Aging – Page 5 – Don't Gel Too Soon

This Just In: The Longer You Live, the Older You Are!

Banksy seniors — Banksy’s view of older folk

They look like big insects with wheels, those people with walkers and canes. I pass so many of them on the streets. Every time, it gets scarier.

“That’s OK” I tell myself, “Lots of them are really obese, many are clearly far far older or looking it and some are obviously dealing with life-long disabilities. They need all those appliances. I don’t.” Even so, each time they pass I see, for the first time, not another species but a possible (perhaps inevitable) future.

We all age. Our grandsons are growing so fast; miss a week and they seem transformed. Our kids have somehow become men of 35 and almost 40! Younger people are more willing to reveal their resentment of those of us from the 60’s and 70’s. (“We’re just bitter because the media spent our formative years (well, the teen and college ones) calling us slackers and then our entire generation got known as a waste of space. It’s still mean about us! I think we are the hardest workers who will work until we drop dead.”)

I understand what that means, even though I disagree with much of it. I don’t mind the idea of aging; so far I’m pretty lucky in how I feel and what I can do and think and be. Even so, I know it all turns on an illness, or a fall, or a loss of strength or hearing or sight. I continue to see myself apart from those old people, but somewhere inside I know the truth. I can’t hide from it forever.

We all get old. We all change, sometimes decline and sometimes gain wisdom. Boomer or Millennial, Gen X or Y – all of us move along the continuum no matter how much we fight it. And no matter how long I sit here trying to finish this, I can’t find a way to make it any better.

Being a Grandmother, a Mother, a Daughter, and Sad

Once a year I pay special honor to my parents. In a service on Yom Kippur called Yizkor, I say a prayer to their memory and pledge to do something to remember them: to donate charity for their sake.

This year, even more than usual, I wept as I prayed, and afterward. I have three grandsons now, one of whom shares my father’s name, and my parents don’t know it. They aren’t here to enjoy these lovely boys, or to help me handle the issues that emerge when one’s children have children.

Our boys and their wives are stunning parents (and wonderful to us) and our grandsons are, of course, perfect; that’s not the issue. It is, rather, that I know now some of what they must have felt and I would be so grateful if I could tell them what I have learned about their own grace as grandparents, and ask them for advice on the moments that grab the heart, or maybe even, as in every family, for a moment, break it.

When the Children Become the Parents: After You…

Two new grandsons have joined our first (born almost three years ago); one is 6 days old, the other just over two weeks. They are beautiful and delicious; watching our sons with them is breathtaking.

With the birth of that first little boy, we became grandparents; he brought us a new identity. Just after the birth of the second of the three, though, the rabbi took us beyond that. With the birth of their children, our children have become ancestors, taking their places, as we had done, in the thousands of years of Jewish history.

I’ve written before about the special meaning of our “Biblical” lineage , especially since we can’t trace our personal ones very far back, but I’m saying something else here: look forward as well as back. There’s something compelling about the concept of one’s children becoming ancestors – something wonderful and profound.

Our Gigantic Family #MicroblogMondays

Two new little boys will enter our family before the end of September. We’re excited, happy for our lovely sons and their wives and very happy too that our grandchildren have such wonderful people as parents.

There’s another thing, that (even though it is, of course, obvious) I hadn’t thought about in a long time: these children, while we can’t trace personal generations very far back because so many records and stories were lost in the Holocaust, have a family that goes back to Abraham and to Moses and Mt. Sinai and to Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca. Of course, we all, biblically, begin with Adam and Eve but because I’ve always known I couldn’t trace our family, I didn’t let myself consider what we might never know – it was too painful.

I think that’s why the sudden recollection of this spectacular Jewish lineage became an almost new discovery even though the reality has always been part of our lives. We, and our children, and theirs, are part of something well beyond ourselves. I am grateful to be part of the tribe – and pray that our boys, and theirs – and their moms – travel safely as the world continues on its magnificent, scary and complicated trips around the sun.

Love IS Strange and the Film is Beautiful

Today’s lesson: When Rick Atkins picks a movie that ISN’T American Pie, go. Tonight we saw Love Is Strange – a warm, loving, measured story beautifully built and executed. I am still reeling from The Normal Heart, as I wrote here and I hadn’t wanted another sad tale in the same week.

SO when I heard what this film was about, I balked. No More Sad. I ended up agreeing to go though, and am so very glad I did.

In most cases with “small” films like this people say they’ll wait for Netflix; there are no special effects or broad vistas that require the big screen. In this case though, Manhattan was such a part of the story that it was worth seeing it in all its glory.

It wasn’t even sad. Sad things happened but there was so much love and humor, Charlie Tahan, the young man in this photo, was so wonderful and Lithgow and Molina‘s couple was so much like any couple who’d been together a long time that there was also a deep familiarity that was a great part of the pleasure on the journey we took with them all.

No big conclusions here. We just got home and these are my first reactions but I doubt they will change; go and see for yourself and comment here if you have thoughts to share.

Thanks to the Man Who Sent Me to BlogHer ’06 and Now It’s ’14 and I’m Still Showing Up

In 2006, I was working with David Aylward and the National Strategies firm. He doesn’t know this but there’s a story (If you know me you know there’s almost always a story.) We had a client who wanted to reach parents. David hired me to help and I had this big idea about making a parent website to promote them. Well.
David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.

Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:

1. Access to an entirely new world of remarkable women (and men too.) Including ( a little bit of a yearbook list) Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and Morra Aarons-Mele and Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann and Liz Gumbinner and Kristen Chase and Asha Dornfest and Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite and Mary Spivey Tsao and Danielle Wiley and people I haven’t mentioned here (Sorry – some I’m not completely sure who I met in 2006 and who later.) Feels like I’ve known you all forever as well as Sarah Granger and Kelly Wickham and Jill Miller Zimon and Joanne Bamberger and Stacey Ferguson and Cynthia Liu and Anita Sarah Jackson and Jenn Pozner and Cheryl Contee (and and and) And that doesn’t count the new (to me) folks like Sharon Hodor Greenthal!.

2. An entirely new way to communicate and create.

3. More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:

4. Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.

Lots of boomer women have joined me and the other early birds each year and I am certain they feel the same way (I’ve asked several and besides they’ve written about it.) At a time when many of our friends are settling into a more and more peer-centered life, we have the gift of having broadened, rather than narrowed, our world and hearing the voices of women we never would have known about, much less known for real. So David, thank you for the gift of my entry into this universe and for the imagination and vision that opened your mind to its possibilities. It’s a beautiful place to hang out and I’ll always remember who sent me through the door.

Margot Adler Sang at My Wedding

Margo in the foreground; that's me in the back. — Margo in the foreground; that’s me in the back.

It was 1971. The song – no surprise to anyone who was young then, was Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Ed McCurdy’s anti-war anthem. We knew we couldn’t get married in the middle of the war that had defined much of our lives without acknowledging it, and the song was the perfect way. Margot was amazing, her voice clear and passionate; people even cried as we two 20-somethings stood, mid-ceremony, and Margot sang. She had a great voice, had actually been a music person forever, and attended the famed Music and Art High School in Manhattan.

We met cute. A friend brought her into the Senate Radio-TV Gallery, just off the press balcony overlooking the Senate. Reporters wrote their spots there, and there was a small studio where Senators could come and make statements for the cameras. I didn’t know Margot, but her Pacifica Radio friend knew she had a question that any pal of Margot’s would have loved.

“Pacifica (the progressive, listener-supported NY-based FM radio station) wants to hire me to cover the White House. I’ve just come back from Cuba where I was helping the Venceremos Brigade harvest sugar cane. Will that be a problem?”

This was Richard Nixon’s White House she was asking about. You can imagine my answer.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

From then on, until I left Washington with the man who is still my husband, our adventures were many, and varied and intense. The moment that rises to the top though, is a small one, very Margot – precise and painful.

We had seen Love Story, the shameless, sentimental, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” Love Story. (Yeah, I know, but everyone went – even politicos like us.) She was quite upset, more than I would have thought – and I never go by Mt. Sinai Hospital on Fifth Ave without remembering it. “What I hated most” she said, “was the scene on the street outside the hospital where my mother died. It was like they threw it in there to make the whole thing extra painful.”

It’s a small story but it always stayed with me. Along with the time we came to NY after we had moved to Palo Alto so Rick could finish school. We were staying with her and we walked in and there in the front hall was her altar. It was the first time we learned of her decision to follow her Wiccan self and it was such a weird way to find out. She kind of said “Well I couldn’t just put it in a letter, right?”

She was, of course, a brilliant reporter and writer and thinker. She was fun and alive and full of curiosity and political brilliance and personal warmth and charm. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but this week, she’s very much with me, along with the memories of that day, and of course, this song.

Obvious Child: So Much More than an “Abortion Movie”

My hands were shaking as I left the theater. Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real. There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.” You already know the story. What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.

At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna. She was careless and immature (but also lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny. Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.

I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long. It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives. A risk many of us fear has returned.

Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion. The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power. It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.

The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.

Farewell to Friends

This is me with my new sister Ramona. We met when we were looking to share a car to Mont-Saint-Michele and she and her amazing husband decided to join us. We have had the best week. Remarkable how quickly relationships form in a travel environment.

Now she is returning to her home in Beirut with her husband to await a new grandchild due within days of ours. We had a wonderful time with them. Thanks my friend! And send pictures.

“There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met.”
― Jim Henson,

From Bunny to Brave Leader of Us All. Happy Birthday Gloria!

Gloria in her "underground" Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine. — Gloria in her “underground” Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine.

I was 17 the first time I saw this, a Pittsburgh kid with grand ambitions for worldliness and intellectual heft and the ability to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink; so many that I actually subscribed to magazines like The Saturday Review, The New Yorker and SHOW: the Magazine of the Arts, where Gloria’s famous Playboy Club expose first appeared.

My reaction: “What a showboat, dumb thing to do!” My (never-less-than-honest) mother responded “You’re just jealous!” And she was right. Gloria had done something I so wanted to do – and so early in her career! How could I ever get from a Monongahela River mill town to that?

I never dreamed that Gloria, too, came from an industrial town – Toledo – much less that we would both have attended the same college, that I would hear her speak at my sister’s Smith graduation, and that, amazingly, I would actually come to know this remarkable woman. And here, on her 80th birthday, is what I learned:

In 1974, I told one of Ms’ spectacular co-founders how much I admired her. She replied “That’s how I feel about Gloria.” Heroes have heroes too, and hers was Gloria.

In 1982, for Ms. Magazine‘s 10th birthday, I produced an anniversary story called “A Day in the Life of Gloria Steinem” for the Today Show. The camera crew and I took a train from Penn Station to Philadelphia with her and followed her from event to event, including a couple of large public appearances. At least once every couple of minutes, a woman would walk up to her to thank her for something: courage, perspective, “you changed my life.”

Every time, every interruption, every stop on the street or in the hotel lobby or the ball room or the train, she treated each woman as if she were the first one she’d ever met. She listened intently. She responded in a very personal way. Every time.

To Gloria, every woman: each of us, all of us, has mattered to her. We are not just a formidable, critical cause, we are women who one by one by one have been living the lives women live, unequal, unheralded, amazing lives.

It is this that has made her the most remarkable of leaders, of change agents and of women. Never, in all the marches and speeches and honors and sadnesses has she forgotten that each one of us is all of us. She is not just a leader, she is a shining example. And inside each of us, we know it.

Happy Birthday Gloria – and thanks, from all of us here now and the girls and women yet to come.

Take a look at this MAKERS profile, too.