Category Archives: aging

I just wanna be me

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“Always be a first-rate version of yourself and not a second-rate version of someone else.” ~ Judy Garland

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I spent much of my youth trying to be the person everyone would like.  I was never ANY version of myself because I wasted too much time being concerned with who others thought I should be instead of becoming the person I was meant to be.   Eventually I was able to break the cycle of trying to please everyone.  I stopped feigning interest in things I had no real passion for and focused more on me.  I slowly distanced myself from the users and spent far less time crossing the Great Lakes for people who wouldn’t jump over a puddle for me.

In my wisdom and older age I have learned a few things that I really like about myself.   I speak three languages – English, sarcasm and profanity – and I am fluent in all three.  I love to write.  I don’t just do it because I enjoy it.  I write because words bleed from my brain and my head feels like it will explode if I don’t expel the stories trapped inside.  And I have learned to write without needing anyone else’s opinion or approval.  What flows from my brain to my fingertips is what I publish on this blog and I’m very proud of the words I have shared.

I enjoy my solitude and am happy with the company I keep, whether I am home alone or spending time with friends and family.  I love to cook and it doesn’t matter if it is a table for one, I will take the time to create a dining experience and not just ‘have some food’.

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(my dinner last night)

Music is a big part of my life and my playlist spans the recording alphabet from Abba to Zeppelin.  I could live without television but I could never have a life without movies.  I will still cross oceans for people but I am much more selective when it comes to deeming who is worthy of my epic journey before I captain the ship.

I am the person I am now because I fought to become this version of myself.  I stopped letting outside voices influence my decisions and started hearing the only voice that should matter – mine.  It took a while to get here but I have enjoyed the journey and am really liking the view.  Thanks Judy, I like your advice very much.

Thyme and time again…

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It is a painfully contradictory reality in my mind, but this is truly my favorite time of the year.  Sure, the leaves are gone and the landscape is a gloomy blend of brown and grey.  It’s depressing.  And sure, the clock has slipped backwards by sixty minutes and it gets dark at 5:00  pm.  That’s disheartening as well.  But I have to look at the bright light that now greets me in the morning when I wake up at 6:00 am and think of all of the good things that happen in my life this time of year.

When the doors of the lodge close for the season and the work clock slows to a turtle pace, my life clock has the freedom to pick up its momentum and I have much more spare time to spend doing things for others.

There is something inherently fulfilling about being able to give my time and my skills to causes that have taken up residence in my heart.  Last winter was the first of hopefully many that groups of locals gathered to make freezer crockpot meals for a family who lost their home to fire while in the hospital delivering twins.  We banded together, gave our Thyme and our time, and filled their freezer with a few months worth of meals.  So many of the group commented on how wonderful they felt being able to help.

And this year will be the fourth year I have organized a Toy Drive for the local children.  To say the response has been incredible would be an egregious understatement.  My heart swells so much when the time comes to pack up the toys for delivery that I am overwhelmed by emotion.

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I had always looked at volunteers in silent awe.  I knew they must feel some reward to give their time, their generosity or even just their smile or a touch of their hand to help someone’s day become a little brighter, but I had no idea how truly euphoric the feeling was until I began giving my time.  And now that I have had a taste of that….I will always want more.  If you have never had the chance to do any volunteer work and the opportunity presents itself to put up your hand to help, in any way, I promise you won’t regret it!

 

 

 

I am in love

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“Life is about finding someone who understands the sum of your parts….and not just some of your parts.” ~ SN

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 It seems my brain, lately, has been running programs in the background that I have been unaware of, until now.  Being in the hospitality industry, and being a student of life, I have had the good fortune of meeting a great number of couples.  Some couples go through their journey alone and many travel the road of life with their children.  And over the last few months, I seem to have been paying much more attention to how these couples interact with each other – the nuances of the looks they give each other, their unspoken communication and the respect they have for each other as best friends and as lovers, and not just as parents.

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There is a silent language they speak, an inaudible conversation they have been having for years.  You can see it in the way they look at each other and laugh at the same silly things.  Their declaration of love comes from a mere touch, their bodies speak to one another, and their understanding of each other comes from years of really getting to know everything about that other person.

I have slowly come to realize that I am in love with the way they are in love.  They just get each other.   They realize that they have found the person who loves everything about them and not just the things they are supposed to love.  They share crazy habits and the same sense of humor but they are mindful of the mannerisms that they don’t quite understand.  They can spend hours just talking and never be bored in each other’s company.

The opening line of this post is one I came up with earlier this year and it has stuck with me.  Enough so that it has haunted me until I was able to eventually use it on this blog.

Whether I have yet to meet him or he is somehow already in my life, I’m willing to wait for that someone.   That person who will know me, really know me, and take every opportunity to let me know that he gets my math.

Can we be honest for a moment?

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“Three things cannot be long hidden – the sun, the moon and the truth.” ~ Buddha

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I have lied.  I have told untruths throughout my life.  Whether it has been to protect another or to surreptitiously protect myself, words born from the fictitious have previously escaped my lips.  But as a great student of life, I learned early in the game that lying only creates a web in which we will eventually become entangled.

Lies beget more lies.  Soon enough, the merry-go-round of deception increases its momentum and those who intentionally expound on their distorted reality are eventually hurtled into the real world at full speed.  And when their trickery finally meets the facts of sensibility, the results can be disastrous.

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Small white lies aside, I like to think of myself as an honest person.  I leave the fiction in my life to my writing and deal with my life in the most honorable way I can.  Being honest simply means I am living my truth.  Being the most sincere version of me allows me to never have to think twice about the words that have escaped my lips.   And just being truthful with myself grants me the luxury of never having to second guess the reflections I share with anyone else because I don’t ever have to keep track of what I have said in the past.

Big or small, lies are lies.  And when you know a lie has been spoken aloud by another, it is enough to make you question the factual integrity of anything else they say.  Knowing you are being lied to is bad enough….but knowing you aren’t worth the truth is excruciating.

I’ll have what she’s having….

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I have several friends who suffer from chronic pain.  Some have a mildly annoying dull ache that never goes away and some are almost immobilized by debilitating pain.  My dog recently became a victim of that chronic pain but, unlike my friends, she had no voice to tell me how uncomfortable she had been until it was alarmingly noticeable.

If you read my most recent blog post, you’ll know that I took Callaway in to the vet on Tuesday and the vet prescribed an anti-inflammatory with a mild pain-killer.  After one dose and about six hours, she was a brand new dog.  She regained some of her youthfulness and we seemed to move the clock back by four years.

I immediately became jealous of my dog’s new vitality and joie de vivre.  I told the vet I would call the day after her appointment to report how she was doing on the medication and my first sentence began with “I don’t know what is in that Meloxicam, but I want some”.

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But as much as I feel the oncoming burdens of aging, I consider myself very lucky that I have not fallen victim to the same incessant pain that my friends must bear.  It seems so unfair that the people who are able to voice their symptoms still suffer the same torment from their chronic pain, try prescription after prescription, and feel no relief at all.

I can only hope that each of you will eventually find your Meloxicam and enjoy the freedom of movement that so many of us take for granted each day.

 

 

What’s a few grey hairs between friends?

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The grey whiskers appeared almost overnight.   In the blink of an eye, my dog had matured beyond the youthful puppy I have known for 9 years.  Sure she still has the spunk of a young pup on occasion but I can slowly see time creeping up on her faster than I would like it to.

My solace lies in the fact that our affection for each other is timeless.   Her devotion to me, whether her joints are currently aching and she has no desire to jump on my bed, is endless.  She is, and will continue for years to be, my true companion.   She is happy to see me when I have returned home after four hours or four minutes.  She never judges my idiosyncrasies and she still manages to hear my soft sobs when I am trying to quietly cry and she comes to clean away the salty tears.

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I thought my life was full before she came along.   I was dead wrong.  We have always had dogs.  Growing up, my life was filled with hairballs and doggy kisses.   But Callaway is a unique soul.   There is not a doubt in my mind that she was meant to be my dog.   The picture we fell in love with on the adoption website (the one above) was a picture of her brother but it was Callaway who came into my life and into my heart.  I fought for her during my divorce because I couldn’t imagine my house without her in it.

I know I must face the inevitable – time will not go backwards and those grey hairs on her muzzle will slowly multiply, but so will the grey hairs on my head.  We will face this truth together knowing that however long we were destined to be in each other’s lives, we will make the most of each moment.

 

Sometimes you can go back

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Some would say to leave the past in the past.  Over the course of this previous weekend, parts of my past engaged with my present and it was a wonderful blend of remembering old and making new memories.

I’ve never been one to shy away from the things in my past.  All of those moments, good or bad, made me who I am today.  And although things may not have worked out the way I may have wanted, I always like to think I learned a lesson from each one of those experiences.

I learned to be strong when I needed to be and to allow myself to feel vulnerable when I needed support.  I have learned that each one of the people in my past still holds a piece of my heart even though they may not be an everyday character in this act of my present.

But the final chapters of my story have not been written.  There may be a rough outline but the story has not been sent to print and there is always room for a few backspaces and some new paragraphs to be written.  Sometimes you can go back, not to the past you had but you can go back to reread the story line and see if any of those characters can be written into a few paragraphs of your future.

I am not going to live in the past, but I will always allow my past to live within me.

Balls to the wall

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It lay dormant, nestled in the corner of the family dining room at the cottage.  It listened to every one of our crazy conversations and eventually became the topic of many of those conversations instead of just blending into the background.

Its birth was accidental.  It came to be through a simple act of property maintenance.  The family cottage was built in the early 1900’s and had begun to show its age so, without regard for its final appearance, a spray foam was used to seal a few cracks in the old building.  What resulted in the upper corner of that dining room was eventually named and heralded as a true piece of our family history.

Perhaps this innocuous object was made more grotesque by my family’s depraved sense of humor.  It is even reasonable to say that other families may never look at this simple mass and see what we all saw.  But from the first time it was noticed at a family dinner, it was affectionately dubbed the “shiny ball sack’.

Over the years, this harmless protrusion witnessed our highs and our lows.  It feasted on the sounds of our laughter and it absorbed the collection of our tears.  Somehow that inanimate object became a large part of the traditions of our family meals and I was devastated to find out it was going to be amputated from its place in those family traditions.

I haven’t been able to visit the cottage yet this summer so I was unaware that the surgical removal had taken place – until today.  I came home from work to find a lovely gift bag on my front door step and when I saw what was inside, my heart swelled.  There, gently preserved in a shadow box, was the shiny ball sack that has been a part of our family dinners for decades.  My aunt had painstakingly saved this piece of history and presented it in a way that would allow me to keep this little gem of our family history safe and sound.

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My mom and I used to laugh endlessly about this mutation of foam and it will now find its place beside a picture of my mother in my living room.  It is a fitting ending to this chapter knowing that two of the things that brought me so much joy will be together again.

 

 

Good for the economy but bad for my temperment

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I am going to do my utmost not to turn this post into a rant, but I make no promises.

The population in our tiny town explodes from May to October.  Cottagers and tourists alike flock to our little oasis to drink from our serene waters, to sip from the fountain of relaxation and to let every ounce of their city stress slowly dissipate until they resemble nothing of their former city-dwelling selves.  This is what we are selling and this is what they are buying.

This year seems to have hit an all-time high for human traffic.   Stores are reaping the benefits of the excess numbers of shoppers, our local Foodland check-outs are all lined up six shoppers deep but I have learned to adjust my shopping schedule accordingly.

We get it.  We are not new to this phenomenon and we learn to adapt to our new routines to keep our sanity.   But there are moments that we cannot control – moments when we have to shop during the peak times and it is during these times I lose my sense of humor.

Blatant rudeness and uncaring attitudes run rampant.  You may think I am simply frustrated from working long hours and dealing with unbearably hot temperatures, but I have first-hand experience of the uncaring attitude of some of our summer guests.  My latest encounter today prompted me to vent write this post.

I pulled into the liquor store and was shocked to get a parking spot without having to wait.   I noticed three carts left on the sidewalk in front of the store, collected them and returned them to their rightful place inside the store.  Wine in hand, I moved to the tills and the line moved quickly.  I was lucky to get in and out without incident.   The woman who was parked beside me had just loaded her box of goodies into her BMW SUV and lifted her cart up over the curb, leaving it on the sidewalk.  I got into my car, made eye contact with BMW lady and then she and I both watched as her cart slowly rolled backwards, tipped over the curb and landed on my front bumper.  Not missing a beat, she slid her vehicle into reverse, no apology, not a shred of remorse, backed out of her spot to head back to her restful vacation spot.

Shopping Cart Walk

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I could feel my blood pressure rising before the color of my cheeks betrayed me.  I got out of my car, checked my bumper and wheeled her cart back in to the store to avoid having this happen to another car.

These are the people who frustrate me.  These are the people who make me believe that, to them, other people just don’t matter.  I may have ranted in an earlier blog and received many varying comments, perhaps rightfully so, but my rants are justified.  Ask yourself how you would have reacted in that situation.  For me, I would never have left the cart in the first place but, I would certainly  have jumped out of my car to make sure the other vehicle had not sustained any damage.

Rant over.   What would you have done?

 

 

 

 

Embracing the sum of my parts

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I’ve learned a few invaluable truths over the last four (plus) decades of my life.  Each stage our lives requires a different version of ourselves.   We grow, we adapt and we transform.  Slowly and steadily we become the person we need to be for the next phase of our lives and, perhaps without knowing it, we evolve into the person we need to be to acquaint ourselves with the person we shall finally become.

I can look back at my life and recognize the divisible parts of myself, the bits that have led to the present sum of who I am today.  I may still resemble a modicum of those versions of myself but the me now compared to the me then are vastly different people.

Through each chapter of the syllabus of me, I have gained a confidence that I only once professed to have.  I have finally gotten to the point in my life where my opinion matters, if to nobody else than, to myself.  I have reaped the rewards of struggle and adversity.  I have calmly assumed a new sense of who I really am and I am very selective with the friends allowed behind my strategically built walls.

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At this stage in my life, I have truly become the sum of my parts.   I have taken the best bits of myself, learned from and discarded my errors in judgment and created the person I am now.

Would I change anything from my past?  Perhaps.  But if all of those equations – the fractions of time, the roots of my problems, the addition or subtraction of friends and family – meant that I would not be who I am today, I would probably answer all of the test questions the same way so I could calculate the same remainder.