IPhone as Brain Replacement

"If you put my working body parts together with those of my husband, you still wouldn't have a whole functioning human being," J half-joked the other day. We were sitting in the car and I was gearing myself up to open the door and get out. I've had pain in my left shoulder for a couple of weeks now and certain movements make me uncomfortable indeed. "Add mine to the mix and you still wouldn't make the grade," I said, not joking at all. 

 Why is it that everything seems to be falling apart at an accelerated rate? Wasn't it just yesterday I noticed all these wrinkles? These age spotted hands? A sudden crick in the knee? The gray hair? I grunt when I get out of bed in the middle of the night, say ooof when I try to get up off my knees (the same second grader who remarked that I looked older than John McCain sometimes offers to help me get up off the floor). I creak when I bend over and creak again when I straighten up. Little involuntary sounds escape without warning whenever I move too suddenly. And what's with the forgetfulness? Yesterday J's son Bri brought home a small parakeet, a lovely little blue and yellow thing in a green cage. "What have you named it?" I asked when I first saw it. He said he hadn't given it a name yet. We talked a bit about the bird's period of adjustment with two cats in residence, what to feed the wee thing and where the best place in the house was for a captive bird. Near a window? Hanging from the kitchen ceiling? 

 "What have you named it?" I asked, and then, "I just asked you that, didn't I?" Bri just looked at me and shook his head. On recounting this to J, she laughed. "He was probably thinking, 'Oh lordy, I'll have to be taking care of her along with my aging parents.' " 

 I see that same sort of half-impatient, half-worried look on my own children's faces when I say something I suddenly realize I've said already, and probably a dozen times. This has been going on for years, true ("We know Mom, we know," was a constant refrain in our house), but all of a sudden it seems to be happening more frequently. Maybe it's because I live alone and I can't remember if what I'm saying is new to my audience or something I've only mumbled aloud to myself. I've been playing Scrabble and doing crossword puzzles and taking Mensa tests in an effort to keep my mind nimble and my memory intact - maybe it's because I live alone and I can't remember if what I'm saying is new to my audience or something I've only mumbled aloud to myself...

 I want some magic pill to slow things down, to let me age a little more slowly. My daughter recently purchased an iPhone, the little computer in a handheld box that does it all. If man can invent the iPhone, surely s/he can come up with something equally impressive to prolong the life of our most personal computer; what I need is an iPhone brain implant. 

The phone rings the other evening. “How’re things?” asks J. When she asks me, I know just which things she’s referring to—the aches, pains, missteps, forgetfulness, pratfalls, and mishaps that come with our age territory. So I hedge my answer. “Good,” I say, “and you?” “Well,” she says, “I’ve had a problem with dry eyes lately so I got some artificial tears. The other morning I stumbled into the bathroom, took the bottle from the medicine cabinet, tipped it up and squeezed. Nothing came out so I squeezed harder. Still nothing. By now I’m shaking the bottle and squishing it so hard my fingers hurt and all I get is a teensy drop. ‘It can’t be empty already,’ I say to myself and try squeezing some into the other eye. I’m practically strangling the bottle and all that comes out is a miniscule amount.” She is laughing so I figure it’s okay if I laugh, too. 

“So, did you go out and buy more?” I ask. 

 “No." (Long pause.) "I took the cap off the bottle. I was squeezing that sucker so hard I actually forced some liquid out with the cap on! Of course, when I did take the cap off, the stuff squirted all over the place.” 

 “Oh, by the way,” I say in an effort to take her mind off the hoot I just let out. “You know the other day you asked if I’d ever left my purse anywhere and didn't notice?” (Of course, she’d just done that very thing and called to warn me.) She started to chuckle again. “Where’d you leave yours?” 

 “At the doctor’s office. And the very next day at a friend’s house.” 

 “You left it somewhere two days in a row?” J laughed. 

 “I did. And when I returned to the doctor’s office to get it, the woman behind the window laughed and said, "Don’t feel bad, dear. You aren’t the only one." There, lined up on her counter were three black purses waiting for their owners to realize they were missing. 

What, are we all the same age?" I asked. She just nodded.

 photo credit: erstories.net/.../2008/ 07/brochure_eye_drop.jp

Seeing the Light

When I was 12, I couldn’t wait to grow up. I was thinking in terms of freedom, autonomy, and privilege, not near-sightedness, difficulty hearing, and general creakiness. How little we notice when we’re young! I first realized I needed glasses when I was driving to the store and saw a small child ahead waiting by the side of the road. I hoped he wouldn’t decide to cross just as I reached him but I needn’t have worried. He was a mailbox. I related this story to J the other day when we were comparing middle-aged notes. She confessed to having just the opposite problem. “I can tell the difference between a chickadee and a junco at 10 yards,” she said, “but I can’t see what’s right in front of me.” Then she gave me a for-instance. 

 One day a week, she cleans house for a client. She was waxing the furniture and noticed her dust rag was getting awfully wet. “It just dragged along every surface,” she said. It wasn’t until she went to put the can away that she realized why. She had dusted the entire house with pet repellent spray rather than Pledge. “The cans were the same color,” she explained as I started to laugh. 

 Things got worse as the week progressed. The very next morning, still sleepy and bleary-eyed, J reached into the cupboard for a packet of hot cocoa mix. She ripped it open, dumped the contents into a cup and added boiling water. The fumes from the instant chili mix made her eyes open right up. Another morning she took a jar of fruit off the shelf. She wondered why it was closed with a metal ring and a sealed lid, but she persisted in opening the jar and spooning the contents into a bowl. Her first taste showed her her mistake. “You know those pickles you gave me in August?” she asked. I gasped. “I ate half that jar for breakfast, anyway,” she confessed as I started to hoot. Her husband came in on the last of our conversation. “You know,” he said to his wife, “I wish you’d take that blue tarp off the clothesline. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked up and waved, thinking it was Pauline coming over to visit.” 

 I don’t wish for the same things I did when I was 12. Now I just wish I didn’t look so much like a large piece of blue plastic.

Little Indignities

The other day a student rushed up for a hug. Then she looked at me and asked, "Why do you have two different shoes on?" I looked down at my feet. Sure enough, the left foot wore a blue shoe, the right one a brown. I have taken to wearing Crocs since a bout with plantar fasciitis so at least I was wearing the same style shoe. They were just not the same color. I grinned at her. "It's weird shoe day, didn't you get the notice?" I asked. She shook her head. Then she took off down the hall to ask her friends if it really was weird shoe day. I ducked into my classroom. Later in the day I saw the same student in the hall. "I think you're the only one who got the weird shoe day notice, Ms. Clarke," she confided. "No one else did!" Well. 

 J burst out laughing when I related the story to her and told me about the day she went to work with her skirt on inside out. If anyone noticed they didn't mention it. Finally a student asked her why she had those funny threads on her skirt. J looked down. Sure enough, all her seams were showing. She hustled into the women's room and righted herself. "It was dark when I got dressed," she made excuse. I know. It's dark in my closet, too. 

 As if looking foolish wasn't enough for the day, that night I got out of bed to use the facilities. I caught my foot on a basket of magazines that I've avoided on my nightly trips for the past 8 years. My balance, never good since an inner ear infection, deserted me completely and I fell. Fortunately a chair stopped my body and the china cabinet stopped my face. I crept painfully into the bathroom to inspect the damage, fully expecting to see the beginnings of a black eye and a split lip. I thought I detected some minor swelling and two red spots on chin and forehead but the next morning there was not a mark on my face. You'd think I'd at least have had a bruise to show for all the pain, some swelling and a shiner to brag about. 

 "That's how it starts, Memere," my daughter-in-law said ominously when I joked to her about being old and falling. "I was able to get up by myself, though," I reminded her, feeling suddenly much older. While we spoke, I moved the offending magazine basket. I am not yet, nor do I want to be, at the emergency-call-button-night-light-on-clear-path-to-the-bathroom stage of old. J says we just have to take these things in stride. At least, she reminds me, we're still laughing at our mishaps. I just wish I wasn't laughing so often!

Signs Everywhere

J & I were discussing general decline the other day and she remarked, "There are just no red flags. You can be driving down the street and suddenly you can't remember where you were going." 

"I know that feeling!" I exclaimed. "Just yesterday I was on my way somewhere and I found myself in town rather than on the road home. I thought, 'Where is my car going?' It took me a moment to remember that I wasn't on my way home." 

"Well, wherever it is that I'm going, I'm not sure I want to get there," she said, looking down at her hands. She held them up for me to see. They looked just like mine - used hands full of aching knuckles, age spots and wrinkles. "But, apparently I'm going despite myself." We both sighed. 

 The next day, a particularly warm one for late October, she stopped by to chat. I was out on the glider swing in my yard, basking in the sunshine. I was dressed in the shorts I kept putting away and taking back out as the weather see-sawed through early autumn. She laughed when I stood up. "Look!" she cried. "You have gnome knees, too!" 

 I looked down. Sure enough, my knees looked like they belonged to the Saggy-Baggy Elephant. I thought wistfully of the ultra-slim me of years before. I went inside to put on the kettle (and a pair of concealing jeans.) 

 "It seems like our ends give out first," J said over tea. "My feet ache, my hands ache, even my hair hurts. And look at it!" She pulled a hank of it forward. "It has no body, it won't hold a curl, it isn't even a color anymore." We consoled ourselves with a piece of pie. Chocolate cream. I'd had a craving the day before. 

"At least my end is plump," I observed. "And it matches my knees." Pie does wonders for all things saggy - including self esteem. Speaking of decline, if there is one book you are going to read this year, make it Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg. It might scare you (he talks about inevitables) but it also might make you take a look at our society as you would your aging body and start now to make what amends you can and plans around what you can't fix. 

Falling Apart...

It’s that time of year when nothing in my closet is appropriate for the weather. It’s too cool for my short-sleeved cotton blouses and too hot for a sweater over them. It’s too cool for shorts, too hot for corduroys. It’s too warm for a hat, too cool to go hatless, too chilly in the mornings for sandals, too warm at noon for shoes. It’s also that time in my life when clothing that fit just fine when I packed it away last spring no longer fits my ever changing shape. Things are “settling” as the doctor so gracefully put it. I was griping about this to J who declared, “I know! Even things that fit don’t fit.” 

 Not only do we have nothing comfortable to wear, we’ve both discovered a newfound inability to cook. (The fact that we both had our first failure with brownies may have a direct link to our clothes not fitting properly, but we’re ignoring that on the basis that life is currently more uncertain than ever so we’ve opted to eat dessert first.) Anyhow, giving in to an urge for chocolate in the form of brownies, I opened a box of mix, followed the directions, and produced a pan of something akin to brownies but, well, crumbier. It was impossible to cut the baked result without having the bars disintegrate into a mass of sticky crumbs. They were delicious crumbs, mind you, but they were impossible to pick up without a fork. I took some over to J’s. “I can’t cook anymore,” I told her, offering a pile of brownie crumbs to her on a plate. 

Her husband snorted. “We still have our teeth,” he said. 

 “I don’t know what happened,” I said after he stopped laughing. “Who can screw up a boxed mix?” 

“You?” he ventured. 

 J took the brownies, forked a few mashed crumbs into her mouth and pronounced them delicious. “We’ll just eat them with silverware,” she said. 

 A few weeks later she called me on the phone. “Remember those brownies you made that came out all wrong?” I hooted. “Have you topped that?” 

 “Well,” she said, “I made the mix according to the directions but when I poured the batter into the pan, it seemed awful thin. So I checked the box and realized I’d put in a cup of water instead of a ¼ cup. I thought, ‘I can fix that,’ so I grabbed the container of flour and added some. Only it wasn’t flour. It was pancake mix.” I could hear her husband hoo hoo-ing and ha ha-ing in the background. “I’ll bring you one,” she said. (You know what they say about paybacks…) 

 The brownie was surprisingly good, especially with a scoop of ice cream to ease it down. Still, if these two examples are anything to go by, we may both be changing our shapes once again. I understand raw foods are really healthy. Why just last week a headline exclaimed that a woman who went raw lost half herself. I hope if I lose half of myself, it’s the half that can’t fit into my current clothes. photo credit: seriouslygood.kdweeks.co

We Can't Because...

We just can’t…

Finish that sentence with
1. clean the house because it’s too big (J) or organize it because it’s too small (P).
2. mow the lawn, rake the grass, bag the grass, distribute the grass in the garden rows because we’ve worn ourselves out thinking about cleaning.
3. weed the garden, pick the ten thousand ripe tomatoes, can the ten thousand ripe tomatoes, or eat one more zucchini because the garden is just about done producing anyhow and besides, some of those weeds are supposed to be edible.
4. do both loads of wash in one morning because to hang two loads on the line requires twice the energy.
5. iron those blouses that have been hanging around waiting to be ironed because once they’re worn just one time, they’ll need washing and ironing again.
6. make a big dinner because cereal and milk is just so much easier.
7. clean the porch (or the garage or the closets) because next year they’ll look exactly as they do now.
8. entertain because the thought of making large quantities of food and then cleaning up large quantities of dishes make us think of napping.
9. make the bed, because, speaking of napping, it’s what we like to do best in the middle of the afternoon and what’s the point of making a bed THEN?
10. do much of anything. It’s just too exhausting!


J and I have discussed this lack of energy a LOT. J has proposed the theory that now we’re at this age, we understand that we’re perfectly capable of doing all these things so we don’t have to. We don’t have to prove anything or demonstrate our abilities. So, though all these things need doing constantly and unendingly, there’s no need to really DO them because we know, should the need arise, we could rise to meet it.

I like that theory but I’ve put my lack of energy down to, well, a lack of energy. It’s not boredom based, it’s not based on laziness, it’s tied to everything else we talk about on this blog – body deterioration. It’s like our bodies are saying, “I know how to do this, I just can’t right now.”



photo: www.mypeopleclipart.com