BoomSpeak

On a warm March day, Felicia and I drive to Kathy’s new house for lunch. We used to live in the same town, but Kathy recently moved twenty miles away. We used to be a solid threesome, unlikely friends in some ways yet consistent in our joys and affection. Then Kathy cut herself off, pronouncing us trivial, gossipy, hypocritical. She recently moved to mend the split, apologizing and explaining it was all her fault, her stuff.

Arriving at her house, we hug and admire the new place. We enjoy the burritos she made and the brownies we brought while catching up on our families, and our plans for the coming months. After lunch, we set out on a walk of the neighborhood. Sixteen years ago, our hikes were daylong treks in our nearby National Forest that would include lunch, and maybe champagne. We would joke about duct taping handsome men to trees so we could have our way with them. But on this day, it’s just the neighborhood we want to explore.

We walk past houses built in the 1940’s and 50’s. We see goats in one yard, purple and pink crocuses in another. We come to a busy thoroughfare and walk back down through a park. We pass a woman who exclaims we have beautiful hair. She must mean the varying shades of silver mixed with the brown, our windblown strands catching in our mouths.

Back on the street, we walk along a fast-flowing creek. A cyclist speeds down the hill, causing us to scurry out of his way. We enter a greenway, muddy in places, and pass joggers, other walkers, and kids smoking pot. We talk about books, our children, our men, and how hard it is to get old and see your friends die off.

“It will happen to us,” Felicia says. “One of us will die first and the other two will be left to deal with it.”

“Yeah, but studies show that friendships keep us healthy and more likely to live a long time,” I add.

The afternoon gets late. Our hair smells like the wind and our jeans are mud-spattered. Circling back to Kathy’s house, we hug again and part ways.

Backing out of Kathy’s driveway, I turn to Felicia. “It’s good, isn’t it? We have it back.”

“Yes,” she agrees, as we pull away and give Kathy one last wave.

Lee Stevens is from Hendersonville, North Carolina

Why did I go into the living room? I was perfectly happy in my study behind the computer. Did I need something in the living room? Was it a thing, a coat, a sweater, a magazine? If I retrace my steps back to the study, maybe that will jog my memory. No, that didn’t work. Something in my mind told me to go to the living room, but on the way there, I forgot the reason.

The solution is to write it down before you leave on the fool’s errand of going after something you are going to forget on your way to get it. Now I find myself writing Post-Its that say “get newspaper,” “get out hammer,” “moves clothes from washer to dryer,” etc. The drawback with this system is that my scrawled printing is so pathetic that I often cannot read my own notes. I can stare at “hawg pc” for hours before remembering that I was supposed to put up a newly framed picture (“hang pic”).

So we make lists. We have grocery lists, task lists, gift lists, weekend lists, job lists, fix-it lists, wake up and do lists, and today lists. God help you if you go off without your list. Freelancing in the grocery store is not a great idea. Sure, you get some of the usual things that you know you always get, but you come home without the eggs that you needed for the baking you wanted to do, which is why you went there in the first place.

I know that it’s natural for short-term memory to degrade, but that doesn’t make me any more cheerful when I fail to pull a name from my random access memory (RAM), which is what I call the place where my brain stores everything I need to solve a crossword puzzle. There’s erg for unit of work, Oona for Charlie Chaplain’s wife, Erato for sister of Clio, élan for pizzazz, and literally thousands more. Unfortunately, the instant recall button doesn’t work as well as it once did, which means I’m leaving a dent in my forehead from where I slap it every time I say, “I knew that.”

It’s not unusual to waste my waking hours (and maybe a few of the ones when I’m sleeping) repeatedly trying to jog my memory so that I can think of someone’s name. I can picture them, maybe even remember the spouse’s name, but all else eludes me.

At this point, I would be happy to take a pill if it solved the problem, but I know that it will come with a list of side effects, such as headache; loss of appetite; stuffy or runny nose; and of course, the dreaded “loss of short-term memory.”

I know there is a reason why I shouldn’t take a pill like that, but I can’t remember what it is and I didn’t make a list.

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.

Nearly every day I tell myself how happy I am to be retired. I don’t miss my job. The nest egg is in good shape, I have lots of hobbies and am having fun. However, at times I miss feeling successful.

The thing is, I never achieved the level of success I aspired to, so I’m not sure what I am missing. I did very well in my career over the long haul and found satisfaction in knowing I used my skills well and accomplished more than anyone else expected of me. Still, I left some opportunity on the table.

Should I go back to work? I looked at jobs online today to see if anything sounded interesting. I saw one job requiring “grit” and “a nearly insane level of attention to detail.” Sure, that could be me on a good day. More than likely it’s not.

Reading through job descriptions, there’s strong demand for passionate self-starters who can roll up their sleeves and collaborate with a fast-paced global team. I used to write this crap – and reading it now cured me of the itch to find a job.

Perhaps it’s not the feeling of success I miss but the feeling of knowing what success looked like. In the workplace, the path to success is mostly linear, and it points up.

That seemed doable to me, so I set my eyes on the prize and worked hard. Sometimes I fell short of my hopes and dreams, and other times I wildly exceeded even my own expectations. But I had the map, I had a compass and I stayed on the trail. There were prizes along the way and incentives to keep going.

By the time I retired, I had lots of prizes, but my bullshit meter was pegged.

In a career limiting development, these days there’s not much of a gap between my inside voice and my outside voice. I wanted to do something different with the last third of my life anyway, so I retired as soon as the math worked out.

I’m coming up on the one-year mark, and I’ve learned retirement doesn’t come with a map or compass. Many of us traded our talents for money and security. I certainly did, and I have no regrets. But I am still driven to reach my full potential, whatever that is, and now I have to figure it out all by my own self. I have a feeling I’m not alone.

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

I signed up for an internet class to learn to search the web for my German grandmother Anna Fricke’s immigrant history in 1904 Brooklyn. A class for seniors. Some of the students use a cane, one uses a walker, there are stiff-leg breaks, pee breaks, and initially a few cranky episodes involving “You’re in my seat,” which had to be handled by teacher.

I’m out of my comfort zone, and love it. Not knowing the terms – server vs. search engine, OS, lists of apps, links, spiders, deep web, why web pages refuse to appear, and etc.

It’s an early morning class. I leave time for bus issues. This morning a crazy lady, up unusually early and cruising on her meds, says there are “devils” on the bus pressing on our heads. I definitely feel it.

At the College before start of class I talk with the two women who sit across from me on the computer dock. One worked at the Presidio at a military job for thirty years. We discuss the California men on the train in Europe who foiled a Euro-Rail terrorist attack. Terrorism we agree, as Nazism was before it, is the latest big popular religion, a strange one since it desires to wipe out all types of Western social relations known since the 9th century and it’s dedicated to doing it using 21st century Western-developed technology. The temple ritual developed by their high priests is building an explosive device, strapping it on, taking opioid drugs and blowing up Nature’s temple.

The woman whose outlook was forged in the Presidio says, “The only answer is that nowadays everybody needs to carry a gun.”

How, I wonder, would that go in our class of sporadically irritable seniors. Shootout at the Internet Corral? Walking slow and menacingly down the long ecru-colored hallway towards one another, the aging Gary Cooper lookalike takes on the side-burned man who always wears a cowboy hat and boots.

One day the instructor tells me that sometimes at her age she wonders about doing her art, Why bother? Is it more important to continue to produce paintings, or to enjoy life’s distractions?

One task of the internet that might eventually prove mindful would be to give all artists the same quality of exposure – and let the future decide. It might be a small way computer technology could partially redeem its soul from intruding, selling, pushing, and pulling naïve minds to do as Hal wants. And, just maybe, in a couple of months, I’ll be able to find my grandma in 1904 Brooklyn, where she fled after having had an illegitimate baby at twenty-five in Rotenburg Germany.

Penny Skillman’s book of essays, “Beats, Hipsters, and California Cool,” can be found on Amazon Kindle. She’s published in many newspapers and journals. Copyright 2019 by Penny Skillman.

Many great literary works make some reference to water. Rivers run through stories and generally represent the movement of life. The constant movement. Change.

After crossing the Rio Grande hundreds of times in my car, over the bridge, I was shocked to go down the banks one day and see how rapidly it is actually moving. From even a short distance above, it appears to be totally stagnant. It is anything but. It is, like all rivers, charging hastily forward, downward, to its home in the ocean.

Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said “No man steps in the same river twice.” (I would say “person” of course.) And it’s true. But what does it really mean?  That the river is always moving? That life goes on? That you don’t get a second chance to correct a mistake? Or to relive a happy time? If you try, it won’t be the same. Something will be different. Everything will be different. Try it more times – different again. Different every time. Read a book again. See a movie a second time. It’s no use; you can’t recapture what you had before.

You can’t go home again. Thomas Wolfe said that and used those words as the title of a novel. I would say it means the same thing. Home, whatever that is, is gone, when you leave it, except in your memory. Return to your old elementary school. You will be shocked at how it seems to have shrunk in size. The river just keeps on flowing and we flow with it. Or fight it if we’re fool enough to try.

Also attributed to Heraclitus: the only constant in life is change. (He clearly gave this subject a lot of thought.) A silly joke; a play on words? Hardly. No, it’s the truth. I know some people who cannot, will not, change. They wear their hair and their makeup the same way they did 40 years ago. They think they look the same. But they don’t. The hair might look the same, but the face under it, like Dorian Gray’s picture in the attic, is changing. Best to change with it. Accept this as a fact of life.

Or fight it if you’re fool enough to try. But heaven help you.

None of this is bad news, I think. It’s o.k. You’ll live, at least for a while. We’ll all live. Let it go. Let it be. Just roll with the river.

Norma Libman is a journalist and lecturer who has been collecting women’s stories for more than twenty years. You can read the first chapter of her award-winning book, Lonely River Village, and an excerpt from her new memoir, The Story of the Story, at NormaLibman.com

I bought Marie Kondo’s tidying up book a couple of years ago and started folding t-shirts, socks and underwear according to her guidance. But a week later, I stopped. In the meantime, she has made it big on TV, and my drawers are a mess. Socks gone wild!

As I recall, Marie wants us to spend time with our stuff, folding and tucking, and thanking them for performing well. It has been quite a few years since my underwear was involved in anything involving performance excellence, unless you count bladder control.

She also encourages us to get rid of stuff that doesn’t spark joy. Honestly, none of my stuff sparks joy. It’s just stuff – stuff I either need or want, and it resides in my home. I’m careful about not having too much stuff, and I regularly toss or donate, but if I purged on the basis of joy, I’d have a mostly empty house.

But here’s the rub – I do have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and it wouldn’t be all that hard to push me off the ledge into the dark abyss of tidydom. Under my careful tutelage, records, CDs and spices are all in alphabetical order. I take my vitamins and meds in alphabetical order. A for aspirin, C for CoQ10, D for vitamin D, F for fish oil, L for Lisinopril and M for multivitamin.

Dale keeps asking what the W is for. There is no W. It’s M, and he knows it. There are days he does not spark joy, but I don’t make him leave, do I?

And yes, it’s Dale, who sort of keeps me within the boundaries of normal. He is the moral opposite of Marie. Dale doesn’t believe in the magic of tidying up. I wouldn’t call him a slob or hoarder. That’s a bit harsh. Let’s just say he’s differently organized. Mess-tolerant. Stuff-friendly.

But because we are married, and people who stay married have learned to compromise, I’ve lowered the bar and somewhat willingly sink toward his standards of cleanliness and order. It’s just too hard to fight about it. Dale makes an effort to meet me in the middle. The house is never as tidy as I would like it, but it’s not the frat house of his dreams, either.

So, I don’t know. Is Marie married or living with someone? That can’t be easy. In our 40-year marriage, we’ve found it is sometimes hard to find joy in each other, let alone each other’s stuff. We’ve reached a détente of sorts. It’s like whatever, do what you want, keep what you want. Let’s just love each other until this party is over.

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