The flood: Take 2

The flood has been very much on my mind this past week—no surprise to anyone who lives in northern Colorado. When I wrote last week, I talked about being amazed by people’s resilience in the face of such tragedy and unending stress. I’m still amazed by that, but I also realize, increasingly, that it may have been the fact that I was not directly impacted by the flood that let me drift into an outsider-looking-in celebration of resilience. Since then, I’ve encountered the flood on a new level. While I still celebrate resilience, I feel like my earlier blog focused on that to the neglect of the awful moments, days, and weeks that people have endured during and in the wake of these floods. Especially, I failed to hear the stories that don’t make the news. The ones we—or at least I—really need to hear.

So, The flood: Take 2.

It’s now being called the 1,000-year rain, the 100-year flood. This doesn’t mean that rain like this comes regularly once every 1,000 years or a flood like this once every 100 years. If that were true, we could prepare for these events. Instead, it means that rain like this has 1 chance in 1,000 of happening in any given year, a flood like this has only 1 chance in 100 of happening in any given year. Either (or both) could happen next year … in fact, the odds for that happening will still be 1/100 and 1/1,000.

These numbers are dramatic descriptions as meteorological statistics go. But more to the point, as the days unfold, I learn more and more about what they mean in human terms.

Over the past week, I have heard a constantly morphing collage of conversations about the post-flood realities that are people’s lives. As we’ve learned more, coffee shop chatter and conversations with friends have changed from how lucky many of us were to talk of just how bad it was. Countless homes were damaged, some beyond repair. Even more basements were flooded—including in “safe” zones well away from streams. Worse, in many of these, the flooding came when over-full sewers surged up into people’s homes. Scores of businesses and public facilities were damaged—libraries with their stores of books, medical facilities with their million-dollar equipment, small businesses barely holding on even before the flood. Homeowner’s and business insurance covers little if any of this, so the consequences will be long lasting—and will spell financial disaster for some. 

The stories from mountain towns are dreadful. Many towns are still shut off from outside travel, although a few key roads were opened late this week. Some folks are taking circuitous routes through the mountains, traveling for hours to get to jobs in Boulder or Denver, where they’ll stay indefinitely. Some towns are unlikely to have any outside connection until next summer. Many people have no home to go back to, even if they could get in.

The worst stories, of course, are those about people who didn’t survive the storm. For days, scores of people were unaccounted for—over 1200 at one point. That number dropped daily as people were able to get out and contact friends or as phone service and cell towers were brought back on line. Still, after a week and a half, the count still stands at 82 people unaccounted for statewide, with 3 missing and presumed dead. The death toll is 4 in Boulder county, 8 statewide.

And then there’s the residual infrastructure mess: roads and bridges, water treatment plants and sewer systems, cell towers, electrical lines, buried cables … the list just keeps growing. Add to that the oil spills. Eastern Colorado is an oil-producing region, and some of those wells were right in the path of this 100-year flood. The spills reported to date are small—especially in the context of millions of gallons of untreated sewage carried by the flood waters. But it’s yet another painful reminder of how vulnerable our human enterprises remain to the capriciousness of nature.

For those of us who felt no direct impact, there are constant reminders of what happened. Trees down, open areas denuded, gravel and debris strewn across lawns. Roads and parking lots still full of mud and debris or bordered by the telltale piles of mud and debris left by graders. Hotels and motels in Boulder and surrounding towns chock full with the cars of local residents seeking temporary shelter, non-local cars bearing friends and family who came to help, and service trucks of every ilk with out-of-state license plates.

Which brings me to the stories that aren’t so widely noticed, that aren’t reported by the media.

One of these is precisely the unusual, sort of weird and complicated presence of so many out-of-town workers. On the one hand, it’s truly wonderful that they’re here—people gathering from miles away to help. On the other hand, it feels creepy—strangers hovering like vultures around the disaster, looking to profit from tragedy. Clearly, it’s good that they’re here—we need them. But it’s creepy at the same time. This morning we heard an ad on the radio for one such company. It convinced me that I wouldn’t call them if I could help it—it was just too sweet, too soothing … too commercialized rescue. But that’s easy for me to say. I don’t need to seek help, accepting it even if it comes from strangers who feel predatory.

I came to realize another invisible impact of the flood through a story on NPR. It mentioned a man who lived in an area that was directly in the path of the flood. When emergency workers knocked on his door, warning him to leave, he heard the knock but didn’t answer. He was afraid it was ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) coming to take him away because he’s undocumented. 

Another experience in a similar vein: I had volunteered to participate in a “citizenship workshop” this past Saturday, a program where volunteers (like me) help people to apply for citizenship. The event, scheduled for just a week after the flood, was cancelled, and no reason was given. I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because this program draws largely from Latino communities, and those communities were disproportionately affected by the floods. One of the largest Latino communities around here is located in Longmont, the scene of heavy flooding, with parts of town destroyed and other parts cut off by the flood. Other large Latino communities are in areas around Denver, some of which were also severely flooded, and on the eastern plains, directly downstream from these same rivers and streams.   

It was these stories and others like them that made me realize how limited my earlier thinking about the flood had been. Yes, resilience is wonderful, and we need to celebrate it, perhaps especially in the midst of horrors like this. But focusing only on that—and doing so from the perspective of someone who was incredibly fortunate—risks missing something deeper. Something that includes the unseen, often unacknowledged side of disasters of this sort: the people who have little power in the first place and who are faced with huge losses and huge risks that others of us can’t even imagine—that we don’t even think about as we reflect on how lucky we are:

The sense of creepy predatory invasion when we are at our most vulnerable. The fear of deportation and the separation from family, friends, all that life has been. The loss of an opportunity to apply for citizenship. Where do costs like that show up on the ledger of the flood’s damage?

So, more than a week after the flood waters began to recede, I find myself with a very different perspective on the whole event than I had in its immediate aftermath. Still grateful for my own good fortune, but far more conscious of the things I don’t even need to consider in my daily life—things that even color experiences as basic as safety and identity in a natural disaster. That’s a pretty good definition of privilege: not needing to think about things that others must think about constantly.

A lesson I need to learn over and over.

Fire, rain, and the marvel of human resilience

Since it became clear that Boulder—and then Colorado more broadly—would have major flooding, I’ve been wondering what I might be able to say about it in a blog. As I start writing, I’m still not sure … but that’s nothing new.

Thoughts on the flood …

Many of you have undoubtedly seen the slide shows and videos, read the coverage, and heard stories on the radio. Those of you who live around here have probably swapped tales with family, friends, and coworkers. It’s all stunning: streets running like rivers, houses vanishing into the creek, flooded basements, damaged and destroyed cars, shops and their wears flattened, tiny streams spreading over acres of land, sewage backing up through manhole covers and basement drains. People startled from sleep by the sound of boulders crashing into their homes. Neighbors helping neighbors to lay a futile line of sandbags, cross a swollen stream, dig through mud and debris to get to a buried home. Rivers leaving their decades-old (or centuries-old) beds to carve new paths through land that used to be farm or lawn or parking lot. People stranded on hillsides, in shelters, at friends’ houses waiting for rescue by a National Guard helicopter. Promises that roads and bridges will be rebuilt to restore access to isolated towns before the snow falls.

Nothing I can say matches all that. These “reality” TV-esque events, come paradoxically to life, are commentary enough.

But then there are the less-told stories, shared among those of us who—by sheer good fortune—were spared these experiences. Louisville, where we live, is farther east and significantly higher than Boulder—both characteristics that spared us the raging torrents that roared down the mountain canyons west of Boulder and straight into town. Imagine rocky funnels gathering water from torrential rains over miles and miles of already drenched mountain slopes, channeling it all into narrow canyons that empty into the western edge of a college town nestled right smack against hills. Add the rain that’s falling in sheets over the town itself, and you get a hint of Boulder in this epic storm. Climb a significant rise to the east, away from the mountains, to a plateau overlooking the valley that cradles Boulder, and you get a hint of what it’s like in Louisville. It’s like a different world, mostly.

I say mostly, because now, almost a week after the flooding began, I’m beginning to hear stories about damage even up here. I spend a fair amount of time doing my editing work at the local coffee shop, and the chatter there over this past week has followed an interesting trajectory. For the first few days, everyone who came in was talking about how lucky they (we) are to have escaped any (or severe) damage. Then stories started rolling in about the nearby creek that overflowed its banks, closing several roads and causing flooding in some Louisville neighborhoods. With those stories came tales of people helping other people to clean out flooded basements and clear mud from streets and driveways. Then yesterday, I heard about a buddy of one of the regulars who had been evacuated from one of the canyons, but had gone back to collect his stuff. Today for the first time, I heard someone in the coffee shop who had himself backpacked out, leaving his house and most of his stuff behind in a flooded canyon west of Boulder.

But still, for the most part, we regulars at Paul’s are a privileged lot. Mostly, Louisville came out pretty well. And that feels strangely surreal. One person told me he feels a little guilty, and I completely understood what he meant. When I look out my window, I can see that it’s been raining a lot lately. On the day of the worst part of the storm, I looked out my window and saw that it was raining really hard. Period. That’s it. No flooding, no fear, no worry, no damage. Yet I know that just a few miles down the road, all heck broke loose that night.

For several days, following the guidance of emergency workers, my partner and I stayed near home and didn’t venture into Boulder. Then over the weekend, when travel restrictions were loosened, we went in to do a couple of errands and check on my partner’s private practice office. Amazingly, it’s fine, although it’s located quite close to Boulder Creek, which overflowed its banks big time during the height of the flooding.  But then yesterday, when I went into Boulder for a medical appointment, I found that the first floor of the medical center where my doctor’s office is located was flooded. Outside, the streets looked like newly abandoned river beds, full of mud and rocks, with the water’s flow traced along the edges, and the grasses and flowers bowed down, pointing the direction of the flow. It’s all so spotty. We’ve talked to friends who live in Boulder who had mild damage, others who had serious damage, and others who had none. Even in Boulder, high and dry can co-exist in the same block with heavy flooding. It all depends on the whims of the rain, the wind, the currents, the local layout. 

And through it all, after each trip to Boulder, I come home to the comfort of a dry, intact, unchanged home. I look out the window and can see that it rained a lot in the last few days. That’s all.

Today, I ran into a friend at the dentist’s office. Her basement flooded the first night, and she had tales to tell about hurried 1:00 am efforts to save her teenage daughter’s stuff as water filled the basement, followed by a day’s labor cutting up and removing soaked (brand new) carpet. That will be followed by the long slog ahead of tearing out, rebuilding, and refurnishing. “We were lucky,” she said. “We’re all fine.”

Yesterday, I noticed that assorted requests for flood-relief funds have begun to crop up—in the grocery store, in the dry cleaner’s, even on national online sites. Seeing these reminded me of similar pleas during the Four Mile Canyon fire just three years ago. On Labor Day 2010, a major fire broke out in the hills just west of Boulder, ultimately burning thousands of acres of forest and destroying scores of homes. Some of this week’s flooding happened in areas affected by that fire. The fire, like the flood, left many people homeless and many more with seemingly unending cleanup and repair lying ahead. In the fire, too, neighbors showed up to help neighbors. And then, too, people—even people who lost their homes—said, “I was lucky.”

Part of this feeling “lucky” is the sheer relativity of it all: Most folks can count themselves lucky in comparison with what might have happened or what happened to others. I can easily say I’m lucky. All I notice is that it rained really, really hard. My partner can say she’s lucky because, although she had to drive, white-knuckled, through blinding rain and rising waters, her drive was relatively short and she got home safely. My friend at the dentist can say she’s lucky because, although her basement flooded, they’re all safe and the house is generally intact. The guy I heard today at the coffee shop feels lucky because his house is still there, although currently inaccessible and likely damaged, and he’s safe. I read interviews with people who had to be airlifted out, who had lost their homes and everything in them, who said they were lucky because everyone in the family got out alive. “Lucky” is relative. This is a great coping skill, to judge life not in absolute terms but in context.

Now, I realize that some folks don’t feel lucky in any way. Some people died. Some lost loved ones. Some lost treasured possessions that are irreplaceable (for any of a million reasons), some lost a way of life that they cherished and will never be able to rebuild. Some came to the tragedy with too few resources—monetary, physical, emotional—to come away feeling OK about coming away. But many people who could well be feeling overwhelmed, bitter, powerless are instead feeling “lucky.” Why, I ask myself.

There’s something more to it than just feeling OK relative to someone else, some hypothetical worse outcome. After the Four Mile fire, I came across a blog by a woman who lost her house in that fire. She’s a wonderful writer, and I got totally engrossed in her journey back from that tragedy to building a new home (in the same spot) and moving forward in new ways. She challenges the easy conclusion that, in the long run, the fire was a “good” thing, losing her house and rebuilding were a “gift,” etc. Sure, she says, she learned a lot, made new friends, emerged from the tragedy with new strengths and new promise in her life. But that doesn’t make the fire or the loss of her home a “good” thing—and she’s troubled when people frame it this way. Instead, she believes that this interpretation of such tragedy says something else entirely … I’ll leave it to you to consider her thoughts about that. Here’s her blog on the topic.

I love what she had to say about this issue … but what her discussion made me think about today was this: It’s not the fire or the flood that was a good thing. No, the “good thing,” the “blessing” in such moments is that folks realize their ability to tap into this amazing reservoir of resilience that so many people bring to these awful moments, these unbelievably daunting, disheartening, even devastating circumstances. Not everyone does this, I know. But so many people do. Part of this is personal, gut-deep inner resilience whose origins are undoubtedly complicated and varied. And part of it is the upwelling of what the German’s call Gemeinschaftsgefühl—a sort of untranslatable word that means something like “community feeling” or “feeling for humanity.” It’s what we mean when we say that in crisis, everyone pulls together, neighbors take care of neighbors. (Would that it didn’t require a crisis! But then, that personal store of resilience is often hard to find except in crisis, too.)

I don’t want this to slip into some sort of positive thinking pop psychology thing: "Stand strong! Work together! Hang on! Draw on your innate resilience! … and all will be well." Nor do I want to disregard the very real and irredeemable losses that some people have faced.

I just want to pay homage to this marvelous thing that comes alive when we are stretched beyond what we believed we could handle. So far, I have only observed and marveled at this in others. And for that, I realize I am truly lucky. I understand that my turn may come, and if it does, my hope is that I might find such resilience myself. And if not—or if it’s not enough—I hope I have a community willing to bring on that Gemeinschaftsgefühl.

Erratum (or, ooops!)

The last few days have been sort of surreal around here. The news out of Boulder has made national headlines: torrential rain, raging floods, roads severed and washed away, people stranded, whole mountain towns evacuated. Where we live, a bit east of and higher than the flooded heart of Boulder, we had the torrential rains, but virtually none of the flooding—nothing, really, other than full gutters, perpetually gray skies, and rain varying from drizzle to deluge. It’s been hard to reconcile those two experiences: the scenes on the news are so awful, but looking out my window, it just seems like an especially rainy period. Since we’ve been asked not to drive in or around Boulder, we haven’t seen the tragic, terrifying parts—except as everyone else did: online and on TV. So getting a grasp of it all has been confusing, at best. Soon, I’ll share some thoughts about all that, once I get my mind wrapped around it. Which is a far smaller task than many people are facing, for sure.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note (which also seems odd in the midst of this crisis), before the “rain event,” before the flood, something came up that I want to comment on. I need to fess up to an error, an “erratum,” in the language of newspapers, which provide lists of the previous day’s errata in each issue. The backstory:

Back in the distant mists of my childhood, I learned about the importance of putting parts of sentences in the right place. Words put close to other words imply an association between them. Similar rules apply to phrases, clauses, sentences, etc. When you stick something next to something else that doesn’t belong with it, you get a “dangling modifier.” It sounds a little like a painful medical condition, but, I learned, it can be very confusing to readers.

Consider, for example, the title of an old Patti Page song (which some of you may remember), “Throw Momma from the Train.” It sounds like more might be dangling here than a modifier. You had to listen to the lyrics to get the real meaning: “Throw momma from the train a kiss, a kiss. Wave momma from the train a goodbye.”

We’ve all encountered sentences like this. Some of us have even created our own. I know I have. Despite those childhood lessons and although my day job involves cleaning up other folks’ writing, those dangling errors still creep into my own. Like just the other day. 

I realized something was amiss when, after my recent blog post called “Feeling fine,” I started to get warm and enthusiastic good wishes for my 75^th birthday. The confusing part of this was that I didn’t have a birthday—at least not recently, and then it wasn’t my 75^th. That one isn’t many years down the road, but it hasn’t happened yet. Clearly, something I wrote was misleading. I messed up a sentence. I dangled a modifier.

“Today,” I wrote in that blog, “I went for a swell 75^th birthday walk and picnic with a friend.” Now, in retrospect, I can see full well why that would make birthday wishes seem in order. And 75^th birthday wishes at that—a major milestone definitely worthy of celebration. What I didn't make clear was that the outing I mentioned was in honor of my friend’s 75^th birthday, not mine. Dangle, dangle. How much clearer it would have been if I had written, “Today, a friend and I went for a swell walk and picnic to celebrate her 75^th birthday.”

This experience has reminded me of another of the cardinal rules of careful writing: pay attention to your assumptions. Don’t assume that other folks have the same understanding of what you write as you have. In this case, since I knew full well that I meant my friend’s birthday, I apparently assumed that everyone else did, too. Besides, if I had given it a second thought (which I didn’t), I might even have persuaded myself that my point was clear because I later mentioned that she is 75 … not considering that this had nothing to do with whether I was having a 75^th birthday. (Do I think there's a rule that only one person can be 75 at a time?)

A clinical psychologist might call my failure to see others’ perspective something like narcissism. A developmental psychologist (like yours truly) might call it cognitive egocentrism. Or, we could just call it a mistake. An “erratum.” I guess if the New York Times is willing to own up to its errata, then I should do the same. So …

Ooops! I misspoke. I didn’t have a birthday. My friend did. I’ll tell her you all send belated wishes for a great day and a wonderful year ahead.

Feeling fine

In a recent blog, I mentioned some dental issues over the Labor Day weekend. Well, that experience turned out to carry a valuable lesson (which, of course, I will now share).

My dental pain that weekend was followed by a root canal, followed by an infection that set my nerves on fire and kept me awake at night. The many drugs I took to deal with it all made me queasy. The combination of pain, infection, lack of sleep, nausea, and med-induced zinginess made me feel … um … really awful. One morning I actually had a passing thought that I’d rather be dead than feel that bad. A slight exaggeration, I admit, motivated by my misery. But I did feel miserable.

A few days later, with the infection coming under control and my diet adjusted to help me tolerate the meds, I started feeling much better. My mouth/jaw/head still hurt between doses of ibuprofen, but I noticed that I actually felt, overall, physiologically fine. I had energy and enthusiasm again, and I actually liked my day. Noticing that change, I started reflecting on this thing we so lightly call the “gift” of good health. Despite this current mouth problem, despite a handful of orthopedic aches and pains, and despite my lower endurance and slower recovery, I am fortunate to almost always feel fine.

What an amazing thing, I thought. When someone asks me, “How are you?” and I answer “Fine,” it’s both a trivial, throw-away response and an accurate description. Virtually every day, I get up and—regardless of whether I like what I see in the day ahead or don’t—I walk through my life feeling physically fine. I may hate some moments for various reasons, and I may whimper about the physical reminders of aging, but my health is, overall, excellent. And that means that I don’t have to think about it. I take it for granted.

Such a contrast to the experience of folks for whom that is not the case—folks with daily chronic pain, daily struggles with enduring illness and persistent medical conditions. I understand that some day, that may well be true of me, too. Meanwhile, that recent day of deep misery was an excellent reminder of what a privilege it is to feel, mostly, good. I promised myself to notice that gift, to remember frequently the contrast.

So today, I went for a swell 75^th birthday walk and picnic with a friend. I wasn’t sure last week whether I’d feel up to it, so it was a perfect chance for me to notice the great fortune of feeling good. It was a funky day meteorologically—foggy, showers in the forecast, way cooler than our recent temperatures of 90° and more—especially in the mountains, where we met for our walk. But the spot was lovely, the rain held off, and it was good to be outside with a good friend, who is also, at 75, enjoying generally good health.

Through it all, I noticed, I felt fine.

    

   

In fact, it was an altogether fine day.

Diana Nyad reminded me ...

As you likely know, 64-year-old endurance swimmer Diana Nyad just became the first person on record to swim unaided from Cuba to Florida. (For Robin Roberts' interesting interview with Nyad, click here.) She had tried several times before, beginning in her 20s (shortly after she swam around Manhattan). More recently, after passing her 60^th birthday, she decided to give it another go. She tried three times over the past few years, but was stymied by weather, currents, and jellyfish. She said this would be her last try … although apparently she’s said that before. In any case, she made it.

As she came out of the water, after 112 miles and 50 straight hours of swimming, she had three messages for her assembled fans (including the assembled news media, who dutifully passed her message on to us):

1.      Never, ever give up (a phrase she credited to abc’s Robin Roberts in the interview linked above)

2.      You’re never too old to follow your dreams

3.      It looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team

In interviews after her swim, she talked a lot about how being older actually helped her: the concentration, the patience, the knowledge that you can push through the tough moments. Her “mantra” as she swam: “Find a way.” She talked about the importance of stepping back, being committed, and then persisting despite setbacks. It wasn’t the athletic feat that mattered, she said; it was what it said about “the human spirit.”

Her messages were inspiring—to folks of any age, but especially to those of us who might have thought we were past fulfilling any long-standing dreams. And her insistence that even endurance swimming, one swimmer in the water for hours and miles, is a team event—this was also important for me to hear. Now maybe more than ever in my life, I am aware of how important other people are to my well-being. How life is a team effort. I learn this regularly from friends who have done a better job than I of building community. And it is something I am, honestly, working on at this very moment in my life. More on that later …

Back to Diana Nyad. In addition to my delight as I followed her last miles to shore (Online, that is. Not in the water), two other trains of thought drifted through my mind. The first was something I’ve written about here before: my concern about “bucket lists”—that designated pile of things we want to be sure to do in our lives. For me—and I know this isn’t true of everyone—what works better for keeping my life full and vibrant is to watch for the unexpected opportunities, the things I hadn’t planned that make me excited and give me a goal, even a fleeting one. I think of things like writing this blog, joining a bird-watching excursion during raptor migration season, swapping a sunny hike in the Utah desert for a photo blog of a rainstorm there, spending a week in New York taking a course in astrophysics, hiking up Storm King Mountain on an unanticipated pilgrimage. 

So, although I have huge respect—and perhaps a dose of envy—for Diana Nyad’s feat, I do not regret that I’ve had no persistent, focused, singular lifelong dream like hers. I’ve had dreams, but they’ve been far more amorphous, and they come true in small ways all the time rather than in one momentous step from the Gulf onto the shore. That suits me well, although it would likely not suit her.

And my second train of thought was this: I am working these days on relinquishing lingering feelings of loss and regret that come from seeing other (usually younger—Diana Nyad being close to the exception) people do things that I have done but can’t any longer or that I just wish I could do. The reality is that there are places I will likely not see, hikes I can no longer take, academic subjects that I won’t master in this lifetime, bike trips that are now impossible for me, books I won’t write. And I’m trying now, with varying but increasing success, to treasure the wonderful memories I have of the times when I have done those things, or things like them, rather than getting caught in sadness and regret over the very real limits to what I will still do in my lifetime.

So, another part of my response to Diana Nyad’s wonderful achievement was to remind myself that phrases like “You’re never too old” and “Never give up” do not mean that I am a failure at life if anything remains undone. I have no absolute bucket list. I’ve had and continue to have a rich, varied, often surprising life. And that’s enough.

Well, that and being part of a “team,” which actually is lifelong wish.

Aging bodies: adolescence, take 2

One of my favorite courses over the 30 years I taught was the Psychology of Adolescence. That may seem odd to some folks. Not a lot of people seem too enchanted with adolescents. Heck, maybe I just identified with their painful angst, disguised as bravado. But really, even though huge groups of adolescents can seem annoying, one-on-one, most of them are really interesting human beings. And besides, most of their seeming craziness is really understandable if you put it in a developmental context.

Still, over the years, I have never, ever wished I could return to those wondrous days of high school. The uncertainty, the painful self-consciousness, the fear of being judged (and misjudged), the obsession with what your peers think, feel, say, do, even are. The certainty that you are unique and misunderstood. And that vague sense that you’re supposed to become something, do something that’s you – the “real” you – instead of whatever it is that “they” want you to be.

So, imagine my surprise when, during a conversation with my partner, I realized that I am back in adolescence. At least in some ways. The particular context was a conversation about matters of the body. We both recall how, in our youth we thought that “old” people had a bothersome habit of talking all the time about their bodies—their ailments, their pains, their injuries, their everyday bodily functions. The tone varied—sometimes folks  bemoaned these things, other times they bragged about them. But whichever tone, the body entered into way too many conversations for our young taste.

But that was then. Now, we find ourselves talking more and more about our physical status. The past few weeks, she’s been nursing an injured shoulder, and this weekend, I’m having serious dental pain. So our first topic of conversation in the morning—right after “how did you sleep?” which is itself a body-ish question—is to check in on each other’s current malady. When she pointed out how often these topics are now a part of our conversation (we were driving along at the time, discussing guess what), I was taken directly back to my psych of adolescence course.

Of course adolescents are preoccupied with their bodies, I’d say. All that obsession with hairstyles and clothing styles, with hyper-thinness in girls and muscularity in guys, with pimples and body odor, with anything that looks vaguely out of the norm—all of it makes sense. Think about how drastically adolescents’ bodies are changing, I’d say. Everything is suddenly different—height, body proportions, fat distribution, muscle mass, hair and skin texture, voice, facial hair, budding breasts, periods... How could they not want to wrest control of some part of their physical being? They’re simply saying, “I can’t help it that I’m not as tall as the other guys, but I can dress cooler than anyone else!” or “I can’t help it that I have zits (although I’ll try anything!), but at least I’m skinny and have the requisite long, straight, blond hair.”

And here’s where old age and adolescence meet. Like adolescents, we’re in a period of life where everything about our bodies is changing. And, like adolescents, we don’t have much control over a lot of it. Same litany: height, body proportions, fat distribution, muscle mass, skin and hair texture (not to mention color and absence), voice, secondary sex characteristics. On top of all that, add health issues that are new to old age. Of course we focus more on matters of the body.

Our experience is different, fortunately, in that for many of us, at least these changes don’t come with the same tortured self-consciousness that they evoked in adolescence. Most of us are somewhat over that obsession with others’ expectations … although probably none of us is ever completely free of it. Now, we don’t have to have the latest style or the “in” hairdo to feel like it’s safe to leave the house. Still, our bodies do hold a more central place in our thoughts—and I suspect that our preoccupation probably has the same roots as it had in adolescence. When things are so totally in flux, as they are now, of course we are preoccupied with the process. Eventually, common wisdom has it, old people slip into a “second childhood.” Perhaps. But the stage of that trajectory that my peers and I seem to be in looks more like adolescence to me: bodies rule.

Ah well, the first of Cherie Carter-Scott’s “rules of being human” (popularized by Jack Campbell in Chicken Soup of the Soul) is this: “You will receive a body. Whether you love it or hate it, it's yours for life, so accept it. What counts is what's inside.”

The last rule in that list promises, “You will forget all of this.” I guess that’s why we don’t instantly get the link between ourselves and those obnoxious teenagers in the mall.