place down. I hope over this last year he has had lots of time to reminisce with everyone. He was quite the story teller so I think heaven for him would be having lots of time to tell his stories and lots of people to listen. I also know heaven for him would be a chance to talk to his father. One of the few times I ever saw him cry was when we were watching a video of “Field of Dreams.” When Kevin Costner’s character was given a chance to meet his father on the baseball field and actually talk to him, tears were streaming down my Dad’s face. I can see him in heaven, sitting on a rock by a river talking to his father, just as he was in a favorite photo I have of them. ![]() I sometimes wonder what people look like in heaven. I imagine my parents looking the way they do in my dreams, middle aged like they were when we were kids. I wonder how they saw themselves in their own dreams, probably younger than I remember them. Do you go back to a more youthful you in heaven like the people in my dreams? Is everyone reincarnated as their best self? What is our best self anyway? I’d like to go back to my 18-year-old body in heaven but with all of my little old lady experiences and knowledge still intact. When I think about it, we probably don’t even have bodies in heaven. It’s more likely all about our spirits and everyone is just kind of glowing and ethereal. ![]() I DO believe that some part of us, perhaps that glowing and ethereal part, survives after death. I went to a Hospice counselor after Dad died. I told her about several people who had experienced contact with Dad after his death. Even though it didn’t happen to me, I truly believe that these experiences were real. My counselor told me she had had a similar experience and that it was not unusual for this to happen. She also told me that Dad was literally alive in me because I am like him in so many ways. I have his patience and his ability to look at things from many perspectives in order to solve problems. I feel his presence in the way I look at life, quiet and thoughtful, steady and strong. Dad had a jest for life. He never stopped looking for ways to enjoy the time he had on this planet and he often said he would love to do it all again. Sometimes I get caught up in the sadness of losing him and forget to enjoy the life I have. I think that's when I need to conjure up the image I have of him in heaven, surrounded by the people he loved, all glowing and ethereal, looking down on me and encouraging me to embrace life here on earth the way that he did.
Last night I put the cupboard doors I had removed back on the cupboards. It was a challenge because the hinges are the hidden European kind that have multiple adjustment possibilities. You wouldn’t think that putting doors on cabinets would be exhausting, but I was sweating. I utilized all my resources, checking the internet for directions on how to align the cabinet doors. I felt the ghost of my Dad and his patience and tenacity guiding me as I embraced my handywoman persona. I saw myself with a flowing cape and hands on my hips like “Wonder Woman” from the old TV show, but with a more chunky body and overalls instead of spandex.
Are the cabinets perfect? Nooooooo. Are the cabinets done? Noooooooo. But eventually I will finish them because I am “HANDY WOMAN!!!!!!!” It’s interesting how doing something like this is so uplifting. I can’t change everything in my house that needs updating by myself, but this project is enough right now to give me the impetus to tackle one thing at a time, one day at a time. ![]() I went on line to see what recommendations there are for maintaining brain function as you get older. There was general consensus that the basic healthy lifestyle of eating fruits and veggies, exercising, and getting plenty of sleep are important. Watching your weight was also suggested. I do watch my weight but that’s about all I do, watch it. I know it’s time to get real about the numbers I am watching on the scale. My research confirmed that staying in contact with people and engaging your brain with new experiences is a good way to keep your mind in shape. I hope blog writing fits into this category. One area I hadn’t thought about as affecting my memory is stress. Evidently being under stress is very bad for your brain. High levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, make it harder to pull out information from your brain's memory. It does make sense that if my brain is ruminating about solving other people’s problems, which is a main area of stress for me right now, it doesn’t leave much room for some of the suggested memory enhancing activities like learning something new and socializing. One website suggested using memory tricks. “To help with recall, post sticky notes around the home and office, or set reminders on your phone so you'll know when it's time to take your medicine or head to an important meeting.” Maybe my old tutor had the right idea. Now excuse me while I write a post-it reminding me to take a nap after I walk around the block while I phone a friend about getting together for a vegetarian dinner. ![]() I have been having quite a few “senior moments” lately. I wonder how much of this is just normal wear and tear on my brain and how much is a serious slide into senility. Here are some of the issues: 1. Forgetting what I am doing as I move from room to room in my home. I know a lot of people who have this problem, and it’s not a new phenomenon for me. It happened when I was younger too. I lose my focus when I see something new that catches my attention, like a dog who spots a squirrel and runs after it. This seems a bit worse than it was in my younger days. 2. Forgetting where I am going when I am driving. The other day I drove right past Home Depot even though moments before I had told a friend who was in the car with me that we were going there. I got almost all the way to Orchard Supply before she reminded me we were going to THE OTHER home supply store. Granted I was immersed in conversation (which I can’t remember anything about right now either), but it was less than a minute before my mind and my car veered off to the wrong store. 3. Forgetting to do an important part of a task before it is finished. I can’t even say how many times I have forgotten to turn off the pump in my bathtub that I use to recycle water into my backyard as a water-saving drought measure. Even though I tell myself I’m going to come right back and check it, if I start watching TV or go into the kitchen to make a sandwich, I lose track of that dang pump. An hour (or two) later, when I have to go to the bathroom, I find it still straining away trying to pump air. I have now placed a hat in my bathroom which I intend to put on my head when I start up the pump. Hopefully I won’t forget why I am wearing a hat. My parents covered the opposite ends of the memory loss spectrum. My Mom had dementia. She always recognized people and would reminisce about memories from her childhood, but new information eluded her. She would ask the same questions over and over, even though she had been given the answer a few moments earlier. She never could figure out how to use the TV remote control because it required a three step process to turn it on. For a while I had the steps posted by the TV but that didn’t work either. My Dad, on the other hand had a memory like a steel trap. We would be in the doctor’s office and he could rattle off the names of all the medications he was taking. I can’t do that and I am only taking two. Just weeks before he died he was working on his election ballot, reviewing the ballot initiatives so he could be an informed voter, and he was 101. I know middle aged people who are not as knowledgeable about the issues as he was. We would discuss politics and religion and all aspects of history, nature, and science. He was a walking encyclopedia. I am afraid I am a little of both my parents. I am not as clearheaded as my Dad but not as forgetful as my Mom. I have the potential to go either way. I just hope that I lean more towards my Dad’s side of the family. When I was in Jr. High I had a serious illness and couldn’t go to school for a few months. I had a home tutor and she was quite flakey. She was so forgetful that she had to safety pin notes to herself of important things she didn’t want to forget. I hope my future “Little Old Lady with cats” persona does not include the possibility of my going around as a human post-it with little pieces of paper pinned to my clothes like my home tutor. It’s bad enough that I have been driven to wear a hat indoors to help me remember to turn off the pump in the bathtub.
With this in mind I embarked on a research project, having a strong desire to be better informed. One of the great things about being retired is that I have the freedom to actually do this kind of research. I figured that the next time the subject came up, I could whip out a string of facts and figures gleaned from the internet to point out the superiority of my viewpoint. As the ego portion of my brain swelled I saw myself as a senior citizen sage, using the lifetime of knowledge I have accumulated and the wealth of information I was about to absorb through modern technology, to inform the masses. I spent a week scouring internet sites and writing and rewriting a treatise on the subject. I shared some of my thoughts with my housemate and he proceeded to shoot a bunch of holes through my reasoning. So much for being a sage. I went back to the internet and spent more time writing, and searching for those illusive facts that would hit the nail on the head and support my opinion. The irony in all of this was that the website where I found ideas that most closely matched my opinions was a conservative Christian Evangelical website. God help me! It was not what I expected and very different from what I know is the mainstream Evangelical opinion on this subject. You could tell they were different by the amount of criticism they received from other conservatives in their email section. The bible quotations that were used on this website to support their viewpoint were about Christian charity, not about judgement and punishment. I could relate. If I didn’t know better, I might consider the people who put this site together flaming bleeding heart liberals, although I doubt they would be happy with that label.
I have been harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and herbs from my garden for a while, but it is now time for my favorite fall harvest, PUMPKINS! I planted four plants, each one a different variety, and I got four pumpkins. It seems to be normal for me to get just one pumpkin per plant, however I remember getting a whole bunch of pumpkins when we planted them as kids. In third grade our teacher saved the seeds from pumpkins we carved in class at Halloween. In the spring, before school was over, we planted our seeds in little milk cartons. I don’t know how many seeds we planted, but my sister and I took our new little pumpkin plants home and put them in the garden. Dad always had a big vegetable garden in the backyard. He helped us put in the pumpkin plants leaving lots of room so they could spread. Pumkins need a lot of space. I loved watching those tiny plants turn into monster vines that covered at least half of the garden. My sister and I were so excited about all the potential pumpkins we were going to have, but my Dad "put the kibosh” on our plans. He didn’t think we would get any. For some reason he told us that he wasn’t sure if the flowers would get pollinated. He explained that pumpkin plants have two kinds of flowers. The female flowers have a little potential pumpkin at their base and “pistils” in the middle of the flower. The male flowers have pollen covered “stamen” instead of pistils. It is the job of the bees to carry the pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers. Dad wasn’t sure if there was enough bee action in our garden to result in actual pumpkins. This discussion was as close as we ever got to any real explanation of the “birds and the bees” from my parents. We were fascinated. ![]() Determined to get our pumpkins we decided to take things into our own hands and do the work of the bees. Armed with small paint brushes we headed out to the garden. We covered every inch of the pumpkin patch, carefully transferring pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers. Dad wasn’t sure if this would work, but apparently it did because we got a bunch of pumpkins. Once we started seeing the pumpkins emerge, we knew we had to protect them from the kid next door. There were no fences dividing yards in the town where I grew up. Everyone’s back yard was open to all the neighbors. On one side of the back yard we had an apple tree. It’s branches hung over the yard next door. The boy who lived there informed us that any apples on the branches that hung over “his property” were his. We believed him. We didn’t want our pumpkins to be subject to this same backyard rule. Every day we went out to the garden and moved the vines that had started to creep towards the property line. We diligently monitored our plants so that the kid next door could not claim any of our pumpkins as his. ![]() The pumpkins got bigger and bigger. Then one day, tragedy struck. Our pumpkins were stolen. Our back yard was open to an alley and someone had come along and cut all of our pumpkins off the vines and tried to haul them away. They were obviously on foot, however, because we found quite a few of them scattered in the alley. They were so big and heavy and there were so many of them that the thieves could not take them all. Still we were devastated. They hadn’t turned completely orange yet and we were afraid that all of our hard work of planting and pollenating and carefully monitoring their growth had gone for naught. Dad assured us that even though they wouldn’t grow any more, they would still turn orange. We hauled them inside for protection, and sure enough, we did have quite a few nice big orange pumpkins that we grew ourselves for Halloween. This pumpkin experience had a profound effect on me. It was a lesson in horticulture and Botany that has served me through many seasons of planting my own garden. It was a lesson in patience and tenacity in the face of the many dangers that people who have open back yards must face, that transferred over into my ability to meet the challenges of life as an adult. And it was a lesson in love, the love of nature and the love of my Dad who was probably chuckling to himself as he watched his twin daughters practicing their lesson about the birds and the bees in our backyard garden. I am not so easily led. I like to back up my research. I too was drawn in when I saw trees with possible royal connections. Yes, I did do a temporary lemming thing and plugged them into Charlie’s tree. Then I started to do the back-up research. It was very disappointing to erase all those high sounding names when reality struck. Unfortunately, although they share a name, Charlie is not related to Charles. Little did I know that lurking in another part of his tree, behind some unassuming farm folk, was the real deal, Henry II and Charlemagne!
My sister is the genealogist in the family. Long before I ever logged onto Ancestry.com, she had already researched our family tree. As a kid, one of her favorite pastimes was scanning the phone book and trying to make connections with people we knew. She loved to check out the family tree book that had been complied by my grandmother’s family. There were some interesting names, like several generations of men called “Preserved Fish.” I fell into doing genealogical research after I retired and now I am hooked. We both got excited when Charlie expressed an interest in knowing about his relatives. Even though Charlie is not even vaguely related to us (although I suspect we both might have a connection somewhere to George W. Bush) we jumped on the opportunity to explore the mystery of a new family tree. I think that is what the appeal is for me, the mystery. I feel like a sleuth when I do genealogical research. I like the feeling of my mind humming along, looking for connections. And who knows, you might hit the jackpot and find a real honest to goodness KING! ![]() September is my Dad’s birthday month. He would have been 102. In his honor I offer some of his memorable sayings, many of which are rooted in the language of the Midwest in general, and Minnesota in Particular. “My get up and go got up and went.” Dad probably said this everyday, particularly as he got older. Now I really get it. I feel this way a lot. Actually, this perfectly describes my energy level today. Along with this phrase came his description of his lack of mobility. He had “two speeds, slow and stopped.” At every doctor’s appointment or meeting with a new caregiver, or even to grocery clerks, Dad would gravely announce “I have TMB.” While the doctor or caregiver or whoever was contemplating what kind of rare disease or mental condition Dad had, he would point out that it stood for “Too Many Birthdays.” Then he would chuckle at his own joke. It used to drive me nuts because he said it so often, now I wish he still had TMB. “Don’t get your pants in a bundle” is a Midwestern version of the British “Don’t get your knickers in a bunch.” I often hear my inner Dad voice saying this to me when I start worrying too much. ![]() Dad had a number of phrases he used to describe people who were mentally off the mark. Coming from Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, one of his favorites was “He doesn’t have all his oars in the water.” As a carpenter he also used a lot of handyman references. “Not the sharpest tool in the shed,” “Not the brightest bulb in the box,” or “She has a screw loose” were part of his repertoire. My sister, who I guess was always in a hurry to do something, remembers him admonishing us to “Hold ‘er Knute!” This was used not only to slow us down, but also as a warning to hold on for just a minute before pursuing some unwise action, like putting a fork in an electric outlet. If you slowed down too much you were “Slow as molasses in January.” Much has been written about the extremely subdued nature of people from Minnesota who live by the Scandinavian code of not being overly emotional. This characteristic is covered quite thoroughly in the book “How to Talk Minnesotan.” I had tears rolling down my face the first time I read this book because it was so Dad. On a scale from really fabulous to horifically bad, the common responses for a Minnesotan are "pretty good," "not too bad," "not too good," and pretty bad." Here are some examples: Me: “I got all A’s on my report card.” Dad: “ That’s pretty good.” Me: “ What do you think of this wedding gown I sewed myself? “ Dad: “Not too bad.” As Dad would say, "If I had my druthers” I would have liked to hear a more effusive reply, but we understood that these phrases were high praise and represented the range of the emotions he was able to express. I used to say that his emotions ran from “A” to “C.” This ability to channel wild emotions worked “pretty good” in negative situations to create a feeling of calm and order. Dad was stoic and calm in emergencies. Me: ( While we were out on a picnic and Dad was building a fire) “You just missed that log and hit yourself in the shin with your hatchet!” Dad: “ It’s not too good. You kids get in the car and I will drive us all to the hospital emergency room.” Me: “There is a tornado headed this way!” Dad: “That’s pretty bad. Let’s all go into the North East corner of the basement.” Dad kept his cool at all times and, except for occasionally using "Damn," he did not swear. He considered it a sign that you were hiding the fact that you had a limited vocabulary. I remember him telling us that the guys at the Steel Plant where he worked were amazed that he could chew someone out without using a single four letter word. I am so happy to have these snippets of Dad in my memory bank. This will be a sad September without him, but when I start feeling down I know I will hear his voice reminding me not to get my pants in a bundle. |
Leslie Masona woman in search of her post-retirement future Guess what! By subscribing, you get notices about the latest Little Old Lady with Cats posts sent to your mailbox!
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(from an entry posted on 5/1/2015) “I definitely fit some of the characteristics of a little old lady with cats: Retired - check, Single - check, Like to knit - check, Have cats - check. . .I do not want to get stuck in my Little Old Lady persona, however. In fact, this blog is a risk taking experiment in exploring and redefining what I want my retired life to look like.” Categories
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