Push through the Pain

As I've stated before, I'm no athlete. Never was, never will be. I have not, however, been exempt from athletic endeavors over the years, either by coercion or misguided attempts to stray from my natural path. So I have been on the recieving end of exhortions to: 

"Push through the pain!"                                                          "No pain, no gain!"

Not being a fan of pain either, this never made any sense to me. As far as I could see, pain was a big, red STOP sign, to be ignored at one's peril. Perhaps, in our more enlightened age, these urgings to brush aside body cues are not as prevelant as they once were, but I don't imagine they've disappeared ----- not by a long shot.

For folks like me, who were looking for a good reason to be sidelined in the first place, pain seemed a logical stopping point. 

"It hurts. I quit." 

"I'll just sit over here and watch . . . or read my book . . . or write a poem . . . or hum to myself . . . or talk to my equally sports-challenged friend."

"I'll just stroll around the track and stop to pick some flowers to make a necklace and look for four-leaf clovers. Ya'll go right on ahead with your game. I'm fine."

Of course, there are other kinds of pain. 

It seems that my pain specialty is internal. I've been pretty lucky about injuries and illnesses --- I haven't had too many. But ask me about depression. Or addiction. Or relentlessly poor self-esteem. Therapists were invented just for me.

I don't actually think I have a lot more psychological angst than many other people. I simply seem wired to be more aware of it ---- and fascinated by it. You know how sports enthusiasts collect statistics about their favorite games and players? Sometimes they can recount, in painful detail, every play from a game fifteen years earlier. That's how I am with therapy.

I have kept a journal for more than fifty years. One would think that it would contain all sorts of interesting tidbits about life in the 'olden days'. Fifty years is a long time. Some of you don't even remember when gas was 20 cents a gallon and candy bars were a nickel. But my journals are not troves of obscure facts about life in Europe in the Sixties, or groovin' through the Seventies. They're me, processing, long before I knew the word or its meaning. Me, figuring out life, or bitching about life, or thinking about thinking and feeling. As a record of the times, even the major events of my own, they're pretty much a bust. But they trace emotional ups and downs with excruciating attention.

I have been endlessly curious about, not just my own interior life, but other people's as well. I want to know what makes people act the way they do. I read terrible news clippings and try to imagine what was going through the minds of the people involved. I take something I've done or said, and try to roll it back, unravel it, looking for antecedents, try to predict outcomes. People say I listen well, and that's probably true, because I'm forever in search of answers. I've never understood the folks who espouse "Ignorance is bliss" as a philosophy of life.

So yes, I look to the past, especially my own past. I watch for patterns, unpack delusional thinking, confront painful illusions. I do it on my own and with professional help. I do it, when necessary, with friends and especially with my wife, Jill. Because if I don't go through the pain of this sort of growth, I'll be doomed to tread the same turf over and over, and that, my friends, really is painful.

Aging in Never-Never Land

I'm a Baby Boomer. In some circles that's a pejorative term. There is no way to calculate the impact of the Baby Boom generation on our country and our society, but we all know it's been significant.

Some people assert that "youth culture" originated with the BBs. I expect there's some truth to that. But we're far from young now, and the youthful orientation of everything from fashion to music to food and shelter still predominates, especially in the media. What does it mean that the vast majority of images, entertainment, and even news are directed toward young people, with elders shunted to the side or relegated to the wrong end of jokes? And has it always been this way? I suspect it has. After all, Wallis Simpson was saying "A woman can never be too rich or too thin" long before World War II.

What's missing, for me, is a positive template for aging in the midst of youth culture. My mom, who has modeled many positive behaviors for me throughout my life, completely missed the boat on this one. She never actually reconciled herself to being old, which played out bizarrely in the years when dementia was setting in. No help there.

The archetypes we're all familiar with provide glimpses, but don't pertain well to the 21st century. We're not going to be little white-haired ladies in long skirts and aprons, feeding the chickens and up to our elbows in bread dough. We're not going to retire to the front porch with the rocking chair at the tender age of 65, surrounded by our brood of perfectly attentive, adoring grandchildren. And nobody wants to be the lady with dyed red hair and bright pink lipstick whose matching polyester pantsuit was all the rage in 1978.

Who do we model ourselves after, if anybody? Gloria Steinem has served for a long time, and continues to be a vital woman. Nothing seems to be slowing Hillary Clinton down. But if you're like me, and you've spent your life going along, doing what needs to be done, with no acclaim or celebrity, how do you hold onto the feeling that life is still interesting, there are more things to learn, it's still important to get up in the morning and keep on going?

I do much better when I shut out most of the media noise. I choose my information content and limit it to what I think is important. Who the hell cares what's styling this year? Why would I ever feel like I have to spend money I don't have on things I don't need? I don't go shopping. I don't watch tv. When I start to feel like there's something wrong with me ---- I'm not good enough! I'm not thin enough! I'm not smart enough! I'm not successful! ---- I back it up a notch or two. 

Life is not a competition. We're all heading toward the same end --- I'd like to pace myself and reach it, as a friend on facebook recently said, with a smile on my face. There's so much ambient noise these days, too many ways to be thrown off track and into doubt. Forgiveness is the watchword for me right now. Forgiveness of the foibles of the people around me, and forgiveness of myself. 

So bring it! I can stay up playing games and listening to TED talks till all hours if I want to. And I can sleep late with my doggies, as well. Because who's going to tell me I can't? I'm a Baby Boomer and, at 63, I'm a little bit tired and a little bit grumbly and that will just have to be enough.

Walking in Mama's Shoes

I took the dogs out to the Neuse River Greenway, one of our favorite walking trails. It's new and in the far reaches of Raleigh, so it isn't heavily trafficked. On this particular morning, I donned my mother's Adidas.

When Mom came to live with us nearly two years ago, one of the first things we did was go shoe shopping. She had foot problems, brought on in part by her insistance that her shoe size was 5, as it had been since she was 20. Small feet rise nearly to the level of fetish in her shoe-loving family.

Shoe shopping with a person who suffers from dementia can be a trying experience. After what seemed like hundreds of try-ons, she plucked a walking shoe from the display and determined that THIS WAS IT! Adidas. White with pink trim. Pink shoelaces. Size 7.

Adidas it was, and she wore those shoes nearly every day. I gradually spirited away almost all of the other shoes from her closet, especially anything with heels or little straps. At that point, she was still conscious of her appearance, still spun and preened in front of her full length mirror every day, but those shoes accompanied nearly every outfit. I think it was the first time her feet weren't squooshed, and she felt secure about walking.

When she became wheelchair bound, a few months ago, the people at her memory care unit tucked those shoes into the corner of the closet. She only wears slip-on deck shoes now. She doesn't miss them. She's not aware of her appearance. I'm not sure she distinguishes between herself and the environment around her anymore. I decided to appropriate those very wearable shoes for myself a couple of weeks ago.

The first thing I noticed was a funky smell. It filled my car, it filled the closet. It took me a day to figure out it was the shoes, and not something to do with the dogs I carry around in my car so much. Another aspect of Alzheimer's, that was well underway before she left our home, is urinary incontinence. Apparently, these shoes had suffered the consequences at some point.

I threw away the laces, tossed the shoes in the washing machine, and set them in the sunshine to dry ---- for a week! New laces (not pink) and I have a fine pair of walking shoes for my treks into the wilderness with Buddy and Nanalu.

It's odd to wear my Mama's shoes. It's not the first time I've gotten clothing from her. I started out snitching things from her closet while I was still in high school. It's not even the first pair of shoes. But pairing these shoes ---- her last real shoes ---- with the time I spend discovering the natural world around me, is unsettling. At first, it made me sad. As we walk along, I often talk to the dogs, pointing out things that I see or hear or smell. This time, it was as though Mama were walking along beside me. She loved to go for walks. She walked every day, answering bird calls, stopping to watch squirrels, greeting neighbors, noting flowers and trees and the changing seasons.

When I wear Mama's shoes, the world is new again for both of us, and life is wondrous once more.