Random thoughts from an older perspective, writing, politics, spirituality, climate change, movies, knitting, writing, reading, acting, activism focussing on aging.
I MUST STAY DRUNK ON WRITING SO REALITY DOES NOT DESTROY ME.
Stubblejumper was bemoaning her lack of finding a proper 2022 Planner. Seems she and I are very, very fussy about our planners. They have to be workhorses.
I found a beauty a month or so ago at a dollar store (who'd a' thunk it?) Unbounded joy for $4.00 approx.
Week at a glance - huge amount of room for every single thing. I like to slot in stuff beforehand and book time off, a day off preferably.
Pages of To Do lists and pages of notes - I use these for movie and book recommendations. And Important Thots. And my never ending to do list.
Special see-through section at the back with a zipper for those bits.
After two years of frozen friend and family meal drop offs I am back to cooking again and had to brag about this marvelous old recipe meatloaf with sides of kale and carrot/sweet potato. I gave leftovers to Daughter along with my home made soup. Quite a switcheroo. So happy about this.
And finally I was in a thrift store (buying men's PJ bottoms, thanks for asking) and found this great ginormous clock to hang above my toilet. I love clocks. Always have. This is so vulgar as to be sublime.
So yes, there was so much lovely in my experimental trip. I say experimental because it really was. A testing of the waters for a semi-planned far longer trip involving around 12 hours of travelling each way.
I hesitate to post the negative as many of us bloggers do, but I feel we do a disservice to the aging community by doing so. Life is not a constant bed of roses and we take the chaff with the wheat. And sometimes the chaff can last for days.
I find my tolerance for discomfort has faded with the ages. I would gladly sofa hop and hard floor sleep in the carefree full-body bounce back days. But no more.
Travel is stressful enough.
I can't praise West Jet, my airline, enough, their assistance was timely and helpful and courteous. Wheelchair from the check=in counter to the ramp, priority seating and assistance to leave the aircraft spot on. I felt very safe and cared for.
The challenges of sharing quarters with an elderly other, though, were many.
We stayed in her place for 3 days, moved to the Gaelic College for 3 days and then came back to her place for 3 days.
It put me in mind of George Carlin's great piece on "stuff" - you travel with bags of stuff for a stay someplace and then once you're settled in there you have to move out for a weekend condensing your condensed travel stuff to a micro-level bag of stuff.
Downside:
(1)Try as I might we couldn't co-ordinate our meal times. She's on 2 spontaneous meals a day supplemented by beers and gins.
I'm on 3 regular meals (diabetic)and no alcohol and was forced to endure enormous meal-gaps (trapped in a car)and I felt woozy and ill at ease with massive discomfort.I realized my assertion of these requirements was irritating and distancing.
(2)My room was the size of a closet (murphy bed) with every surface cluttered, no closet space, not even a hanger, so I lived out of my suitcase of wrinkled, un-aired clothes with nowhere to put medications, accessories, toothpaste, etc., and no bedside light to read, no wee table for my laptop which languished in my luggage, neglected. Added to that was a rug upon a rug which heaved itself into high ridges, tripping me often in the middle of the night and unadjustable blinds which hung at half mast throwing unwanted light into the tiny room.
(3)I couldn't use bathtubs or showers in both places as there were no safety bars. I tried the deep tub in her place but gave up as I knew it would take every blasted bit of ingenuity to climb out of it as it was so high and my foot slipped alarmingly on the non-slip bottom as I gripped the glass door to climb high and test it. Sponge baths were de rigeur. I hate prolonged sponge baths.
(4)She was very forgetful of conversations and maybe that is the downside of two elders sharing quarters, who's the one with the memory loss? Maybe it was me? Who knows?
(5)I hated not having my own transportation so I could get supplies. I hated not having my own quiet time. I hated hopping along after her with my walking stick and scoping the enormous distances on the college campus for benches to rest on between buildings.
And maybe all of this is about adaptation. I did this well when younger. But now? I find it stressful and miserable and if I could have flown back earlier, I would have.
I admire elders who go with the flow, roll with the punches.
I am not one of them. More like a grumpy geezer. I embrace it.
(1)I can't imagine what life is like without some creativity or passion in it. Any creativity. One of my dear buddies now since gone, would make log cabins out of those flat icecream sticks, with a working fireplace of pebbles and the chimney lined with tinfoil and a porch with rocking chairs on the front.
Me? Well I write and knit. And yesterday I finished this massive knitting project. It took me months but now it's winging its way to Massachussets to a sweet young friend whom I wrote about here. She sent me this incredible yarnbowl, right out of the blue, when Ansa died and signed it "Sunset for Ansa".
We had one of those rare instant connections at her father's wake. The kind that sees into each other's souls. Rare enough to be treasured.
(2)Since I moved here I've had the chance to explore my personality in ways I couldn't even dream of when I lived in the metropolis. Time, the gift of time and beauty all around me frees up the mind and imagination like nothing else does. The timelessness of the ocean at my door, the salt-laden walks on the shores or in the pine drenched woods invigorates, wakes up dormant brain cells.
(3)I continue to whittle away at "stuff". Discarding 5 items a day. Should be more like 10. Attaching the words precious or important or valuable to pieces of it is dangerous. A burn barrel is where much of it is going. And the dump. I don't want any kind of clutter in my new home. I'm listing what's coming with me. And so far it's not much. Clutter is weighty and murky and has a stranglehold on the psyche. I lived that in a marital home way back and remember feeling so overwhelmed as we conducted a 3 day sale around and in the property. Given space, I will fill it. Time to let go. Of inner and outer stuff.
And yes, that lovely old window you see overlooks the ocean.
It's all very well to cruise around and plot colours and pick out lovely paints, make decisions on matte or semi or gloss but HELL. My painter is wonderful, one of those self-deprecating geniuses. And so far 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and 1 upper inner hallway are completed. By completed I mean: primer, ceilings, wainscoting and trim have all been meticulously applied, but to do all that he had to move stuff around. And hereby the chaos. He had a personal commitment for the weekend so wrapped up here Friday afternoon. He'll be back again on Monday morning first thing, to correct any small defects I might spot (none that I see) and then he'll tackle the upper outer hall and the lower main hall ceilings, on down to the living room and my office and back hall.
You might think I have a vast mansion of a place with all these halls but you'd be mistaken. The reason for the halls was to conserve heating in the winter in the good old days (and even now the freezing new days). So my little rabbit warren of a house has 4 halls and 5 tiny bedrooms with NO closets.
I sometimes wondered why I invested time and money into this place. And then I see the freshly painted rooms and I think - this is lovely, so badly needed and maybe, just maybe, these freshly decorated walls will extend beyond my lifespan and I won't have to do them again.
Meanwhile, I will trudge upstairs once again and survey the enormous amount of bits and pieces, scattered everywhere and question my own sanity: do I truly need all this stuff? And get ruthless, absolutely ruthless. Hear me, universe?
I have a PhD in procrastination. I don't know why I do it. Which drives me crazy in itself as I am over-analytical by nature. It's like I save up stuff in case there is NOTHING to do. Insanity, right? As if by fobbing off and deferring I can live forever or something. Do most people die with an unfulfilled To Do List do you think?
I live in fear that someday, somehow, somewhere I will sit twiddling my thumbs at the end of The List. Finally complete. Waiting for the grim reaper to scythe me up, gibbering and drooling into my Ensure.
Right now the list is long. Persnickety stuff. Like 8 big boxes in the front hall that need decanting. But to decant them means moving the bookshelves (after offloading them) out of my office to said hall. Then offloading the existing shelves in the hall and bringing them upstairs to the craft room, my cute liddle craft room. Then shelves in my bedroom will be moved to my office and reloaded. And then a smaller shelf from the utility room moved to my bedroom and useless shelves from the craft room moved to the utility room.
Okay - you in the back, stop snoring. And the rest of you, unglaze your eyes please. Pay attention!
And then crafts decanted from the big shelves in the family room and put in the craft room. And then there will be room for all the contents (books, movies, albums) of the boxes removed from Daughter's basement in September and brought out here. I know it sounds like I'm chasing my tail all around the house here but seriously it makes total sense.
So yay, I say unto you, I am going to apply what has always worked for me before. I commit to one hour a day on the timer, to start-up this massive mobilization and put all the STUFF where it belongs.
It strikes me there are two types of people in this world.
Those who like vast empty spaces in their homes.
And those, like me, who can’t abide an empty shelf or cupboard or cabinet or rack or window and feel compelled - perhaps even driven - to fill it chock full of, oh, whatevers.
“The world is too much with us; late and soon Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers"
This wonderful quote of William Wordsworth was sent by a blogger friend the other day in response to my post on Crackberries.
It got me thinking.
Then again most things these days get me to thinking.
As in: most of our lives revolve around stuff. The getting and gathering of it, the guarding of it from predators, the grooming (i.e. maintaining and cleaning) of it.
I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone. Maybe it is the elder years that throws a clear sharp floodlight on to our own behaviours. It is only now I see that all of it is so empty and frivolous and meaningless. One only has to go to a mall and sit on a bench and be absolutely and completely astonished at what people are doing there. What is everyone buying? Really. And is there ever enough of it?
Lately I think that what brings me the most pleasure is the interior life that is only satisfied with stuff that can’t be bought.
The sunsets that I resolved to see daily since the beginning of the year. The daily walk on the shore or around my daughter’s locale with one of our dogs. The perusal of driftwood or a lovely stone or a shell. The satisfying woodpile beside my stove. The glowing faces of dear friends and family across the dinner table (and I’ve had a surfeit of that in the last two weeks and still want more!). The smell of cooking and baking on the wood stove. The recounting of the daily doings of friends and family, The knitting of a few rounds of a sock, The CD painstakingly copied by a friend because he knew I would enjoy it. The revisiting of pictures of the work of the architect Gaudi with dear friends, The multi-generational chat with my daughter and the grandgirl of a book all three of us had read, The news of an upcoming wedding of a nephew in Ireland, Being privy to the lives of a whole batch of young nieces and nephews who’ve befriended me on Facebook, The plans for a dinner dance in my village this Friday. And getting out of Dodge while fam and friends are still telling me my stay was far, far too short.
I return to The Rock tomorrow. To my beloved Newfoundland.
A big mistake this, I'm in a hotel attending a conference which is about 400km from my home. I don't know what possessed me. The drive was in fog and rain and I arrived looking the worse for wear, stressed and tired. I retired to my room early.
I took a photo of my luggage before I left this morning. You'll note the trees are yet to leaf in Newfoundland. You'll observe I keep a very old licence plate on car for sentimental reasons (plate has been on five cars and is now 25 years old!). That will soon change as I need to switch the registration of the car to Newfoundland plates.
The back of the car is jammed with a small bag of dog food, her dishes, her water and her leashes. Laptop, camera, knitting, and very little clothes, just a change a day fill up the rest. I'm one of these people who never overpacks. And I can go for a month with one carry-on bag. That's my French Roast coffee in my Goofy mug (thank you, grandgirl!) and an apple. And one jacket - not rainproof - note to self, bring rain jacket always.
STUFF. It looks appallingly too much, doesn't it. And all necessary.
More Rules of Life on next post.
The picture below is one I took near Kelly's Mountain in Cape Breton a couple of weeks ago. I love the justaposition and flow of the lumber, the water, the mini iceberg and the to die for blues. Click to enlarge
It’s a word I’m quite fond of. It seems to envelope me lately, being back in the big city of Toronto ‘n all from my little village in Newfoundland.
I am sorta wearing my grandgirl lately, she packed her bags and landed up here
with me on Wednesday and I dropped her off home today but am picking herself and a pal up tomorrow. We have missed each other most dreadfully. She and pal are going to help me sort out my lockers (my stuff, my stuff, as George Carlin would have it) and then spend overnight up here in this fancy schmancy house I am house-sitting for four months.
I’m in the lap of non-owned luxury here down to the whirlpool tub and monster flat screen TV (my prior opinion confirmed, 400 channels and nothing to watch). Lots of security to protect their stuff. Remote controls everywhere, for light dimming and fireplace tuning and built in speakers everywhere music selection.
I’ve landed smack dab in the midst of someone else’s life. A very respectable life.
Family photos everywhere and well thought out pictures of places visited, hills climbed, mountains skied, seas swum. Being the under-the-rock-peeper that I am, I keep speculating on what secrets they must carry, mother, father and their now adult and living away from home children. One of each naturally. Male child older, naturally. It is so darn perfect this house. A kitchen that belongs to Martha Stewart, bathrooms designed for creative purposes involving candles and expensive lotions. Clean and organized but not neat enough to make you barf. Tilley people I call this couple and their like. You know, lots of khaki clothes and those hats that float and ne’er a cross word passing their lips. Ever.
I think if I had to live this life all the time I would quietly prop myself in a corner and open a vein and bleed out slowly.
Which confirms yet again why I was never marriageable material. I should have taken the alternative plunge at an early age in Ireland and become mistress to a series of wealthy old men who wouldn’t bother me much, being of pre-Viagra vintage, and been indulged in all my mad passions for writing and art and music and travel and eccentric conversation. But in the era I emerged in Ireland, I would have been ex-communicated both by my family and the Church. And that would have bothered me then, being pre-feminist and unenlightened as to the misogynistic ways of the Baby Jaybuzz 'n all and no clue as to the acquiring of the means to provide the afore mentioned lifestyle to, by and all for my little ol'self.
I spent today with a dear friend out in the 'burbs, admiring her new paintings, winding up late in a Scrabble Game in front of the fire with grapes and cheese and polish sausage and really good pale Christmas cake and chai. I am blessed.
And more on R when I process what happened on Tuesday night over dinner.
