Aging: The Promise of One More New Year

     

      As I am writing this, on New Year's Eve, at the end of 2018, I am reminded again how each December 31 we symbolically mark the end of the year as a kind of death as we watch that ever-present trope of Father Time, bearded and bent, shuffle off to make way for the Baby New Year.

     The figure of Father Time traces its roots back to the Greek god Chronos and to the Celtic Holly King. Both are described in ancient tales as an old man, usually bearded, wearing long robes and a dour expression, often carrying a scythe (like the Grim Reaper, the very personification of death) and a timepiece.

     We get it. Time is passing him by.

     The Baby, on the other hand, stands for life, resurrection, a new beginning. He echoes the Greek God Dionysus, the god of fun, wine-making and drinking and ritual madness.

     He looks rarin' to go.

     I'm rarin' to go, too, but I know realistically that my life is closer to the man with the hourglass than the Baby in the top hat. But how do I navigate well this time "somewhere near the end," as Diana Athill calls it, as I count down another year of my life?

     On my bedside table is a book called Aging Thoughtfully by philosopher Marsha Nussbaum and legal scholar Saul Levmore that attempts to answer my question. It is a lively debate between two academics about how to approach the subject of aging. It begins with a firm denial that their book has anything to do with that sullen man with the scythe:

     "This book is about living thoughtfully, and certainly not about dying, gracefully or otherwise. To age is to experience, to gain wisdom, to love and to lose, and to grow more comfortable in one's own skin, however much it might be loosening."

     Yet despite their denials, the subject of death permeates Aging Thoughtfully, from the authors' examination of the choices made by a dying King Lear (a fictional character, of course) to their discussions about how the fear of death affects real-life people's end-of-life choices.

     I ordered Aging Thoughtfully, published in 2017 by Oxford University Press, after hearing that Nussbaum was this year's recipient of the Berggruen Prize. I was curious to read something by a 71-year-old who had just been awarded a million dollars for thinking.

     The prize, launched in 2016, is given out by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute to encourage research in cross-cultural understanding. The results of the American presidential election in 2016 certainly drove home how desperately such research is needed.

Marsha Nussbaum & Saul Levmore (Book photo by Lloyd Degrane)

     Aging Thoughtfully is a conversation between Nussbaum and Levmore who are colleagues at the University of Chicago. The book's subtitle -- Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles & Regret -- give you an idea of the range of subjects they cover. The conversational format -- Nussbaum and Levmore take turns weighing in on all those subjects -- was inspired by Cicero's De Senectute (On Aging) written in 45 B.C.E.

    De Senectute is a fictional conversation inspired by letters exchanged between the Roman philosopher and his friend Atticus, both of whom were in their sixties at the time. The two men didn't consider themselves old at all ("Romans were a healthy lot," Nussbaum and Levmore point out) so in De Senectute Cicero invents a dialogue between a truly aged man -- in his eighties -- whom he calls Cato and two men in their thirties.

     Cato, the imaginary 80-something, is healthy, politically active and obsessed with gardening. He seeks to dispel the myths that his two young men friends have about aging -- that as we age we lose creativity and that death is a "constant fearful presence," for examples.

     "Each part of life has its own pleasures," Cato tells his young interlocutors. "Each has its own abundant harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in body, but we need never grow old in mind and spirit."

     At the same time Cicero was writing about aging, he also wrote a book about friendship -- De Amicitia -- which Nussbaum discusses in Chapter Three (entitled Aging With Friends). That book, too, was based on Cicero's correspondence with Atticus, but as Nussbaum points out, Cicero's official writings don't tell the whole story of what the two men discussed in those letters. At the time Cicero was experiencing a deep depression. His daughter Tullia had died in childbirth. The unbearable pain of his grief and even thoughts of suicide are present in the letters exchanged with Atticus, but they don't make it into the books.

     "These two books have been justifiably popular over the centuries. Both have some very good ideas and arguments. But still, there is something missing," Nussbaum writes. "Although in form they are dialogues, they are very abstract, and they lack, therefore, a key aspect of both friendship and aging: the nuanced sensitivity to the particular that Cicero often praises under the rubric of humanitas." 

    In other words, when philosophers generalize too much about aging, they risk missing the point.  King Lear is not a commentary on dementia -- "or any other universal, individuality-effacing feature of aging," says Nussbaum, "but about the aging of a very particular type of person, one accustomed to dominating and enjoying control."  We all experience loss as we age, but Cicero's grief over the loss of his daughter was specific to him. While his official treatise on aging offers an upbeat, forward looking way to view aging, his letters reveal a more realistic look at age as the struggling, more human Cicero relies on his friend Atticus to see him through a difficult time.

     In other words, we all age, we all grieve, we all love in our own peculiar way. We'll get a more accurate picture of what we need to do as we age if we see ourselves as individuals aging and not just part of a faceless group of "senior citizens." 

    "Cato says that aging is in many ways superior to what precedes it because of the quality of the talk it contains. But he doesn't make good on that promise; your letters do," Nussbaum writes, addressing Cicero directly. "Aging is bound to contain tragedy. It is not bound to contain comedy, or understanding, or love. What supples both of these is friendship."

     Friendship -- by bringing us that understanding and love -- also can edge us away from a fear of death as we age. 

     For as Marcus Tulles Cicero put it:  "No one is as old as to think he or she cannot live one more year."

    One More Happy New Year to us all!

    



     

     
     

    

     

   

     

   

Nevertheless, she persisted

       Nikki Fried finally was declared the winner in Florida agricultural commissioner's race.

      On election night, she refused to concede. Her race was so close it prompted an automatic recount and she eventually prevailed. She won by just 6,753 votes -- a margin of .08 percent.

     The election of Fried, who ran on a program of putting consumers needs over corporate interests, gives me hope that Florida will re-instate public postings of health violations at grocery stores and won't, like the last agricultural commissioner (proud NRA-sellout Adam Putnam) be susceptible to political influence by Publix. Publix's political contribution to Putnam, which looked to me like an obvious quid pro quo to suppress that chain's health violations, had prompted my months-long boycott of Publix. I was determined to continue to boycott the grocery chain as long as there wasn't a consumer watchdog in the agricultural commissioner's office.

     Fried is now the highest ranking Democrat in Florida -- and the first woman to serve as Florida's agricultural commissioner.

     Something for which to be grateful. Happy Thanksgiving!

     

Why I Still Boycott Publix and How It Has Changed My Life

To Publix, I am Case Ref # 1758234.

I triggered that moniker when I wrote the grocery chain after reading in my local newspaper that the Florida company had contributed “more money to Adam Putnam’s gubernatorial bid than any other candidate since at least 1995 and likely for the entirety of the company’s history.”

Tampa Bay Times reporter Steve Contorno reported that Publix, the heirs to the company’s founder and its current and former leaders had given Putnam a whopping $670,000 in the last three years, “or enough money to buy 74,527 chicken tender subs.”

I was not the only one who was outraged by this story. Putnam, who was running as a “proud NRA sellout,” was not popular with those who favor more strict gun regulation. News that Publix was pouring money into his campaign coffers sparked calls for a state-wide boycott. The store quickly released a press release insisting that its support of Putnam was not an endorsement of the National Rifle Association, but merely the support of a fellow hometown boy. Both Putnam and Publix trace their beginnings to the same rural area in Florida: Polk County. 

But that didn't stop the bleeding. Teenagers from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas in Parkland announced that they were going to stage a "die in" at their local Publix. They had recently experienced gun violence in a very directly and took Publix support of a "proud NRA sellout" personally.  “I guess I should’ve bought my flowers for the memorials somewhere else,” tweeted Alex Wind, who had survived the horrific massacre at the school that killed so many of his classmates.

Pictures of students lying down in the aisles of a South Florida grocery store was a public relations nightmare. Wisely, Publix didn't interfere with the students' peaceful protest and immediately announced that it would suspend all political contributions and review the matter. 

That seemed to do the trick. Things quieted down and most people went back to shopping at the place “where shopping is a pleasure.”

I didn’t.

I was alarmed that Publix had gotten away with leaving unanswered the really disturbing issue raised in Contorno’s story which had nothing to do with guns. Contorno had outlined how the man whom Publix was showering with mammoth political contributions had worked on the grocery store’s behalf to hide reports of health infractions at their stores from the public. Those contributions sounded awfully like a simple quid pro quo. We scratch your back and you scratch ours.

Putnam was not only Publix's hometown boy, he was its mole in state government. Putnam heads the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services which conducts health safety inspections at grocery stores. In other words, as head of that department, Putnam was overseeing the regulation of Publix’s 785 stores in Florida.

And in 2016 that hometown boy did Publix a big favor.

According to Contorno’s story, in 2016 WFTS- 
Channel 28 had reported that seven Tampa Bay area Publix stories had failed the department’s health inspections. In those stores, food inspectors found rodent droppings, bugs and hundreds of pounds of meat and other food stored at unsafe temperatures. They found that employees were not washing their hands, as instructed in every retail bathroom I have ever been in. WFTS-Channel 28 found out about those health hazards at Publix stores because at that time the Department of Agriculture -- yes, the department headed by Putnam -- routinely posted on its official website the names and addresses of all the stores in the state who “failed” inspection.

The next day after the TV report — the next day! — Putnam scrubbed the department’s website of all the notices of failed inspections and announced that he was eliminating the department’s pass/fail grading system which had been in place to warn the public of infractions. Now that it was Publix that was on the list, Putnam no longer wanted the list to be public.  Publix was an “industry leader” and “ought not be mislabeled based on minor infractions,” Putnam explained to WFTS-Channel 28. He failed to mention that Publix also was one of his major political contributors.

Six months later, Putnam launched a new approach to informing the public about the results of his department's inspections. Instead of receiving a failing grade, which might imply that it was so bad the establishment needed to be shut down, the worst labeling a supermarket now would face is “re-inspection required.”  Putnam (apparently a proud Publix sellout) decided that it was more important to protect Publix than to let the public be informed about which stores have rodent droppings or are leaving meat unattended.

I emailed Publix, raising my concern about this apparent quid pro quo and the lack of transparency that it now created. I received this email back, marked Case Ref. # 1758234. Note that the letter addresses me by my last name only, but signs with a first name only, as if from a friend:

Dear Ms. Hammond,

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us. We regret that we have failed to meet your expectations. We would never knowingly disappoint our customers and we appreciate the trust you have placed in us to address your concern.

We recognize that our political contributions have caused an unintentional customer divide, and for this, we sincerely apologize. As we shared last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend corporate-funded political contributions, and reevaluate our processes to ensure that our giving better reflects our intended desire to support a strong economy and a healthy community.

We hope we have answered your question to your satisfaction. Should you have additional follow up, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Care department at 1-800-242-1227. You may also contact us via email at www.publix.com/contact or write us at Publix Super Markets, Inc., P.O. Box 407, Lakeland, FL 33802, ATTN: Customer Care. Please be sure to reference your case identification number. We look forward to hearing from you again soon.
 

Sincerely,
Hannah
Customer Care

Here’s how I responded:

I was disappointed to receive this email which obviously was just a computer-generated response to anyone who sent an objection to the recent disclosures about your political activity. “Hannah” clearly did not read my email nor did she “answer” my concerns. I had already explained in my letter what I thought of Publix’s statement about “suspending” corporate-funded political contributions and, no, “Hannah” did not address the questions I raised. 

As I stated in my previous email, I was not thrilled that you gave such a large contribution to a “proud NRA sellout.” This country desperately needs more sensible gun control. Those Parkland kids have got it right.

But that was not my biggest concern. As I stated in my previous email, I am even more disturbed about the quid pro quo that you received, thanks to your generous contribution to Adam Putnam. Thanks to your political pressure through a substantial contribution, you were able to change the transparency that was in place to let the public know about health infractions at our grocery stores. Having any mention of such citations scrubbed clean from the Agricultural Commissioner’s site is not reassuring. I realize every industry does some political lobbying, but your getting away with such a blatant quid pro quo is very alarming to me. 

I am not so naive as to think that all grocery stores in Florida don't benefit from your political lobbying on this issue and that the grocery stores I have chosen to replace you could now also have health violations without my knowing, but as the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you were the one who pushed your weight around (with your greasing the palm of Adam Putnam) and made it impossible for me to know which stores have passed and failed inspections. In this era of political lies, corruption and unaccountability, I feel I need to draw a line in the sand. I need to hold you responsible for your actions.  Continuing to patronize your stores while you simply “reconsider” your political contributions is akin to letting you get away with what you have already done. I realize that my boycott will make no difference to you, but it is a stand I feel I need to take in order to send a message that such corporate influence on politicians is not acceptable.

So, I will be “suspending” my shopping at your stores and “reevaluating” whether you are putting the concern for your profits over your commitment to the needs of the general public. I assure you, I will be back as your customer the moment I see that you have used your considerable influence over politicians to assure that the results of the inspections of your stores — and others — are made public and that your industry is made accountable for health infractions. 

Meanwhile, I am shopping at Winn Dixie, Aldi’s and some small local produce markets. Believe me, I would rather be giving you my business. Like a lot of Floridians, I always thought you were the good guys. You treated your employees well. Your stores were clean. And, yes, shopping at Publix was a pleasure. So, do the right thing. Don’t just put out a lame public relations press release. Let people know that you support inspection transparency. Let people know you are for more reasonable gun control in this state. If you did that, it would then be truly a pleasure to return to your stores.

Sincerely,

Margo Hammond

Publix never answered this second email. I have continued to boycott the store. 

Meanwhile I have added a number of other grocery stores to my list of where I shop: Trader Joe’s, Lucky’s, Gordon Food Service, Walmart, Mazzaro’s, Meat House of St. Pete, Whole Foods, Earth Fare, Spiro’s Pasadena Produce and the Saturday Morning Market in downtown St. Petersburg.

In some cases, I had never set food in these stores before boycotting Publix. Ever since moving to Florida 25 years ago, I had only shopped at Publix, trekking there once a week for a big blowout shopping excursion. Now I shop in spurts, popping into a store whenever I can: before or after meeting with friends, before or after attending a concert or lecture, while I'm running other errands. I feel like a European who seeks out speciality shops and places with exceptional produce. Of course, I am retired and have this luxury of multiple shopping stops, but to my delight I find shopping has become for me more of a pleasure than devoting my whole Saturday morning to Publix. 

I also have discovered amazingly good buys. 

I have become addicted to the French Vanilla ice cream at Trader’s Joes, the fruit at Spiro’s (where do they get those delectable grapes?), the $5 sushi at Lucky’s on Tuesdays, ham hocks at the Meat House of St. Pete, potato salad at Gordon Food Service and $5 whole pump chicken at Earth Fare on Fridays.

I also learned that my husband really does listen to me when it counts.

I never asked him — or anyone else for that matter — to join my boycott, but he, too, has not set foot in a Publix except to pick up his free medicine at the pharmacy.

Early in my boycott, when I mentioned to a Winn Dixie cashier that I was boycotting Publix, she said, “You do realize, don't you, that your boycott won’t make any difference?”

If she meant financially, of course that is true. Publix's bottom line did not suffer as a result of my staying away. The company’s profits are up and it is doing so well, it recently announced, that it is expanding its Lakeland headquarters and adding 700 new jobs there.

But that Winn Dixie cashier was wrong. My boycott has made a difference. To me. Sometimes it has been inconvenient. From my house, I pass two Publix to get to any of the stores I now frequent. Sometimes I miss the croissants I used to buy at Publix. I have never found any as fluffy and crusty, and believe me, I've tried. But for all the bother, my private boycott has proven to me just what I am willing to do when I see something I think is wrong. For once I put my money where my political mouth is. 

And, as it turns out, doing what I think is right has had benefits I never would have imagined. My boycott has gotten me out of a shopping rut, forced me to explore the town I’ve lived in for more than a quarter of a century and showed me that my husband will stand with me.

On November 6, we all have a chance to voice our protests over what we have seen as wrong in these past two years. We have a chance to express our political opinions at the ballot box. Adam Putnam will not, despite all those Publix contributions, be on the ballot. In the Republican primary, he lost his bid to become his party's gubernatorial candidate. And after November 6 Putnam also will longer be the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture. Term-limited, he could not seek re-election to a third consecutive term.

So this is no longer about Adam Putnam. 

Instead, Floridians have a chance to elect an Agriculture Commissioner who might actually put consumers ahead of profits. In her bid to be our next Agriculture Commissioner, the Democrat, Nicole “Nikki” Fried actually puts protecting Florida consumers at the top of her list of what she would do if elected. As a bonus she is not the candidate endorsed by the NRA. And, yes, that is a marijuana leaf that she's holding in her ad below: She vows to fight to fully implement Florida's medical marijuana law.

I didn't ask anyone to join me in my boycott of Publix, but I am asking everyone who reads this blog to join me in voting for Nicole "Nikki" Fried for Agriculture Commissioner.

If she wins, I've decided to end my Publix boycott. I will never return, however, to only shopping at Publix. My boycott has changed me. I'm a diversity shopper now and there's no going back.

Aging Dicks: Still Fighting Crime After All These Years

     Bring Your Shovels: How to Move a Body

     Now there's a panel topic you don't often see.

     Unless, of course, you attend Bouchercon. Figuring out how best to dispose of a corpse is all in a day's work for people who show up to the annual gathering of mystery and crime writers and their fans.

        Usually Bouchercon (named after critic Anthony Boucher who pronounced his name to rhyme with voucher) is held in a large city like Toronto (last year's) or Dallas (next year's). This year's convention, however, was held at the Vinoy Hotel in my hardly metropolitan hometown.

     St. Petersburg, Florida. Population: 244,769.
                                                                             
     Of course, I signed up.

     Anyone who loves to read a good book of mystery and mayhem would kill to see this all-star cast: Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, Sara Blaedel, Laura Lippman, Lisa Unger, Tim Dorsey, James Swain, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Cara Black, Mark Billingham, Amy Stewart, Lisa Scottoline and the appropriately named Karin Slaughter.

      For three and a half days, these authors and dozens of other mystery, crime and thriller writers addressed such subjects as Holding You Hostage, Who We Kill and Why, Threatening Families and Aging.

      Aging? Yes, I was fascinated by how often the subject of aging cropped up. Not the aging of the crime writers but of their fictional creations. The world of crime and mystery fiction, it turns out, is awash in aging dicks.

      In many cases, these detectives, cops and private investigators were never intended to last beyond one book. Their creators had no clue that they were destined to become iconic and would continue on and on in many books to come. But as those books kept selling and the series continued, these protagonists moved forward in time, getting older and older. Now twenty plus books later, they are still fighting crime -- but also the ravages of age.
 
      Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, for example, now retired from the LAPD, is a sixty-something with creaky knees and poor eyesight. Ian Rankin's John Rebus, forced to retire from the Edinburgh police force, is overweight and prone to fits of coughing. Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder, an ex-cop, ex-alcoholic P.I., has slowed down to a snail's pace: He's 80, the same age as Block.

Ian Rankin and Lawrence Block at Bouchercon

          "I started writing about Matthew Scudder in the mid-1970s, and it's been a great pleasure watching him grow and evolve over the years," Block says on his website.  "An aspect of the realism of the series is that Scudder has aged in real time; he's forty years older than he was when I started chronicling his fictive existence."

        Sharing a stage at Bouchercon, Block and Rankin talked about the aches and pains their protagonists have experienced as they have grown older. Both Scudder and Rebus started out in their forties, but now, as Block put it, they are no spring chickens. "Most of Scudder's friends are dead," Block admitted. Rankin's hard-drinking, chain-smoking curmudgeon now has a good reason to be cranky. "Rebus is facing a gruesome disease," said Rankin. "COPD."

      "To quote Eubie Blake who said 'If I knew I was going to last this long, I'd taken better care of myself,' I would have taken better care of Scudder," said Block, turning to Rankin. "You would have taken better care of Rebus.  But they are still here."

      Fictional crime fighters didn't always age. For 40 years Perry Mason never had a birthday nor did his secretary Della Street for that matter. Los Angeles, where they operated, was changeless, too. Rex Stout, on the other hand, moved time forward in his Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin series, from Prohibition to the era of J. Edgar Hoover, but Wolfe never moved out of his mid-fifties and Goodwin was always in his early thirties.  Nancy Drew began as a teenager and remained one throughout her various updates.

     Agatha Christie also never aged her detectives -- although, to be fair, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were already long in the tooth when we first met them.

     Now, in crime fiction, however, characters are expected to age.  Readers want to see their heroes face all the challenges of real life. Murderers. Serial Killers. Arthritis. It's far more interesting -- and believable.

     In Cara Black's latest installment of her Aimée Leduc series, which takes place in 1999, Leduc is a single maman who needs to juggle her job as a P.I. with taking care of her now 10-month-old child. At Bouchercon, Black talked about the tricks she's used to stop the flow of time: flashbacks to fill in the backstory of her character (in Murder on the Quai she took us back to Leduc's college years when she first inherited her detective agency) and the art of slowing down the aging of her characters.

      Because, after all, fictional characters don't age exactly as we do.

    "Older. Braver. Better," said Sara Peretsky, when asked at Bouchercon to compare herself to her serial character, the Chicago-based V.I. Warshawski. Why better? "Because she doesn't age anymore." Peretsky had been aging Warshawski, letting her complain about her "tired middle-aged legs" and about Chicago winters, "no country for old detectives," but in recent books, she's frozen her in time. In fiction, authors can slow time down to a crawl.

    When Sue Grafton started her alphabet series with A is for Alibi, P.I. Kinsey Milhone was 32. By the time she reached Y is for Yesterday, Milhone, born in 1950, was only 39. Writers call it novelization time (as opposed to calendar time). Grafton never completed the alphabet: She died at the end of last year.

      Some mystery writers have made aging an integral part of their story. "I might not be the best but I am certainly the oldest," says the gumshoe who narrates Barry Fantoni's spoof on the private eye genre, Harry Lipkin, Private Eye. Too sore to get up on the roof of his decrepit house to fix his tiles, Harry keeps up his job as a P.I. because what else is there for an 87-year-old to do in Miami?  With a 40-year-old Impala, a spare set of dentures and a .38, he solves the caper -- moving as slowly as possible, all the while complaining about acid reflux.

     Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a middle-aged cop working in a small Sicilian town, also constantly complains about growing old, worrying about his fading virility. Author Andrea Camilleri, who himself is 94, has already sent the last Montalbano book to his publisher so he can control just how Montalbano is finished off. "When I get fed up with him or am not able to write any more, I'll tell the publisher: publish that book," he told a Guardian interviewer. "Sherlock Holmes was recovered, but it will not be possible to recover Montalbano. In that last book, he's really finished."

     I wish John D. MacDonald had done that for Travis McGee.  When The Lonely Silver Rain, the 21st book in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, came out in 1985, a New York Times reviewer said it was "about McGee's vulnerability to loneliness and advancing age."  McGee, the reviewer reported, had grown "a bit flabby, a tad slower, a good deal less caring." He was convinced that McGee -- whose age never was determined -- had to be using bifocals to read. The reviewer speculated that MacDonald was about to end the series. In the book, McGee does seem to be tying up loose ends: questioning the wisdom of clinging to his loner status ("the most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home") and happily discovering a grown daughter whom he didn't know existed. But I think in this last Travis McGee novel MacDonald might have been haunted by feelings of his own mortality. He died the year after The Lonely Silver Rain was published.

    At Bouchercon MacDonald was honored as the Ghost of Honor. I couldn't help but wonder how he would have imagined his new Travis McGee -- ready to leave his beach bum existence behind -- coping with aging.

    Maybe we should all take a page from these fictional heroes, throw out the calendar and embrace novelization time. That's Block's advice:

     "If I have one piece of advice for y'all, it's this: Don't age in real time. I'm talking about you, not your characters. Slow down. What's the damn hurry?"

 
 

FEELING YOUNG IN ART CLASS

     Recently I went on a writer's retreat in Gulfport, Florida, a town on Boca Ciega Bay just 20 minutes from my house in St. Petersburg. A one-woman writer's retreat, that is.  For one week I cut myself off entirely from family and friends --  even from Facebook -- and just wrote. The retreat was made possible by a friend who lent me her place in exchange for walking her dog and feeding her cat while she was up north for a week visiting her mom. She once had been my editor when we both lived in New York City. Her house is in Gulfport, a town that prides itself on being weird.

     During the week of my writer's staycation I was extremely productive, writing at times 8 hours a day (I am working on a mystery, my first work of fiction). My dog-walking chore gave my day structure. Most mornings we went to Stella's on Beach Boulevard where we sat at an outside table, me enjoying a breakfast sandwich with a cup of coffee, Banjo savoring the doggie treat and water bowl the staff provided. One day, in the Gabber, a local free weekly newspaper, I read that the Senior Center down the street was offering a 12-week Drawing and Painting class.
     I signed up.

     Why did I decide to take the painting class, the first ever in my life? Maybe because it was free (although the art supplies are costing me). Maybe because I wanted some excuse to keep going back to Gulfport (although I often met and still meet my editor-friend at SumitrA, a popular laid-back coffee & tea place on Beach Boulevard). Maybe because I just thought it would be fun.
      I really wasn't sure why I suddenly had an itch to do something visual.
      "Cross-training," a fellow writer said when I told her about taking the class. Yes, of course, that was it.  Like walking the dog, art class was giving me a break from writing, a chance to exercise a new skill, a counterpoint to flexing my writing muscles.
     Soon after I returned home from my writer's staycation, the wisdom of my decision to take the art class was reinforced by the oddest coincidence. My local library informed me that a book I had requested weeks before had finally come in. Touted in O, The Oprah Magazine, the book had a long waiting list. I had wanted to read it because it seemed a good topic for this blog which focuses on creativity and aging. Now in light of my decision to "cross-train," the book's subject matter had taken on even more significance for me. The title?

     Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

     The author -- Nell Painter -- certainly was starting over. She had spent the bulk of her life not in art studios but in libraries and classrooms. She's an historian. And not just any historian. A world-renown historian with a PhD from Harvard and a professorship at Princeton and a whole stack of books to her name, including...

and also...

and the New York Times bestseller, The History of White People:

    

   So why go back to earn more degrees at age 64?

   In her memoir, Painter explains it all -- and then some. With jaw-dropping honesty, some truly off-beat descriptions (she compares art supply stores to vaginas for starters) and laser-sharp observations about the people who inhabit the world of easels and canvases, Painter takes us on her journey -- both external and internal -- of being "old in art school."  A journey, she points out, made financially possible thanks to "Saintly Husband Glenn" who still was working as a mathematics professor at Rutgers and could support her.
    Painter gives us a crash course on how art is made, conceptualized and promoted. We have a ringside seat as she tangles with her fellow classmates and teachers about What is Art and Who is a Real Artist. I read her book with my laptop close at hand so I could use Google images to see the work of the myriad of artists she references -- those approved by "The Art World" and those who in her view have not gotten their proper due. I learned about crits, about the widespread practice of appropriation in art these days, about transcription and about how not to get hung up on looking to others for validation. 

    Painter's friends tried to talk her out of going to art school. They told her she didn't need a degree to do art. She disagreed. Who would take her seriously unless she engaged in "formal study" and earned a degree?  (Spoken like a true daughter of academia where titles are permanently attached to its denizens' names.) So Painter attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University for three years and then the Rhode Island School of Design (the second most prestigious graduate school  for the arts in the country after Yale) for two more.

      At Rutgers, Painter tried to fit in with her younger classmates, even changing the way she dressed (donning cowboy boots, but holding the line at getting a tattoo). In Providence, she tried to move beyond her "twentieth-century eyes" and forget about her research training in history, concentrating on process over substance in her art. She tried to create art that operated in a space beyond history -- all the while fighting the very real historical battles of racism, sexism and ageism.
       She tried and tried and tried but was continually plagued with self doubt.
       Art school, she discovered, was brutal.
       A female teacher told her she "couldn't draw, couldn't paint." A male teacher told her she would "never be an artist." These art teachers didn't believe she would ever be an Artist with a Capital A because even though she produced a dizzying amount of work, she didn't focus on her art exclusively.
       They had a point. As she enter graduate school, for example, she was still busy editing the final proofs for THWP, as she called her New York bestseller. She couldn't attend the RISD's painters' kick-off barbecue because she was in Durham, North Carolina, for the opening of her archive in the John Hope Franklin Center in Duke University Library. She postponed the meeting with the second reader of her thesis (a requirement for graduation) because she had to be at the Harvard commencement to receive a Centennial Medal, "an honor of a lifetime."
      Painter also had some serious personal demands on her time that prevented her from doing art full-time. Not from Saintly Husband Glenn -- he gave her all the freedom and support she needed. But as an only child, her aging parents were another matter. She was constantly rushing out to Oakland where they lived to deal with her mother's illness and death, her father's chronic depression and eventually her father's need to move East, closer to her.
       Painter didn't have time to be an artist with a Capital A.
       In the end, however, she prevailed. Painter, the painter, prevailed. Her friends had told her, "Keep on. Keep on making art. Keeping on making your art." And she did.
      "I'm an artist who lives and works in Newark, New Jersey," she writes at the end of Old in Art School, providing us with an update of what happened to her after art school, "an artist whose other -- not, as I once said 'former' -- lives as an historian and as a daughter are still crucial parts of me. I am a wise old person, not a hot young artist, not a hot anybody with a young anybody's future before me. I know the value of doing my work, my work, and keeping at it. I do keep at it -- in the pleasure of the process of making the art only I can make.
      Serious artist? Yes. I make and show my work regularly. Professional artist? Yes. I get paid for my work. An Artist artist? Probably not, probably never, because I still do other things. Do I miss not being An Artist artist? Yes, a little. But not enough to live my life any other way."
        Painter got her degrees -- a BFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and  MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design -- but she got a lot more out of being "old in art school." She learned to listen much harder to the voice within herself.
       My own foray into an art education is far more modest than Painter's. Unlike her, I am not looking to art to provide me with a second career. I am merely cross-training.
       Yet I can see how learning to paint -- even the most basic lessons like mine are -- can change the way you look at the world. After I have squeezed blobs of paint on my palette in class, I walk outside and see cobalt blue skies and Phthalo green grass. After layering for paint with Dioxazine purple for my picture of grapes in class, I notice the dark and light shades on the rounded fruit in my fruit bowl. I am beginning to experience the world visually in ways I never had before.

       After only two classes, I painted my very first piece. Everyone in the class did. Our subject matter was whales. The teacher gave us all a printout of a painting of a whale lob-tailing its flukes out of the water. She first showed us how to sketch a copy of what we saw onto our canvases. Then she instructed us on how to mix and apply our paints -- cobalt blues, pure blacks, titanium whites. For the splashing water, we first were instructed to paint only with water and then dab paint into the wet spots. My splashes didn't look right, so I tried to rub them away with a piece of paper toweling. As I rubbed, however, I found that I liked the effect the smearing was creating and went with it.
     At the next class, the teacher had us pick out what color mat we would like to use to display our paintings. One by one, using our chosen mat,  we showed our "framed" picture in front of the class. Each one of us had completed the assignment a little differently. Different taperings of the whale's body. Different finishes to its flukes. Different ways to show the splashes of water surrounding the tail. Different colored "frames."
     "You've each made it your own," the teacher pointed out.
       I felt a bit giddy when my turn came to be applauded by the class for my feeble effort. Not because I got some outside validation -- we clapped for everyone -- but because of what I perceived within myself: I felt like a young student again, starting from scratch and eager to learn.
     When I got home, I pulled out the canvas and showed it to Saintly Husband Carl. "Can you tell what this is?" I asked. "A whale's tail," he said. Yes, exactly, I thought, my whale's tale.
     At the next class, I showed the teacher Painter's book, suggesting that she might want to read it. She took one look at the title and turned away. "We're not old," she said.
     No, not in art class anyway.
   

   
 
   
   
   
     

   

In Defense of the Internet (Yes, the Internet, that Cesspool of Pop-Up Ads, Cyberbullies, Hate Speech, Privacy Invasions and Vladimir Putin)

   When the internet first appeared back in 1983, it was heralded as a network that could connect us all and maybe even foster world peace. Now it seems that nearly every article about online activity is negative.

Photo illustration by Joe Darrow
New York Magazine Select/All website

     Last spring, New York Magazine wrote "something has gone wrong with the internet":

The Internet Apologizes:

Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it. By Noah Kulwin

— New York Magazine, 4/16/18

      Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, believes that the iPhone, the device he helped build, is too addictive. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, fears his creation is being “weaponized.”  Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”  Tony Fadell, known as one of the "fathers of the iPod says that he wakes up "in cold sweats every so often thinking, What did we bring to the world?”  

     Even Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, when he testified before Congress ticked off a list of everything his platform has screwed up, from fake news and foreign meddling in the 2016 election to hate speech and data privacy. 

     Just this week, 24-year-old Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson announced he was dropping out of social media: "It's an evil place and doesn't make me feel good."

      Meanwhile, however, seniors have been using the internet like crazy. The use of the internet for those of us 65 and older has risen steadily over the last decade and a half, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study. In 2000, only 14% of seniors used the internet. In 2017, 67% of those 65 and older said they were going online. 

      Internet use is even more popular when you include younger seniors. Last November AARP came out with a study that found that over 90% of adults over 50 owned a computer or laptop, 70% have a smartphone and over 40% own a tablet. And across all devices over 7 in 10 adults 50 plus are on social media. Nine in 10 (91%) say they use the technology to stay in touch with family and friends.

     So which is it? Is the internet a cesspool of hate speech, pop-up ads, cyberbullies, privacy invasions and Vladimir Putin? Or does help us to stay close to family and friends; enable us to engage with our communities; provide the means to have goods, including hot meals, miraculously appear on our doorsteps, and enable family caregivers and health care providers to monitor a senior's well-being?

     All of the above, of course. The internet is just a tool. It can be used for harm or for good.

     I was reminded of that fact when I read a recent post by Molly Barnes, a friend of mine on Facebook. Now retired (for years she co-directed and taught at SunFlower, a unique, hands-on elementary school in Gulfport, FL), Molly describes herself online as "pretty old" (she graduated from high school in 1958). She lives on a ranch in rural Pasco County with her husband Andy (my former boss at the St. Petersburg Times). Here is her post: 

     "I have a love/hate relationship with getting old. Mostly, I love the so-called wisdom I have accumulated, and I love having had so many experiences along the way. Who knew that I would be so happy every day to live in the middle of a huge natural area? When I am out in the woods and swamp I rarely think about getting old in a physical way. This is still me, ten years old, full of wonder at it all. And now I really know the shrubs and trees and wildflowers and I am always learning more about this amazing world.

      Yet, if you were to ask me what the most important thing that has happened in my lifetime I would have to say it is the internet."

  

Molly Barnes with the Community Gardens project

     I have to admit I didn't see that last line coming, but it makes sense. Molly's use of the internet is nothing short of inspiring. She is a frequent contributor on Facebook, using social media to connect with her family (she has 8 grandchildren) and her community. She posts pictures of her pottery studio, describes the nature that surrounds her and ruminates often on the state of the union (which lately has worried her quiet a bit). I've especially enjoyed her posts about her work with the Dade City's Community Gardens Program. It provides public land so that children can learn to grow food on public land and then learn to cook healthy meals.

     Recently, Molly asked her Facebook friends to donate to help send a young man, an Eagle Scout who just graduated from high school, go to college. Because he is one of the Dreamers in the DACA program, he cannot get any loans.

     Here is part of her post:

     "I have loved this young person since he was seven years old, so clearly advanced and intelligent. When ICE was prowling our neighborhood, we signed up as surrogate parents for him and his sister. He has a wonderful family that still lives in the shadows of the undocumented. One by one, I want to make sure that these kids will zoom up to be the people they want to be. What else makes America great?"

     

      So far, she has raised over $1,000 for this Eagle Scout. All because of the internet.

      The internet isn't used by all seniors, of course. As that 2017 Pew study pointed out, income and education make a huge difference in who has access to technology. Social networking use is common among those who have at least some college experience (57%) and those whose annual household income is $50,000 or more (56%), but drops considerably among those who only have a high school diploma or less (20%) and whose households make less than $30,000 (23%). 

      Still, seniors on the whole value the internet, perhaps even more than millennials who take all this connectivity for granted. According to the Pew study, 58% of seniors say technology has had a positive effect on society.

      For despite Putin's attempt to disrupt our inter-connectivity, the internet provides us with an amazing way to reach out to others. And despite the hatred that you can find online, there is also a lot of caring expressed on social media. People offer condolences when their friends lose a mother, a father, husband, a wife, a child or a pet. Friends remember your birthday. People who you haven’t seen in years reach out. 

     Yes, the internet has benefited the alt-right and hate groups, but it also helped elect Barack Obama. Yes, the internet may have subsequently helped elect Donald Trump, but it also is strengthening the resistance against him.

     It is a means for all of us to get our stories out there.

    "It would have cost a fortune to air the ad on TV in the New York market, but through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter she inexpensively explained her working-class Puerto Rican roots and her demands for 'Medicare for all' and free public college tuition," the Washington Post pointed out after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pulled off a stunning upset victory in the Democratic primary in June. 

     Like Molly, Ocasio-Cortez and other first-time women candidates have seen the good the internet can do. Like Molly, they have seen it as a way to get their — our — stories out there. Take a look at these videos. They stand in testimony to the positive side of the internet and its story-telling power:  

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: The 28-year-old community activist who tended bar and waited tables won the primary by 4,000 votes over Rep. Joseph Crowley, a 20-year Congressional power broker representing a heavily Hispanic district in the Bronx and Queens. Millions have viewed her ad. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez youtube video

MJ Hegar:  An Air Force pilot shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan, she was the first to use the viral online video as a political weapon. Her 3 1/2 minute biographical ad, called "Doors," has been viewed by nearly 5 million people. Thanks to the video, donations have poured into the Texas Democrat’s campaign to unseat Rep. John Carter, a Republican who has been in Congress since 2003. MJ Hegar youtube video

Amy McGrath:  A former Marine fighter pilot, she overcame a 47-point disadvantage in early polling to win the Democratic primary, defeating the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky. Her biographical ad, seen at least 1.8 million times just on YouTube, helped propel her to victory without any official party backing. She has never held an elected office. Amy McGrath youtube video

Wisdom for My Last Year as a Sixty-something

Seventy once sounded old: Not anymore

    On Women Turning 70: Honoring the Voices of Wisdom by Cathleen Rountree has been on my bookshelf for more than a decade.  I found it among my mother's belongings when she died in 2006 at the age of 92. I thought I'd read it when I turned 70.

      Back then 70 sounded really old. Now, not so much.

      Today, the first day of my last year as a sixty-something, I decided it was time to read Rountree's book and get a head start on learning what it will be like to be in my Seventies.

      The book, published in 1999, is full of the promised sagacity. There is the usual good advice: Don't act your age. Don't give into aging. Etc. Etc. Etc. And then there are the unexpected tips from these seventy-somethings. Texas journalist Liz Smith admitted she didn't want to travel anymore. She'd rather read a book about history: "You don't read when you travel. You're too tired." British writer Doris Lessing also encouraged life-long learning. "What I think is that it is probable that we are put on this earth in order to learn...I don't know if they have it in America, but here there is an astonishing phenomenon -- everyone is off at night classes learning this and studying that."

An ironic title for an author turning 70.

      My mother had left a bookmark in Rountree's interview with Ruth Asawa, a Japanese-American sculptor, so I naturally was very interested in that chapter. My mother had never talked about Asawa and I thought perhaps she had merely placed the bookmark so she could find her place, but when I came upon this line I knew it to be the wisdom that caught my mom's attention:

     "Something very important that I want to tell women is that it's never too late," said Asawa, eerily echoing the theme I have used for this blog, which I began after my mother's death. Asawa, however, adds an astute warning: "But don't wait until it's too late, because you won't have the energy...It's important to learn how to use your small bits of time, your five minutes, your ten minutes, your fifteen minutes. All those begin to count up..."

       Most of the 16 women Rountree interviewed and photographed for On Turning 70 are not household names. At least not to me. Lessing and feminist icon Betty Friedan, both touted on the cover, are the most recognizable. As a former newspaper book reviewer, I had heard of Liz Smith and young adult book writer Madeleine L'Engle (the title of her most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time, seemed ironically appropriate for this topic), but the other women -- a political activist, a photographer, a choreographer, a sculptor,  an executive director of a multiracial and multicultural non-profit, a teacher, an analytical psychologist, a poet, a sociologist, a visual storyteller and a Ph.D. student -- were unknown to me.

     Most have died since Rountree conducted these interviews nearly 20 years ago. One of the hard lessons about turning 70 seems to be that we have to get used to the fact that people won't be surprised to learn of our demise. My neighbor Nancy Appunn, whom I wrote about on this blog in 2013 when she traveled across country with another eighty-something to meet up with everyone on their Christmas card lists, told me once that she suspected some people called her up for the sole purpose of finding out if she had keeled over yet. Two years ago Nancy had a stroke, from which she has completely recovered, but I admit each time I stop by to see her, it does cross my mind that she might not answer the door. The other night we bumped into each other in the lobby of the Palladium in St. Petersburg before a performance of "La Traviata." Waiting for her boyfriend who was parking the car, she looked great.

      The surviving women from On Turning 70 who, like Nancy, have lived into their 80s and 90s, also are real dynamos. Here are some of the updates on their lives that I found on the Internet:

An emotional Mitsuye Yamada
watching the 2016
Democratic convention

      Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, the American Chicana feminist and long-time community organizer, will be 93 in December. After her stroke in 2005, she continued to lecture and work with Latino youth groups. Her book De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-colored Century was republished this year as part of Verso's feminist classic series.

    Anna Halprin, the choreographer who broke all the rules of modern dance, turns 98 in July. She still performs and teaches at the Tamalpa Institute which she founded with her daughter in 1978. Her next workshop is in July.

     Mitsuye Yamada, the Japanese-American poet whose first book of poems was about her stay in  Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, turns 95 in July. In 2016, her granddaughter snapped a picture of her watching the Democratic National Convention. She posted it on Twitter with this comment: "Watching my 93 year old grandmother, a lifetime feminist and activist, cry at Hillary Clinton speaking." The photo went viral. Yamada's advice to young people:  "I think the worst kind of thing is passivity There's a Japanese phrase, Shikata ga nai, meaning "it can't be helped" -- it's the way it is. But then you become known as the model minority, and it's just really deadening to be invisible. You should stand up and be counted."

    Betye Saar, the American assemblage artist best known for her transformation of Aunt Jemima from a racist stereotype into a symbol of black female power, turns 92 in July. "You could say I work with dead objects, with things that people have thrown away: old photographs, and so on. But my work is at the crossroads between death and rebirth. Discarded materials have been recycled, so they’re born anew, because the artist has the power to do that," she wrote in 2016. In 2017 she had solo shows in Milan, Los Angeles and at the Tate Modern in London.
   

Betye Saar's "The Weight of Whiteness," available
for sale at Roberts Projects gallery in Culver City

     And, finally, Leah Friedman, Rountree's Ph.D. student. Friedman went on to get that Ph.D. in mythological studies at age 73 and write books, including The Power of Ritual: How It Can Change Our Lives, published in 2013, and The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old, published last year.  Now approaching 90, Crone Leah, as Rountree called her, recently posted a video on uTube to talk about aging: Leah Friedman: Coming Home 2018 Author Spotlight. "I see my later years as a fascinating exploration of unknown territories," she says.

     "When you think about women in their seventies, who comes to mind?"  Rountree asked in On Turning 70.  She provided a list of famous people who in 1999 were all 70 or older. One was Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature at age 73. Szymborska lived 15 years longer, dying at age 88.

     Four on that list are still with us:

     Rosalyn Carter turns 91 in August. Now the oldest living first lady, she voted for Bernie in the Democratic primary and, unlike her husband (who turns 94 in October), believes the Russian intervention in the presidential elections helped Trump become president.

     Jan Morris turns 92 in October. A Welsh trans woman who began life as James reporting for the Times and the Manchester Guardian, she is an award-winning historian and travel writer. Her latest book, Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony, was published this year.

     Dr. Ruth Weistheimer just turned 90. The famed sex therapist currently is in negotiations to return to television (maybe sex, or at least talking about it, does keep you going).

Angela Lansbury as Aunt March, her 19th shot at an Emmy

   But my favorite long-time survivor from Rountree's list of famous seventy-somethings from 1999 is Angela Lansbury. Rountree noted that Lansbury's hit show,  Murder She Said, had just been cancelled "allegedly because of her age."  Fighting back, Landbury had appeared on 60 Minutes to complain about the cancellation and to talk about ageism.

     Too old for television? Lansbury has had the last laugh. She just turned 93 and she is still a working actor. Last month she appeared as Aunt March in the Little Women miniseries on PBS and is now in contention for an Emmy.  For the first time in her nearly eight decades in show business, she worked with a woman director, Vanessa Caswill. How did she like the experience? In contrast with many of the "shouty" male directors she has put up with, Lansbury said that Caswill comes up to the actors and "whispers in our ears...I loved working that way with her."

        Rountree was 38 when she got the idea for her first book, which she published five years later: Coming into Our Fullness: On Women Turning 40. After the success of that volume, she published On Women Turning 50: Celebrating Midlife Discovery and On Women Turning 60: Embracing the Age of Fulfillment. When she was 51, she published On Turning 70.
   
        Next month Rountree herself will turn 70. If she is alive, that is. The last mention of her on the Internet was that she published a book in 2007 called The Movie Lovers' Club: How to Start Your Own Film Group. Her two websites, still up online,  haven't been updated in years. An email I sent to her has as yet gone unanswered. Hopefully, she's busy going to the opera, writing another book (or reading one), fighting for a just cause or falling in love. You know, doing things people do in their Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.

Anna Halprin in 2013

        I'm grateful to her for introducing me to these women, both those who are no longer with us and those who are still burning bright in their 90s, aging both gracefully and ferociously. As Anna Halprin, the now 97-year-old dancer, put it back in 1999, "When I look in the mirror, I know I'm 78, but inside I don't feel 78. I'm reminded of something a Japanese painter said: 'When I was 5, I did things for the fun of it. When I was half a hundred my paintings were worthless. When I was 72, I began to understand animals insects, birds, and plants. When I am 80, I will progress a little. When I'm 90, I'll know the essence of things. When I'm 110, I'll know how things are. God of Longevity, give me the time.' I identify with that...At 110, I hope I'll be able to dance things as they are."