Archives for April 2020

You are not going to live forever. We can all agree on that. Yes? Let’s assume you’ve reached the age of 70. A large number of our cohort have arrived there and even exceeded that milestone.

But here’s the big question. What’s your reset? “Reset?” you ask. What’s that?

Your reset is the number you think of when someone asks what age do you feel you are mentally and physically. Sure, there’s 50 is the new 40, 60 is the new 70, but let’s get real. When you wake up in the morning and don’t want to get out of bed, what age do you feel then? When you play tennis for the first time in 2 years, what age do you feel the next day? When you do an out and back 8-mile hike, what age do you feel when you get back to the car? How about when you go to an outdoor concert for some new group and the audience is almost exclusively twenty-somethings (i.e. yours is the only gray hair in sight), what age do you feel then? When you are driving at night and you can’t see the turn you’ve made hundreds of times, what age do you think you are then?

Some baby boomers are just embracing it. They say that they know they are overweight, hard of hearing and eating poorly. What’s the use of trying when you know you’re dying? Harsh yes, but it works for them. Other boomers are fighting it tooth and nail. They exercise, get cosmetic surgery enhancements and act ten years younger than their real age.

Me? I’m just sticking with what I’ve got. Walking and hiking a lot, doing the free weights, trying to eat well and paying more attention to my vitals. As for my reset, I’ve chosen 58. I’m not sure why, but when I wake up in the morning, I know I don’t feel like 40. On the other hand, I’m certain I don’t feel like 60. At this rate, when I turn 80 I will have to change my reset. But I’ll cross that reset when I get to it.

Now I ask you again. What’s your reset?

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

Our consciousness is crafted by attentiveness. – Nan Shin

I’m making tuna fish salad for lunch today, on a damp, smokey-gray afternoon. I start by mixing low-fat mayonnaise with olive oil and honey in a large white bowl. Next comes a table spoon of French herbed mustard, for the fine-grained texture and color, but more so to add a tangy bite to the creamy sweetness of the mayonnaise and honey. Then comes a pinch of salt, and then another of equal or greater value of pepper. The salt leaves a round, satisfying finish on the tongue, while the pepper crashes over the taste buds before moving on, the same way an ocean wave curls and crashes into the sand before rolling on to shore. After that, I mix in some sliced green grapes and a handful of slivered almonds or walnuts if there’s still some left in the cupboard. Last comes wild dill, my favorite herb by far.

I like everything about dill – its spicy fragrance, feathery green texture, warm, grassy aroma. Most of all, I like how it complements every thing around it, makes every ingredient a little better than they are by themselves. It works well with butter and sauces and salad dressings and pastas and and soup and fish and anything else. Dill is the first person you would invite to your birthday party, the one everyone hopes sits next to them on the first day of school.

All this takes me an hour or so, much longer than such a basic, uncomplicated task should take. By the time I’m done, the counter is covered with open jars, scattered lids, and powdery trails of herbs and spices and ground pepper. The kitchen looks more like a post mortem Thanksgiving dinner then a simple lunch. Its just that preparing a meal in this way is so much better than my usual process – Miracle Whip mixed with Chicken of the Sea mixed with sweet relish straight from the jar plopped on a lettuce leaf. That way, the tuna tastes more like slightly sweetened anchovy paste, and the lettuce is pale green with blanched-white, brown-curled edges.

Preparing food slowly and attentively, nibbling samples along the way, monitoring the subtle change in character as each ingredient is added, enlarges the process. It transforms a routine task into a journey, the sum total becoming larger than its individual parts. If I do my job well, tonight, when I go to bed and my mind flits like a butterfly between wakefulness and sleep, it will be the satisfying taste of salt on the tongue and bright fragrance and earthy taste of dill that will sing me to sleep.

Before retiring, Scott Peterson was an educator in Mattawan, Michigan. He also taught writing classes at Western Michigan University. HIs essays and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.

I enjoyed visiting my neighbor’s workshop. Joe’s basement had the cozy smells of pine boards, sawdust, and fresh paint. Every time I went down his stairs, I was transported to our church boy’s club where volunteers helped us trace comic book figures onto ¼ inch plywood to be sawn on vibrating jig saws then sanded and daubed with water-color paint: Archie and Veronica, Tweety Bird and Sylvester, Chipmunks and Bugs Bunny. It was a way to shift from passive observers of cartoons to active participants in the world of Disney that delighted us between double features on Saturday afternoon matinees.

And now my neighbor, Joe and his wife Maryanne, were doing much the same thing with lawn ornaments. Some were recognizable Looney Tune critters. They could have been enjoined to ‘cease and desist’ by trademark lawyers, but then those lawyers wouldn’t have been living anywhere near the kind of neighborhoods that would have displayed that kind of folk-art. Nor would they have gone to the kind of art fairs that would have marketed two-foot-high versions of a Dutch boy and girl bending to kiss each other. It’s about taste and culture and lawn-art standards, I suppose.

I mean, what’s the difference between a craft fair and an art gallery, folk-art and museum artifacts? It’s all in the eye of the beholder and the ability of the artisan. Perfumed candles and Petoskey stone jewelry, mounted paintings and photographs, clay tea pots and woven sun catchers, hand-carved animals and handcrafted chairs…who is the artist and who is the craftsman? It’s all a matter of production sophistication and depth of vision. We all like to create. Man the toolmaker. If not marble statues or the temples to house them, then the quilts to keep us warm and the favorite meals to nourish our families. And if artistic and culinary creativity escape us, there is always the last resort of procreativity for self-expression and extension.

So, who am I to judge if my neighbor Joe and his wife’s creativity ran to campy? Their products brightened our neighborhood much better than plastic pink flamingoes on the front lawn or bathtubs set on end with a statue of the Virgin Mary enshrined within. It’s all a matter of scale and talent and taste and that definitely is a sliding scale.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara and his wife live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

Good news! Aging is cool! There’s even a website that says it’s so. Agingiscool.com. Really. Their slogan is “Stay Strong. Stay Smart. Stay Social.” The couple that founded the organization wants to help us stay strong, smart, social, and above all –– cool.

They look like they are in their 30’s so I’m a little skeptical about them laying the “cool” moniker on aging boomers. I might have thought I was cool in some ways through my 50s, but once you get past the half-way mark in your potential lifespan are you really cool in any way anymore?

If it combats ageism in some way, I guess I’m okay with it. Meryl Streep is pretty cool. Dr. Seuss was very cool. Nancy Pelosi? Come on! She’s very cool. Harrison Ford, Patrick Stewart and Robert Redford still have the cool thing going on. And Helen Mirren? Doubled down cool for that lady. Did someone say Betty White? She’s 97 and still too cool for school.

Cool has always been a perception thing. You act cool and people think you’re cool. Pretty soon you believe it too. And what is cool? It’s an attitude. Above it all sometimes or just against the grain. The key thing is to make it look like you don’t care. Be natural. Nonchalant. Not easy to pull off and sometimes just a burden, being cool is a state of mind.

Between dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, don’t we have enough state of mind issues at this stage in our lives. I’m less worried about being cool and more worried about any sign that I might be losing my mind. Forgetting what someone told you yesterday and not being able to recall names and facts as easily as you once did can give one pause. Definitely not cool.

In the final analysis, and I hesitate to use the word final in this particular context, cool is in the eye of the beholder. Oh, the hell with it. It’s cool that we’ve even made it this far.

You be cool now.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.