I am lying in bed with my charger on my back. When the pain in my feet returned, I knew something was amiss.
"Put it on the bullseye of the device," the company rep wrote.
But which incision is the battery? I ask him....then he tells me it's the other one. "Ohhhh!" I write back. "No wonder! I've been putting it on the wrong place!" There's a learning curve here--the kind we keep getting.
Growing older means adapting to what we can't change, and doing everything we can to change what we can.
Several conversations with my mama and friends in the past few days clustered around issues related to aging. We talk about what we're doing, books we're reading, and what we're learning about growing, and growing older. We decry the fact that we can only accomplish a fraction of what we had the energy for last decade, but we share what we're doing with that diminished energy. We ferret out good news stories and share them.
Friendships like these are islands of peace in a troubled world.
Like this: Jan insisted I watch The Quilters on Netflix, an intriguing documentary about a group of prisoners in a high-security prison who make intricate quilts for foster children in Missouri. Most are in for life; some have spent decades inside. "But when we're doing this, it's like we're outside," one said. They want every foster child to receive a quilt for their birthday.
These men cut and press and fold fabrics, sometimes waking up in the night to create patterns on graph paper. The walls of the quilting room are stacked floor to ceiling with donated bundles of fabric. Thank you notes from the recipients make these "hardened criminals" cry.
Like this: I tell Carlene that I got scammed yesterday.
Some scammer had tapped into the catalog of Natural Life. I'd bought gifts for friends and summer blouses for myself, then got an all-cap notice from Natural Life that they'd been scammed. This was not a moving sale at all.
Carlene's text: "You had the best part of the ordering!!
You got to think of each
Recipient and what they like! As special as a gift!!
I called Chase to alert them to the scam and to reverse the charge on my card, all the while thinking about how Carlene can find nuggets of good almost anywhere.
Last week, she was reading a 30-year-old Anne Lamott book about her drug addiction and recovery. "If I had read this back then," Carlene said, "I probably wouldn't have liked it. I probably would have felt judgmental or something. But it's SO good!"
Like: Nellie telling me about her 20-day art retreat in Italy with a friend. She's trying to hold on longer to the peace and quiet of Italy.
Like: Beverly telling me about Larry's lush garden filled with vegetables--and about their attending a protest march every Sunday.
Like: an email from a book group several of my friends belong to. Their next book is one I am definitely going to order: Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times. (Gregory Boyle). This book group is a marvel, a group of septuagenarians and octogenarians who have been reading together for forty years.
Like Freda who--even with her own knee issues--volunteered to walk Luci when I was recovering from surgery.
Like Linda who called from beautiful Cape Cod this morning and we wound up talking about our prior writing and how a manuscript she wrote when she was 35, and I read shortly after in a pop up camper on Molas Lake, was the starting point of a lifelong friendship.
Like this text from Jan reminding me of Glue Parties--Elena being the little cutie who showed up at her door to invite her and Makken and Sebastien to join our sticky little porch party.
So it's a dreary, rainy day and suddenly the sun shines forth and you hear a tiny knock at the door and here's this bright-eyed little cutie asking if you can come out and play at a glue party. Her hands, festooned in a shiny white "glove," are drying in the sun, in preparation for the ultimate thrill: "peeling." That's the secret of a great glue party. Enshroud yourself in white school glue, let it dry (you can dance and do the hokey-pokey while on this step), then peel, gleefully, with your friends. Pure joy.
Most of my friends are in their 70s, two in their late 60s, several just over the line into 80. Sometimes we do wring our hands over the incompetent mostly-men who are running the country. (At this point, let me recommend a powerful six-episode series on Max, The Plot Against America, based on a Phillip Roth novel, and eerily similar to what's happening in America right now. )
Sometimes we talk about our aches and pains and help each other with food, offers to drive, and encouragement.
But my friends and I are watching less news and try to change the conversation if it lingers too long on the horrors of Trumpism or aches and pains. (Freda calls the latter "organ recitals").
