old age | old age
Dec.03.2010
For a variety of reasons, I've been contemplating the end of life just as I inch past the middle of it. I'm not having a morbid attack, really. It's just that friends have been sick--one just having surgery for a cancer proved completely curable--and friends' parents are growing feeble, breaking...
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Jul.26.2010
Inventing a Life
Yesterday I went to visit an old friend who is 87 now and mostly stays close to home. She moves about with a cane and is in pain a lot of the time but her mind is as sharp as ever and her memory is filled with the most remarkable things. I visit her every few weeks or so not out...
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Jun.12.2010
What a weird topic... For one thing, despite the fact that I'm 62, I neither look nor feel old. My mustache/goatee is completely white, and yet when people first meet me, they think I'm in my forties (and often flat-out don't believe me when I tell them my true age).
Is this any consolation? ...
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Jun.09.2010
Why do we want to be old when we are young and young when we are old? The age-old question goes.
The best part about aging is I get better at what I love to do, I care less about what other people think, and laugh when I remember being told in my 20s not to trust anyone over 30. Now I want to tell...
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May.06.2010
Back in the early 1990’s, Sam, a family friend with Alzheimer’s slipped undetected out the door of his nursing home and wandered into a freezing winter night. He was found the next day, dead from hypothermia, at the edge of a stream. A charming, bright-eyed man who’d never lost his deep southern...
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Dec.01.2009
For just a moment I thought I glimpsed you as you might be when you are old
when a tentative shuffle commands your gait and a slight paunch emanates 'neath a grey fleece designed to block out the freeze
a glimpse too of when my shadow no longer walks beside yours and you are but a lone figure on a...
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Nov.12.2009
When I am an old woman, I shall wear wine-dark velvet
in a retrospective style,
with plumed hat, tilted at a rakish angle
and toss off a brandy in one go.
And quaff champagne because the sun is shining,
or the rain won't go away...
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Oct.28.2009
I was born in LA county in 1960 and feel NO connection there. None. Even the ocean is changed. I do like the salt air smell and the eucalyptus trees. It is like being an adoptee who occasionally visits a biological parent who has both terminal cancer and Alzheimer's. You came from them originally,...
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Oct.03.2009
I haven't blogged in a while because a family obligation has recently been requiring a lot of time and mental energy--but I'm taking a breath now, and I want to write about that obligation and one of my favorite relatives: my Aunt Jerri.
When my two sisters and I were little kids, a trip to Aunt...
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Aug.12.2009
I am a pretty liberal mom.I grew up with the TV babysitting me and I was classified as a latch key kid. I even slept all night with the TV on. I know, not good for that subliminal timing and interrupting deep REM sleeping, but I was young and my mom was a local singer in clubs. I was alone a lot....
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