Watching surfers the day before my 74th birthday

They are tiny figures on the outside sandbar, straddling their surfboards, heads bobbing up with each oncoming wave, and then obscured again behind the froth.

I know how it feels, this waiting. It’s not like other kinds of waiting, waiting for a traffic light to turn, waiting in the grocery store line, waiting for school day’s final bell.

It’s waiting for the future, waiting to see the heft of the wave, the promise of the day’s best ride as the sea moves beneath your board and lifts you up and it’s up to you to see where you go and what you do

And sometimes it’s a bubbling brute of whitewater that pushes you off the board and into the drink and depending on the wave size, how much time you spend cartwheeling until you emerge to find your board.

These young surfers out there today, they wear leashes and their boards spin with them and sometimes into them.

In the 1960s, the boards were bigger and unleashed, could whack you good if close enough, the skeg or fin a sharp knife that can leave a mark.

My surf life was short, a high school thing that I left behind in my twenties and I don’t know why.

Some of today’s surfers will be out on the waves in twenty years – remember how young you were at 37, half my age now? At 17, 37 is forever years away, 74 is so far down the line that it doesn’t exist except among those old people who clog the roads as you speed to the beach before the waves get blown out.

Age beached me. I can’t walk. I can swim with a floatation device. I can get to the beach by car and use my walker to get to the water, let it lick my toes, take me back to 1967 when a December day with waves was good enough but not as glorious as a July day with surf and 80-degree water and my fellow surfers surround me and I spy my girlfriend pull up and park and she waves and I return the wave and feel as if I will live forever this way, a young man in the ocean, just waiting for the next wave.

We Young, at Hospital

We young orderlies, CNAs, techs, nurses fresh from graduation. Voices blared from loudspeakers: code blue ortho, code red ER, code pink nursery. We razzed each other, lunched on cafeteria burgers, one fragment of attention listening for our color, our next emergency. The call came. Chairs abandoned, lunches half-eaten. We reveled in the action. Legs flexed in sprint, adrenaline pumped. We ran the corridors, took the steps two at a time, spurned the vators those were for old people like the ones in trauma. We aged as we ran, furrows formed on faces, arms and legs, brains. By the time we reached the coded sites, we were the elders in crisis who needed rescue by the summoned helpers, who ran to us, strangers who helped strangers. They ran, abandoned lunches, wondered will I ever stop running?  It awaits you around the next corner.

Your stories will survive you -- write or record them while you still can

I was thinking about this today as I went through some tests at the local hospital.

I like the idea of a National Service Program for 18-21-year-olds. Not a military draft – that didn’t work so well – but a program that puts youth to work doing good deeds. As a college dropout, I found jobs in hospitals. I was called orderly and not nursing assistant or CAN. I was a guy wearing a white uniform that nurses and patients called on when they needed a strong body to perform various tasks: scoot a patient up in bed or turn a patient so a nurse could get at the malfunctioning part of the body, transport patients to X-rays, take temps and BP and fill water pitchers. 

This was Florida so listening to old folks was also a keen skill. Young folks aren’t so good at listening to old people. Too bad – therein those aging bodies are many great stories. So why not put youngsters to work listening to old people’s stories while they also help them get around. Welcome to the Corps of Willing Listeners! They’d get paid a decent wage to push wheelchairs and hear stories. 

If they want to write some of those stories down and turn them into novels, so much the better. Maybe some of them can be made into memoirs for the family, something to remember grandpa by when you see that old face in a photo but can’t really place him. “That was grandpa: he was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.” “There’s grandma: she raised 10 kids in a house without running water and an outhouse out back.” “There’s Uncle Jack – he was funny when he had a few drinks.” And so on.

Young people are energetic and smart and impatient. Old people tend to be tired and smart and patient and sometimes impatient because they know they are on the downward slide to the grave. I am 72 and that’s my reality. I love a good story but I can tell when the listener isn’t listening. Today a tech in his 20s took me to X-ray and took pictures of my chest. He saw my High Plains Arboretum vest and we talked gardening while the machines hummed. We talked about the difficulties of raising plants and veggies in our climate. I could tell he's had mixed results and I suggested he drop by the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens and ask some questions of the horticulturalists. 

Writing skills are a key element in storytelling. It's good to be able to tell a story on a blog or written on paper or told in a podcast or any of the myriad other ways we relate info. I have some writing skills so I can tell stories to those people in the future who see my e-photo online and wonder about me. Who is it? Why is he in the photo? What did he do for a living? Was he nice? Did he love someone and did someone love him? How did his kids turn out? I’ll leave behind some stories to inspire or bore to tears but I won’t care, will I? I will be stardust. I hope a few of my stories survive.

Don't get around much anymore, but plan to change that

My daughter Annie invited me to go on the Friday ArtWalk. I used to go every month when I worked at the Wyoming Arts Council. Then I retired and went less often. Then I hurt my spine and needed a walker to get around. Then came Covid and there was no ArtWalk. Then Covid was over and my wife Chris was diagnosed with breast cancer.

ArtWalk was taken over by Arts Cheyenne in 2022 after a ten-year run in the hands of local artist Georgia Rowswell. It's gone from the second Thursday of the month to a First Friday arts event. It includes visits to local galleries, such as Clay Paper Scissors and new arts venues such as the Cheyenne Creativity Center downtown. There's new art to see, lots to eat and drink, and music by local musicians.

I hadn’t been to a First Friday before Annie invited me. She’s an artist too, you see, and just getting involved in the local art scene. Since most of my professional life was spent as an arts administrator where I did a lot of arts stuff, Annie depends on me for insight into that world. I laugh inwardly, not wanting to think about all of the things I don’t know about the art world. I know just enough.

Last night I realized that my social skills are not as fine-tuned as when I regularly had to schmooze with artists, writers, gallery owners, politicians, just plain folks. I was quite adept at small talk and most of the time I was on hand as a professional from the state arts agency and people expected me to say something enlightening. I tried. More than once I had to say I didn’t have an answer and I would get back to them on it. And I did. That’s how I learned. OJT. There are people born as arts administrators, there are those who go to college for it, and there are those who learn through trial and error. I am in this latter category. While in grad school at Colorado State, I helped arrange readings by writers. I had attended quite a few as a fan and someone busily writing fiction while I tried to make a living in other ways. I had no real sense of what it took to put on a reading. I found out at CSU.

I also did my first try at administering the arts. One of my faculty mentors, Mary Crow, asked if I wanted to serve on the Fine Arts Series. I was trying to get to class, teach a couple sections of composition, workshop my own writing, and find way to spend time with my wife and young son. Naturally, I volunteered. The Fine Arts Series meetings were busy and congenial. Its members included undergraduates and graduate students. Also CSU staff including the director, Mims Harris. I stepped into a semester that featured music and dance performances, an annual poster art show, and literary events. I volunteered for the latter. Thus began my journey.

Last night, I felt detached from that world. Early in retirement, I made a choice to spend time with my own writing and not volunteer for arts events. And then all of those other things happened and I found myself out of the loop. There was a lot I really liked about the loop. Educating myself and meeting new people. I liked that. Paperwork? Not so much. Annie has had a few arts-related jobs and is learning. My son volunteers for the local theatre and he also is discovering the joys and sorrows of THE LIFE.

I plan on attending more ArtWalks, readings, book signings, and the annual Governor’s Arts Awards gala. I miss it. I continue writing – that’s a priority. But all work and no play make Mike a dull boy. My advice: stay in touch with your schmoozing self. It keeps you engaged and the mind working, a concern for anyone over 70 which is where I find myself. I could play Wordle or assemble 1,000-piece puzzles. That would sharpen my synapses. I could do any number of things in retirement. An Atlantic Magazine Online piece this week asked "Why so many people are unhappy in retirement." The subhead: "Too often, we imagine life to be like the hero's journey and leave out the crucial last step: letting go." I could only read the first graf before the paywell clicked in. But I got the gist. Nobody wants to let go. Our entire life is based on beingness. We are not equipped to grasp nothingness. So we rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Or we sulk. Or lurk on social media. Or watch Fox News all day and experience the sweet rush of having our brains sucked from our heads.

I will choose engagement. I feel alive then and can delay thoughts of letting go for just one more day.

You will forget things, micro-essay

You will forget things. As you age, that’s the mantra you hear from people who think they know better. Nobody tells you this: you forget how to forget. The past rolls in like the Florida East Coast waves I once surfed. That’s me on my long board walking the nose on a wave spawned by a tropical storm. I am 16 and my shoulders already are scorched by the sun. I will be riding this wave as a 71-year-old living in Wyoming’s high prairie as my dermatologist burns off a rough patch birthed that day at the beach. I am 28 making love with my girlfriend in a Colorado mountain stream. The water so cold, our skin warms from the friction of our bodies. Do you remember… starts my wife, 66, the one from the stream, and I say I cannot forget and it seems like the right thing to say but what I really mean is there is no way that I can forget, that even if we had split up during the awful times that we want to forget I could not forget how, in the shade of quaking aspens, the sunlight vibrated across your skin, your blue eyes on me. My last thoughts will be of waves and water, you and me. I will not and cannot forget. That’s old age, the truth of it.

Me and MyAmigo

We cruise through the Cheyenne grocery store like angels on the wing. We ride MyAmigo scooters, tidy charged-up EVs that transports you through the valley of soft drinks and into the foothills of baking supplies and to the mountaintop of the candies you crave but say you’re buying for the grandkids who never visit. We greet other grayhairs as we pass, josh about drag racing down the aisle at 3.521 mph. I round a corner and encounter Floyd Lopez in his own MyAmigo and we adjourn to Starbuck’s for coffee and talk about Spanish declensions. I insist it’s MiAmigo and he agrees but argues that my idea will make no sense to the majority of Anglo geezers like me. He says that “MyAmigo” is the perfect Spanglish term. “Pancho used it all the time on The Cisco Kid.”

Caffeinated and informed, we return to our respective routes. We try to avoid returning to the other end of the store for items left off the list somehow. That drops the MyAmigo charge to dangerous levels, causes us to seek out a staffer to transfer us and the groceries to a fully-charged EV if one is available and not in the hands of another retiree who breezes around the store as if there was no tomorrow as there may not be. Most shoppers avoid eye contact. What we need is on top shelves. Elders who walk upright ask if they can help. Young couples too, guys in middle age who just got off work and we remind them of their parents tooling around a store in Case Grande or Fort Myers.

Check-out is odd. Cashiers are nice but young ones especially try not to look at you, as if grayness is catching. They hope you will not pay in bills and small change, or labor over a check, or redeem too many coupons clipped out of the Wednesday print ads. They move you right along as they don’t want any repeats of the old lady who yelled about how the leaking deli chicken got all over the muffins. The baggers ask to help you out but you lack any small bills and the kids won’t usually take tips but you never know. You cheat a bit by scooting outside into the lot even though the cart’s label reads “indoor use only.” Some people stop to help as you load groceries into the trunk. Some days you need it. The snow comes down, bitter winds blow. Once I forgot my gloves and it took too long to unload; spent 15 minutes in front of the car’s heater to defrost the claws of my fingers.

I drive home through the blowing snow. My son unloads my haul at home. It's done.

Jane Campbell explores the "persecution of remembering" in her Cat Brushing story collection

The cover of Jane Campbell's story collection, "Cat Brushing," shows a ringed hand sweeping across the fur of what must be a very large cat or maybe the gorgeous gray locks of one of the author's elderly women characters. It could be both as you will discover reading her 13 wonderful stories in the POV of women in their 70s and beyond. This is her first book, published in her 80th year, as it says on the book jacket. I'm nine years younger than her which puts us, approximately, in the same age cohort.  

These tales are quite personal, erotic in spots. Am I surprised that women of a certain age have erotic thoughts and sometimes more than thoughts? No, but as a person in this age group, I am impressed by the directness of the stories. It challenges the idea that women of a certain age must be handled carefully lest they fall and break a hip or leave a pot burning on the stove. It's the "I've fallen and I can't get up" woman sprawled on the kitchen floor who would be lost without her handy Medic-Alert bracelet and her male rescuers. Old and helpless.

Fuck that.

In "The Question," the narrator gulps down a dose of morphine and describes the rush that results. I figured she was a goner, in the last stages of cancer, but she's actually a feisty woman who chased after her cat on a winter night and fell on her porch's icy steps. The idea that she likes the buzz of the morphine helps us get to know this woman in a rehab center who has no intention of staying abed. Tests surprisingly reveal she has no broken bones and only sustained a few bumps and bruises. When released, she asks her male nurse if she can have a to-go portion of the opioid. He genially refuses but as we read the interaction between patient and nurse, we find that she knew him in the past and knows his dark secret. 

The writer has a sure touch in turning tales on their head. In "Kiskadee," a woman lies by a pool in Bermuda and hears the melodious song of the Kiskadee, a predatory tropical bird with a big beak designed for killing. Interspersed are memories of her "special relationship" with her father. She recalls years of touching and cuddling, sleeping together, syrupy words from the father. Story's end has a horrible twist which I won't spoil here.

Most of these women recount loves gained and loves lost. The memories are clear and immediate, no brain fog here.

I reread Campbell's second story, "The Scratch."  Nell wonders how she scratched herself, a cut that bled profusely. 

What drawers had she opened carelessly, perhaps knives rearranged, had she handled scissors?

She forgets about phone calls with her grown children. She forgets things even though she writes everything in her diary.

But it's not the forgetting that concerns her most. 

The old barriers behind which she could once shelter... they all tumble down as the years pass. Just as running upstairs becomes a lost art and skipping down becomes impossible, so the capacity to forget is lost. There is a persecution of remembering. Remembering so much. Those midnight hours, dark nights of the soul, where remorse bites hard and the past presses against you.

Nell, in her 70s, forgets how to forget. 

I too, in my 70s, have forgotten how to forget. Memories become crisp and clear, even those I want to forget. This hit me so hard. Since retirement, I've been wondering why old memories come flooding back to me. As an old person, aren't I suppose to forget things instead of them rushing back to me with incredible force? It's not like I'm bored, lazing about in a tepid pool of nostalgia. 

Still, the memories flow. 

As you climb toward retirement, friends and family urge you to be busy when work ceases and you have all the time in the world. People get bored, get sick, get careless. But that's not it at all. Memories can overwhelm your present if you are not busy making more memories. They don't tell you about the "persecution of remembering." We have to leave that up to Campbell and her fictional characters. 

Meditation after another trip to the dermatologist

Angel Kisses

The sun’s first ray taps the crown of my head. I’m the tallest creature on the ocean, me, a young man bobbing just outside of the breaking waves. Light from 93 million miles away cascades over my torso, lights up the many colors of my surfboard, paints my body with freckles that will only become visible when winter comes. Soon all the surfers will be illuminated, their multi-colored boards, the stripes on their baggies. The sun will crawl over the beach and the early-bird walkers and houses perched on the dunes and the town and Florida entire. It will unleash the heat, fire up the humidity of a July morning.  Decades later, a Wyoming dermatologist talks about his family’s Colorado ski vacation as he scoops skin from this young surfer turned old man. Cancer may have been there all of this time, a remnant of the sun’s touch during hundreds of mornings in the semi-tropical sun. My crown, my nose, my ears have all been biopsied, scraped and sown. Nothing awful, nothing like melanoma that killed my brother. I wonder if the dermatologist slaps on sunscreen before he negotiates Steamboat runs named High Noon, One O’clock, Two O’clock for the prime meridian times that January sun reaches the west-facing mountains. If sunscreen had been a thing in 1967, I would have used it. Maybe. I know one thing – I would never trade one second of those mornings for blemish-free skin. Every scar a dance with sun and ocean, every freckle the kiss from the heavens. “Freckles are angel kisses,” my mom told me when I believed in angels. I now know the science behind melanin and derma, ephelides and solar lentigines. But during my seventieth year on the planet, angel kisses seem exactly right. Just perfect.

Boring old college lecturer responds to "The Chair"

Watched the last episode of "The Chair" this week. I laughed, I cried. Various faculty and administrators and students pissed me off.  All in all, a good investment of six Netflix hours. 

I have never served time on a college faculty and I've been an adjunct at community colleges. I was an undergrad English major at one community college and a land-grant university in the Palm Tree South and a grad student at a land-grant university in the Rocky Mountain West. I never got within spitting distance of a small liberal arts college such as Pembroke. 

But Pembroke's people seemed familiar. As a grad student T.A., I experienced some of the same frustrations of Pembroke faculty, those f*cking f*cks referenced in The Chair's (F*cker In Charge) desk sign. Some faculty members were old and stuck in their ways. The Literature, Composition and ESL faculty didn't like creative writing faculty and vice versa. The administration was always targeting the English Department for cuts due to the fact that we all speak English so why in the f*cking f*ck do we need an English Department? Shouldn't it be the  'Merican Department since we all speak 'Merican here? 

All an MFA grad student could do was teach our two sections of comp, keep our heads down and write a lot. We had regular classes to attend on top of writing workshops. And, in my case and some others, I had a family to support. 

One of my favorite aspects of "The Chair" are insights into faculty's families. Dr. Ji-Joon Kim has a daughter who is as argumentative as faculty ("You're not my real mom"). Dobson's wife died and his only daughter went off to college. No matter he gets stoned before and after class, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Dr. Joan Hambling gave up her personal life and career advancement to prop of the fragile egos of male colleagues. She is working on a relationship with a college IT guy who is as much as a wise-ass as she is. Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban) chats with his wife before a college event and we find out that she gave up her academic career to raise three kids. "Someone had to cook dinner," she says as she urges her aging husband to wear his Depends.

My daughter, an English major, is watching "The Chair" but I don't think she's finished. After a couple episodes she was angry at the students, which I thought was interesting since she is a student and a Millennial. I was angry at the students too but possibly for a different reason. They didn't want to learn Chaucer and Melville? I fondly recall my red-haired prof at UF who taught us Chaucer in Middle English. She spoke it like a native and there were times I imagined her as The Wyf of Bathe. 

The Pembroke students just didn't want to learn it the old-fashioned boring Boomer lecture way. They liked the way Moby Dick was taught by Dr. Yaz, a Millennial who approached it in a new way. By the end of the final episode, I was depressed about the state of academia. No surprise -- I was a boring old lecturer and probably still am. Back in my day, etc., etc., and so on. 

Nursing home signs should read: Welcome to the Titanic. There are no lifeboats

I don't always read the AARP Bulletin. It's a good publication with lots of helpful info for retirees like me. But, you know, there are books and the Internet and football and writing and "Queen's Gambit" on Netflix. 

This issue of the Bulletin carried a red banner crying SPECIAL EDITION and below that this header: "Covid-19 & Nursing Homes: An American Tragedy." It grabbed me because my stepmother died of Covid in a Florida long-term care facility. And I have been reading other articles on the subject since March and have been shocked with how many people my own age have died. I am 69 now but next week is my birthday and people in their 70s and 80s with underlying conditions are most vulnerable. I soon will be in that cohort.

This comes from the WyoFile weekly pandemic report, 12/11/20:

The Wyoming DOH has reported 321 Covid-19 deaths. That includes 128 in November, the most of any month so far. Many of these have been related to long-term care facilities. Wyoming now ranks third in the country for its rate of nursing-home-related deaths, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.

So there's that. And this subhead from the Bulletin:

In one of the most devastating health debacles in our nation's history, some 54,000 residents and workers in long-term care facilities died of causes related to the coronavirus within four months of the first known infection.

The article spans the 18 weeks from Feb. 29 and the first death in a Seattle nursing home to June 22. The best things are personal stories of patients, family members and health-care workers. Cami Nedleigh relates the story of her mother, Geneva Wood, a resident of the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash. Wood went into Life Care in late January to recover from a stroke. She was supposed to be released in early March but fell and broke her hip the last week of February. She stayed in Life Care. 

This from Wood: 

My roommate was coughing. Everybody was saying bronchitis. The I got a cough and could barely breathe. Thought it was pneumonia. I remember them saying I had a 102 fever. I guess I didn't know enough to be scared.

And Nedleigh: 

Mom got better, thankfully. She's a tough old Texas broad. But Mom's roommate didn't make it.

The article conjures scenes of chaos and bravery. In the first week of March, 27 of 108 residents and 25 of the 180 staff had the virus. And nobody really knew what it was and how to treat it. This led to many deaths.

Timothy Killian (Life Care spokesman): We all grew up with these movies about pandemics, in which the government vans swoop in and take control. As the situation escalated and the facility went into lockdown and people started dying. I kept expecting some type of coordinated response, but we saw nothing of that nature.

The facility, of course, gets some of the blame. Killian had obviously seen "Contagion" and "Outbreak." In the latter film, a monkey has the virus and ends up in a California small-town pet shop and starts spreading the virus. The commanding general of the national response team won't act because he knows the virus came from an Army bioweapons lab. Epidemiologists Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo sneak into the site and start doing their good deeds while the evil general (the usually heroic Morgan Freeman) makes plans to seal off the town and bomb it to destroy the evidence. The most memorable scene takes place in the town's packed movie theater. A virus carrier coughs and we see spit flying around the room in slow motion, landing in people's mouths. Aw hell no, you might say. And you'd be right. 

It hits a bit close to home. Covid carriers were still going to movies in March and spreading the virus to seatmates. Asymptomatic carriers were going out to crowded bars and attending parties. The virus was in pandemic heaven, latching on to many new human hosts and spreading which is what viruses do.

You can read parts of the Bulletin story at the AARP web site. Kudos to David Hochman and contributors for the story. It appears just as the FDA approves the Pfizer vaccine and hope emerges. That doesn't help the many dead and dying in the U.S., almost 300,000 at last count, with a 16 percent fatality rate in long-term facilities. Compare this to the total U.S. fatality rate is 2.3 percent. 

This final quote is from Judith Regan, a publishing executive whose father, Leo Regan, is a resident of the Long Island State Veterans Home, site of 32 deaths:

The residents and staff are being led to slaughter. He is on the Titanic, but there are no lifeboats.

Telling the story behind the statistic

My stepmother died at a Florida nursing home on April 9. She was 94 and suffering from an assortment of maladies. She had end-stage celebral atherosclerosis. She was blind and bedridden and very weak.

It was coronavirus that dealt the final blow.

Our family didn't know it at the time. Her obituary said nothing about coronavirus because nobody knew she was yet another COVID-19 casualty. The nursing home, the Opis Coquina Center in Ormond Beach, Fla., said nothing. It was only through the efforts of the Daytona Beach News-Journal and other Florida papers that the medical examiner's office issued the names of those in nursing homes diagnosed, mostly post-mortem, with COVID-19.

This is from an April 20 article in the News-Journal by Nikki Ross:

Constance Shay, 94, was an Ormond Beach woman with coronavirus, who died of end stage cerebral atherosclerosis on April 9 at Opis Coquina Center, a nursing home in Ormond Beach, according to the Volusia County Medical Examiner’s report. 

Her medical history includes coronavirus, vascular dementia, hypertension, GERD and atherosclerosis. 

Since Shay resided at Opis Coquina Center, which has an active COVID-19 outbreak, her cremation was flagged. She was swabbed for COVID-19. 

She’d been a patient of the nursing home since 2016. Over the years her health declined and by February 2018 she was unable to care for herself or make decisions, and she had lost a significant amount of weight. She was placed in hospice. 

Her death is not included on the Florida Department of Health’s list of coronavirus related deaths.

The newspaper article was the first time that any of us, including my Florida siblings, knew about this. The newspapers dug deep to get this info and find out that the many of the Central Florida nursing home deaths were not included in the state's count of coronavirus-related fatalities. This is crucial because Florida is one of those states accused of undercounting the death count for political reasons. The Florida Office of Health reported this morning that more than 40,000 in the state have tested positive and 1,735 have died.

Today's New York Times had this:

While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to COVID-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities. 

At least 28,100 patients and workers have died at nursing homes and long-term care facilities for the elderly.

None of this tells us who Constance Shay was as a person. She was Connie to us. She and my dad married in 1992. Both had lost spouses. My father had been devastated by my mom's death of ovarian cancer in 1986. The CPA was keeping busy doing people's taxes when he dropped by Connie's house to square her with the IRS. One thing led to another and they got married and stayed that way until my father died of prostate cancer in 2002. Connie stayed in Ormond Beach and eventually sold her house and moved into a long-term care facility. The last time I visited from Wyoming she had lost most of her sight. My sister and brother-in-law came over from Winter Park to visit and chat and read to her. She had other visitors from the family that remains in Florida, which is quite a crowd.

Connie was a lifelong Catholic like my father and they attended mass together every Sunday. One of their hobbies was tending to the flower gardens at St. Brendan Catholic Church, the same place Chris and I were married in 1982. They also had a verdant garden at their home. They both read a lot.

They are both gone now. I don't know if I will one day meet with them in heaven because I am no longer certain there is such a place. But I do know that we are made of stardust that will be floating around the heavens for eternity. We will run into each other somewhere in the cosmos. I hope to tell my birth mother and my father that we found a cure for cancer at long last. I hope to tell Connie that nobody ever died alone again and had the real cause of their death printed 11 days later in the morning paper.

Cohort replacement is the only cure for Trumpism

It's an "age" thing.

In September 2016, just weeks before Trump's election, writer Chris Ladd in Forbes foretold the future. The article, "The Last Jim Crow Generation," spells out the roots of white anger that led us to this earthly paradise called Trumplandia. If you were a 70-year-old white man at the time of the election, you had led a mostly white life in the U.S. Here's a sample:

Like Donald Trump, white voters turning 70 this year had already reached adulthood in 1964, the year that the first Civil Rights Act was passed. They started kindergarten in schools that were almost universally white. Most were in third grade when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. A good number of them would complete their public education in formally segregated schools. 

Read the rest here.

Is it just me, or some of the best articles on Trumpism have been in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.? This liberal baby boomer must be getting soft in his old age.

I am in this same cohort, those of us born in the first five years after World War II. I was born in December 1950. All of us boomers born in December of 1950 share one thing -- we were born in the same month and year. We do share some touchstones of our journey from birth to 18. Depending on who you were and where you lived, you had at least a passing knowledge of the Civil Rights struggle and Vietnam. You may have been involved in them, or blissfully ignorant. "Turbulent," they call the sixties. That term came up more than once last night in the first two segments of CNN's "1968."

Children and teens, as a rule, are focused more in school and sports and dating than they are in social justice movements. In my senior year of high school, my attention was on getting my basketball team to the state tournament, finding a date for the prom, and deciding on which college I could (or couldn't) afford. I was a good student, but not great, and a pretty good surfer. I had a car that ran most of the time. My parents were good people, but imperfect, which describes most of us humans trying to do our best. At 18, I complained about my parents to my friends. At home, I was respectful as any tormented teen.

My school was integrated, sort of. An all-white Catholic school recruited black athletes. My class of 69 had three African-Americans, two of whom were my teammates. Some of the football players were recruited from our town's all-black high school. Integration was still a few years in the future. My class also had an Iranian place-kicker and first-generation Cuban immigrant who looked more Irish than me. That was the extent of our ethnic diversity.

Ladd's Forbes article  talked about a workplace, unions, schools, churches, military -- all dominated by white males. That was our experience in our formative years. So, is it any wonder that men from the early baby boomer cohort look around, see a changing America, and freak out. And that is the cohort that turns out to vote, this time for Trump.

I am 67. I did not freak out in 2016. I am freaking out now. Racism and jingoism have returned with a vengeance. I was susceptible to these influences when I was 18. I am susceptible to them now. I choose a different path. The question remains: How did I get here?

How did we get here?

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Our young people feel betrayed.

Youngsters are getting murdered at a sickening rate. After the Florida high school attack, survivors are angry. They are speaking out, staging sit-ins and planning protest marches. 

Their elders have abandoned them. As one of those elders, I am ashamed of my country. And I see myself as one of the good guys. I've worked for decades to derail the nefarious plans of crackpot right-wingers. I have allies in the fight. Fellow travelers, in the terminology of the Red Scare 1950s. In a small place such as Wyoming, we tend to know one another. Right now, we have our eyes on a state legislature dominated by wingnuts. I would say wingnuts from the hinterlands, but some of the worst ones are from the state's most populated county -- Laramie. My county. 

Sad to say, being a good guy is not enough. 

The children can teach us. Today, 100 teens from Parkland, Fla., got on a bus and took their pleas to their legislators in Tallahassee. We send them our thoughts and prayers. Scratch that. Thoughts and prayers have already been tried. I send my anger with them. They will confront a building filled with earnest faces.  Good guys -- mostly guys. They are involved in their churches, love their wives and children, are kind to animals, and care for the state of the nation.

Sad to say, being a good guy is no excuse.

To paraphrase Jesus: "You will know them by their actions." Matthew 7:20: "...by their fruits you shall recognize them." These legislators, many of them from rural America, are good Christians and read the Bible. Perhaps they neglected this section of Matthew. To use another phrase, "actions speak louder than words." What are their actions? They rail against immigrants. They demonize their LGBTQ neighbors. They cut food and medical benefits for those who need it most. They hatch plans to stop blacks and Hispanics from voting. They cut funds to education. They give carte blanche to gun dealers. 

You know them by their actions. So why do you keep voting for them? I ask these questions of Wyomingites, too. Florida may be in the news but we are seeing some ridiculous behavior in our own reps. In Wyoming, we are looking at a bill to allow conceal and carry in churches. Really? Have these people no sense of right and wrong? Didn't they get their butts paddled if they lied and cheated and bore false witness against their neighbors? Didn't they get Atticus Finch or Andy of Mayberry-style lectures when they broke the rules? They show no evidence of this. Apparently, you can't trust the words of good guys.

Our children and grandchildren now show us the way. I am not going to rain on their parade. Tread carefully, I could say. Be patient. After all, the world won't change with one fit of outrage, one speech, one march. But they will have to discover these hard facts as they work for change. 

As many aging activists will tell you, the struggle for black civil rights took hundreds of years. Women's Movement veterans can tell you the same thing. The struggle for gay rights didn't begin with Stonewall. Environmentalists have been publicly advocating for change since the first Earth Day in 1970.  But those battles have been going on a lot longer as people discovered that their fate is tied to that of the planet. 

This is beginning to sound like a graduation speech. I apologize. Aging good guys see themselves as founts of wisdom even though they may be just tired and afraid. I advise you -- wear sunscreen and don't take any wooden nickels.  

And don't let the good guys get in your way. 

During spring cleaning, the bell tolls for booklovers

What do I keep? What do I recycle? What do I throw away?

The questions of spring cleaning.

Over the weekend, I vowed to clean up my writing room. Spring cleaning fever hit us on Saturday as we helped our daughter move to a new place in Fort Collins. We tackled her room first, which she hadn't lived in for 18 months. Because it was vacant, I used it as a storage room for the stuff overflowing from my office. The jig was up. She's at home, searching for stuff for the move. So I had to comb through the boxes of receipts and old checkbooks and manuscripts and books.

I tackled the books first. The difficulty is that I want to read parts of a book to decide if it's a keeper. Got stuck on a Brad Leithauser poem, "The Odd Last Thing She Did" by his collection of the same title. It's about a suicidal young woman who disappears after leaving her car running on a cliff overlooking the ocean. "The car/Is Empty. A Friday, the first week/Of June. Nineteen fifty-three." A mystery is at the heart of this poem. Could be the setting for a 250-page hard-boiled mystery novel, a case for Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. But it's a four-page poem, long for a poem, short for a novel. The summer night is lovely with "the stars easing through the blue,/Engine and ocean breathing together." She could have been abducted, but that's not what the poem implies. She threw herself off the cliff. A suicide. A pretty, 23-year-old, and one with a car. But she didn't want to live.

"What are you doing?" Chris asks

I look up. "Reading," I say.

"That's not spring cleaning."

"Yes, but..." I want to say that this poem is wonderful and filled with mystery. It's why we read. But realize that I have been caught in the act.

Now my daughter is looking at me. She writes poetry. "C'mon, Dad," she says, hauling another box of rejected books out to the car trunk. She will take three boxes of books to the library today.

Caught in the act. I close Brad's book and put it into a box labeled "Mike books." Our rooms and basement have many such boxes as the bookshelves are full. In some circles, I would be labeled a hoarder. But among booklovers? Also in the box is "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy, which I keep pledging to finally read; "The Voice of America," stories by Rick DeMarinis, which doesn't have my fave DeMarinis story ("Under the Wheat") but does have "The Voice of America" and "Aliens;" and a 1968 Fawcett Crest Book edition of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" or, if you prefer the German, "Im Westen Nichts Neues." I have been tempted lately to reread the latter book as I am working on a novel set in the years after The Great War. But I have other research to do and may never get to it.

Therein lies the bookie's dilemma. What to keep, what to send to the library? I cannot bear to throw away a book as it seems too much like burning a book. Someone, somewhere wants to read the book that I don't want. Just as I want to read a book that someone else doesn't want, which is why I stop at garage sales.

I am 66 with grown children who are both readers. What will I make of all of this when I am gone? My accountant father painstakingly put the division of his library in his will. He read history and presidential biographies and autobiographies. I got everything from Lincoln to Kennedy, including a beat-up 1885 edition of the "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Volume 1." Not sure which of my four brothers got the other volumes, if there were any. But I also got a trade paperback of the Grant memoirs which is comprehensive but not nearly as compelling as the original.

Technology is changing reading and collecting habits. Old books fall apart. Indie bookstores die along with their proprietors and aging customers. Good news, though -- it appears that this trend may be reversing. Our kids read books but spend a lot of time on Kindle and online reading.

I am tempted to bring up all these issues with my family. But I am in a losing battle against time. Nobody will care for these books as I do. Some will be claimed by my heirs but most will end up in library second-hand sales or in paperback bookstores or on the curb in garage sales. I will get rid of those that I can now and let time take its toll on the rest. John Donne said it well, and I don't have a single Donne book, not even holdovers from my undergrad and grad school English courses.

Here's the quote, which you may recognize:

"... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Before those bells start tolling, I need to tackle these books. Wish me luck.

Happy Cheyenne Bike Week

Me and my Peugeot, back in the day. Bob Page photo.

Happy Cheyenne Bike Week.

That's "bike" as in bicycle. Bike Week as in Harley Vroom Vroom is a totally different animal (see Sturgis or Daytona).

Bicycle Week celebrates two-wheeled people-powered transportation. Sometimes it can involve three wheels, as you see in recumbent bikes for us oldsters with bad and/or replaced knees. Kids sometimes navigate the greenway on their trikes or on training-wheel-assisted bikes. That actually makes four wheels. But you get my point.

I once was a knowledgeable cyclist, riding all the time and aware of all of the makes and models and gadgets.

No more. Arthritic knees did me in. Waited too long to get them replaced and the orthopedic doc had one heck of a time making me new again. My first new knee is not so new now, replaced in April of 2015. The second knee was replaced in February of this year. For that knee, I just finished rehab. I was supposed to be finished a monthly ago but my doc decided I needed more time with the good and caring people at rehab. Their motto: "It's supposed to hurt."

Enjoyed listening to NPR's "Here and Now" report on Monday on knee replacements. One thing brought up several times was the crucial nature of rehab. You are moving that knee before the anesthesia wears off. Actually, a continuous passive motion (CPM) machine is doing the bending for you. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Mesmerizing to watch. Teaming up with the machine are strolls around the hospital and then around your house, usually with the help of a walker or cane. A week after surgery, you are off to rehab. Someone else drives, as you can't use your right leg and your brain is scrambled with Percocet. Once there, the dedicated therapists get you to bend your knee in uncomfortable ways. You occasionally hear blood-curdling screams. Some of them are yours.

Back to bikes. Thee only bike you rise during your recovery is the recumbent bike in rehab. You may want to get back on the ten-speed or mountain bike and ride to Chugwater. But that would hurt too much. And you are still on drugs, which they don't cotton to in Chug.

I may never ride a bike to work again. First of all, I'm retired. Second, my bike needs some serious work, or I need to replace it with a 21st century super-bike that costs more than my monthly mortgage payment. One bike I looked at online today has the following attributes:

New frame with updated commuter friendly geometry

Carbon fork makes the bike lighter & reduces some of the vibrations for a smoother ride

Shimano Alfine i8 internal gear hub

Shimano hydraulic disc brakes

Gates belt drive

It is beginning to sound a bit like a $20,000 Harley, although the list of goodies would be much longer. Suffice to say, this $1,100 "Raleigh i8 Flat Bar Road Bike is the apex of the Cadent line of bikes." The apex of the Cadent? It must be good. And pretty typical of the type of bike I want.

But there's a third thing that may prevent my return to cycling. Fear. Ever had a bike wreck? I've had several. No broken bones but plenty of lacerations. In my later years, I wore a helmet now and ride mainly on the greenway. My new bike undoubtedly will be street legal and I will obey all laws, which is what retirees pledge to do when presented with their Medicare card. But a spill may wreck my knees and I am not ready to face that pain again. NPR's report said it straight -- the pain is substantial and takes time to heal. Interviewees said they knew people who took their new knees back to the jogging trail and tennis court. The producer they interviewed said it took him a year to get to the almost-pain-free stage. I am not there yet. When I reach that apex, I expect it to be all downhill from there. That used to be my favorite part, flying down hills and mountain passses. But dangers awaited around every bend. Gravel. Slick spots. Animals. Human motorists. 

My bike adventures from now on will take place on stationary conveyances. I can still manage a great workout and, unless I get the vapors, probably will stay aboard until the timer goes off and I can move on to the weight machines. And then to the showers. And then to the brewpub. Ever tried an Apex IPA? Me neither, but I keep searching. 

Never too late for a wellness class

Chris and I are attending a wellness class at the YMCA.

The class uses a text entitled "Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions." It outlines self-management tools based on "an ongoing series of studies conducted at Stanford University School of Medicine." Stanford, founded by robber baron Leland Stanford, is known for many things. It helped spawn the computer revolution, trained numerous NFL players and sponsors a kooky marching band (go you Cardinal!). And I have nothing against robber barons -- with them we wouldn't have Stanford's Wallace Stenger poetry fellowships, the many Carnegie libraries that taught generation to love books, and Grand Teton National Park (thanks Rockefeller family). Our current crop of high-tech billionaires seem to be trying to follow in the footsteps of their elders, although our grandkids will have to judge their legacies.

I'd be lying if I said the book's Stanford connection didn't impress me. There are some elitist bones in my body. But the book is a good and helpful and logical. We all need self-management skills when it comes to our health. Too often, we don't sail our own ship, health-wise, and that leads to many problems down the line -- heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, asthma and, as the book notes, "other physical and mental health conditions." Notice that latter term -- mental health conditions. The book stresses links between physical and mental health. Very important. You really can't have one without the other.

Pages 8-9 lists the management skills recommended for an array of chronic conditions. Categories include pain management, fatigue management, breathing techniques, relaxation and managing emotions, nutrition, exercise and medications. Notice that "medications" is last? I did. I take a boatload of meds for my heart disease, but also pay attention to the other categories, especially exercise and nutrition. I would like to wean myself off some heart meds. This is a challenge, as the drug lobby is adamant we use its products and never get off of them. Out docs are complicit in this strategy. They may also need this wellness class.

The series of six classes are led by two women who were trained in the process. Each class involves note-taking and brainstorming and action plans. We often choose partners to work on action plans. Our workshop leaders call during the week to check up on our progress, or lack of it.

Is the class worth it? Not sure, as I'm only halfway through. I probably will miss the last two sessions, as I'm getting a new knee Feb. 3. Takes a good month to get back in the action. But wellness is important and I wish that I'd taking it seriously sooner. At 65, I have several chronic conditions: heart disease, arthritis, depression. A better lifestyle would have spared me the heart condition. Arthritis and bad knees show the wear-and-tear of time, and many years of basketball and running. Depression runs in the family.

I'd like to sum up by saying something memorable about living life to the fullest. Must be a gazillion quotes and thousands of memes on the subject.

Here's one: "Be here now," coined by writer/philosopher Ram Dass for his book of the same name..

Here's another: "One day at a time," something I heard once or twice at Twelve-Step meetings.

"So it goes" from Kurt Vonnegut.

Florida and Wyoming duke it out as retirement destinations

Headline in today's Casper Star-Tribune: Forget Florida, Wyoming is number one for retirees

It's funny for a lot of different reasons.Wyoming is not the first state that comes to mind when retirement is mentioned. Florida and Arizona are obvious codger destinations. Florida is warm most of the time and it is filled with nifty little retirement communities where you commute in golf carts and play golf all of the live-long day. Ditto Arizona, although it's a dry heat and it doesn't have as many bugs.

But Wyoming? A recent study ranked Wyoming high on the list of job opportunities for retirees, with its 4 percent unemployment rate. It also ranked high on economic security and the lack of state income tax. Weather was not ranked, nor was the scenery.

Fact is, retirement ain't what it used to be. When I was growing up in Florida in the '60s and '70s, the place was lousy with old people. They migrated south from Massachusetts and Michigan to warm their old bones and play shuffleboard out in the January sun. They clogged the roads, their little old grey heads popping up from behind their big Caddy or Lincoln steering wheels. You often got behind them in grocery store checkout lines as they counted out their pennies, nickels and dimes to make exact change. Here you were, young and in a hurry to be somewhere, while someone your grandma's age was counting out change and asking the clerk if she wanted to see photos of her grandchildren.

Now retirees my age are cruising the great rivers of Europe, climbing Macchu Picchu and surfing Costa Rica's bitchin' waves. It's enough to make you veg out on a recliner watching Charlie's Angels reruns. But your friends will make fun of you. What are you, some kind of 21-year-old slacker sitting in front of a screen all day? Get out and do something!

Wyoming offers 98,000 square miles of outdoors. The summers are so nice that I feel guilty when I'm indoors. You can ski or snowboard in winter if your 60-something knees are better than mine. Snowmobiling is a better alternative, as long as you don't get stuck in a snowbank or -- God forbid -- an avalanche. The sun shines on winter days, more often than not, but the wind blows a mean streak. More than one spindly senior citizen has been blown to Nebraska in near-hurricane-force March winds. I have much too much meat on my bones to go airborne during a chinook.

There's another factor at work for retirement destinations. If they have kids, retirees want to be close to them and their grandkids or other family members. Our son lives in Tucson and his sister is thinking about joining him there. My wife Chris and I grew up in Florida and all of our surviving siblings and their kids live there. We have good reasons for living in FL or AZ. Most of our friends are on the CO-WY Front Range. And there is so much to do in Colorado. Chris and I plan to be busy with the arts and volunteering and travel.

So which destination is it? AZ, CO, FL or WY?

Cardiac Chronicles, continued

I get my implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) on Monday. It's an ingenious little gadget, weighing only 70 grams and 12.9 mm thick. Your average chicken egg weighs 70 grams. The belt holding up my pants is about 12.9 mm thick.

The docs will cut a slit just beneath my left collarbone, slip some leads through the vein to my heart, connect the leads to the gadget, jump-start the ICD (they told me to bring my jumper cables), sew me up and send me away, a new man. Partially new, anyway.

The ICD will correct dangerous arrhythmias and prevent sudden cardiac death. I'm at risk for these because my heart muscles sustained some damage when I had my Christmas holiday heart attack. Sudden cardiac death is what people mean when they say "He dropped dead from a heart attack. Boom -- just like that!"  

Boom -- just like that.

Not me, thanks. Not now.

Got a lot of living left to do.

Wyoming Republicans look to the future with Dick Cheney as keynote speaker

Watching the inauguration festivities on Monday in D.C. made me feel old and out of it. A wonderful African-American First Family with their two beautiful daughters and Richard Blanco reciting a poem celebrating the 21st century in America and a huge crowd of people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds and origins. This is the future and this old guy wants to be a part of it as long as possible. The Republicans, on the other hand, have proved themselves to be the political party of old ideas and old ways and selfishness. There may be hope to Repubs in the likes of Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal and those who look ahead instead of back into the previous century. Even some of the young leaders are burdened with the hatreds and prejudices that were born in the pre-Civil Rights era, back when I was a kid growing up in the American South. Nothing says outdated and old like having a remnant of the latest Repub administration as the keynote speaker at your annual banquet. Here's news from the Wyoming Republicans:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney will be the guest speaker at a Wyoming Republican Party dinner next month.  

Cheney will speak Feb. 9 at the dinner being held at the Little America Hotel in Cheyenne. The party says the event is open to the public. 

Tickets are available by contacting the party's office in Casper at 307-234-9166.

"He had arrived at a cliff, with an abyss before him and a fire behind him"

Meredith Melnick writes in Time Magazine Online today about World Suicide Prevention Day, which will take place on Monday, Sept. 10 (tomorrow):

Every day 3,000 people end their own lives, and for every person who dies, there are 20 more people who unsuccessfully attempt a suicide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the United States alone, that amounts to one death by suicide every 16 minutes, says the National Council for Suicide Prevention (NCSP).

It’s a bit tricky to figure out how to honor World Suicide Prevention Day and so the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) and the WHO have collaborated on a list of activities for organizations to consider as a way to help support the cause. But what about individuals?

The NCSP launched a “Take 5 to Save Lives” campaign that summarizes how we can all help prevent suicide — simple steps like learning the signs of suicidal behavior, raising awareness by telling other people about the World Suicide Prevention Day, and asking for help if you are concerned about your own thoughts and behavior.

Some suggested activities include holding a press conference, writing an article for your local paper, distributing information about depression, posting the WSPD banner on your blog or web site, lobbying politicians about mental health issues and other activities. Seems to me that "spreading the word" is one of the most helpful things anyone can do, since the stigma surrounding depression and suicide seems to be the strongest barrier to prevention.

Cheyenne author Edith Cook wrote movingly in the Sept. 5 Wyoming Tribune-Eagle about her brother's and niece's suicides. The Sunday Denver Post carried a front-page story about the aftermath of the December 2011 suicide of one of the city's foremost philanthropists, Noel Cunningham. He hung himself in his basement. His wife, Tammy, found his body when she arrived home from work that evening:

"It was really difficult, because all I could see for the next couple weeks was Noel, and the way I found him."

Suicide is especially difficult on those loved ones left behind, especially if it arrives as a ghastly surprise, as it did with Mrs. Cunningham. While she tried to get her husband to open up about his inner pain, he never did.

The most moving and poetic quote from the Post article came from an unexpected place -- former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter's eulogy at the 62-year-old Cunningham's memorial service. He said that Cunningham's manic level of service to his community and to international hunger relief had a "dark brother:"

"Call it depression, or despondency, or despair, but it is real, and it has to be dealt with in this eulogy."

--clip--

"Like many of us in this life," Noel had arrived at a cliff, with an abyss before him and a fire behind him, Ritter said.

"He did not see us, he could not see us, on the other side of the fire, pleading with him, telling him we love him, telling him that we will do anything, anything in the world for him, if he would just let us help him put out the fire, and bring him back from the cliff," Ritter said.

The final powerful lesson that Noel gave us all, Ritter said, "is that self-care matters too, even for the selfless."

Not bad for a politician known more for fiscal austerity than metaphor.

How many people in Wyoming are at this cliff today? Too many. Teens and aging white males are especially vulnerable, or so say the statistics. Wyoming's rapidly greying population has many of the latter group, and they tend to kill themselves in dramatically Western ways -- by gun and by rope.

So spread the word: "You don't have to face the abyss and the fire alone. I am your friend. I can help."