Facing The Third Phase Online

When I was a girl, I remember my parents reading the obit pages of The Hamilton Spectator to see if anyone they knew had died. I found the activity not only morbid but incomprehensible. Now, of course, I have friends who do the same thing. I don't read newspapers - in paper form - any more and don't go hunting on line for obits so I've lost the tradition of the generations before me who checked the mortality of their acquaintance and reaffirmed their own each day by scanning those pages.

In the past eighteen months, two women I have admired greatly have died - one quite suddenly. Emails circulated with the news but before that I'd learned the raw emotional details from family members who used their Facebook accounts.

One grieving husband announced his wife's death by messaging her friends on her account, and then responding to those who responded back with details of the funeral as they came together. It was an eerie feeling to log into Facebook and learn I had a message from my dead colleague.

I first joined Facebook for my work; I needed to keep up with the subjects of a book I was writing and they were all on Facebook. But when I left my place of employment after more than 20 years I came to learn its value on a personal level. Facebook became a way of checking in with people still working there or people, like me, who had left.

There's been debate about the term "friends," as it applies to Facebook. Do some people really have 332 "friends?" But for me, Facebook replaced the kind of friendly conversations I had in the workplace about where people were going on holidays, what movies they were seeing, how their children were doing. Those conversations made me feel that I belonged to a community. I might not dine or even go out for coffee with all I encountered in a day. But we shared a telling of our stories that made the workplace human. And I missed that terribly when I became a sessional instructor and a freelance writer. Facebook helped a lot.

I'm not alone in that feeling. As more of more of my former colleagues retire they suddenly become Facebook aficionados. That's perhaps why in late 2013,  Forbes magazine reported that seniors were the fastest growing group on Facebook. Any why there are Facebook for dummy books for seniors.

Grandparents love Facebook. Their photo status can command a much larger audience than the photo book stuffed in a purse.

Travels, new homes, second careers are all the stuff of Facebook postings by people in The Third Phase. For some, Facebook, becomes the promotional vehicle for their latest projects (guilty); for others it's a place to share an observation, a good article, a moment of joy in a good meal, a new garden flower (guilty) or a hack that's worked for them.

One thing I really came to appreciate about Facebook was how I was able to reconnect to people I'd lost over the years, often through my own neglect. In Toronto, a few years back I finally went to a reunion of women from my university residence and, after the event, linked to a few on Facebook. I came to exchange lively messages with a woman in B.C. whom I'd known well in my twenties. Pat Hibbits had become the vice-president of Simon Fraser University. And her Facebook posts were impressive; she gathered photos her friends had taken around the world and linked them to an album called "your views this morning." She reported on the long illness and death of her husband. She posted on sports, on politics, her children, food deals in Vancouver and the good or bad behavior of that city's citizens. And her private messages always showed an interest in my endeavours and the blogs Peter and I wrote. I felt I was rediscovering her vast intelligence and her caustic, grew-up-on-a-farm earthy wit.

So I was shocked to open Facebook one morning and discover a message posted by Pat's son. One of her children had found her collapsed and disoriented; doctors at the hospital discovered a brain tumor and operated the next day. Two days later her son posted that she had died.

I felt the same emptiness I felt when colleagues from work suddenly disappeared. Turning down a hallway where I might run into them, I'd feel the loss each time. Now when I sign into Facebook, I miss Pat's vivacious presence on the newsfeed.

Facebook has it critics and privacy is a concern. And, of course, it can never replace the pleasure of sitting and talking to flesh and blood friends. But I feel grateful that I came to know my old college friend again after all those years. It's fitting that her Facebook page is now a place for friends to remember her. I have her last message for that. A month before she died, she wrote to say she had read Peter's book on his mobility issues and to send her compliments; she described the pain of her own debilitating arthritis. She ended by saying: " I hope aging is very good to you and Peter."  D

Teaching an 'old dog' a 'new' trick

Waiting rooms everywhere are alike. It can be an emergency ward in a hospital, a visa office, a doctor's office, the closet off to the right in a garage, the ante-room to your lawyer's offices or even the Drive/Test Centre in downtown St. Catharine's. It is all the same. Old acoustic tiles in the ceiling, a number system that has lost any semblance of rationality to it (or any semblance that you can fathom), staff that are hostile, bored, abused or a toxic combo of all three and a whack of people who just want, need, to get out of this purgatory and back to life. And needless to say most of the people waiting are anxious. They are anxious because they fear that the end result of being in the waiting room will be bad news, a hefty bill, a serious disappointment or being told to come back the next day. And that's me on Thursday afternoon at the Drive/Test Centre located in a crummy little mall on Bunting Road in St. Catharine's.

I don`t drive. Well, I haven`t driven for about 30 years. I stopped driving for a whack of reasons, some practical, some psychological. But over the last few years it has become increasingly clear to me that not driving is actually very selfish. Why should others be at my beck and call and why should others not expect to be able to rely on me driving them to an appointment or heading out to do errands? Driving was becoming, had become a matter of simple basic fairness. So I committed to learning once again how to drive.

The first thing was of course passing a test to get a temporary licence in order to practise driving and them meant learning a whole bunch of rules that I might have known once and forgotten or never knew. Where should your car be if you are turning left from a one-way street to a two-way street? What does a very curvy line on a yellow sign indicate? How close can you park to a fire hydrant? And so on, and so on. Luckily there are on-line practice tests that I could train myself with and train I did. I did ok for the most part but every once in awhile I'd get thrown by a question about the penalty for some infraction was. If you didn't stop for a school bus, if you drove without a licence and so on. I would always get these wrong because I always opted for the more extreme answer and that was never right. Clearly, my sense of justice is at odds with that of the province of Ontario.

So I am sitting in this waiting room, waiting to take my test and I am really anxious. I am convinced that all these nervous teenagers sitting around me are going to ace this test and some officious bureaucrat is going to call out my name and announce loudly that I have failed and that I should go home and think about how stupid I am. (Now imagine what it portends that I am so nervous taking a written test...just think about when I actually have to get in the car with a driving examiner...one of us is going to need a Valium or two...and yes...I realize that according to rule 2.7.6 as a beginner drive I am not allowed to operate a motor vehicle while taking Valium.)

As Debi would say, of course I passed. I actually did quite well. Out of 40 questions I only got two wrong and one of the two was a trick question. Now all I have to do is learn once again how to actually drive a car. Updates to come, and no...you will never see a book with the title "The Man Who Learned How To Drive Twice". P.

A Man Mows a Lawn

I am sitting, resting actually, on an old teak bench at the back of our property. I have just finished mowing half of our very large lawn and I am feeling a bit wiped. Behind me I hear the sound of our 96-year-old neighbour firing up his sit-down mower. My mind whirls.

For the past few days, when I haven't been mowing or listening to neighbours mow, then I have been reading about mowing, thinking about mowing, planing to mow or examining mown lawns for tips, lessons or warnings.

For nearly 20 years, I have not mown lawns and  have not missed the activity. Then we moved and mowing a lawn became a necessity and strangely a bit of a blessing. I have written before of my odd way of mowing lawns and I have come to understand that mowing is strangely a guy thing, one that I have started to wrestle with in the Third Phase of my life. Everyone on my street who mows a lawn is a guy and if there is no guy in the house to mow the lawn, the rule seems to be, hire a service and a guy will come and mow the lawn. And we are judged by our lawns and once you start mowing and start feeling judged you find yourself judging other lawns. Like why has one of my neighbours let his lawn literally go to seed. Is it because he rents and doesn't own? Is he lazy, lacking in initiative, ill, away? Is it possible he has simply decided to drop out of the lawn mowing competition all together?
It intensifies. Especially if you have a big yard and an electric rechargeable mower that lacks sufficient battery power to do the whole job in one day. You start planning your assault and weather and the daily schedule starts to play a role. Soon you feel like the old guys at the community centre who talk and talk incessantly about their lawns.

My friend, the excellent writer and curmudgeon Parker Donham, has summarized the history of lawn mowing quite succinctly on his blog, and then acknowledges that his need to mow has been made easier with the purchase of a Husqvarna mower or a sit-down mower. And sit-down mowers haunt me. Is getting one a cop-out, is there some virtue in sweating through a hot day in order to lower the height of the average grass blade of our yawn? Will I feel or look foolish sitting down on a mover? Is there a mower small enough to move between our front and back yard but large enough to make having one reasonable? The questions...the questions...see what I mean about this lawn mowing stuff getting obsessive?

Roger Cohen at the New York Times places mowing the lawn at the centre of the pursuit of happiness project, the joy to be found in the repetitive tasks that make up the day-to-day of a good life, our life. I identify with that. When I was recovering from surgery, the mark for me that I was healing was when I could empty the dishwasher. There is a value in the quotidian. There is joy and meaning to be discovered in patching together all the moments that congeal together in the fashioning of a day.

That's what is really different today when it comes to mowing a lawn. In past years. when being at the office was a full-time job, mowing the lawn, doing the everyday necessary seemed to be one task too many, one straw too onerous. In this phase, where life is more malleable, more under my control, making sense of my day is my job and part of making sense of my day means stitching the repetitive into the grand scheme of things.

I am still sitting on the bench but for the moment I am now longer thinking about mowing or not directly. I am thinking about music. When I was young, in my teens, I loved Carole King's Tapestry. Still do actually. I doubt she had lawn mowing in mind when capturing the sense of life as a deeply woven tapestry, but that's okay because I do as I remember the song and contemplate the remaining half of the lawn to be mowed.

Gardens of The Third Phase

I have a wonderful new garden that is totally preoccupying me. For the past few weeks, I have been out there whenever I can, sometimes for five hours at a time.

The garden was established by the people who owned the house before we bought it last fall. They had spent 16 years turning a large barren lot into a multiple-garden bed wonder. I thought my job - daunting enough - would be to maintain their efforts.

When we made the decision to move away from Toronto to our small town and our huge garden, friends said things like, "why don't you just move to a condo?" "you're going to miss the city," "how will you ever maintain such a garden?" They knew I would care for the garden largely on my own and their comments nipped at my confidence.

So this spring I set out to face the challenge and soon discovered that the fun came not in trying to keep the garden as it was  - an impossibility anyway - but in learning each section and rebuilding it to keep it going forward, to reflect our tastes, and to add some edibles.

As I work, I'm reminded that gardening let's me know where I am at and who I am. Sometimes, I am impatient to get the jobs done. Sometimes, I want perfection, Sometimes, I lose myself in the quiet contemplation of the land. Sometimes, I channel my father as I create a vegetable patch. Sometimes, I channel my mother as I clip flowers for the house. Sometimes, I channel my original self, the one who loved to play in the dirt as a child.

But I've discovered that gardening in the third phase is a different proposition. In the past, I have planted trees and perennials - buying the cheaper, smaller pots - knowing they would grow eventually. But now, I think a lot about what a tree will look like in five years, how high a perennial will be in two. Because, just like plants, life is fragile. And as I plant a cedar or a stick of a pear tree, I hope they will survive the harder winters and I wonder how long I will be able to be around them. I plant nonetheless because life is a gamble at the best of times.

The strongest reminder of this is the paw-paw trees I recently planted. The paw-paw is a native fruit tree I'd never heard of until I moved to the Niagara region - a tree that produces a papaya-looking fruit. But I can't expect to see any fruit for at least three years, have to keep the trees wrapped for the first year and a half. In some ways, planting the paw-paw trees is a leap of faith, an incentive to keep active. If nothing else, they are a legacy. Native trees I'll leave behind. D

Let An "Old Geezer" Rant

Sometimes, if we aren't careful, we let slip our prejudices and when we realize what we have done, we are chagrined. But if we think our prejudices aren't prejudices or are sufficiently widely shared that we don't think of them as prejudices at all then putting them into play becomes simply normal. Let's be clear, a prejudice is an irrational labeling and libeling of an entire group. Examples always help so let's meet Tim Fernholz and his wholesale beat down of 'geezers'.

Fernholz writes for publications in the Atlantic network of magazines, newsletters and blogs. In the May Saturday edition of Quartz he writes:"Good morning, Quartz readers! How did we let a bunch of geezers swindle global soccer for this long? Of the 14 top soccer officials and businessmen arrested on FIFA-related corruption charges this week, all but five were over the age of 60." 

Reading that, the only thing one can conclude is that corruption is an age thing. You know, all round moral individuals acting in the best interest of sport and then the guy turns 60 and wham, he is a sleaze bucket and corrupt to boot. And I guess the brilliant analyst that is Fernholz must assume that the 5 folks under 60 who were charged were corrupted by the geezers. What's not clear to me is whether the charges the 14 are facing relate to events that occurred before they turned 60 or after. And if the charges were from a pre-geezer state, how will the authorities, let alone the public cope?

Geezer is a word that originated in England in the 1800s and originally meant an eccentric or cranky male, and often carries the adjective old in front of it, except in America where geezer seems to mean old and male. I am not sure how geezer became associated with corruption so I asked Fernholz and Quartz the following: "What is the link between age and corruption, and can you cite some research that establishes that link? Are just males susceptible or inclined this way? Is it just white males? Is corruption a universal marker of people who turned 60? There is so much here that if you had only shared the full extent of your understanding I might have been able to describe it as something I read elsewhere that made me smarter." 


Fernholz and his colleagues chose not to answer, I am assuming because they believe those over 60 wouldn't get it and those under sixty just accept that those over sixty have lost their smarts, their morals, their integrity and their sense of what is acceptable. Or they didn't bother answering because they realized that what Tim Fernholz was blathering on about was simply a moment of spouting off an irrational and a hateful generalization without a basis in fact...wait there is is a word for that...what's the word...am I having a senior moment....no there it is....prejudice.  

Ironically for Mr. Fernholz, the whole FIFA scandal is only public knowledge because a 71-year-old journalist broke the story 9 years ago when he was 62....my God, how did that happen? How did an old Geezer do something that should have been the work of some guy in his 30s? I am waiting for Mr. Fernholz to explain it. 

Brain or Body? If I Had to Choose.

I can't help being enticed by books like Two Weeks to a Younger Brain. Who wouldn't want to learn tricks to stave off Alzheimer's? And every time hacks for a longer life jump out at me on Facebook I have to open them. I like my life. I like the fact that my body still allows me to do many of the things I love and my brain works pretty well although I forget names fast and worry about that.

With good fortune I still have a couple of productive decades ahead of me. But there is a question nagging me, one left by the women who preceded me. If I had to choose which would go first - the body or the mind - which would it be? For most of my life, I never thought seriously about the question because who at 20, 30, or even 40 does? But I suppose it's been at the back of my mind for a while.

When I was young and leaving home for university, I had to go and say goodbye to my grandmother who had lived in the same town as my family my whole life. By then Ga-Ga, as we called her, had become what everybody described as "senile." That day, my grandmother told me a rambling story that ended with the stricture not to go beyond the schoolyard walls in order to keep safe, drawing on some long-ago memory, confused by why I was saying goodbye.

As a teenager I found some of my grandmother's eccentricities amusing in the unaware invincibility of youth. I laughed when her cat walked all over the dining room table and stuck his paw in her teacup and when, even after we'd told her not to drink the tea, she forgot and drank it anyway.

But there was really nothing funny about my grandmother's decline. She had always been a smart woman, a woman who may have been limited by her time but ahead of  it nonetheless. She never traveled off the continent but she understood the sorrows of others oceans away. After World War II she housed Eastern European refugees in her home until they learned English and could get jobs in nearby Hamilton. In the '60s she sponsored a young girl from Hong Kong who wanted to come to Canada. She was a business woman at heart, mind you. The young girl had to read to her each day; the Estonians who lived in her house or our house helped on the farm until they could set out on their own.

And even though she never went to university, she taught herself about the stock market and turned the meagre earnings of a fruit farm into a handsome profit, able to care for herself financially after her husband died.

And yet what I remember of her at the end is a woman who allowed a farm manager to steal from her constantly, who wouldn't trust her own children, who grew more and more paranoid all the time. On one of my last visits to her when she was in hospital she told me the staff came into her room at night and cut off the skin from her finger tips. They boiled it, she told me, and made the curtain that hung in her room.

She was never diagnosed with Alzheimer's although it was clear she suffered from some form of dementia. I saw the toll this took on my mother, her caregiver, who tried her best to help but was rewarded with mistrust and abuse. One day when she came back from my grandmother's, exhausted, my mother told me she hoped that when she grew old, her body would go before her mind, partly because she didn't want her children to have to face the same situation.

Unfortunately, she got her wish. Childhood polio, post-polio and the effects of five pregnancies on a back with weakened muscles made my mother completely immobile by her eighties. She had the wherewithal to handle her own arrangements and insisted in the end on staying in her retirement home but moving to the only floor where there were nurses who could care for her - the Alzheimer's floor. Night and day, people wandered into her room scaring her. And frustrated with her inability to manage even the simplest physical tasks, my mother said she wished her mind had gone so she didn't have to be aware of what was happening to her. I reminded her of our conversation from years earlier. But by that point she was suffering too much to engage in a discussion.

When we see our grandmothers and our mothers in their final days they are others with a fate that is foreign to us. We are the young who will go on and on. But in the third phase, that question of how our lives will end has a way of catching up to us as we face the spectre of illnesses and the death of contemporaries. But if I had to choose the how and the when, I don't know what I'd want those to be. To end up like my grandmother or be as helpless as my mother. Both seems so unfair.

So I will read hacks to keep my health and I will try to exercise my brain. Luckily, the science shows many of the same good habits will protect both. And in the meantime, I'll try to put the question aside and enjoy each day as it comes. D

Science and Music

When I was a child, my parents and my sister argued about the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, a classic trope of generational conflict over taste. Looking back from the third phase of life that family quarrel (which never ever quite resolved itself) and the old line about not knowing art but knowing what you like (arguably first uttered in the New York Times in 1880:" I don't pretend to know much about art; but I know what pleases.") just keep bumping around in my head these days but with a slight variation...now I am thinking I may not know much about science but science sure doesn't know music...or not in any way that is 'helpful' to the human condition.


I love music, love listening to it at my desk, in the car. I listen when I am moody, mellow, anxious or serene. I listen to immerse, to distract, to concentrate and to learn. I learned about music from my parents, who had a floor cabinet stereo system and a few 78s and a lot of 33's. Some of what they liked to play, I still like to listen to: Roy Orbison, Otis Redding and Harry Belafonte. My most consistent musical favourites I acquired through personal exploration in the 1960s and 1970s: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young. When I worked at CBC radio, I was constantly learning about new musicians and new genres of music. The list of who I will and do listen to could go on and on. But I fear that some folks are intent on making music about something other than music.

The past few weeks  news feeds and newsites have been filled with stories purporting to make definitive comments on music rooted in 'science,' or, more accurately, in algorithmic analysis, lyric content analysis, suspect on-line surveys and a host of other big data analytic tools  used to make the news equivalent of click bait. The upshot of the 'news' is: Nickleback has or doesn't have 'the smartest lyrics', people stop listening to new music at age 33 (earlier if you are a parent) or don't, pop music is increasingly about advertising, that the biggest changes in music were in the 60s but in 1991...and without doubt there is more to come. Predictably, each time one of these 'studies' was released, the media both old and new when nuts.

What types of music we listen to is often portrayed as one of the key markers between generations, cultural groups, class etc. Who you like to listen to, simply reveling in the joy of performance, composition, sound, meaning and memory, has been turned into a means of division, a matter of separation rather than what it should be: a remarkable defining characteristic of what it means to be human, to be truly alive. As you can probably guess there is even a Buzzfeed quiz that bets it can guess your age by the music you listen to.

Don't get me wrong, there is much that science and music can tell us about the human condition, the idea of memory formation and even how the healthy brain works and the unhealthy one doesn't. In an earlier post, I made mention of Daniel Levitin, the neuroscience and musician who is constantly finding out new things about the brain, music and the link. And that's the science we should be paying attention to, the stuff that elevates us, that makes us think, not the stuff meant to divide and distract.

But the flood of 'news stories' did trigger one nagging thought. You do have to keep finding new music. New sounds, new ways of interpreting life are important and keep the brain working. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that the only 'new music' was music produced yesterday. I am learning more about blues musicians I had never heard of, listening to recordings and performances by people dead before I was born. New is just shorthand for new to you. In that sense new is good. P