Counting Days/daze

Days always had a rhythm to them; weeks beginning anew on Monday with demands of school, or work, or family, mostly all three to mark the passing time.  Calendar blocks filled, time measured by meetings or assignments due; lunch or dinner engagements recorded; special occasions noted with small icons (a smiley face or heart); and the usual entries for body tune-ups at doctors or dentists or auto shops.   With each phase of my life the patterns took shape; from work assignments due, to tests and exams; volunteer or work-based meetings and conferences and papers and lectures and agendas planned and executed.  

 

Alarm clocks set, although my inner clock rarely failed to arouse me for an early start, usually 7am.  Ben would always sleep in, preferring the quiet of the post midnight house to do his major writing or thinking.  The joy of weekends always began with no need for clocks in the morning, chores managed at my own day’s pace.  Sundays reserved for the weekly crossword puzzle, family time, laziness nurtured with rare deadlines to meet.

 

I wake up today and lie still as I try to orient myself to the present.  Is it a weekend or weekday?  Was yesterday a day of leisure, or used to run errands?  I was at a concert, I remember, but was it Saturday or Thursday? If this is Monday, the trash must be rolled to the corner, if Wednesday, the recycles put out.  But wait, Thursday was a holiday, which is why it felt like a weekend day, and the recycling is collected a day later. But did I do that, or has a new, holiday-less week begun?

 

I know in nursing homes and hospitals it becomes important to help patients and residents keep track of time’s reality, so the day, date and time is often scrawled onto a white board in each room.  Should I begin to do that?  Hang a calendar near my nightstand?  Should I really need to count the days? 

 

Some days, with their set routines, are easy to slip into; Thursdays for exercise and Tai Chi, Saturdays for Sabbath services, Sundays for the regular morning talk shows.  In Florida during the winter months, my waking mind is much more in sync with my daily routines; each weekday offers an array of programs, discussion groups, trips and entertainment, from Current Events on Monday afternoon, to Tai chi on Tuesday and Friday mornings; Foreign affairs discussion each Friday morning, visual arts on Thursday and on to Women speak on Fridays.  But here at home, for the other 8 months, I float through time unchartered, with only an occasional scheduled activity.  More often than not it will involve lunch, eating out and catching up with friends, probably adding unneeded calories to my waist line.

 

Today, I tell myself that I will begin a new pattern, up each day, and after exercises and breakfast and the daily puzzles, face the computer, work on your planned book about women, write in the newly started blog, or just mundanely check emails and pay bills.  But the room I work in cannot be suffered after noon during these hot summer days, and I soon end up, yet another day, reading or watching endless British cop shows or comedy.

 

Get, up!  Go for a walk! Yes, but its 90 plus degrees!  So go to the club!  Workout!  Yes, but maybe tomorrow in the morning.  For now, the room is stifling, and the couch and that great new novel wait. 

 

fitness and fitting in

 

thoughts on our bodies.  Written in 2009, and yes, I'm still working on the fitness part!

 

Fitness and fitting in

 

 

The alarm rang, disrupting a dream filled with shadowy figures wandering hallways, drifting through time.  It took a few moments for me to make that wrenching transition from sleep to waking.  While my dreams recently have been complex and filled with strangers moving about in odd, unfamiliar settings, they dissolve into shadows, and my early mornings are always still and silent.  There is no one stretched out next to me, his room-darkening mask covering deep brown eyes, his breathing just audible.  There was a reason for setting the alarm today, but I momentarily forget it and in my confusion, wonder why it’s still so dark outside.  This is June, after all; where is the early morning sun?  But it is indeed time to wake up, into this gloomy today, with rain already threatening to drench the already over-watered flower beds. Today, I belatedly remember, I have to be at my physical therapy appointment for aquatic exercises, to strengthen my leg muscles and help me regain my balance after a grueling year with my left ankle encased in a walking boot cast.  

 

When I arrive at the pool, I greet the staff, and the now familiar faces of others slowly walking or gliding around the heated pool.  After coming to sessions for about a month now, many of the faces are familiar to me, and we remark to each other on improvements in gait, or strength as we lazily move through the warm water, laps forward and back, sideways and with legs crossed.  A generation ago, such a  group of men and women,  in their 60’s and 70’s, would never have worked so hard to stay fit or regain strength after surgery or injury.  I recall my grandmother, sitting on a stool in the kitchen or on the front porch, her fingers gnarled with arthritis, her back permanently bent.  Her only exercise consisted of the daily routines of food preparation. Yet here are two older black men, comparing knee replacement surgery experiences, laughing about the prospect of needing periodic ‘lube jobs’ like their cars.  Two Asian women slowly swim laps, never stopping while they talk quietly of grandchildren, or compare notes on instructors teaching women to move through the stiffness of their arthritis.  Helen is the preferred instructor, I gather, since she is close to their age, and joins the class in the pool. Another woman, well into her 80’s, walks her twenty minutes smoothly and gracefully, before she climbs out of the pool, retrieves her cane, and bent almost double, slowly makes her way to the elevator.  She and her husband live in a nearby senior housing complex. He has rapidly advancing Parkinson’s disease, and she uses this time alone as a needed respite from his daily care.

 

After my session, I return upstairs, greeting the usual gang of men and women sitting around a low table, resting from walking treadmills, or lifting weights.  The talk is usually of politics but more recently about health care.  Each has very clear ideas about the best way to solve our growing health care crisis; but all agree that it must be fixed, and it must be fair, and it must be soon.  As I look around the gym, I see so many older adults, working their bodies to the limit, defying entropy, defying disintegration of body and mind.   Across the road sits a senior center, open and available to local community members.  Compared to the usual mid-morning members at the club, the senior center is filled with the truly elderly, many in wheel-chairs or walkers, some drifting from quiet conversations to catnaps, all past dreams of rebuilding their worn bodies.  Are we, at the gym, fighting against reality, or are we changing reality? If “fifty is the new thirty” than is “seventy the new fifty?”  Will our generation, the pre-baby boomers, be the first ones to try to outrun, out-fox age and infirmity? Do we need a human version  of “jiffy-lube” for our bodies, bringing them in for periodic tune-ups; a knee replacement here, a rotator cuff repair there; then back on the road, or the bicycle, or treadmill?  How old is old?

My blog, ideally

Ideally, I hope this blog will provide an opportunity to share my own journey into aging, thoughts, poetry, suggestions for fully experiencing this next stage of life.  I spent most of my career working to improve systems of care for medically fragile children and children with mental illness to provide them and their parents with a coordinated, family centered, set of services and supports.  As I've aged, I've come to realize how critical this concept is for seniors, and have begun reading, teaching, writing about ways for us to keep control of our lives, get the most from these years, and, oh yes, enjoy them!!  finding humor, and insights and love and sustenance among our family, friends and providers of services. 
So I start this blog with a poem I wrote, to set the stage. 

Sensing change

I’m sensing my senses are slowly subsiding

Acuity starting to fade.

Where once I could see in bright sun or dark night

Now I find myself squinting in shade.

 

That sound of a pin drop, the cry of a babe

Could be heard from a distant room.

While now I lean forward and strain to hear

Sounds as shrill as a sonic boom.

 

I’ve learned to ask “please, could you say that again?”

Or, “Is this the brightest it gets?”

I rely on the smiles, or the laughs of the crowd

To follow along with the rest.

 

How easy it is to forget to remember the value of hearing and sight

We move through our days and our spaces with ease,

Putting out all unneeded lights.

 

I’ve learned to accept needed help on occasion,

To change a light bulb or two.

I walk with more care, or hold on to a rail,

Call a plumber if pipes start to spew.

 

I teach fellow seniors to risk, to take chances,

To ask for the help that we need,

Its better to barter, a home baked cake for a ride,

Than sit home and start going to seed.

 

But the loneliest moments, the times filled with dread,

Come when sitting among all our peers,

And you so want to add to the stories and comments,

But you haven’t a clue what was said.

 

Reality hits me; I know what to do, to stay active and unafraid.

 Get that cataract fixed, aids for both ears in place, and you go, girl, and lead the parade!