The Art of Age

I was walking down a busy street in Buenos Aires and happened across some sort of open-door art studio/ art class. This older woman was so occupied with what she doing that she was the only one who didn't look up when I started taking pictures. She was in that wonderful space we lose ourselves in when we are being creative, when the work we are doing matters more than anything: the street noise, others in the room or intrusive cameras.

It's a space I've always loved to enter. But it seems to me that over the years of working and parenting I've lost some of that deep concentration I knew as a child creating new worlds. When I was about twelve I wrote story after story in small lined notebooks. They were largely adventure stories inspired by my love of Trixie Beldon, a fictional character I could relate much more to than the sophisticated Nancy Drew. The biggest compliment I got for one of my original stories was from a teacher who accused me of stealing it from a book.

I have tried my hand at fiction throughout the decades but, for the most part, I never put enough into it: most of the writing I did was work-related and non-fiction. Recently, I've entered that imaginary world again. Whole-heartedly. Creating lives for people who exist only in my head. I don't know if I can master something good enough to last but I know I am enjoying trying. And I know that I am able to enter imaginary worlds because I have the time to stay with them, to move undisturbed hours at a time with the next moves sloshing around in my brain. And that I have the experiences in life to create full characters.

It may be easy to see the creativity of the third phase as some sort of hobby to pass the time. Especially if we believe that creativity is the domain of the young. There are those that say our creativity begins to die the moment we enter school (We all know the changes in the wild drawings of children once they learn to draw inside the lines), and declines further as we try to conform or develop ossifying habits. 

But I just can't see it that way. I see it a a chance - for those open to it  - to grab the creativity that has been latent for too long. And I don't see it as a desperate act of accomplishing something before it's too late.( Of course, I am aware of time becoming a limiting factor. But then I always worked better with a deadline.) Creativity in the third phase comes without the pressure to perform; it is done more for the self than at any other time in adulthood.

The question remains; how good can the creative results of third phasers be? Creative energy is often equated with youth, especially in our social media/instant recognition era. But David Galeson in his book Old Masters, Young Geniuses, says creative types can be divided into innovators, the young geniuses who make brilliant breakthoughs and experimenters who build on their experience and improve with age. Think of masters like the artist Matisse and the poet Robert Frost who did some of their best work in their later years.

I once met the Canadian print maker David Blackwood and he told me he expects to continue to work as long as he's physically able to. He collects old French prints done by a master who got better and better until his death. Each an experimenter building on a life's work.

But what of those of us who haven't had the time to focus all our lives on particular creative skills?
I have a friend - Debbie Dryden - a woman I worked with in my early twenties when I started out as a teacher. She was the art teacher at the school, a graduate of a university art programme. But she had - as we all did - a complicated and busy life for much of her twenties to her fifties. She still managed to produce some innovative art during that time but could not give it her full attention. Now that she is retired she has returned to art in a serious way.

She turned part of her home into a studio, takes courses in her chosen art form - encaustic painting - joined an arts co-operative in Guelph, Ontario and regularly has shows with successful sales. No one can call this a hobby. She has the time, the commitment, the skills and the free imagination to accomplish great work. She is a prime example of rediscovering the full potential of a latent creativity in the third phase.

               

                                                       

                                                                        Photo Courtesy: Debbie Dryden



While I love the visual arts, I'm more interested in knowing how writers fare as they age. Star writers like Doris Lessing and Alice Munro both decided there was a time to stop, which is alarming. But then there is Frank McCourt who didn't write Angela's Ashes until he was 66 and Wallace Stevens who started writing poetry after a career in business. More promising but perhaps just exceptions.

There's a bell curve (which looks exactly like a bell) that's been around for decades showing how creativity builds up until about forty and then declines rapidly until it almost flat lines by age 70. It has supported the belief out there in workplaces that new, young blood is needed all the time to come up with fresh ideas and has made us doubt our own powers of creativity and renewal.

Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, did research that sustained that bell curve. But then he discovered that if people traveled, had new experience, changed careers their creativity flew off the peak of the curve and spun upward.  In other words, age does not have to mean ossification. And that is the most hopeful take I can find.

That means, of course, that there's great creative potential for a generation of career-changers, frequent flyer, experimenters. It all makes sense to me.  Experience + new challenges + latent abilities = late creativity. Inhibiting bell curve be damned. D

What Are the Rights of The Elderly and Are they Different from the Rights the Rest of Us Have?

 

In the 1990s, while working at CBC Radio`s Morningside, I produced a series of conversations about the then emerging field of elder law. Most of the work being done was in the area of living wills, obligations parents owe to children and vice versa and whether any or all the rules change when one party to any transaction or issue reaches the milestone of 65 years of age.

Nearly two decades later, I am visiting the Evita Museum, just around the corner from the zoo in Buenos Aries. Argentina is not an easy country or culture to crack but it is clear that Evita, the Show Girl turned National Hero is an important piece to understanding the last 60 years of the country`s history. It is during the playing of one of the several newsreel type movies about Evita and her time on the national scene that I am brought up short by one of the subtitles that declares that in 1948 Juan and Evita Peron introduced legislation enshrining the `Rights of the Elderly`. There are no further references to the content of these rights at the museum but it is the phrase itself that gets me remembering and thinking. I know that the third phase of our lives is filled with changes in attitudes and opportunities, but does it also change our legal status?

A couple of years ago, our daughter Jane came upstairs to our kitchen at breakfast time and, while she was waiting for the kettle to come to a boil, asked me what a living will was. I took her through the basics and she seemed slightly perplexed and asked what Power of Attorney was and I explained that and she then asked if I and her mom had made arrangements for a Power of Attorney. When I said no, she asked if we wanted to give her Power of Attorney. I laughed and said a first rule of life is never give Power of Attorney to someone who asks to have it. She laughed, made an instant coffee and headed back to her room

That's story makes me laugh because Jane is one of the most truly kind and generous individuals I have ever met, certainly kinder and more generous than me and so I don't actually worry about the idea that control over my life might fall to her. But the reality is that all kinds of people, good people with good children, worry about what life might be when they are no longer in 100% control or even 50% control. Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, is wrestling with a double edged sword when she says "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

In January, The New York Times ran a fascinating story about the increasing frequency of nursing homes seizing power of attorney over patients to collect debts, often without informing family members in advance. It is enough to cast a cold chill over any of us, regardless of how many years remain before a nursing home becomes a likely possibility. At the heart of any sense or idea of Elder Rights are questions or control, respect, attention and compassion. 

It has been nearly 70 years since the Peron Government experimented with the idea of Elder Rights and a quick or even exhaustive Google search leaves me still wrestling with what exactly would those rights are. Would subways have the power to insist that you give up your seat to a senior citizen, would Seniors Tuesdays at Shoppers Drug Mart become the norm and legally binding for all stores? Would seniors be entitled to a greater degree of respect and attention than anyone else in society? It doesn't require much imagination to realize that all of those ideas are more than slightly askew and unlikely public policy initiatives. 

After all there is nothing magical about turning 65, or 60, or 55...wherever that  'freedom at' figure falls for you and suddenly fearing a loss of control or needing some reassurance that you are still a valued if slightly less valuable member of society. A 30 year old contingent worker relying on a whimsical supervisor for the number of hours of work they might get that week probably feels a lot less powerful and in control than a 75 year old with a defined benefits pension and the ability to spend the entire winter relaxing far from bitter winds and deep snow. 

If there is one area where the 'Rights of Elders' might be made concrete it is probably with questions about whether the things being done for the person or to the person are in their best interest. And then to make it that much more complicated, how do we define 'their best interest'? When public services, including health services, are under strain how do we ensure that the provision of services is equitable? Does the 80 year old have less of a right to dialysis than the 30 year old, and, if so, what is the value system we are using to make that determination? 

I don't have easy answers to any of these questions. I know for some disabled activists and some elder advocates the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision on medically assisted death raises a host of complicated ethical questions, not the least of which is how do we ensure that the wishes of the person in question are adequately represented. 

After leaving the Evita Museum, Debi and I had lunch at a very nice coffee shop on a leafy square and we talked about Evita and the idea of the rights of the elderly. We talked about our parents and others we knew and the problems that can and do occur as families drift apart and the elderly are left at the mercy of individuals and institutions that have other priorities, other demands that might at times trump the needs and wishes of the person in question. During that conversation the idea of the Child Advocate in various legal systems arose. The concept is simple. Children have rights, needs, concerns that are separate from society, from their parents, from institutions charged with their care. The Child Advocate steps in as a check on the power and privilege of others, a check to insure that the needs and perspective of the most vulnerable party to the process are respected and acknowledged. Do the elderly need an Elder Advocate? 

A couple of days after the visit to the Evita Museum that prompted these thoughts, we are in a gorgeous park just around the corner from our apartment. At the heart of the park is a huge rubber tree that spreads shade everywhere. Dozens of  teenagers, adults, young children were present and simply enjoying another gorgeous day. I was reading a new biography of Pope Francis and was in the section where his birth and circumstances in Argentina were being discussed. The author, Austen Ivereigh, takes us through some of the reasoning behind Francis' attention to the migrant and notes that of course Francis is the child of migrants, his grandmother Rosa had emigrated from Italy. Ivereigh writes "Francis was born to an American nation forged from millions of similar deracinations. Nostalgia- from the Greek words nostos and alga, a yearning to return to the place- ran in his veins. When we lose it, he said in 2010, we abandon our elderly: caring for our old people means honouring our past, the place we come from."

I close my book and watch small boys led by a very determined young girl race around the park on scooters, bikes with training wheels, bikes and an odd little means of locomotion that scares me a lot more than the young boy using it. I watch a couple in their late seventies or early eighties return from lunch and I enjoy observing the adults talk and eye their children while simply letting them play. The rights of the elderly are not something pressing but in this our third phase something we attend to from time to time. Life might actually be a circle. All the issues that bedevil us as infants and children return to bedevil us at the last moments of life: the need for respect, attention, decency and an understanding and commitment to the proposition that all human beings have human rights.

P                                        

The Power of Grandmothers

I started to write a blog last week about the unfair way older women are treated. The idea came out of the obit for Colleen McCullough, the author of the Thorn Birds, in which she was described as "plain of features and certainly overweight." It seems where sexism meets ageism the joint is particularly sharp.

The anger and derision that shot through Facebook and blogs over that obit resonated with me. It's easy for any women over fifty to come up with her own examples in careers and personal life, and I certainly have stories of being treated unfairly or dismissively because of my age and gender.

Here's just a small, fresh example: the week before the obit went viral we had a sexist/ageist tradesman in our house. Now you have to understand that I am the one in our household who does minor repairs, all the painting, the designing etc. And I am the one who knows what needs to be done when a tradesman arrives. Well, the tradesman who came that week didn't get it, even though I showed him the materials I'd picked and talked to him about the possible ways the job could be done. Throughout his visits, he kept calling Peter "sir" and me "dear,"(over and over before he switched to "honey.") And when he needed to find the electrical panel he walked right past me to Peter's office to ask him where it was.

But my heart's not in writing that blog anymore, I'm just not feeling particularly outraged at the moment. I still believe we have to fight sexism and ageism in the workplace and politics and when it comes up in our daily lives. But the huge outcry over that obit comforted me. And, as the old saying goes, living well is the best revenge. Strong, old women may have the last word yet.

Then I remembered a quote that I'd filed away in my brain although it had no relevance to me when I first heard it. I was a producer involved in an interview with Germaine Greer who had just written a book about women, menopause and aging. In the interview she said that, after menopause, women become invisible and then she laughed. What she said next stuck with me for decades and finally became useful. She said it was wonderful to be invisible; you could do whatever you wanted. At the time I couldn't believe that Germaine Greer, of all people, would enjoy not being seen (and I still don't buy it completely) but it seemed such a liberating statement.

Certainly, there's some pleasure in walking for hours down streets at home and in foreign cities without being eyed or harassed. But there's more to it. Old women can get away with so much. And it is in realizing this power that they can make changes others can not.

That brings me to this week when I watched the remaining Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo march around the plaza in front of the Casa Rosada, the Argentinian seat of government, as they have for almost forty years. There are far fewer than the fifty or so women who started the movement and they circle the square three times instead of marching all afternoon. They have their own bus now and sell pins and cards of their iconic white scarves.

But they can not be dismissed as a tourist show. They began marching in the dirty war when generals "disappeared" their children; they demanded to know what had become of their grandchildren, who were often born in prisons and put up for adoption, sometimes to the very military men who had destroyed their families.

Today, there are plaques on the streets of Buenos Aires to commemorate those who disappeared but back then most citizens turned a blind eye out of fear, out of impotency. The military had banned public gatherings but didn't quite know what to do when a group of women in skirts and white scarves started marching with pictures of their loved ones below their windows.





And the women got results. Of the suspected 500 missing children, they have identified more than 100, enlisted an American geneticist, and are credited with creating the Argentine Forensics Anthropology Team. Just last summer the leader of the group, Estella Barnes de Carlotta, then 83, was reconnected with the grandson she had been looking for all those years. A pianist in Buenos Aries, he volunteered to give his DNA to find the truth. The two then met Pope Francis, who had been archbishop of the cathedral next to Plaza de.Mayo during the time the women were marching.

Watching the frail, elderly women march in the 30 degree heat, I was in awe. They are a fierce reminder that old women should not allow themselves to be dismissed, that they are capable of becoming a society's conscience and fighting for what is right. If they choose to, if they don't allow others to define them. Then, those who describe them only through their appearance will be the real dinosaurs. D