Redefining "Second Childhood"

I like the old-fashioned sound of the word, "dotage," although I don't like its definition much with its connotations of decline, poor judgement and ill health. To be in one's dotage is not to be in a good place. There's another phrase I like even though I fear its meaning: "second childhood." It describes a stage of the old when they are as dependent as small children. Both dotage and second childhood suggest that dreaded state of dementia when old people are no longer in control of their thoughts and, therefore, their lives.

But what if we redefined second childhood to describe a phase in life when a person has the time and the strength to look at their first childhood seriously in order to make peace with the bad and sad of it and revel in the activities that gave them joy back then? What if we redefined it as the phase where we say,"I'm too old for that," in a defiant way as in "I'm too old for that shit," and think of it as a time to play as freely as we did - or wanted to - back then? As a time we jump over the need for success and material possession back to a place where our sense of right and wrong was the strongest? A second childhood where this time we have the power and means to do some good.

High horse thinking. I know. But those of us who can manage financially without the rigours of daily jobs should be capable of creative play, meaningful acts and more high horse thinking. We have that pause in our life to fill and what better way to fill it.

It's been a year since I left the institutional work force. It's been a year of settling in to a new rhythm of life, of settling into a new home and developing a garden that reminds me daily of the joys I experienced as a child growing up on a fruit farm. The mud, the taste of a hot tomato from the vine, the lost hours under a tree. They are all wonderful. My first childhood was a decent one. But, like every child, there were hurts and disappointments which I can reflect on as I pull weeds and plant trees. All the power and all the responsibility to make the most of life are mine in a second childhood.

Moving into the second year, I feel the need to be engaged again. I've no desire to be limited by the hours of a college instructor's schedule or the office politics of the journalist's world. I don't see myself going back to full-time work. But I miss the sense I was doing good for others - working on a story that matters like the current refugee crisis, helping non-Native speakers accomplish their goals in English. Like a child churning at a new stage of growth I am trying to figure my way through that now.

There was a recent article in The Atlantic on discovering the narrative of your life, of adjusting it, of finding its arc.What better stage of life to do that and what better source of material for the second childhood than the first. We can edit out what we didn't like, build on what was good and recreate the best. Only this time, the stakes are higher. In our second childhood, we don't have those seemingly endless years ahead as we did with the first. The last chapter is not that far away this time.

When One is the Loneliest Number

Loneliness can suck. When I've felt it at various periods of my life, it left me listless and desperate for ways to end it. It left me uncertain about myself and careless in my actions. I've been lucky though; I've had the right people and some good coping tricks to pull me through each time.

But it seems loneliness is becoming an epidemic. We are becoming a lonelier society, isolated in our easy-communication world from real friends and meaningful contacts. In an article from the Globe and Mail Elizabeth Renzetti documents some sad facts: social isolation is the biggest concern in the city of Vancouver, more Canadians than ever live alone and a quarter of them describe themselves as lonely.

The article is almost two years old but with updates still circulates on the Globe's website which says more than the article itself about our fear of loneliness.

When it comes to seniors, the article quotes a Statistics Canada figure from 2012: Twenty percent of old people report feeling lonely.

Being alone is not equal to loneliness. After all, the 75 per cent of those who live alone in Canada and not mentioned in the Renzetti article didn't describe themselves as lonely.

Loneliness is the cruel cousin of solitude. Solitude allows for creativity, a greater connection to the earth and a strong sense of self. Loneliness brings all the opposites.

Loneliness also pushes people in directions that can harm them. This summer  The New York Times reported on swindlers who take advantage of lonely, aging woman trying to find new partners to share their latter lives and ease their isolation. Even the fear of loneliness, the fear of dying alone, often keeps people who are in relationships in bad ones.

No one wants to die alone. Wild actor, Jack Nicholson fears it. I fear it. We all fear it. No one wants to be the British woman whose body was discovered six years after she'd died. According to Jezebel.com, those who fear dying alone are childless, have children who live far away, live alone, have physical or mental impairments, live in rural areas or are the loner type with small social networks. That covers a lot of ground.

I know childless people with the fear. And I know people who live alone with that fear. For me, my fear centers around the fact that I am a bit of the loner type without a lot of social networks.

But that's what it is: a fear. None of us can predict how or when we will die. There's little we can do about it.

On the other hand, we can tackle loneliness as we age, find ways to build a community we are comfortable with, reach out to those who we know are suffering loneliness now. We can avoid the traps, work on ourselves and work with others to stay connected. It might be one of the greatest challenges we face in The Third Phase but that doesn't mean we can't do anything about it.

That may sound Pollyanish. But as a girl I always admired the spirit of Pollyanna. Pushed in the mud, she found a quarter. I'd like to see how an older Pollyanna would handle loneliness. D

A Third Phase Vacation Conundrum

When I left the CBC, a few years after Debi did, a good friend said 'the biggest change you will experience is that in this phase of your life...you get to decide if Tuesday is a Saturday or whether Saturday should be a Tuesday. See, in the Third Phase, your schedule is your own. Where this gets slightly more complicated is when you aren`t talking about the days of the week but trying to figure out when or if you are on vacation. Being on a vacation is nothing like being hungry or tired...sometimes you need a clue.

So we conducted a bit of an experiment.

And we are back. We have been away, well not really away physically but mentally. We decided to take a vacation, or as folks like to say, a staycation because we checked out of normal routines but stayed put. That meant not writing for money, not attending to some of those weird household jobs that seem okay during the week but not on a day off or a week off. We`d leave the house for little excursions, we`d eat great food late at night, we`d sample local wines and beers and do things that had long been on our list that we'd never gotten around to.

And we thought about vacations and work life balances which gets really tricky if what you are really wrestling with is life-life balances. The big issues was why travel seems to be so much a part of how we think about vacations. We travel; we both love to travel. Sometimes travel is about work, an assignment, a research project. Sometimes travel is an adventure. Travel can be hard and arduous. Travel can be and often is mind and spirit expanding. So is all travel a vacation and does a vacation imply travel?

Vacations are conundrums. The reality is that taking a vacation was unheard of for most people until relatively recently. The word itself is connected to a break when the law courts weren`t operational, or so Wikipedia tells me, and that suggests a break for a very particular type of class of individuals. In the early days of the 20th century, cottages and resorts were the nearly exclusive luxury of the well-to-do. I know when I was a kid, vacations were about the family driving to visit relatives. When I was in my twenties and thirties, vacations were all about seeing things I had never seen.

But now, in our Third Phase, what's a vacation? Ironically, as I sat down to write this I received a free e-book from the University of Chicago press, "Travelling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel" For a moment I was lost. Travel could be done inside a room, confined to a room even. If so then if travel was truly essential to a vacation than a vacation could be me staying put, staying in my room even. And if my vacation is me staying put, then what is the difference between staying at home and travelling? And ultimately does any of this matter?

It matters because giving shape and meaning to life is what life is about and documenting that is what this blog is about. Vacations are part of the rhythms that we are are used to and are comfortable with. Vacations are also a way of forcing oneself out of routines and habits that always bear occasional evaluation. You become aware of loops and strictures often by stepping away for a moment...stepping a long way away or crossing the room. In fact, there is a whole emerging science of vacations that is providing keen insights into how to plan one, how to best enjoy one, how to reflect on one...

Our vacation was great and the proof of that may well be that we were sad when it was done. And to be completely honest, I am already planning the next one and the one after that. P

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