Balm

For some time, I’ve been hinting about a future blog on issues around fire, flood, climate change, etc. Last night, I sat down to start what I imagine as a series of blogs on these things. But instead of a thoughtful, informative piece, I found myself writing a rant—a tirade about our misdeeds as a species, our failure to “get it” about climate change, and our individual responsibility for how we deal with the risks of living with nature in all her beauty and danger.

After a few pages of that, I settled down, having “vented my spleen,” as they used to say back in the 18th century. And now, I think I’m prepared to start the blog(s) in a more calm and thoughtful mood. To ease the transition from the rant to the conversation, I thought I’d share some photos from a lovely, balmy late afternoon walk—the glorious fall air, the Colorado blue skies, and persistent autumn colors. Oh … and a mysteriously perched token left by (or for?) some passing child. 

In only two cases did I take more than one picture of the same tree ... or maybe it's three. Spot them if you can!

Who wouldn’t be soothed by such a day?

Editing the sandbox

I mentioned not long ago that I have signed on as a part of a group that will be responsible for KGNU's LGBTQ program, "Outsources." Well, last Friday, I got a sort of baptism by fire into this new gig.

The previous Monday, our group, which we have dubbed the "Outsources Collective," presented our first program. In this program, one member of our group interviewed author Molly Haskell about her book "My Brother, My Sister: Story of a Transformation." As you might gather from the title, Haskell's former sibling recently transitioned—at the age of 59—from a male to a female gender identity. A few of us in the Collective thought that some of Haskell's comments would evoke a degree of resistance from other members of the LGBTQIA community.

This seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring to life one of the goals we hold for this program: to invite a variety of perspectives on complicated issues that affect the LGBTQ and ally community. We agreed that it would be good to do a program that would offer a different point of view on trans issues and, especially, on family members' responses to variations in gender identity. So we decided to do an interview with a local mom of a trans child. This would give us another perspective from a family member—this time a mom instead of a sister, and this time, a family member with years of learning about trans issues and years of involvement in trans communities.

And I got tapped (largely because I had the time ... ah, the risky benefits of retirement!) to do the interview. My conversation with the mom was energized and informative. She is so comfortable, so solid, so clear about her child's place in the world—the result of an open, loving heart and a life spent beside a child who transitioned early in elementary school and is now almost finished with high school. Along the way, this mom has spent much of her adult life working to convey her principled clarity and solidity to others.

As you might imagine, her experience and that of her daughter have been quite different from the experiences described by Molly Haskell the previous week. To get a feel for both, you can listen to the interview—which also includes excerpts from Molly Haskell's comments—by clicking right here and then playing the 10/21 show.

This mom has thought so much about these issues, has so many personal stories about the difficult path she and her daughter have traversed. Not to mention the challenges that lie ahead. Many of their experiences have been oppressive and arduous, as is clear from our discussion. Some encounters and some recurrent obstacles (bathrooms, legal records, medical personnel) have been extraordinarily—and unnecessarily—painful. Nonetheless, her comments convey strength and resolve instead of despair, and she seems satisfied about the trajectory of her life. 

And then our KGNU mentor notified me that the next step—editing the recording and turning it into a show—was up to me. He had given me a lesson in editing earlier, so this wasn't out of the blue. But I can't say that I felt ready to take in on alone. Still, KGNU is largely run by volunteers, and I'm one of them. So, as if I were an actual "producer," I spent 5 hours in front of the computer screen transforming a 36 minute interview into a 29 minute show. Basically, deleting 20% of the interview. I couldn't believe what time it was when I finished. Five hours! And I'd have been there much longer if I hadn't had an evening commitment. Still, I was as finished as time allowed, and we had a show. That I produced ... mostly.

What a great (if fiery) experience it was! I mean the interview, of course, but also the editing. I actually love fiddling with things techie. And I was delighted (if a bit daunted) to be set loose on a learning-by-doing project to convert the interview with this remarkable woman into a fragment of its former self while still maintaining the integrity of her comments. And in the process, resisting the temptation of what our mentor called "vanity editing," i.e., editing out all my own "uhs" and "ums."

When I was done and told our mentor how long it took, he assured me, chuckling, that 5 hours was actually not a record. He also said that in the first few efforts at editing, it's typical to spend about 20% of your time producing the show and 80% learning to edit. He meant these comments to be reassuring. Still, framed another way, this would suggest that of the 5 hours I spent, only about an hour was "productive." Actually, though, after many years teaching, I know better: time spent learning is productive time. In fact, those exciting moments of getting it, of mastering something—or even moving in that direction—are exactly what gave me such pleasure during this slow process. It's also what kept me returning to school in the fall every year for 50 years. (What a nice thought:  I've had a happy lifetime of 20% to 80% days.)

I've gotta say, this was like a day in the sandbox for me, a chocolate ice cream cone melting down my arm.

And now, the Outsources Collective moves on to the next show. It turns out that, in addition to being a lot of fun, this is a lot of work! No time to kick back and enjoy the sandbox. There's another show to be produced for next week. And then the next. With several of us working on it, at least that doesn't mean that any one of us has to do a full production every week. But we are all in it ... and it's always waiting to be tended to again. For now, it looks like I'll get to do a big part of another show in a couple of weeks. Including hours of editing.

I can hardly wait.

The wish I didn't want

I was sitting in the back seat of the car, next to my partner’s grandson, his buddy on his other side. A few of his many grandparents were taking the kids to a corn maze, and I drew the back seat. As it happened, this position meant that I kept seeing myself in the driver’s rear-view mirror. And I found myself wishing that I weren’t so bothered by what I saw. I kept wishing that the thought passing through my mind weren’t there. But there it was. “I wish I didn’t look so old.”

I’ve thought a lot about this topic of aging in recent years, as you know if you’ve been following this blog. In my mind, I’m clear that aging is a part of living, a part to be celebrated. “Old” is an inevitable and valuable position on the “people mover” of life, and it’s the one I currently occupy. In my mind, I am genuinely fine with that. But deep down, in my gut, I realize I’ve taken in all the ageist notions that float around us, the stuff we hear and see and breathe in every day.

The wish I didn’t want to be having merged that ageist stuff with our societal obsession with appearance. The combined message is clear and demanding: dye your hair to hide the gray, use Botox to hide the wrinkles, wear “youthful” clothes to hide the rest. The message is especially strong for women, of course; women’s appearance is a measure of their value at all ages. Stir in the cultural devaluation of age, and looking old as a woman is about as bad as it gets. It’s sort of ironic, actually, that even as we old women slip into social invisibility, we still worry about how we look, about what impression we make. Even when the world, increasingly, doesn’t care, isn’t impressed. At all.

Yet, despite knowing all this on an intellectual level, there I sat, glancing at myself in the mirror, wishing …

Actually, like most folks, I look in the mirror several times a day. I comb my hair, check whether clothes are on straight, put in eye drops—focusing on some isolated part of the whole picture, and doing it in a particular, familiar context. But there’s something so vastly different between that intentional narrow focus and the sudden image of myself caught by chance in an unexpected mirror—my reflection in a department store mirror, in an elevator mirror, in a shop window as I pass. I first wonder, “Who is that?” Then I realize: “Oh … it’s me.” This time, I caught myself wishing it weren’t.

I recognize that I look especially old for my age—at least in the wrinkle department. Some combination of the genes I got from a mom (I almost said “bad genes”—there it is again, that ageist stuff) and thousands of hours in the sun over years of serious outdoor activity gifted me with a very old-looking face. But I forget that all the time. I experience myself from the inside as I am, not as I look. So I’m regularly surprised when people assume that I’m older than I actually am. And I’m surprised when I see myself, unexpectedly, looking exactly how I look instead of how I feel.

Now, I know that people do respond to what they see. They can’t possibly know all of who I am, and their best clue is how I look. Predictably, I don’t want people to respond to me first and solely as an old woman—both because of my own internalized ageism and because I know that they’ll make assumptions about me that are simply false. That’s how stereotypes work.

But still, I can’t put this all on other people, the misunderstanding “They” in the world, the “Our society” that fails to honor age. The truth is that as I caught my image in that mirror, no one except me was telling me that it would be better if I looked younger. It was my stuff that tripped me up in that moment.

I wish my age and my appearance didn’t matter—to me or to anyone else—as I insist they shouldn’t.

But there it was.

I was sitting in the back seat wishing I weren’t thinking what I was thinking: “I wish I didn’t look so old.”

Ah, the work goes on …

“The fine line ...

… between nature’s beauty and her indifference.”

It’s a phrase I read in a Time magazine description of movies featuring a single protagonist caught on this line (“Cast Away,” “Into the Wild,” “127 Hours,” “Gravity”). It’s a perfect description of our ambivalent feelings about nature: our delight in her beauty and diversity and our ultimate powerlessness over the magnificent forces that we still can’t control. (Although we do influence them … more on that in another blog, coming soon). Being a weather freak, I think about this a lot.

It’s been an amazing year in Colorado weather-wise. Of course, folks in Colorado (and in New England and Michigan and San Francisco … heck, folks everywhere) are fond of saying of the local weather, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes. It will change.” Still, it’s true that Colorado has all the makings of dramatically erratic weather. The high altitude and low humidity combine with that amazing wall of mountains bisecting the state from north to south to stir up some complex and only vaguely predictable weather patterns. But this year has been one for even Colorado’s record books. Over and over.

Only slightly belaboring the point, it went like this. A very dry winter that left the snow pack far below average was followed by record-breaking precipitation in April and May, raising the snow pack in the mountains to normal levels in a few weeks and bringing much-needed rain to lower elevations. Then the rains ended, and a parching drought set in that lasted all summer. With it came record-breaking fires, fires that reached new levels of intensity, speed of growth, and degree of devastation to wildlands and property. The early rains added long grasses to the fuel—but there was already plenty of fodder for the fires. (More on that in another blog, coming soon.) Then this summer of virtually zero rain slid toward fall, culminating in record high temperatures in early September. Ironically, news coverage of that record heat wave predicted a “welcome” cool-down and increased chance of rain a couple of days later. The cooler weather was welcome, but not (for a change in Colorado) the rain. In just 10 days of record-breaking rain, the early-summer fires receded from the weather news to be replaced by the late summer floods. The “thousand-year rain,” the “hundred-year flood,” the signs of which were still all-too evident on walk near my home earlier this week.

             

Then, remarkably, nature’s indifference gave way to her beauty, and we’re suddenly gifted with this amazing variegated fall with its spectacular morning skies—a chance for some pictures, which have been missing from my recent, more text-dense blogs. Not that I’m finished talking, of course. But before I start, an interlude:

Fabulous fall …

  

... and its spectacular morning skies

  

 

A fine line, indeed.

Nope. Definitely not bored yet.

Retired? Aren't you bored? What do you do with your time?

"I lie on the couch, watching soap operas and eating bonbons," I say when someone asks.

Given my incredible freedom to do what I want (and not do what I don't), my life could be very leisurely—even boring. But the truth is that I usually feel really, truly, insanely busy. And that's the case for lots of the retired folks I know. Most of us wonder how we ever had time to work.

Where does this busyness come from? For me, it's simple: opportunities come along that are just too interesting to pass up. One-time adventures and long-term commitments. Some of these float unexpectedly within reach, and if I'm lucky, I get to catch them in flight. Some, I chase after. Some arrive in familiar form, some in unexpected form. The especially interesting part is that most of the things I end up doing are a surprise to me. The retirement I expected is not at all the retirement I have.

I've been thinking about this recently as I've watched my life morph from one set of activities to another. A couple of my most recent involvements were totally (totally!) unexpected, unimagined just weeks ago. In both of these, I'm aware of a pull that many people report as they age: the desire to be engaged with a community. I mentioned this in passing in a previous blog, and it was these opportunities I was hinting at.

My first new gig is as a member of a sort of a "production collective" who will work together to plan and produce a show about LGBTQ topics on KGNU, the local community radio station. The show, called "Out Sources," has been ongoing for some time. But the long-time producer moved on, and a group of us have agreed to step in to his role. I had never, in my wildest dreams, imagined producing a radio show—and am I ever glad it's a "collective" process! It'll be fun, for sure. We'll get to decide on content and format for the show—neither of which any of us has done before—and eventually produce and present the show ourselves. The KGNU staff are extremely helpful in this process. Yesterday, I had a private tutoring session in how to run "the board" and edit content for the show. That'll take a lot of practice, but I'm eager to get into it. My only worry is (totally predictably) time. 

The other new gig also promises to be rewarding in so many ways. I've written several times about Resonance Women's Chorus of Boulder—mostly praising their music and their social consciousness. But in addition to their public presence, I have appreciated them as a friendship group, as a community. I've come to know several of these women over the years, initially through my partner's singing in Resonance. And I've had an opportunity to see how much they show up for one another. The ways they do this are countless: attending one another's art or music shows, contributing to causes championed by others in the chorus, singing at ceremonies (weddings, commitment ceremonies, funerals, memorial services), showing up over and over to help ill or dying members and their families and friends, gathering informally to sing when singing is what they need ... the list, as I said, is endless.

When I began to consider recently how isolated I have been from any real sense of a larger, broader community, Resonance looked more and more appealing—but unavailable to me, since I've never been a singer. But then Sue Coffee, the director of Resonance (and of Sound Circle, which I've also mentioned before), invited me to work with the chorus in a support capacity. The chance to join Resonance—in this or any capacity—was a gift. 

It is true that the radio show will provide me with an opportunity to be connected in a new way with the queer community in the Denver–Boulder area, and that's a very good thing. But what speaks most to my need for a sense of belonging in a community, what best addresses what I wish for as I age is the community of women in Resonance. 

But these two mega life events—both of which will entail long-term community engagement never imagined by the contentedly reclusive self I was just months ago—aren't the only things keeping boredom at bay. There are also the many one-off events that pass through all our lives, retired or not. In recent weeks, my schedule of such events has included a movie at the Women's Film Festival in Denver about American nuns and their activism, a play at the Boulder Fringe Festival about being closeted (and not), a film at CU's International Film Festival  about Hannah Arendt, and a "Science on the Screen" talk and film event at the Dairy Center (a benefit for flood relief).

Just to be sure I don't get bored now that those are past, my calendar shows a similar line up in coming weeks (I'll provide links in case anyone want to go): "Just Like Us," a play about a group of Latina friends (in Denver) dealing with the impacts of their differing immigration status; "The Book of Mormon," which most of you know is a musical comedy about two Mormon missionaries in Uganda (by the Colorado-based creators of "South Park"); a much more non-mainstream play, "G.I.M.P. Nation," a guaranteed consciousness-raising "differently-abled sketch comedy" that includes segments titled "Sex and the Pity," Suicide Hotline," and "Your Own Private Hell." Add to those the ever-changing set of musical events. Coming up soon are a concert by singer-songwriter and lefty activist Holly Near and two by a favorite local group, Somethin' about Lulu—you get the (boredom-free) picture. 

There's always more to do than can be done. Next week, I have to choose between an interesting talk at the Boulder History Museum or a poetry/roundtable event exploring the context of Trayvon Martin's murder. My partner reminds me that these are "existential dilemmas" that we all face. Retired or not. And that's just counting the fun stuff.

Really, how could I be bored.

Meanwhile, in the quiet recesses of my crazed mind, I've been paying increasing attention to the issue of wildfires—our role in creating them, in making them progressively worse, in increasing the risk to ourselves and to others, in creating an unsustainable and indefensible (literally) situation for those who are charged to deal with these things. I've found I don't have time to do the work I want to do on that topic, so I'm going to take occasional days off from my editing work (OK, so I'm not really totally retired) to do more. So be prepared for a series of blogs ... and maybe more than that. We'll see. After all, I'm retired. I get to choose what I do and how much of it I do.

If I wanted to, I guess I could even get bored. Soap operas and bonbons, anyone?    

Stay tuned ...