Archives for October 2020

On the entertainment front, I watched a movie on Amazon Prime called, “Edie.” It’s about an 83-year-old woman in England who feels she wasted her life and now wants to climb a mountain in Scotland. It made me wonder about the definition of a wasted life.

Unlike Edie, I’ve gone after almost everything I wanted in life. However, in the grand scheme of things, I haven’t accomplished much. I consider making enough money to retire my greatest achievement. And here I am approaching 65, piddling around and relishing in simple pleasures.

I guess you could say the slacker retirement model works for me … at least for now. I am the happiest I’ve been. I don’t miss my career. I enjoy how I spend my time on the planet. Of course, the go-go model is another option, but I see that as just another race, only the rats are different.

But never say never. I suspect we experience different phases throughout retirement. Three years in, I might still be in my nesting phase, but something might switch over, and I’ll wake up wanting to climb that mountain. If we’re lucky, we get to make choices along the way.

I asked Dale what he thought, and his response was so profound I immediately ran to get a piece of paper and pen to write it down, but by the time I returned, we could barely reconstruct what he said. It was something like this:

If you can do what makes you happy and help people along the way, then that is a life well-lived.

Pretty good, yes?

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

Sitting outside the Starbucks on Taylor street in Chicago’s Little Italy, I sip my latte macchiato. Something is missing but I can’t put my finger on it. I grew up here as a kid and it’s always nice to get back. Snag a plate of spaghetti and neck bones at Pompei. Buy a cannoli at Scafuri’s. But sometimes I just like to sit and watch the people coming and going. None of them look especially Italian. But then maybe Little Italy is just a brand, a PR name like Harlem in New York or Cork Town in Detroit. Little Italy—another ethnic meatball floating in Chicago’s melting pot.  A guy shows up. Plaid shorts hanging over his knees, belly hanging over his belt and a boy, maybe 8, holding his hand. He stands at the raised garden, a circle of bushes in the middle of the sidewalk. He looks around. Spots me under the umbrella.

“Hey!” he goes, “where’s DiMagg?”

That’s what’s missing. There used to be a statue of Joe DiMaggio in the middle of the flower bed. I shrug. Shake my head.

“I bring my grandson all the way from Peoria to see something Italian, something to be proud of, an he ain’t here. What the hell? I tried to tell the kid, he was famous. Great ball player. Joltin’ Joe. The Yankee Clipper.”

I nod, thinking, yeah he was a great athlete. Set some kind of hitting streak record. But he didn’t play for the White Sox did he? A New York Yankee right in the middle of Sox country. So what if he was Italian? Everybody’s something. What did he ever do for Chicago…baseball, yeah… but for Chicago? I’m not going to argue with the guy. Embarrass him in front of his kid. Anyhow, I’d have to interrupt him shouting, waving hands, “What the hell. They’re taking down statues all over the place. What’s this country coming to? You can’t even give a kid something to hang onto, his tradition. C’mon Mario let’s go to Arrigo Park. At least they got the Christopher Columbus statue there.”

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/

 

Get rid of it! Let it go. Give it away. Clear it out. Dump it.

How many ways can we say it? It’s time, maybe no better time, to clear out all the clutter and junk you’ve been holding on to since who knows when. Some things may have sentimental value, but when push comes to shove, not that many.

I can hear you now. But these things may come in handy one day and then you’ll be sorry that you got rid of it. How sorry? Like “Oh my God, that would have been perfect for (fill in the blank). Really? Perfect? Will the recognition that you could have held on to it for just one more week, month or year really make you feel better or worse? Or will you be able to just think, too bad, and then move on?

I’m reminded of the t-shirt that had printed on it “Whoever dies with the most things wins.” But what do you win? And besides, you’ll be dead, and everyone knows there are no winners in that case. If you have kids, they don’t want any of the stuff you’ve been saving for them. So that leaves…..who? The people who clean out houses for a living. They are unsentimental pros. You would be better off disposing of your junk NOW than leaving the job to strangers.

Sell it online or donate it to people in need. Either way you will be doing them and yourself a favor. I wish I could go one day without mentioning the pandemic, but if you need another reason to jettison all your flotsam, it’s that a virus could wipe any one of us over 60 types in no time at all. Imagine strangers pawing over the stuff you could not bear to part with, perhaps rejecting it anyway because they already had enough junk of their own. It would be far better to see it go to people in need or those who might actually desire it than seeing it continue to collect dust in the attic, basement and garage.

Once you get in the disposal spirit, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to part with just about anything. In the end, it’s just things. Trust me.

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.

We’re in dark times now. The deep political divide combined with an ongoing pandemic challenges us all to stay balanced, sane, and level-headed when people, including those we love, diverge from our points of view or our approach to staying healthy. In the midst of it all, and likely because I’m a Pollyanna from way back, I’ve been keeping a catalog of kindness. Those large and small moments exchanged with both friends and strangers that help us overlook our differences and stay focused on what matters most.

I run in the same neighborhood most mornings – with tree-lined streets and well-tended homes. By now I greet the same people each day. After we maneuver to opposite sides of the road or are otherwise at a safe distance, we exchange a smile, a wave, a few words of good morning. One woman leaves vegetables from her garden on a table in her front yard, and I’ve enjoyed her tomatoes and squash. Another family set up a free library box in their front yard, along with a decorated bench to celebrate the joys of reading. It’s my reward to stop and browse, as well as to give and take books there.

I tell a friend about my catalog and she tells me the ways she’s noticed that people are being more kind. In her neighborhood the kids make chalk drawings on the sidewalks and add encouragements like think outside the box, and we are in this together. She has also found painted rocks placed around the neighborhood and while hiking at a local park. Another friend, who lives alone, tells me her younger neighbors check in on her regularly and offer to run errands for her.

To give back, I’m thinking of leaving one of my handwoven towels for the woman who puts out vegetables, and I’ve started saying thank you to people more often, especially grocery store clerks, postal workers, and medical professionals. And I finally said to a young dad, who I see playing with his five year-old daughter in the grassy areas of my apartment complex, that I appreciate what a good father he is. Would I have said that if we were not in this current mess? Maybe, maybe not. I think it takes something like this – the current state of our world – to shake and wake us up to how to love each other. I hope so anyway.

Lee Stevens is a writer and a weaver living in the mountains of western North Carolina.

In 1962 a good friend and I decided to team up to both decide upon and then create the required high school science fair project. We decided to test the effect of differing diets on study animals. To conduct the actual experiment we purchased two cute cuddly hamsters and two small cages. They were housed in my dark scary basement where they could be closely observed and monitored during the defined experiment period.

Our plans for the experiment went like this. Hamster number one was fed a balanced diet that contained vegetables and commercially produced pellets made specifically for hamsters. Hamster number two received a mixture of fat, white flour and sugar that had been combined into a pasty unappetizing lump of junk food. He ate his junk food diet with delight but after a few weeks visible changes in his appearance and demeanor were observed. He had put on excess weight; his fur coat was disheveled and he seemed withdrawn and a bit psychotic.

While excitingly reporting the findings to my science fair teammate we together agreed we had a chance at winning the whole shebang. Then a few nights later when our furnace failed to run during a bitterly cold night disaster struck. While shivering I descended the stairs into the very cold basement to feed my little fury friends before departing for school. At first it appeared they were sleeping in but upon a closer inspection I discovered they were dead stiff.

At school, while in a stunned and disoriented state, I informed my teammate that the odds of us taking home the trophy were now about as good as the U.S. landing a man on the moon. He drew a bit of attention when he blurted out, “The hamsters died!”

We quicky accepted reality and consoled ourselves with the fact that they had given up their lives for science and proceeded to tell their story on our science fair story boards. We could not say, “No animals were harmed in this science experiment” nor did we have any results to report due to the untimely death of our study subjects.

We were both sufficiently scarred from this experience that we chose careers unrelated to science and pledged to stay away from a diet consisting of only fat mixed with flour and sugar.

Wait, wait, what are donuts made of?

Robert Hafey offers this excerpt from a memoir titled, “Boomhood – A Baby Boomer’s Free-Range Childhood.”