Occam’s Razor

More intimations of mortality

Doctors are busy people. Generally, if I get a phone call from our doctor’s office, it is some nurse giving me the banal details of some lab results. When out of the blue your doctor gives you a call it feels unnatural. If your heart does not start racing a bit, it should.

My doctor left a message on my voice mail at work on Wednesday asking me to call her back. I was at home attending my wife, who was recuperating from back surgery. I was not aware she had even called until Thursday morning when I got to the office. We played more telephone tag but she eventually called me at home on Thursday evening. She said that she received copies of my sonogram. Recently I had a sonogram of my bladder and kidneys. It was precautionary and part of some steps I had taken dealing with my annoying lower back pains.

While the technician was examining my kidneys, my liver must have been close by. The sonogram turned up some sort of lesion on my liver. My doctor felt that it was probably nothing to worry about. Most likely, it was some sort of benign cyst. Just to be on the safe side she wanted me to get a CT scan of my liver.

My wife would shrug off a CT scan. Her body has been scanned, poked, prodded and examined repeatedly from all sorts of directions for much of her adult life. She has had CT scans as well as MRIs and is something of a pro at this business. (”Close your eyes when they put you in the machine and try not to move.”) She expects things to go wrong. Me, I expect things to go right. There is a reason I hit the health club regularly, ride my bike to work and pop baby aspirins at night. I expect to remain healthy. I do not particularly like my minor back pain and my slightly enlarged prostate. However, these are all normal and almost predictable conditions for middle-aged men. What I do not expect is anything weird to be going on inside my body.

A cyst on my liver is not normal. On the other hand, neither is it all that abnormal. Thanks to the power of Google, I have learned that many people have cysts on their liver. At any one time, approximately 5% of the population has them and they are largely benign. I may have had one for decades. It is only now with sufficiently advanced medical devices that these things are even noticed. So it is probably just a benign blood cyst. Yet undeniably, it could be something more dreadful, like the early stages liver cancer. My maternal grandfather died of liver cancer. Of course, he did not die until his late 80s, which was a remarkable lifespan for someone born in the 19th century.

Women get cysts all the time, particularly on their ovaries. Gynecologists just keep an eye on them. In fact, women deal with all sorts of medical crap, from ovarian cysts to fibroid tumors, PMS, menopause as well as breast and cervical cancer. We middle aged men think it is unfair because our enlarged prostates make us run to the bathroom a couple times during the night. We are such whiners. Women learn to deal with their bodies giving them abuse. They have had a chance to get comfortable with their own mortality. For me the back problem and the enlarged prostate are mere annoyances. A lesion on my liver though, is a cause for concern. I wonder if I should be panicking.

I do not like prolonged periods of ambiguity yet I must wait. I must wait to get time inside a CT machine. I must wait for a radiologist report and for my doctor to ponder what it means, if anything. I should feel grateful for all this wonderful modern technology. This sonogram might have been a blessing in disguise by locating a problem before it turned into a much larger or life threatening one.

Or I could be one of these men whose life’s clock much shorter than they think it is. For me September 11th is memorable for two reasons. The first reason is obvious. I worked in Washington D.C. and saw the smoke rise from the Pentagon. I was part of the fear and chaos that marked that day, although somewhat tangentially. The second was because I was commuting in a vanpool at the time. The driver and owner, Dan, drove us all back early, fighting hellacious traffic to get us out of the city. In retrospect, his actions were almost heroic. Yet it would be the last day Dan would ever drive the vanpool or even go to work. He was complaining of stomach pains. It turned out he had pancreatic cancer. He was dead within a month. He was 48.

Life is a roll of the dice. In general, I inherit good genetics from both my parents so I know that my chances of premature death are slim. I am and feel very healthy which explains why this all feels so surreal to me. If I had some potentially major affliction I sense I would know about it somehow. Most likely, that is not how these things happen. More likely, you move through life in ignorance then discover rather suddenly that you were deluding yourself.

Overall, I am taking this news is stride. I am concerned but not anxious. Logically I know the odds are small that I have any condition that could be either serious or fatal. The emotional part of my brain is not quite so sanguine and is hyper vigilant. I am hoping in a week or so this ambiguity will be gone and I will resume enjoying life to its fullest.

March 2nd, 2008 at 02:00pm Posted by Mark | Life 2008 | one comment

My warranty has expired

My wife and I must be channeling each other. Shortly after Thanksgiving, she slipped her first disk. Since then she has spent much of her time in pain ranging from bad to excruciating. When you have pain that pervasive and acute, you get desperate. Unable to get physical therapy right away she ran to a chiropractor hoping for relief. Not much was found from either her chiropractor or her physical therapist. An MRI revealed a badly herniated disk. A shot directly on the affected ligament seems to have reduced a lot of the pain. She now bears some resemblance to her pre-Thanksgiving self. More shots are on her horizon and if they do not work spinal surgery may follow and with it the possibility of permanent injury.

Meanwhile my back has started hurting too although thankfully not so acutely. For a few weeks as we men often do, I ignored the pain and hoped it would go away. Eventually the pain reached a point where I grudgingly decided I should be seen. A nurse practitioner placed her finger in places inside my body that no human ever should and diagnosed prostatitis. Two weeks on Cipro though did not seem to alleviate the dull pain in my lumbar region. My doctor then guessed that I was probably dealing with lower back pain from sitting too much, as us office workers tend to do. A week on Naproxen and muscle relaxants seemed to help a bit but the pain has not gone away. It is time to consult with a urologist. Meanwhile, I convinced my boss to order me a fancy Herman Miller Aeron chair.

I had been warned that when you are fifty-something these sorts of medical mysteries become more routine than atypical. Somehow, I thought that I would be the exception. With enough regular aerobics and weight lifting at my local Gold’s Gym, I believed that I could beat the odds. Sadly, I seem to be suffering from self-delusion. My challenge now is to keep my medical issues minor rather than assume that with the right diet and exercise I can escape them altogether. My warranty has expired. In short, I am doomed.

I know intellectually that I will die someday. I cope with this morbid fact via the typical human means: denial and distraction. The sad fact about your warranty expiring is that neither denial nor distraction is possible. To deny your back problems while keeled over makes you worthy of derision. Age spots appear unwanted on my skin, which I had so carefully protected all these years with sunscreens and lotions. I need reading glasses to read anything closer than two feet from me. If it is more than two feet away from me then the font had better be large or I cannot read it at all. I used to have the ears of a dog. When some ultra high pitch entered my ear canal, I was frozen like a deer in a car’s headlights. This is no longer a problem because I can no longer hear those higher registers. Eczema splotches appear on my legs during the winter. Some years ago, something I wore irritated my legs. As a result, I lost most of the hair on my legs below my knee. The hair is not growing back.

Running, my preferred exercise for so many years is now largely out of the question. No matter what shoes I try, it hurts too much. In the best case, the nerves in my feet will tingle for a few hours after a run. In the worst case, the pain in my feet becomes excruciating for several days and my ankles swell up. Even some of the cardiovascular equipment at the gym designed for neutral impact on joints and muscles seems to give me minor inflammation. I am not that fragile, I tell myself. If I am going to work out then I need to work out, damn it. The last advice my doctor is going to give me is to stop exercising. I need to stay in shape and I need good muscle mass to avoid bone density loss as I age. The result of all this healthy physical activity is that I may live to see age 90. Yet it looks like in order to attain this milestone, I must spend inordinate amounts of time exercising when I do not want to do so and eating foods I do not want to eat while dealing with periodic bouts of chronic pain. I suspect if I reach age 90, it will be because I am chained to a treadmill.

I try to comfort myself by thinking, “Well, it could be worse.” There are plenty of examples around me. My wife deals with ten times the physical problems that I do. Somehow, she manages, though she spends much of her life in doctor’s offices and in pain. Watching her go through her issues may be contributing toward my anxieties. Wanting to avoid her issues, I feel like I need to do more of whatever she is not doing.

I can now clearly see my future. I was attached to my mother by umbilical cord before I was born. In my future, I will be attached not just to my doctor, but also to a whole network of specialists and care providers who will charge hefty fees to poke, probe and analyze my body so I will bitch less about my aches and pains. I want the body I had when I was 25, not the body I have now with its middle-aged aches and maladies. I pine for that body. Intellectually I realize I will never have that body again. Emotionally, I refuse to believe it.

When you turn 50, you consent to intrusive tests that you would never have agreed to at 25. Last month I endured a colonoscopy. The risk of colon cancer rises dramatically at age 50. The preparations for the tests were worse than the actual procedure. There was actually one fun part: being put under anesthesia. I was only under for 45 minutes while some extremely advanced gadget danced through my large intestine taking pictures. Nevertheless, I slept with the intensity of a baby. I wished an anesthesiologist could put me to bed every night.

The evidence is overwhelming. I am entropy in action. I can try to make the best with the body I have at this age, but it is unlikely to improve over time. It is likely to get worse. I will find relief in prescriptions but they bring only temporary relief. I need to accept that I am an older American. I need to think, not just about my retirement but about dying and death. I need to ponder what it means to be finite and adjust the rest of my life accordingly. That I cannot seems to cause cognitive dissonance that just makes my problems seem worse.

“It doesn’t get any better,” my sanguine brother in law told me last summer. At age 57 his face is dropping and his joints hurt most of the time. The feeling that he is Dorothy trapped in the Wicked Witch’s castle watching sand move quickly through the hourglass weighs heavily on his mind too.

Perhaps this is why men with the means look for much younger wives. Sometimes I think if Dennis Kucinich, age 61, can attract a babe half his age to be his lawfully wedded wife, maybe I should ditch the one I have too. For if they, being youthful, can love me in spite of my middle age aches and conditions, then perhaps some of their youthful pixie dust will rub off on me, and I will feel spry and youthful again too.

Fortunately, these are fleeting feelings. Age may just be a number, but aging has undeniable consequences. No red headed thirty-year-old vixen can change the fact that I am an aging American. I need to accept my reality and try to make the best of it. I sometimes dully wonder if some virtues will rise that will compensate for my aging. Perhaps I will find them in time.

Right now, I just want the dull pain in my lumbar region to recede.

January 16th, 2008 at 08:37pm Posted by Mark | Life 2008 | one comment

Over the Hill

Age they say is just a number. It may be just a number, but when the number is BIG and very ROUND (it ends in a zero) it becomes, if not a time for contemplation, at least hard to ignore. In two days, I reach a very big and very round number: I will be half a century old.

Naturally, I have been scrutinizing myself in the mirror a lot lately. I always wondered what I would look like when I hit 50. I did not expect (and I say this with all modesty) to look so good. Doubtless, part of my rationalization is denial. I hear we older Americans are good at denial. However, I do think there are some elements of truth. For a 50-year-old dude, I look pretty good. It is not accident. It required a lot of work: eating right, exercising regularly, and applying sunscreen religiously. Most likely though I owe most of my reasonably youthful looks to my mother’s side of the family. My father turned grey in his thirties, so in some respects he always looked older than his years. Not me. Yes, I have grey in my hair, but it is not very much and it is blended in so well that most days I do not even notice it.

I half expect though that I will wake up one morning, look in the mirror, and find that my face has fallen and grey streaks coming out of my hair like wild onions. I am in the middle of a large sibling pack, so looking at my older siblings gives me an idea of what may be imminent. It is not necessarily pretty but, like death, there is not much I can do about it. In fact, if I look at myself in the mirror it is obvious that my youthful look is more in my head than on my face. A small droop is developing under my chin. There are the lines near my eyes. Age spots are popping up here and there. My bright hazel eyes look a little less bright. My hairline is not receding, but it may be thinning a bit. Moreover, there are those other unwelcome signs of aging: the hard work that is required not to have a paunch, hair growing out of the ears, bifocals and annoying medical conditions that probably would not occur if I were half my age. Running, at least for the moment, is out of the question; my feet and my joints cannot handle it anymore. Thank goodness for elliptical machines. When I press those weights at the health club, I feel quite virile. Then I watch some young man half my age pressing twice as much weight. In addition, there is the truest sign of middle age: you have to constantly watch what you eat. If you get a free lunch, or even if you do not, it will end up around your middle.

Fifty is an age when you should have discovered some limitations. While it is also an age when you may be over the hill, you can still find the vista from being on top quite breathtaking. If your experience is like mine (and mine is likely atypical), it is a time when you have arrived after so much darn struggle. Career-wise, I cannot complain. Maybe I had dreams of being a bestselling writer at age 25, but there is nothing wrong with being a mid-level manager with a six-figure income running a dynamic, content driven website for a living. It is not just any web site though, but a web site depended on by the public and by governments, sometimes to make decisions that save lives and property. I am blessed to manage a talented and supportive team of people any of whom, if truth were told, are more talented than I am. My job is empowering as well as demanding. I may not always like where business takes me, but it does take me places. Last week I was in Denver. I know I will be back there again this year, and I also know I will be in Savannah in June. On what other adventures will I be sent on someone else’s dime before the year is out?

Admittedly, there are still challenges. Our daughter is about to graduate high school and she is so not ready to confront the real world. My wife and I have to work on that, as well as our own relationship, which after 21 years could perhaps use a dose of Viagra. Yet both these challenges seem doable. After all my wife and I have 21 years of marriage to build on. In addition, my daughter, while she is woefully unprepared for adulthood, is smart and personable and will no doubt succeed in time. I was just hoping that she would be a bit better adjusted at this point, so I could sail smoothly through my fifties.

That is likely not to be. Life of course is about living, and living implies that things will not stay the same. While I hope for a decade of optimal health, I likely will not have it. I will have to deal with it, along with my wife’s medical issues. Yet perhaps, with some good fortune my fifties will be reinvigorating. (According to my Chinese friend Hua, this is the Year of the Golden Pig, which only comes every 60 years, and which means good fortune.) Perhaps I will retain some semblance of my youth, my daughter will move into adulthood without major trauma, my marriage will deepen, and I will retire with plenty of financial security, able to squander the rest of my life as I see fit.

If for some reason, you forget that you will be turning 50, AARP will remind you. Actually, their mailer arrived more than six months ago. Apparently, age is no longer a barrier to AARP membership. Taking my father’s advice, I have declined to join. Nevertheless, there is also the fact that I just do not feel old. I know I should, and the 25 year old me would definitely see the 50 year old me as old, but I either live in denial or I am very fortunate.

A few things are clear. Even if I were inclined to go after a younger babe, they do not want me. They might if I were in my early forties, but in your fifties they only go after you if you will keep them in fine clothes and fine dining. In short, when you are fifty-something, they do not want you because of who you are, but because of what you are. This is good because my wife remains one of a small number of women who like me just as I am, and for whom my age simply does not matter. I do sometimes wonder when we are twenty years older, with droopy faces, wearing dentures and with a medicine cabinet full of Polident, whether we will still feel some spark of romance. I guess time will tell. Perhaps if I am still blogging in twenty years, you will find out.

For me, age 50 finds me in something of a state of denial. I do not deny the fact that I am virtually 50, but I do feel increasingly like denying my own mortality. It was less than two years ago that I watched my mother die of a progressive disease. Having observed the dying process close up, it no longer holds quite the horror it once did. One lesson though which I have incorporated as part of watching her dying and going through my own grieving process is to understand important it is to live robustly while you can.

It is hard though when you are over the hill not to contemplate your own date with death. Perhaps I am naïve or optimistic, but for all my life I have assumed I would live into my eighties and be in reasonably good health. It is no longer wishful thinking, given the mortality statistics. When I view my date with death dispassionately, I feel like a Las Vegas odds maker. I feel there is a 75% chance that I will make it to age 80, and maybe a 25% chance I will make it to age 90.

Coincidentally, I had a life insurance physical yesterday. A nurse from Portamedic came to my house. She had me pee into some test tubes, drew several vials of blood, weighed me, measured my height and even had me lie on the couch while she took an EKG. This is my third life insurance physical, and they get more intrusive every time. If I do another one, I expect a proctological exam. My financial adviser says I need to maintain life insurance through age 60, so I subjected myself to the process again. Sitting around the kitchen table while the nurse kept asking me intrusive personal questions, I could feel her sizing up my odds of making it to 60.

No matter. Life is about living and I intend to live it. Turning 40 was traumatic; I hid in the basement most of the day. Turning 50 feels fine. I intend to spend the day working, as I have plenty of tasks on my To Do list, and then maybe celebrate by going out to dinner with my wife.

Still, while I do not play golf, I do feel the need to go buy a golf shirt, a straw hat, a pair of sunglasses and some oversized canvas loafers. If it were summer, I would want to sit under the shade with a mint julep in one hand and converse with my aging neighbors at a block party. We will tell stories of friends and family lost, and our children blossoming into adults. We will chat about the latest movies or who should win the World Series. We will mention casually that trip to Europe we took, or our new vinyl siding. We will hear the steaks sizzling on the grill. After the mint julep, out will come the bottle of Chardonnay to be passed around and drunk from Dixie cups. The grill will pop when the occasional drip of fat hits the lava rocks. The dog will bound up the steps to the deck. Light conversation and laughter abounds. The next phase of our lives, the best one, begins.

That is how I feel as I turn 50.

January 30th, 2007 at 08:42pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

Welcome to the New Middle Age

Okay so I am 49 and I will turn 50 next February. It will not be long before I get that first AARP solicitation. I do not know how, but I am sure I am in their database somehow. AARP used to be an acronym, “American Association of Retired Persons”. Now it is just AARP. Nevertheless, we all know what it is, since you must be age 50 or over to join. However, you do not have to be retired.

I have no idea if I will join AARP. I do know one thing. 50 is way too young to retire. Few of us can afford to retire at 50 anyhow, although increasing numbers of 50 something Americans may have no choice. At 49 though, I feel I am in my prime. I know middle age is supposed to start in your 30s. Yet for those of us living in first world countries, and who are fortunate to have a certain income level, our 30s and even our 40s are not so much middle age, as a kind of extended period somewhere between adolescence and the onset of middle age. With so many of us living into our eighties and nineties these days, maybe 50 is where middle age begins.

Many of us have gotten the message. While you cannot stop aging, you can prolong optimal health. If you work at it, you can also prolong the illusion of youth. I do not think of myself as middle aged. When I look in the mirror, I do not see a middle-aged face. Perhaps it is vanity, perhaps it is delusion, or perhaps it is a combination of good genetics and prevention. I got the message in my early twenties that if I wanted a good quality of life, it would not come free. Therefore, I started running at 24, and have been running or engaging in some form of regular aerobic exercise ever since. In addition to popping the vitamins, I have been regularly applying the sunscreen. I have not always eaten right, but I have never had a bad diet. Throughout my adult years, vegetables, fruits and fiber have been a regular part of my diet.

Unlike my turbulent twenties and challenging thirties, life in my forties is pretty darn good. I am finally where I always wanted to be in my career. It just took twenty-five years of working hard and a bit of the luck of the Irish to get here, but here I am. My only child is nearing adulthood and hopefully will be soon on her way toward a successful young adulthood of her own. Retirement is on my distant horizon now. If my stars align correctly, it will begin in my late 50s. That certainly does not mean I will be ready for the old folk’s home, or even really retire. Instead, it is more likely I will begin a second career.

I do not remember it being this way. When I was a mere teen, 49 was old. I suspect I am as perceived to be just as ancient to today’s teens. Yet I simply do not feel like I look my age. I am by no means alone. I work in a building populated by forty and fifty somethings. We look good. Our skin may not be quite as tight as it was in our twenties, but for the most part, we are free of all but minor wrinkles on our faces. These midlife ladies breasts may sag a bit, but just a bit. In any event, there is always the wonder of the Wonderbra.

To some extent, we baby boomers succeed in masking many aspects of aging. Many women in my age group dye their hair or, just as importantly, pay top dollar for a top hair stylist. Others are liberal in their use of makeup; it hides their more prominent age spots. We dress (when we can) as we did in our early twenties. When I was a child, older men wore felt hats, pleated pants, shoes and suits around town, even when they were at leisure. Lounge around the house in blue jeans and sneakers? They would have none of it. Well, we will have none of their kind of middle age. Perhaps the time will come when we wear knee-high white socks, baggy shorts and garish tropical shirts, but not yet. Maybe at age 50 we will start playing out the idea in our minds. Not yet though.

Admittedly, there are signs that we are not immortal. Perhaps the most depressing of them is that our eyes do not have the flexibility and acuity of our youths. I have worn bifocals for most of my forties. I also have a set of reading glasses. Nevertheless, even there we have new options. Many of us choose progressive lenses. Others of us choose laser vision correction, which allow us to see even better than when they were youths. We live in something of a magic age where science and technology provides the illusion we need that, if we are not immortal, we have dramatically slowed down our entropic nature.

Though I would like to think of myself as in my prime, I am not. I hit the Gold’s Gym several times a week too. While there, I use a number of weight machines. I feel good about the weight lifting, even though it is hard work and often leaves my joints tender for a day or two. Then I have incidents that make me realize that although I am in good shape, I am cannot begin to compete with a teenager. For example, about a year ago, we brought home a used office-sized desk. It felt like it weighed a ton. Between my wife and me, we could barely get in into our house. Its destination was our loft. Try as we might between the two of us we could not move it more than a couple of stairs.

Enter Stephen, the teenager from two doors down. He is 17 and he is on the wrestling team at school. Lifting a desk? No problemo. While I lifted the bottom of the desk using all of my force, he pulled the upper part of the desk up the stairs and into our loft. He did not even work up a sweat. I sat there panting from the exertion. I was also a bit staggered by how strong the human body can be in its prime. I am in good shape for a 49-year-old dude, but he has twice my strength and agility, at least.

Fortunately, on most days I can still pretend and actually believe I have the strength, agility and good looks of my youth. It may be a necessarily illusion for me to successfully navigate through my forties. However, it does not matter. All that matters is how I feel. And I feel great.

Like waiting for the other shoe to drop, I keep waiting for real middle age to show itself. Perhaps with sufficiently positive thinking and self-brainwashing it never arrives.

I hope this illusion continues.

May 19th, 2006 at 07:36pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

The honor never ends

There was no need to buy a Mother’s Day card this year. There was no mother to call on the phone today either. I am feeling a bit like Opus the penguin today. Maybe I should be spending $1.99 a minute on a Dial-a-Mom service. Nah, it would not be the same. Just as there is no place like home, there is no mother like your mother. One thing is for sure: my mother will not be opening any mother’s day cards this year. She passed away last November.

I do still have a mother in law, for which I am grateful. I am sure she is a terrific mother (although my wife might quibble) but she was of course not my mother. She came with the marriage and in the unlikely event that my marriage dissolves, she goes out with the marriage too. Moreover, unless I elect to travel 2500 miles to Phoenix, it is unlikely that I will see her. Nevertheless, I call her Mom. She seems to like it and it is an easy thing to do. I signed the card my wife picked out for her. As mothers in law go, she is better than most. Nevertheless, she is not my mother.

I do honor my wife on Mother’s Day, since she is the mother to our fabulous daughter. I usually buy my wife a card for Mother’s Day, and do her chores. Yet this year it skipped my mind, probably because I did not need to buy one for my mother. What my wife really wants for Mother’s Day is downtime and a foot rub at bedtime. That is easy enough to accommodate.

That is not to say that I did not honor my mother at all. Mother’s Day weekend is an appropriate time to pay a visit to her grave. My father and I contributed plenty of fresh flowers for the cistern on her grave. With luck, they may look good for a week or so. We actually did our duty a day early. The Saturday before Mother’s Day is a popular day at the cemetery, yet I suspect it will be even more jammed today. For a while there I felt we needed to take a number. My mother will have to forgive our flower arrangement. There were no women present to artfully arrange them. We did the best that two heterosexual men with engineering mentalities could do. I brought yellow tulips; yellow was my mother’s favorite color.

It is entirely possible that with my mother dead that she will “see” more of me now that when she was alive. When she was alive, she was hundreds of miles away, and not easily accessible by either airplane or car. At best, I visited her annually. Now her cremains are interred in the Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Visiting her grave means crossing the Potomac River, not the Appalachian Mountains. The cemetery is not too much out of my way when I go that way, so I suspect I should be able to pay my respects at least once a quarter. I will be one of many people helping to keep the floral industry in business.

In her last year of life, she seemed to want rest more than anything else, for her disease meant that sleep often alluded her. There is no doubt that her cremains will remain at rest. Yesterday was the exception. It was almost lively with all the visitors at the cemetery. Peace is one of the cemetery’s key attributes. If you like meditation, a cemetery seems an appropriate place to visit. It is a good place not only to pay your respects to loved ones, but also to contemplate your own mortality. It does not take too many minutes of contemplation though before further contemplation becomes challenging. When surrounded by death on all sides, all one can really say about death is that it is. It is beyond argument or dispute. Rather than be the creepy place imagined in horror movies, cemeteries are spots of utter tranquility in an otherwise restless world. If I craved tranquility in order to get some sleep, I suspect sleeping in a cemetery would have me sleeping like a baby.

Some part of me though does wonder why I go and pay my respects. Exactly who and what am I respecting? What is left of my mother is a box of ash a few feet underground. I am too secular to believe that her spirit hovers above my shoulders when I visit. Thus far visiting my mother’s grave has neither made me mourn nor feel wistful. However, I do feel a certain sense of the sacred with each visit. While my mother’s spirit may well still be around, it cannot be geographically located. Her grave though is a physical place where what is left of her physical body remains.

The meaning of my mother’s life, like birth and death, is shrouded in mystery. Like most mothers, my mother was a nurturer. She provided a foundation and an infrastructure that I took for granted growing up. With an adult perspective, I understand just how much her commitment to her children really meant. It meant giving up her future so we could have a future. It meant millions of carefully prepared meals, thousands of diaper changes, and hundreds of visits to the pediatrician and emergency room. It meant a clean house, laundered sheets, picnics, recitals, science fairs, movies and watching bad family television together on Friday nights. It also of course meant hugs, kisses and caresses. I gave her lots of “go power”. For twenty-five years or so, we largely consumed her life.

All this so many of us could raise similarly talented children with good values, so we could have interesting jobs, enriched lives and make our marks on the world. For all that to happen though she first had to be there for us. It was a Herculean effort, but one at which she met the challenge, not just for me, but also for my seven other siblings. She did it without so much as getting to put one contribution into her 401-K. Her rewards were to be intangible.

That is why I still honor her. For I was launched into this world on her mighty shoulders. I could now be miserable. I could now be impoverished. I could now be dysfunctional. Heck, I could now be dead too. That none of these things have happened I can largely attribute to my mother. That is why although she is not around she is still a daily presence in my life. No gift that I could give her could come close to what she gave me.

Thanks Mom. Rest assured that as long as I am alive, you will never be forgotten. There is no card for you this year, but I still honor you on Mother’s Day, and will every Mother’s Day for the rest of my life.

May 14th, 2006 at 12:00pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

Report from the Post-Mom Era

Everyone grieves uniquely when someone they love dies. My mother passed away nearly six months ago. Overall, I have adjusted quite well, as has my family. At least, that is how it appears. For all I know my father and siblings could each be going through their own painful grieving processes. If so, they are not talking about it. My mother’s death last November 10th was hardly unexpected, although it did come quicker than I anticipated. Most of my tears for her loss were shed when she was still alive. Many occurred after visiting her during my many visits to her in the nursing home. While grateful to have time with her during her last days, I was also crushed with every visit, because with every visit she was more diminished. It was heartbreaking to see such a vibrant woman reduced to near total dependence on others. It was hard to stay chipper while feeding my mother, wiping her chin and brushing her teeth. It was little wonder then that her actual death was as much a relief for us as it must have been for her. My life was no longer framed by her decline. My weekends opened up again. There was no reason to rush out and see my father every week as I did with my mother. My father has all the companionship he wants in his retirement community. He seems to have moved on rather quickly too. As he told me, he really lost my mother several years earlier. When her mind went as a result of her disease, much of the woman he loved died too.

That is not to say that no one really mourned my mother’s death. I am sure I will be grappling with her absence for the rest of my life. In truth a day does not go by when I do not think of her. Her absence no longer brings tears, but does bring a certain wistfulness for the time when she was such a presence in my life.

Probably the person most affected by my mother’s death was my wife. For reasons I do not fully understand, my wife deeply cared for my mother. Of course she has a mother of her own that she loves, but my mother did not come with strings and a history. I am not sure that my mother was quite the wonderful woman my wife made her out to be. While she brought no baggage to her relationship with my mother, I had baggage with my mother. She never saw the anally obsessive, screaming mother I remembered from my youth. Her mother, on the other hand, never raised her voice.

It probably does not matter why my wife so bonded with my mother. All that really matters was that my wife was an angel during her darkest days. She visited her at least once a week, usually at midweek when no one else could. She patiently listened to her, spoke honestly of our small little life, helped her with intimate female things, and found unique ways to touch her heart. A few weeks before her death, my wife put together a large photo collage of her children and grandchildren and placed it on poster board at the foot of her bed. By this time, my mother was in the advanced stages of PSP (Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) and could not move her eyes. However, she could stare straight ahead and look at our pictures, courtesy of my very loving wife. Perhaps during those dark times she also could marvel at how many wonderful children and grandchildren resulted from her life, how we all turned out to be such good people, and how we were making our marks on the world.

I do not think my wife has fully grieved over my mother’s passing. Other than her grandmother, my mother was the first woman that she deeply loved to pass out of her life. In retrospect, it was natural that she would be attracted to her. They were born about sixty miles apart and almost forty years apart. They came from poor white families and had similar values. They learned how to scratch a living. Both were introverted. In addition, both knew how to delight family and guests with culinary treasures made by scratch from their kitchens. In retrospect, it is as if I ended up marrying my mother. Moreover, in many ways, it was as if my wife ended up marrying my father. No wonder she feels more wedded to my family than her family.

My father is busy making the best of the rest of his life. After 55 years of marriage, you might think that the idea of another love interest would be far from his mind. That is not the case. He may be 79, but he is in good health. He clearly misses the intimate daily connection of living with a woman. For better or for worse, he has plenty of women in his age group in his retirement community. My mother had only been dead a couple months and he was making carefully considered and very gentlemanly advances toward other women.

I was wondering if my siblings would be offended. So far, no one has spoken up. I spent a week examining my own feelings. By pursing other women, especially so soon after my mother’s death, was he in a way dishonoring my mother’s memory? Should I feel upset or offended? Some small part of me wanted to feel this way, but the other part remembered how absolutely dutiful and loyal my father was during their long marriage. While I am sure their marriage, like all marriages, had its ups and downs, my mother got quite a bargain in my father. He is sober man, cautious with money, steadfast in his devotion, faithful and as devoutly Catholic as she was.

At 79, I am also aware that my father was not going to live forever. How could I not wish him happiness in his final years? Perhaps he will get a reward for his devotion in the heaven he hopes to get to someday. Meanwhile, I see no reason why he should not have a bit of a reward while he is still alive and in reasonably good health. Therefore, I wished him luck. So far though he is finding that these late in life relationships challenging. While I think he harbors ideas of another marriage, I doubt many of the widows he is gently pursing feel this way. They are settled in their apartments. Their wills are signed, sealed and notarized. Their children are probably not anxious to have him inherit any of it. Time will tell whether another marriage is in his future. Nevertheless, I can see why he is interested. After 55 years of marriage, six months of being a bachelor must still be a disconcerting feeling. He dutifully took care of my mother, but she also dutifully took care of him. Even during his short stint in the Navy, someone else did his laundry. He lived at home while he went to college. He is used to having a woman take care of him. His current state is exceedingly unnatural.

On the other hand, my wife is having mixed feelings. She sees my father as the father she never had. (Her father left home when she was six, and divorced her mother at age eight.) While she loves him as much as any of us, I think in some ways she thinks by pursuing women, especially so soon after my mother’s death, he is dishonoring her and their marriage. They were after all devout Catholics. Catholics believe in marriage for life. How could he consider someone else after so much time loving just one woman? I think she is wondering how someone in such a devoted marriage like his could move on so quickly.

Yet he has moved on. In fact, I think all my siblings have moved on. We are still touched daily by the memories of our mother. However, life did not stop when she died. It kept moving on and we were still caught in its vortex. Bills still had to be paid. Our children and significant others still had to be dealt with. We honor my mother, in a way, by choosing life, for she was always a woman in motion. She would want us to do move on. Perhaps that is why while I still miss my mother, it took me only a few weeks to work through the bulk of my grief.

Life is about living. Our ends will come soon enough. For now, simply enjoying being alive and healthy seems a fitting way to celebrate and honor my mother’s remarkable life.

May 3rd, 2006 at 09:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | one comment

Raising our retirement sails

Oh, how I wish I could stop thinking about tomorrow. Ignorance may be foolhardy, but while you are in it, life is truly blissful. However, since my retirement seminar about a month ago, I have been feeling a bit spooked. All along, I had this image of my ideal retirement. I would “retire” at 55 on my government pension. There would be no financial worries. However, I would work or consult a little for my own amusement and set my own hours. Maybe I would take up teaching full time at a community college or maybe not. I would leave plenty of gaps during the year for vacations and extended cruises. Then, perhaps around age 60, I would truly retire. The rest of my life would be on the house and stress free. I would indulge my many hobbies and whims. My life’s cup would runneth over. I would climb many mountains and ride my bike on many a trail. I would avoid all medical problems, stay in optimal health, and always look like Hugh Downs. I would die gently in my sleep sometime my extremely late 90s or, perhaps in the arms of an illicit and voluptuous lover half my age. Hey, it worked for Nelson Rockefeller. What a way to go!

The vision is fading. Now, after two days of learning the ins and outs of retirement, I feel like someone has thrown a bucket of cold water on me. The Eight Ball is now saying “Outlook hazy, try again”. So unfortunately, I now find myself painfully and uncomfortably financially awake. I now realize that if my wife and I want a good retirement we need both a stroke of luck and must get our financial house in order post haste.

How silly of me. I thought my government pension, our modest 401-Ks, and our small IRA would see us robustly through retirement. I had faith that my retirement income would cover expenses. Alas, it ain’t necessarily so. The sad reality out there is that not many of us can afford to spend our retirement hitting the golf course every day. As a government worker I am more fortunate than most. Yet it would not take too much for my financial house of cards to collapse either. There is nothing certain in life, not even a government job or a government pension.

In fact, retirement is turning into a scary experience for many Americans. The good news is that we are living longer. Instead of dropping dead of a heart attack in our sixties, many of us will reach our eighties or beyond. That is pretty much the extent of the good news.

The bad news is that because we are living longer we need to save even more money to carry us through those extra years. Medical expenses and home prices are likely to continue to exceed inflation during our retirements. Many of us have to work longer because social security insists we must wait longer before it will pay out benefits.

Yet there is no guarantee that we will remain gainfully employed until a proper retirement age. It seems that we budding senior citizens are expensive employees. We too have jobs that could be amenable to outsourcing. If our employer is watching the bottom line, and whose employer isn’t, someone half our age and willing to work for half our salary can likely replace us. Consequently, long before we turn 67 and a half there is a decent chance that we will be shoved out the door. If it is done gracefully, we will retire on a reduced pension. However, pensions are largely obsolete. So for most of us, a graceful forced retirement means perhaps a few tens of thousands of dollars to not come to work anymore. So there we are, maybe age 50 or 55, forced to buy our own health insurance at exorbitant rates (if we can get it at all), our mortgage payments still due every month, and working perhaps 2 or 3 mediocre jobs for less than half what we made before. We can see a second career as a Wal-Mart greeter in our future. Naturally, we will be too young for Medicare or Social Security benefits. In addition, we dare not touch our 401-Ks for our living expenses, since we will have to pay stiff penalties. Meanwhile, Junior is miffed because we are having a hard time turning up even spare change under the cushions to send him to a community college.

I hope that most of you reading this will not suffer this fate. Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that millions of Americans have already gone through one of these peculiar levels of hell. Nevertheless, even if we are fortunate and retire with a decent pension and bulging 401-K, there are other potential financial landmines just below the surface. Perhaps we have aging parents with special needs. Perhaps our spouse will develop a chronic condition that will require years in a nursing home. If you thought owning a house and raising children was complicated, welcome to modern retirement living. It is a new landscape, where many doctors will refuse to see you because of they will not accept the government’s niggardly Medicare reimbursement rates. Cash only please.

Darn that Jerry. Jerry is the financial planner at the retirement seminar I attended who sobered me up. Yeah, I think I knew about all these landmines in my future, but I was much more comfortable not thinking about them. I have more immediate health problems inside my family to navigate and a daughter who will be attending college soon. Now I also have to think five, ten, twenty, and potentially forty years ahead to make sure I have all my bases covered.

I have decided I cannot do this alone. Yes, I am good at tracking my net worth in Quicken. I balance my accounts to the penny every month. I even put away money for my daughter’s college education, although we have saved only about half what it will cost. The sad reality is that managing a successful retirement is beyond all but a tiny percent of us. It is too complex. There are too many variables. The rules keep changing. Therefore, my wife and I are hiring a financial planner.

Even this is risky. Most financial planners are more interested in their bottom line than yours. Moreover, their bottom line will look a lot better if they sell you the stocks and funds for the banks or brokerage firms they represent. So where do you go? You may want to do what I am doing and hire a fee only financial planner. Yet even that is no guarantee that you will get your money’s worth. It is easy to squander your money at $150 an hour too.

We decided to hire Jerry, the financial planner who woke me up. I know he has many clients, and I was surprised to find he was taking on new ones. He seems to spend about half his time engaged in financial evangelism by going out and talking to people like me. Yes, he is affiliated with the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, a fee-only group of financial planners with reasonably rigorous standards and ethics. Still, NAPFA affiliation is no guarantee of quality advice. However, having met Jerry in class I feel confident that although his fees are not cheap, I will get my money’s worth.

Getting there from here will be another chore. Aside from the initial planning fee, (I am glad we are getting a substantial tax refund this year so we can afford to do this) and the yearly retainer there is much work that we have to do first. The bundle of papers from Jerry arrived in the mail the other day. This is as intimidating as filing a complex tax return. There are about thirty pages of forms to go through asking for excruciating details about our financial life and goals. Many of the questions are hard to answer. How long do you expect to live? Well, forever naturally, but they want a number. I answered 90 for my wife and me, although I would be surprised if either of us live that long. Where do we want to retire? I haven’t a clue. When do we want to retire? We do not know precisely. Sometime between 55 and 60 maybe, if we can afford it?

Perhaps it does not matter much, but putting our thoughts down on paper does have merit. For in doing so every year we have an opportunity to reassess our goals. Then, with Jerry’s sound help, we will steer closer toward meeting those goals every year. As he put in his newsletter, “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”

This is good advice. We need to start by putting up our sails.

(Stay tuned for more chapters in the months and years ahead.)

March 10th, 2006 at 11:03pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

Yin without Yang

Clearly, it is going to take a while to process all my feelings about my mother’s death. For now, it seems surreal. Even when she and my father lived 600 miles away, even when I did not see them for a year or two, still they were always in my present. Both were an easy phone call or email away. With my Mom’s death all that has changed of course. My father is now a widower. Now he is left to pay the bills and try to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He remains in decent health. Of course, we, his children, hope for many more years of good health and happiness for him.

At 79, he is not quite the man that he was. We see signs that he is losing some of his independence. He still drives a car, but he drives it locally and only during non rush hours. I am grateful because the drivers in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area are unforgiving to someone with aging reflexes. As a consequence in order to come visit us, someone has to drive him here (about 30 miles each way). Today being Thanksgiving, we provided the dinner. My sister Mary drove him over.

Seeing him come in the door to our house - alone - for me drove home the reality of my mother’s death. Yin was without Yang. Yes, death is a natural experience but this seemed decided unnatural. It was exactly two weeks ago today that my mother died. Even if last Thanksgiving my mother had to be helped bodily into our house, that was more natural than seeing my father come through our door without my mother.

My father remains philosophical and pragmatic. He brought with him a number of my mother’s keepsakes, principally a lot of costume jewelry. My wife got to pick through them and retain any items that she wanted. The book I gave to my mother on famous movies stars back in 1974 was returned too. I guess it was on loan. My father said my mother had enjoyed reading it many times. There are still things for him to sort through. Doubtless, many bills will need to be settled. My mother’s possessions are being farmed out to family if possible. The lesser ones are likely to end up at Goodwill. Then there is the matter of her interment. Her body was cremated but her ashes will go in a nearby cemetery. My father still has to pick out the exact plot. He is still a bit puzzled why I would want to attend this last act.

On the surface, my father seems like himself. We played a game of Scrabble (he won). We went for a Thanksgiving walk, a custom in our family so we do not feel so guilty about the feast to come. His mind is still sharp but our Thanksgiving walk came harder to him. I could hear him breathing heavily as we walked.

At our table, he was sometimes the odd man out. Had my mother been with us, there would have at least been someone his own age with whom to discuss things. We tried to keep him engaged but a lot of the conversation simply was not relevant to him. Discussions about TV shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer has no relevance in his life. So quite often, he was left alone in his own thoughts. Nevertheless, he seems philosophical about this time of his life. He seems to understand that his time too is nearing an end, and the world belongs to newer generations.

I am glad he has his retirement community. Too much time with my family would probably be a tedious experience for him. However, at Riderwood he has plenty of people in his own age group with whom to chat. These connections are perhaps the most meaningful experience in his life in more than twenty years. Many of the residents at Riderwood also grew up in this area. Consequently, there are endless stories to plumb with residents about the way Washington D.C. used to be sixty or seventy years or so years ago, when he was a young lad.

I hope that he has the time for a late life renaissance. Since he is unencumbered, perhaps he will take Elder Hostel vacations again. Perhaps he will visit distant relatives at times of his own choosing. On the other hand, perhaps he will simply stay at Riderwood where he is so happy, and enjoy time with family when we are in his neighborhood.

Since husbands tend to die before their wives, we are also wondering whether he might start dating again. Riderwood has many widows. A courteous gentleman like himself should be in high demand. Time will probably tell us whether he will even entertain female prospects. None of us wants to see him lonely. Fortunately, he does not appear to be the least bit lonely. He makes his own social life.

I may be projecting, but being spouseless after fifty-five years must be difficult on many levels. The void must be difficult to fully accept and work through. So we watch him with some wariness, sanguine that his last years are likely to be happy ones, but wary nonetheless. Since we live locally, my sister and I are also feeling our way through this change. How can we best support my father during his last years? Right now, we do not know the answers. We want to give him the space he deserves as a grown up in full control of his faculties, but we also want to be ready to step in when needed.

Yes, it does feel surreal. It feels surreal to play Scrabble with my father, to have his mind still so sharp, yet to have my mother irrevocably exiled from our lives. In a way, my mother still lives on. In my desk drawer are two cassettes of conversations with my mother taken some three year ago when she was of sound mind and body. I have yet to transcribe the oral history that I took. I need to. However, right now I cannot work up the courage to listen to the tapes. Her passing is still too near. I too need a little distance in order to gain perspective.

While I mostly feel fine, I sometimes wonder if I am like a soldier suffering from shell shock. Perhaps rather than being at the end of my grieving process, I am just at its beginning.

November 24th, 2005 at 08:37pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments

Imagining My Life in 2015

Yesterday evening was covenant group again. Once a month I meet with the same small group of members of the Unitarian Universalist Church that I attend. Six to eight of us commit to meet once a month, share stories, do readings, eat snacks and digress on a topic of some depth. After an hour of us doing a brain dump of the significant things that happened to us during the last month, we discuss a topic that we had agreed to discuss the last time we met. This time it was where we wanted to be five and ten years in the future.

I hated to admit it, but the topic was a stumper. For most of my life, I had a good idea about where I wanted to be ten years out. Now at age 48 I felt clueless.

We all agreed we did not want to be dead. That was easy. We also agreed we wanted to be in good health. I am the youngest member of my covenant group. As I noshed on strawberries, I wondered if I would break out into a cold sweat when it was my turn to speak. What was I to say? At 58 would I still be working? Would I be retired? Would I start playing golf? Would I start a hobby like building train sets in my basement? Would I find my evil side and take delight at exposing myself to unwilling victims on street corners? Would I write that novel I figured I would write eventually someday? Or would I just kick back and lead a wholly unplanned life, flitting from day to day like a bee flits from flower to flower?

I realized that part of the reason I did not want to think too much about it is that I would be a lot older. I hope that I would retain some semblance of my youthfulness but if it did not work for Robert Redford, it probably will not work for me either. At 48, I feel I look a lot better than most my age. I doubt that will be the case at 58. Generally, we Caucasians do not age well. Therefore, I hope I will graceful about my age. If I attract any young babes, it will be because I won the lottery, not because of my charming personality or youthful demeanor.

Sadly, the chances are good that when I am 58 both my parents will be deceased. My daughter will be 25 and presumably out of the house. (There are no guarantees these days. She seems very comfortable in her room and not anxious to start independent living. I suspect that I will need to bring in marshals to evict her.) If the federal government does not change its retirement policies I could be several years into retirement by the time I am 58.

Part of me expects there to be some calamity between now and then. Perhaps a few suitcase nuclear bombs will go off in Northern Virginia. If I survive that then I expect our assets will be gone with the nuclear fallout and I will be eking a living in drainage pipes and pushing a shopping cart. Perhaps my wife’s various medical problems will become persistent and acute. As a result, perhaps I will end up much like my father and spend my days catering to her. However, the odds are good that age 58 will find us comfortable. I hope that the economy will be good enough and my pension will be secure enough that I will not have to work anymore.

What I do not know yet is whether I would start a second career. In this country being age 58 would mean another decade in the workforce. Fifty-eight is now arguably the middle of middle age. Ideally, any second career would be on my time schedule. Most likely, a full time job would seem too burdensome. Economic necessity might require it. Since I currently teach part time (no more than one three-credit course a semester) and usually enjoy it, I can see myself doing that, probably teaching computer courses full time. Teaching has never been a profession to get into because you want big bucks. With a decent pension, forty thousand dollars a year would seem like a lot of money. On the other hand, since I am clearly a political creature perhaps I would run for public office. (Perhaps not. I cannot see myself spending days dialing for dollars.)

Yet I may still be in my present job. Perhaps I would enjoy it too much to retire. Looking five years ahead, it is likely that I will still be in my current position. For the first time in my life, I feel like I am in a job that is rewarding enough where I might want to keep doing it for ten more years. The pay is excellent. The responsibility is challenging but not overwhelming. I like making actual important strategic decisions. In addition, I am blessed with a terrific team. I am doing about the most interesting professional work that I can imagine. It is all right up my alley.

Nevertheless, I have always been one of these people who continually expect the other shoe to drop. Although there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, I figure that I cannot keep a good job like this going indefinitely. Real life has to crash in eventually and make this latest job unrewarding.

Therefore, I am hoping that things will work out well: with my family, my career and financially. If so then I will have a genuine opportunity at 58: the ability to live life without much worry that I will become insolvent. In other words, I will have a real and extended retirement. Just the idea rather boggles my mind. What would I do with all that time? Having spent my life so far scrambling, what would I do with 20 or so years of decent health and no financial worries feel like?

I suspect I will not know the answer unless I experience it. One small nugget of wisdom that I have acquired in 48 years is that life’s journey rarely takes you where you expect. I expect that wherever life takes me in 10 years I will be surprised. Watching my older relatives go through these years, I do expect that much of it will be mundane. I doubt my wife and I will do quite the amount of traveling that we have envisioned. I expect there will still be gardens to weed and trash to take out. The last third of my life may not have many surprises but may feel like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. In ten years, blogging will no longer be sexy. I hope though that I will continue to make a habit of recording my thoughts, rambling and incoherent as they doubtless sometimes are, for my enjoyment, and perhaps yours too.

July 19th, 2005 at 10:05pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | one comment

Driving with Dad

With my mother in serious decline, my family’s focus has been on her. My mother is now in a nursing home. She still has some expectations that she will eventually be released from the nursing home and will be sleeping in her regular bed again. The sad reality is that barring a miracle the nursing home is where she will remain, unhappily and crankily, until death takes her.

We still visit regularly with mother of course. But I am beginning to turn more of my attention to my father. The sad fact is that there is not much else I can do for my mother. I can provide occasional company, tell her I love her, and push her around in her wheelchair to meals and physical therapy. I bring her flowers on occasion and tell her stories of life around our house. But it is difficult to visit her more than once a week and the more her mind goes the more challenging the visits become.

Although my father now effectively lives alone, managing my mother’s care is still a full time job. Not surprisingly, the last couple of years have been very stressful. He no longer has to immediately fulfill my mother’s demands. There is staff in the nursing home to do most of this, just at a more sedate pace. Providing somewhat distant tender loving care is a challenge of itself. In addition, the finances of nursing home living are challenging.

Each day is a cycle with few variations. As my mother’s mind deteriorates, the woman he loves becomes less recognizable. We sense that our father is fraying around the edges. So I’ve decided it is as important to provide support for him as it is to support my mother. My mother may be unhappy, but she gets the physical care that she needs. My father needs distraction. He needs to get away from his situation. He needs respite.

The good news is that he now lives near Washington, D.C. He is a native Washingtonian. The bad news is that it that he is tethered to his retirement community and cannot usually get away for more than a few hours at a time. My father is a sociable creature, but he is still developing friends at their retirement community. It can be a bit chancy for him to get away by himself. While he can still drive, the Washington traffic is relentless and unforgiving. We are worried that the split second response times needed by drivers around here may be beyond him at this point. Too many day trips are probably chancy.

My goal is once or twice a month to get him out of the apartment and engage his mind in something unrelated to fretting over my mother. What could we do with a couple hours? It turned out that what my father really wanted to do was see old haunts.

He grew up in a row house in Northeast Washington. Of course, over the years he has revisited Washington many times. He has even been inside his old house, now passed on to new owners. He has seen graves of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and distant relations. He has visited old schools and neighborhoods. Yet one thing he had not done was retrace some of his many youthful bike rides. With his ADC Atlas of the Washington area, me in the driver’s seat, and my Dad in the passenger seat we set forth in my car on a hot July afternoon.

It was a rambling little adventure on Maryland and DC roads, mostly inside the Beltway. It turned out that being in the passenger’s seat was ideal for him. He did not have to concentrate on driving. Instead, he had the pleasure of looking out the window. While it was hot and muggy outside, it was cool and comfortable inside my car.

We looked in vain for an entrance to the Mormon Temple in Kensington, which is easily seen from the Capital Beltway. We got lost a few times. He changed his mind frequently about where he wanted to end up next. Eventually we were in DC and heading down Beach Drive. Here, along Rock Creek Park, was an area he knew intimately from his boyhood days. There used to be a horse stable around this corner. Was it still there? Yes, it still was! There used to be a monastery here. We pass an old building. Could this have been a monastery? He was not sure but it was fun to speculate. We traveled at minimum speeds down Beach Drive under the canopy of tall trees. We made frequent stops so he could look out the window. “Seeing this brings tears to my eyes,” he told me. He said he was at a nostalgic age. While much has changed about Washington, much is still the same. Many of the houses that were new and opulent to his boyhood eyes are still there and kept in good shape. He knew the most surprising things. “John Rockefeller used to live in this house.”

We ended up at a Starbucks at Four Corners in Silver Spring. We laughed as I tried to explain the concept of Starbucks to this man from the World War Two generation: fancy overpriced coffees and sweets. My Dad is more the type to drive through the McDonald’s drive-thru and make sure his coffee came with a senior citizen discount. Neither of us are big coffee drinkers. So despite it being a hot day we ordered hot chocolate and noshed a brownie while watching the traffic on Colesville Road pass by.

Mission accomplished. For a few hours, my father was a happy creature again. The woman I know as my mother recedes from my present. Perhaps consequently I am increasingly grateful that my father is still around and in full possession of his faculties. I am indeed fortunate for the first time in nearly thirty years to have my father living near me again. I will try not to dwell too much on how many good years he has left, but to savor in the time we have together. It may be that our drives around DC will, in the end, be far more meaningful to me than to him. Someday perhaps I will make the drive down Beach Drive alone. I may stop at a place where my Dad and I stopped, and I will be the one with tears in my eyes.

July 3rd, 2005 at 01:49pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments