Your best is good enough
I was invited to the MSU New Horizons Band (NHB) end-of semester concert. No holiday music was played. But it was the most joyous music making I’ve heard in a long time. New Horizons is a different kind of community. Regardless of ability, it accepts any adult who wants to learn to play or sing and improve making music. Though I’ve researched and written about New Horizons before, and know several MSU NHB members, this was my first close-up of the group. Before the concert I talked with several members. They all described the group as a...
read moreSeniors’ mind-body problem
I recently wrote about safe environments for protecting seniors from falls and injuries. But for the mentally competent elderly, mental preparation for activities is perhaps even more important than safe surroundings. The mind is a curious thing. Its “connection” to the body is one of science and philosophy’s insoluble problems. Descartes, in 1637, proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” believing he’d established that the mind and body are one. But of course, all it proved was that he had that particular belief. It didn’t prove either the...
read moreSenior-proofing lives
My gym buddy’s tee was dripping wet. He looked bushed. “It’s mind over matter,” he said. “My body tells me no, but my 17-year-old mind tells me to keep going so I can still be playing racquetball when I’m your age.” Like a few other early elderlies, he’s clinging to a fantasy that determination and hard work can overcome decades of subtle, progressive mental and physical decline. But falls and accidents and their aftermath are leading causes of death and disability in people over 65. One in four elderly who break a hip will die within a year....
read moreLast rites
Several of my friends died recently, under different circumstances. I’ve been pondering death as physical and spiritual loses to both the deceased and their survivors. I’ve written about my friend, neighbor and fellow physician Ray’s experiences while dying. His journey to death began when he developed heart failure from a brief hospital procedure, and ended a couple of years later with wretched joy. His heart never fully recovered from the initial insult. His lungs began stiffening with pulmonary fibrosis. He developed painful nerve damage...
read moreA few of aging’s simple pleasures
“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” actress Betty Davis wrote. Her book, The Sad Life,was published shortly after her conflicted, tumultuous life ended in 1989 – my age now. There’s also a heads side to the aging coin. Mornings are the best. I get up whenever I’m ready. Usually before 8:30. My day starts with juice and coffee, reading the paper, and meditating. An hour or so later I hang out birdfeeders and move on to the rest of the day. I’ve reconnected with Pat, a best friend from Ferris in the 50s. She was from a small UP town and I...
read moreAn octogenarian drops out
I’ve stopped getting upset over daily accounts of wars and catastrophes, shootings, corporate shenanigans, Congressional follies, and the Legislature’s wrangling. Using a 60’s term, “I’m beat down to my socks.” I missed the 60’s wave of dropouts inspired by the writings of poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Jack Kerouac and others. Beatniks protested the oppression of minorities, McCarthyism’s witch hunts, the Viet Nam War, and Victorian sexual mores. They also protested the post WWII rush to consumption. Peace brought a welcome end to the...
read moreOf orchids and dandelions
Life is one darned challenge after another. Few things seem to turn out exactly as planned. Our coping with adversity roughly resembles either orchids or dandelions. Orchids, valued as symbols of delicate beauty and luxurious fragrance, are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants. Like Spanish moss hanging on southern trees, they’re epiphytes who are able to get nutrients from air. Walking across the Haleakala Crater moonscape on Maui, I came across a most beautiful orchid clinging to a vent gently wafting puffs of nutritious...
read moreWho am I this time?
Since fully retiring a year ago I’ve been transforming myself. Again. I’ve had to reinvent myself lots of times. The first was when I left the safety of home to enter school, with its variable authority figures, and needed to learn to socialize with others. Leaving a tiny high school and going to college far from home was challenging. Graduating, I had to learn the professional role of pharmacist. And finishing medical school, I had to make myself into a doctor. After a full career in medicine, I did another do-over back into pharmacy for...
read moreGrandpa’s Anxious Blessiings For A Cherub
Grant, at four you’re a picture of the best of humankind. Your half-bashful smile and twinkling eyes, and the way you sometimes flirtatiously wrinkle your brows when speaking is disarming. You have the heartiest laugh I’ve ever heard and, regardless of what you find funny, others can’t resist joining with you in a chorus of laughter. But that’s merely window dressing for the soul and, while perhaps you are a bit unusual, that’s not enough to make you stand out in a crowd of charming four-year-olds. Your disposition is unique. Every morning...
read moreTrying To Beat The Odds
I decided to take the AARP Safe Driving Course after a friend told me how much he learned from it. It’s widely available in group settings, but I took it online, in sections, over several days. That seniors sometimes have driving issues is a standing joke. Once, when I was eight, I went for a short trip with a grandfather. I laughed as I described the experience to my dad. He cringed. Then there is the hilarious opening scene in Driving Miss Daisy where she missed the brake pedal, hit the gas, and the car ended up in the bushes. But it’s no...
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