Passing My Mom

My Dad, me, my sister and my beautiful Mom

Day Something-or-Another

I came up with a brilliant plan just now. I'm doing a fairly good job of sticking to eating really healthy foods. At the moment I have so maligned sugar in my mind that the goblin is cheese. All in all even that hasn't been much of a problem although I may cold-turkey it for a while.

Oh, yes, my plan. Call me crazy, but I have decided that trying to lose 50+ pounds by the end of the year (four months from now) is probably not going to happen. So I've come up with an alternate timeline. It may sound gruesome, but my goal is to outlive my mother. I am almost 60 and 1/2 (remember when you used to say, "I'm not 5, I'm 5 and 1/2!!"? It appears those halves return late in life when every moment counts). My mother died suddenly just two weeks shy of her 63rd birthday. That's a little close for comfort. Two and 1/2 years. But for my health effort that is a timeframe I can work with. Slow and steady wins the race.

So, here's what I see happening - on my 63rd birthday (March 6, 2018) I will be the glowing picture of mature health and vitality that I want to be. One day at a time, putting health first.

(Now my great-grandmother Nana lived to 104. We'll work on that after we hit the 63 mark.)

The Girl's Alright With Me. You Know the Girl's Alright.

Me, Earl the Cat, and a dog  Athens, Georgia 1975-ish

Day Two

“Wake up and think about your health.” Almost. Pretty close. Better than ever before.

Had a fantastic healthy breakfast of oatmeal to which I added: chopped apple, chopped dried plums (cracks me up – we all know they are prunes, you’re not fooling anyone, except Millennials, which I guess is the point), sunflower seeds, chia seeds, and hemp. I haven’t put sugar on my oatmeal in years and can’t believe I ever did. Surprising. It was a delicious meal and I savored every bite.

Took all of my vitamin, thyroid, and turmeric (my new thing) pills and those pills with 10 billion somethings that are supposed to be in your stomach. And, coffee. Thank God they’re saying coffee is good for you.

Did some of the exercises my old physical therapist gave me for my posture when she was treating my shoulder, um, torn rotator cuff, that’s it. I forget. I have had so many injuries. I’ll tell you about them some time. It’ll be fun. Really. Like the time I broke my arm when I fell off a train in England on the way to school in the Cotswolds. Wish someone had filmed that! But, that’s for later.

 Recently I’ve had call to look at old pictures. Very old pictures. This morning it hit me like a ton of bricks that I have spent my entire life berating myself for how I look. But, I look at those pictures and I think I was kinda cute. And, I wasn’t fat, I just wasn’t Twiggy. Seriously, I wasn’t bad and I like the spirit I see on my face and in my eyes. So, I decided to be ok with how I am today. If I do nothing I could still look back at pictures of me today and say, “Jeez, I wish I had appreciated how good I have it.”

So, day two. I appreciate how good I have it today.

Are You Noticing a Pattern?

Granddaughter Riland, a good reason for living!

Off an on, off and on. I signed in on the computer at the Y the other day and it said “Congratulations! You’ve been coming here for seven years!!” Oh, #$%@, are the words I used to congratulate myself as I looked down at my body and realized how tired I felt. Ever the optimist (or, eventually the optimist) I then thought, “Well, think how bad off you would be if you hadn’t sort of worked out for the past seven years.” Nice spin.

I don’t know what it takes to finally commit to something. A decision? Yeah. A decision made 100 times a day. My son desperately wants me to be around to watch his children grow. I do, too. My husband wants us to travel the world for years to come. I do, too. But, the fact is I just turned 60. My Mom died at 62. My dad died at 64 (smoking-induced lung cancer so that isn’t as much of a warning as my Mom’s death, but still). Those numbers can bring on some serious thinking and panicking.

How many times did I have to quit smoking before I actually quit? 100 times? I thought it would be impossible to quit. But, one day, I just did. I realized that knowing I had to quit was worse than actually quitting. I visualized myself so healthy and alive and it worked. It has been about 40 years since I smoked (ouch, guess I didn’t need to say that out loud). 

So, here I am, back from the doctor (again). This time it’s because my knee, hip and small of my back hurt so much I can’t sleep. But, the great news is that he prescribed physical therapy and I have really wanted to have somebody tell me how to work out without hurting myself all the time. At last. Nice spin.

Driving home from the doctor I called my son. He said, “You have to make your health the first thing you think of in the morning. You can’t put anything in front of it. You won’t have your work and your family if you don’t have your health.” Luckily, I have a wonderful husband who is at the grocery store right now buying all kinds of good stuff. I’m going to make an appointment with a PT ASAP. 

One day at a time. It works for other things, why not for changing my life? I have a VIVID picture of what life will be life if I don’t change. Now I need to find some fun pix to post around to inspire me. What do I want the rest of my years to look like, to be like? What do I want to accomplish? I know the answers to a lot of these questions. And that big huge stack of books on getting healthy all say basically the same thing: move, eat fruits and vegetables, cut out sugar, move some more, meditate and love. 

So, from “on again off again” to “One day at a time” and “Just do it.” I have a lot to live for. And, today, I will eat and live accordingly. No spin.

Enough With the Talk, Talk, Talk

(from The Washington Post May 27, 2015)

I have a big mouth. I mean that in the kindest way. I talk and talk about dreams and plans and more dreams and more plans. Every day I'm going to change my life so I can change the world for the better. Enough, Ms. ADDlady.

Don't get me wrong. I do some good work. I'm proud of what I have accomplished, but I can't stop the spiraling down of my physical body and at the moment spiritually I'm feeling a little "squirrelly". But, if I hear myself say, "Today, I'm going to start......blah, blah, blah," one more time...

Today's Washington Post has a great article out of Harvard on the benefits of meditation. I was particularly interested in the part about stem the deterioration of the brain as we a.g.e. The study said that you could make profound changes in your ability to handle stress, handle and remember information (even nouns?!?), and so on. An astounding study, validating what I pretty much already knew, and it's from Harvard so we all know what that means...the word of God!

So, today, I'm going to shut up and see what happens.

This is well worth reading and taking to heart:

How Exercise Keeps Us Young

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

 JANUARY 7, 2015 12:01 AM

Active older people resemble much younger people physiologically, according to a new study of the effects of exercise on aging. The findings suggest that many of our expectations about the inevitability of physical decline with advancing years may be incorrect and that how we age is, to a large degree, up to us. 

Aging remains a surprisingly mysterious process. A wealth of past scientific research has shown that many bodily and cellular processes change in undesirable ways as we grow older. But science has not been able to establish definitively whether such changes result primarily from the passage of time — in which case they are inevitable for anyone with birthdays — or result at least in part from lifestyle, meaning that they are mutable.

This conundrum is particularly true in terms of inactivity. Older people tend to be quite sedentary nowadays, and being sedentary affects health, making it difficult to separate the effects of not moving from those of getting older. 

In the new study, which was published this week in The Journal of Physiology, scientists at King’s College London and the University of Birmingham in England decided to use a different approach. 

They removed inactivity as a factor in their study of aging by looking at the health of older people who move quite a bit. 

“We wanted to understand what happens to the functioning of our bodies as we get older if we take the best-case scenario,” said Stephen Harridge, senior author of the study and director of the Centre of Human and Aerospace Physiological Sciences at King’s College London.

To accomplish that goal, the scientists recruited 85 men and 41 women aged between 55 and 79 who bicycle regularly. The volunteers were all serious recreational riders but not competitive athletes. The men had to be able to ride at least 62 miles in six and a half hours and the women 37 miles in five and a half hours, benchmarks typical of a high degree of fitness in older people. 

The scientists then ran each volunteer through a large array of physical and cognitive tests. The scientists determined each cyclist’s endurance capacity, muscular mass and strength, pedaling power, metabolic health, balance, memory function, bone density and reflexes. They also had the volunteers complete the so-called Timed Up and Go test, during which someone stands up from a chair without using his or her arms, briskly walks about 10 feet, turns, walks back and sits down again.

The researchers compared the results of cyclists in the study against each other and also against standard benchmarks of supposedly normal aging. If a particular test’s numbers were similar among the cyclists of all ages, the researchers considered, then that measure would seem to be more dependent on activity than on age.

As it turned out, the cyclists did not show their age. On almost all measures, their physical functioning remained fairly stable across the decades and was much closer to that of young adults than of people their age. As a group, even the oldest cyclists had younger people’s levels of balance, reflexes, metabolic health and memory ability. 

And their Timed Up and Go results were exemplary. Many older people require at least 7 seconds to complete the task, with those requiring 9 or 10 seconds considered to be on the cusp of frailty, Dr. Harridge said. But even the oldest cyclists in this study averaged barely 5 seconds for the walk, which is “well within the norm reported for healthy young adults,” the study authors write. 

Some aspects of aging did, however, prove to be ineluctable. The oldest cyclists had less muscular power and mass than those in their 50s and early 60s and considerably lower overall aerobic capacities. Age does seem to reduce our endurance and strength to some extent, Dr. Harridge said, even if we exercise. 

But even so, both of those measures were higher among the oldest cyclists than would be considered average among people aged 70 or above. 

All in all, the numbers suggest that aging is simply different in the active. 

“If you gave this dataset to a clinician and asked him to predict the age” of one of the cyclists based on his or her test results, Dr. Harridge said, “it would be impossible.” On paper, they all look young.

Of course, this study is based on a single snapshot of an unusual group of older adults, Dr. Harridge said. He and his colleagues plan to retest their volunteers in five and 10 years, which will provide better information about the ongoing effects of exercise on aging. 

But even in advance of those results, said Dr. Harridge, himself almost 50 and an avid cyclist, this study shows that “being physically active makes your body function on the inside more like a young person’s.”

One Day at a Time

Thirty-five years or so ago I started yoga. My son was a toddler, I was newly divorced, and working as a receptionist in an ad agency for something like $450 a month. I can't remember why I started yoga although I'm quite sure I needed something that would help center me and give me strength.

I studied yoga then with a woman named Margaret Pierce in a little building called the Quaker House. I remember the door open wide on nice days and a gentle breeze making it's way through the room and over my body. I remember moments of peaceful quiet after our class where she would serve us herb tea. I remember my body electric and strong. I remember my heart and mind calm. Eventually I got to the point where I practiced for 90 minutes a day and loved everything about it, and then I remember nothing - not why I stopped going, not why I stopped practicing. 

While I wasn't paying attention things changed and "suddenly" I find I have a different body - one that I need to get to know. Maybe I got cocky. I was always the youngest in school, the youngest Mom...and, then, oops! First, the "guys" on the street don't see you. Then they call you "Ma'am". Now there is a stranger in the mirror. OK. Whatever. Now what?

Yoga.  

After talking about it for a year or more I found a yoga studio and teacher that I like. I went to my first class on Sunday and I am stunned at how well I did. The teacher is an RN and I told her before class about all of my "issues". She paid attention. I pushed to keep up in class, but I didn't do that thing where I dig deep for the remains of my inner Hercules and use it all up. I pushed, but I paced myself. I am in this for the rest of my life. For the rest of the day I was afraid I would collapse, but all I felt was alive and strong. I was aware of muscles I hadn't been aware of in years, but I wasn't exactly sore and I certainly didn't hurt. I felt electric. It was baffling and exciting and inspiring. I want more!!

"I want more." Warning! Warning, Will Robinson! All day Monday I was giddy with excitement and luxuriated in how great my body felt. And, then it happened on Tuesday morning. I decided I'd do it myself. Cocky, so cocky. I stretched, and pulled. I flailed about. A little later at my desk I turned a certain way and POP! Something snapped in my back. Dammit! I can barely walk. I can't stand up straight. This is what happens when you don't listen to your body. So, I'm on anti-inflammatories and the whole shebang. But, I'm going to my chiropractor today and a friend is going to recommend a massage therapist. Gentle.

Slow and easy win the race. They certainly will win this race. This is a new body. I have to respect that and get to know it. It is almost 60. It is very overweight. It is weak, and tight. It is beaten down by the stress of trying to do too much, of trying to absorb the loss of a beloved step-daughter. I must be gentle. Powering through is now stupid. Slow and easy win the race. 

This if for the rest of my life. I know that by gently returning to a regular practice of yoga I will change the trajectory of my future. I look in the mirror and work on loving who I see. The ship has sailed on being one of those beauties in the magazines. Now I get to be someone even better. As the joints in my hands grow misshapen I smile. I've always thought those old lady hands were cool because they hold the history of years of doing, touching, loving. The skin on my arms turns crapey, but instead of despairing I have taken to consciously rubbing oils and lotions into my body. Everything I did before was so mindless. I have no time for mindless any more. My remaining life is sacred to me. I use this brief period of injury to become more conscious, to forgive, to hold rapturously happy images of all the love in my life in my mind. I like this new woman I am becoming. I like that I am returning to conscious living.  

I love that my teacher Margaret from all those decades ago is now my daughter-in-law Alice's yoga teacher. Alice is taking a pregnancy yoga class as she carries my granddaughter. The richness of that circle of life, living and love blows my mind. Life is good. 

Je aime Paris et je suis Charlie

Paris in the rain (2013)

Je aime Paris et je suis Charlie.

I am an American, a bit of a writer, and a thoroughly smitten Francophile. Oh, how I do love Paris, a place I discovered late in life. I had not traveled much until I approached 50 and met the man who was to become my husband. Al took me to Paris for the first time. We became engaged on that first trip a little over eight years ago and now it is hard to stay away.  I couldn't believe that the city was real. It was as if every block, every tree, every window was filled with some kind of special magic. I couldn't believe that I was really there and no matter how often I go I still feel that way.

A year or so ago I took this picture from the back seat of a taxi as Al and I were driven from Charles de Gaulle airport to our apartment in Paris. Although it was pouring rain I couldn't stop snapping pictures. I was so excited to be back. What is it about a place that touches your heart?  if you are lucky in your life you will find your place.  For one person it is a town surrounded by snow capped mountains, for another it is the ocean, for yet another it is that ocean or that village. Different places hold that magic for different people.

For Al and me it is Paris. There is nothing like that first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine. And, the bridges. And, the rooftops. And, the people, the texture and feel of the language. The long-awaited taste of real chocolate mousse. The city resonates for us - with memories, with beauty-inspired awe, with flavors, with history, with culture. We both could talk without end about facets of Paris that captivate us. Every time we go we discover new things, old things, ancient things. Within days of returning home we long to go back.

The shootings at Charlie Hebdo were mere yards away from where we once strolled along Promenade Plante (an elevated park that inspired New York's High Line) with my stepchildren Summer and Jordan. That day spattered rain here and there. The flowers along the promenade were bursting with color and intrigue. The beautiful memory of a daughter now gone, of a son now in college, of flowers now dormant, makes the horrors of the massacre in Paris too real and too close. Just as I once couldn't believe Paris really existed, two days ago I also believed something this horrible couldn't really exist. No, that's not what I mean. I was in Sarajevo right after the war. I work on behalf of children in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon and beyond. This is just so close to my heart's home and it rips apart my dream. It is all the more raw and terrifying for existing where I go to find my magic.  Leave my city and its people alone.

The insanity of the past 50 or 60 hours reveals yet again that for too many on this planet nothing that is good about life is sacred. Truth is not sacred, nor is beauty, love nor life itself. The horrific face of this version of war is ripped, shredded and dripping with blood. All because someone dares poke fun at that which is sacred to those who will tolerate no other views but their own.

Last night we ate a a local French bistro that is simply and truly French. The rooms were filled with signs of "Je suis Charlie". It was Al's birthday and I gave him this picture, enlarged and framed. It is the picture of more than a dream. It is our hearts' home and our hearts ache for her today.

Al with his birthday gift at Anis in Atlanta.

Now They Tell Me

Last week's cover of The New York Times Magazine

The bright red-orange magazine cover has taunted me for days. The quote upon it, "One life is too short for doing everything." is from the influential Italian designer/architect Massimo Vignelli, who, incidentally, died this past year. One life is too short. No kidding. 

Living in a state of potential is a delectable place. Everything is possible. There are no limits. There is time. But, it is a place for the young because one day you wake up and living in a state of potential suddenly means you are wasting time. You are living in fear. You are delusional. It is time to grow up. It is time to close the door on countless dreams. 'what if's', and 'maybe I'll's'. 

Saying "no" to countless possibilities used to be thought of as a bad thing. But, as the quote implies, you must, because you don't have time to do it all. And, if you're like me, maybe all those thousands of ideas are intended to give the illusion of accomplishment and focus when really they are a dramatic avoidance technique...avoiding life, avoiding risk, avoiding (oh, dear God) failure. You can't fail if you don't try. 

As the calendar pages fall away and a very few sheets remain between me and my 60th birthday, I enter this glorious new year full of vim and vinegar...I'm working on the vigor. I am all too aware of the limited time left - my mother died at 62, my father at 64, my brother at 36, my sister at 3, my stepdaughter at 16. See my point? Every day is a gift and I'm not wasting any more. I'm determined to leave this world a tiny bit better than the way I found it, and I have brushed away the fantasies and built a solid plan for what I am going to do, and I hope to God  I have enough time to do it. I'm a grandmother for goodness sake. My youngest grandchild turned two yesterday. Two! Do you know how long we have to not f#$% up this planet for things to be ok for him?! And what if he has children? I have got to help clean up a few of the messes we've made.

2015. I want to accomplish great things. Things that make a difference. I'm working on my road map and I'm going to give it everything I've got, but remember when I said I didn't have vigor? Getting my health back and getting in shape has to be a very big deal for me now or I will not be able to get things done. So, I've got many a goal. Remember that great line from Pretty Woman. "Do you have a goal? You gotta have a goal!" 

I wonder what you'd be interested in hearing about as this year progresses. It's not like I've got something specific like cooking one Julia Child recipe a day. Do I write about how I am working through things - like getting healthy and my work? I suppose so. Not sure exactly why I feel compelled to blog about it other than I know I have learned how to live by watching others struggle, fight, and overcome. It's embarrassing to say that I hope I can help others but maybe I could. It helped me to know that Julia Child didn't write her cookbook until she was in her 50s. Or that I think it was Louise Nevelson started sculpting at 60. 

Here's what I know - I wasted a lot of time (I've got some great excuses, wanna hear them?). But, I REFUSE to think that 60 is too late to start. I mean, for crying out loud, I'm just starting to figure this crazy life out so I'm not just going to quit. Ha! NO WAY. So, I'll just write. It helps me so that's something. Good night now. 

Oh, and go see the movie Selma. 

Happy New Year!

My husband and me sharing a kiss at my son's wedding. Life can be so good.

I will keep this simple. I have posted this poem before, but as you can see, posting it again is a good thing. 

2015.

Feast on your life, my friends.

Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,


and say, sit here. Eat.


You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you


all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.


Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,


the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life. 

Derek Walcott