Tag: Aging

Where We Are All Alive Always

Posted on by KM Huber in Aging, Beyond Time, Lupus, Oneness, Zen

Recently, I was reminded I have been blogging for 10 years as of this month. It doesn’t feel that long any more than it feels like I am in my 70th year. Once I would have been world weary with the passing of a decade and getting older—I would have put it in a box and labeled it—agonizing over the passing of time, as if I did not live in the eternal present. But that’s fear for you.

When I began blogging I was terrified of putting myself out on the Internet, especially my writing. What did I have to say that had not already been said (and no doubt much better than I could). I was trying to define what was possible, as if I had that kind of power, when all I had to do was wake to the world as it is.

Despite all the fear, I was determined to have a post published on January 1, 2012 so I posted Andrew Marvel’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress”; the opening line is “had we but world enough and time.” It was not me actually writing but it was a blog post published. I had to begin where I was as I was, not that I knew that at the time.

And there was something else about 2012 that was important. It was the year the world would end, according to popular Mayan calendar conspiracy theorists. After all, it was on the History Channel so it had to be true. So, it could be a short blogging experience—there was that—but the Mayan calendar possibility worked neatly into yet another version of a book I have yet to finish. So many signs, so little time.

Early on, I found the structure of the blogging challenge, a Round of Words in 80 Days, quite helpful. I had to publish my writing goals, whatever they may look like—daily word count or number of writing hours. I tried all the strategies but what worked for me was blogging regularly. Still does.

About seven or eight years into blogging I added another blog, aimforeven.com, because I wanted to explore, specifically, the idea of living evenly, not to settle for mediocrity but to live with an open heart, constantly mindful of life, digging deep into change and what it offers.

I thought I might write a book about aiming for even, if it worked for me. It has. As for the book, I have shelved it for that other book that never goes away and is making yet another appearance. My 70s feel like the years I will write my books, and I put that down to blogging, the constant flexing of the writing muscle. It’s not about the fear of finishing or self-publishing that stalls me.

In these last seven years, there have been so many new health scenarios. First there was one hip replacement then another, some of my cervical vertebrae needed to be fused, I fractured my pelvis, and now I am dealing with what appears to be a herniated disc in my lumbar area (I’ve had this happen three times), and I cannot stand long enough to take a shower.

I have ordered some durable medical equipment for the bathroom, and I am now outfitting my wheelchair to accommodate my package and mail pick up in the lobby of my apartment building. This is the stuff of getting older, being offered new lenses through which to view life, and the adjustment takes awhile. In the meantime, awareness is key.

And yeah, I aim for even. Living evenly gives me space no matter how little there may appear to be. It’s great for the tough stuff in life, those moments that take the breath away, especially when it involves the ones we love most.

My 90-year-old father is living with stage four pancreatic cancer. It’s been hard waiting for the diagnosis that the early scans made obvious. Dad says, “Well, the first day I blubbered, but then I decided to get on with it.” He knows there will be more days of blubbering, as he calls it, but he also knows that no one is guaranteed tomorrow—not a one of us—so we might as well dig deep into today to see what it offers. And that’s what he does and has done all his life.

Being 90 is just a number to Dad for he has always been so much younger than his years but he rather likes the idea of living to 100. There is something to be said for having lived all the days of a century and staying curious about life, as my dad does. At 88, he decided to retire to do other things beyond being part of the everyday work world. Not surprisingly, Dad was onto something.

A New England Journal of Medicine study, published in 2018, revealed the years of 60 to 80 as being our most productive. My father has certainly proven that to be true so it may be that that 90 to 100 are our prime retirement years, whatever that may look like. I remember reading about a writer who thought his most productive writing years were in his 90s. He was 104 and still writing.

In a sense we have “but world enough and time” if we live in the moment we have, immersed in what the day offers, unconcerned about the past or the future, for no one lives there. No one. The eternal present is where we are all alive always.

Life as a Pirate: A Love Like No Other

Posted on by KM Huber in Aging, Beyond Time, Inspiration

Note: Regular readers may recognize the picture of these four young pirates or remember a bit of the previous post but writing, like memory, is a collage of images—the who, what, when, or why—jostling for time and space. Each revisiting reveals another perspective. 

It is Dad who turns me into a pirate for Halloween. Particularly impressive is the way he ties that scarf around my head, perhaps the last time I ever wear it. I was not a girly girl. I don’t remember what we used for my pirate sash but it was impressively blood red and ran to my calf. I doubt I told Dad how impressed I was or whether I even thanked him for this moment that was so good for both of us. And my mustache has a bit of a French flair to it, doesn’t it? I looked good!

Yup, that’s me on the far right.

My mom uses pinking shears to create my black eyepatch. She knew her way around any piece of cloth. I wonder if I thanked her. Probably not. If nothing else, I was consistent in my thoughtless pre-teenage angst.

It is a financial stretch for my parents to buy black, corduroy slacks (as my pants were called) but they read the Halloween invitation dress requirements carefully. This is my first slumber party, and my parents like these girls—a lot. Maybe what they like most is who I am when I am with them. Sometimes, I bring the glow of their friendship home with me.

All four of us are 12 in 1964. We have been in junior high for two months.

Maurya is the witch with the fading pirate mustache. She had always been a witch for trick-or-treating but for us, the mustache. She was so good at making a witch and a pirate work together, as if they always had. She did that kind of thing all her life.

And the witch-pirate is the reason this is not a Halloween post anymore.

Maurya exuded equanimity, and I suppose in our own way we knew that; I would not have known the word but the other three, probably. It’s just that she seemed to know everything without ever seeming to know everything. Who would not want to stand in the light of that witch-pirate?

Nancy is the pirate next to Maurya. Then Jeré, the party host, next to me.

For reasons understood only by junior high girls, we will not remain friends with the party host. Even Maurya was not too enthusiastic about the way Jeré popped the bands of the braces on her teeth—food on the fly. It probably was uncomfortable for Jeré, as she said, but it made Nancy gag, and the gag reflex won the day. And I think there was some issue about Nancy’s boyfriend living too close to Jeré. First romances are drama like no other, also for reasons understood only by junior high girls.

Jeré was the only child of much older parents who did their best to give her the world as she had come to expect but what teenage girl didn’t believe the world was hers? She moved away within that school year (I think), and I hope she found what I did with Maurya and Nancy.

The three pirates go on for 52 years—together with separate lives and never disconnected—no distance too great to come a runnin’. In 2014, the witch-pirate sails into the sunset for the last time. Nancy and I are adrift for a while but love eventually puts the wind in our sails. Today, Maurya would’ve been 70.

I no longer think about calling her but it is the rare day that I don’t think of her at all. The love is greater than the loss, the gratitude for over 50 years of friendship immense, enough for the years I live without her. Or so I tell myself every moment I reach for our friendship, the light in my stars, sunlight on pond waters, moonlight waxing or waning.

The witch-pirate did not suffer fools nor was she unkind, ever. She understood people have only their kind of love to give; she knew that often our shortcomings and our strengths are one and the same. And on this birthday and every day I think of her, the image of two lines, in her handwriting, comes into view:

Never cast aside your friends if by any possibility you can retain them. It is easy to lose a friend but a new one will not come for the calling nor make up for the old one. And when it is death that comes calling, the loss is no less.

But what of the two adventurous pirates still sailing the sea of unconditional friendship, 58 years and counting. They are now virtually connected every month in what is eerily similar to the 3 ½-4-hour phone calls they knew as teenagers. Nancy and I might be more different than alike, and we have set sail for opposing seas from time-to-time but our friendship always closed the distance.

We do not see eye-to-eye on politics or religion, if we were to list our points for argument but that’s not how we roll. We talk about what we know to be true and that puts every subject on the table without labels. We were fortunate to find love during years when we needed it most and it has withstood the events and years of our lives. Might as well cut off an arm rather than lose this testament of friendship.

Nancy is much better at setting the table at our monthly virtual meetings than I am, and it is so hard to leave her each time. There may be a day we just stay permanently connected—virtually—we already take food, drink, and bathroom breaks so maybe naps are next.

On December 19 Nancy is 70. Happy birthday, me hearties!

When Zero Was Not a Number

Posted on by KM Huber in Aging, Consciousness, Inspiration, Zen

In the woods outside my window, it seems like nothing will stop this growing of green and the flurry of flashy red cardinals as they prepare their nests with their olive brown mates, who blend beautifully with the firebush, sparkleberry, and mesh of the passionflower vine. 

In spring, every day is endless.

I am not immune to all this wonder of squirrels munching on the tender leaves of a wax myrtle, a treat seemingly worth the trek from the hole in the leaning Live Oak across the longleaf pine and down the passionflower vine.

Frankly, it makes the human world pale in comparison but then, nature usually does. 

Here at the Apartments in the Woods, we have replaced watching the murderer among us with having to deal with mandatory online rent payment. Checks are no longer accepted. Not amazingly, emotions run high as if life itself, again, was threatened. 

Quite the welcome for a new manager who had been assured the online payment system for our 55+ community of 144 apartments was in effect, one of many untruths she will discover for truth is not always what it appears.

I don’t know the percentage of people who pay rent online but I imagine the majority of residents use the convenience, which was not true just a few years ago when the majority cohort was more like 75+ but no one lives forever. Nonetheless, their numbers are still sizable, including my 93-year-old neighbor, Sybil, who somehow still maintains her flip phone, despite threats from everywhere and everyone that it can’t be done. 

Although we have been neighbors (sharing a common wall) for 11 years, and true friends for the last five, I often forget Sybil is Sicilian and have to be reminded, which she does with pride. Round faced with a slight rosacea on her high cheekbones, Sybil is a clear-eyed beauty with flowing white hair, agile yet fragile as her petite body begins to fail her. 

Sybil is prone to one point of view on any subject (until she’s done with it), no matter the cost. She traces this to the island existence of her Sicilian ancestors who were faced with one invasion after another. Hers is a kind of reticence, which some have called stoicism, and with this visage, she faces all weathers.

Something like 30 or 40 years ago, Sybil decided the Internet was a passing phase and only last month did she admit that had “probably been a mistake.” 

To their credit, Sybil’s family is proceeding at her pace, in their completion of the online payment process, relying on the information Sybil provides, such as the documentation sent out by Apartments in the Woods Enterprises (AWE) for the online payment portal. 

AWE is to be commended for a streamlined and simple process. Residents who had never made any kind of online payment completed the process in about a quarter of an hour. It feels rather worldy, this being on the web, writing electronic checks for rent. 

Sybil is not so sure, although some days she sees its truth, yet when it comes time for her son, Paul, to complete the process, Sybil lies awake at night worrying about hackers, for she is well read and has an amazingly accurate understanding of the World Wide Web for someone who has only looked upon but never browsed or received an email. 

“It seems that there is still a problem with the rent,” Sybil tells me. “Paul is exhausted by all this.”

“There is no problem with the system, Sybil.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop myself, clipped and cold. I’m tired of the conversation before it begins yet again, but I do better with “what’s the problem Paul is having.” 

“There is no place to put the routing or account number,” Sybil pronounces this as fact. “I don’t want Apartments in the Woods to have access to my checking account.” 

We have been having this conversation two or three times a day for the last two weeks, and I know where it’s going, but I also know Sybil vets her ideas with me before she shares them with her family, for reasons understood only by Sybil, but there is a lot of fear, too, always a tough subject, which is to say that I, too, sometimes get the wrong end of the stick. 

“Sybil,” I say, wincing at my tone of voice, not quite terse but close. “If Paul enters your routing and account numbers into the AWE system—

“The WHAT?” Sybil begins to talk over me, thankful for the tangent. “I don’t even know—

“Sybil, stop. Just. Stop. Talking. Over. Me.” And finally, she does. “When you write a check for your rent, isn’t the routing number and the account number on the check? Yes or no.” 

“Yes.” 

“So, Paul is going to enter that same information into the online system. It’s an electronic check rather than a paper one. That’s it. Nothing more.” 

“Okay. I’m fine with that. But we’re going to use a credit card.” 

“You do you, Sybil, but know there will be at least a 3% charge for using your card. That’s about $30.” 

“Paul says five or 10 dollars,” Sybil fires back.

“He’s wrong, just wrong.” 

We are both so over this conversation, but we both know it’s not yet resolved. Sybil is upset at herself, not for the first time, for refusing to have any kind of online presence over all those years. So many missed moments, those, but I’ve made that kind of mistake, too. It hurts.

At 93, both Sybil and her family are doing everything they can to maintain her independence. Increasingly, that means more to do for them and less for her. They love her deeply and do not mind, and Sybil is grateful, but with each task, there is one more thing out of her control. It’s such an uneasy balance for all of them.

Somewhat similarly, my body is far older than my almost 69 years, and I am ever adapting to maintain my independence. So, Sybil and I are each at an age where decisions close a door and not always does another window open.  

My heart is a bit sad that my tone of voice has been firm with Sybil—well, terse at times, if I am honest—Sybil, too, is a bit sad that she can’t write a check to pay her rent as she has always done for the last 17 years. For her generation, loyalty and consistency were just about everything in life. I get it.

As usual, I turn to Pema Chödrön to see if I can find something in her words for my frustration. I don’t want to repress it or reject it. I want to go to its core to see what I can learn from it and maybe help Sybil look at hers. In other times, Sybil has done it for me, in her own way, which is not mine.

Turns out Pema has a friend who talks about this very thing.

“As a way of working with our aggressive tendencies, Dzigar Kongtrül teaches the nonviolent practice of simmering. He says that rather than ‘boil in our aggression like a piece of meat cooking in a soup we simmer in it.’” 
Pema Chödrön

Not exactly the imagery I was seeking but I get the metaphor.

“We allow ourselves to wait, to sit patiently with the urge to act or speak in our usual ways and feel the full force of that urge without turning away or giving in.” 
Pema Chödrön

I am aware of the energy in “edginess,” or what Pema Chödrön refers to as “groundlessness,” and I find it attractive, that unknown. How to manage when I don’t have my feet on the ground, when what I know is not of worth to someone else or is not what they can yet receive, and I must be patient and listen in acceptance. 

“Neither repressing nor rejecting, we stay in the middle, between the two extremes, in the middle between yes and no, right and wrong, true and false.”  
Pema Chödrön

Most of my life I was a “fixer,” offering the obvious solution only to have it rejected because the choice was not mine to make. Not everyone comes to change the same way or at the same pace. Patience in every moment—to sit and simmer—although easier with age, it is no guarantee.

There is only one solution for Sybil no matter how many times we talk through what must happen. What is not an issue for me is a game changer for her but we offer what we have to one another, although it doesn’t feel like it’s what we need. I don’t hear anything about online rent payment until the fifth of the month, the last day before rent is late.

“I was going to have to pay almost $28 if I used my credit card!” Sybil has never been a stranger to umbrage. 

“So, Paul found where to enter the routing and account numbers?” I just have to know, which feels a bit unfair but somehow, it feels important. “He received a receipt by email, correct?”

“Well, if you can call it a receipt. It says, ‘Dear Sybil’ and then gives only my apartment number without which building. There are at least four different apartments with the same last three numbers.”

We talk about unique transaction numbers for a while, which is what is important for a transaction to take place between the two systems.

“But that’s just it. It hasn’t cleared my bank. There is no transaction.”

“Sybil, we just went through the receipt, line by line. You have a transaction number. The receipt says it was sent. That specific transaction was sent.”

“The bank has not received it. I’m going to be late on my rent.” 

“You are not going to be late on your rent because you have a receipt saying you paid it on the 29th.”

“But there is no transaction is what the bank is saying,” Sybil says, with a calm that is surprising.

That is a problem but there also seems to be a solution or maybe she’s been winding me up. I can’t say I might not do the same.

“Paul is working with the AWE manager.” Sybil pauses, pleased with her use of the acronym, and I find myself smiling. She goes on, “The account number was wrong.” 

“Did Paul enter it incorrectly?” 

“No!” Sybil snaps. Her son does not make mistakes. “I didn’t give him the zero.” 

“The what??!!” And for a moment I am as lost, if not moreso, than Sybil was when all this started.

“The zero in front of my account number on my check. I never use it. When I was in school, we were always told that zero isn’t a number. It’s nothing.”

“Let me put it this way, Sybil. Data is made up of nothing but ones and zeros.” I pause before adding, “that’s just probably adding to the confusion.”

“No, it’s not! I understand that. I’m saying that when I was in school zero wasn’t a number.”

“Zero is a number and it has value, Sybil. It may look empty but it’s anything but nothing.” We wait for a moment before I ask, “Didn’t you give Paul a voided check so he could enter the numbers?”

“Yes, but he said he didn’t need it because I read the numbers to him.”

“So, Paul had a check but he entered the numbers you read to him.

“Correct.”

“But he has now entered the correct account number into the system????” 

“I don’t know.”

This time I don’t go there. I look at the woods outside my window and tell Sybil I watched a goldfinch singing this very morning, sitting atop a still bare branch of the fire bush, yet another add to my birding life list. 

And Sybil who has taught me so much about the flora and fauna that is the woods outside my window begins to tell me yet another story about spring in some year before the Internet, when you could believe zero was not a number and not be bothered at all.

*Pema Chodron excerpts from Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, page 49.

The Cable Guy Meets Old

Posted on by KM Huber in #LongerView, Aging, Inspiration

It might not have happened if the recycle dumpster had not been overflowing is what I initially told myself. But that day with the cable guy had nothing to do with the dumpster. No proverbial straw stuff. No stacking of excuses.

There are thunderheads darkening the patch of sky over my apartment complex. Everywhere and with just about everyone there is talk of moving, wanting to leave but where to go?

At 67 that’s a completely different decision than it was at 57, when I came to this wooded area of loblolly pine, live oak draped in Spanish moss, the fragrant magnolia among lilacs and dewberries. For my neighbors in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, moving is wishful thinking if they are honest and if not, well, magical then. We moved here to stay.

Two years ago, on-site management changed in this 55+ community of four apartment buildings. It’s affordable housing, allowing the corporation a tax credit, so HUD housing but not section 8. There are more differences than you would think and how it matters to some.

This is a first-time manager job for the director and her leasing agent. It’s been tough on them. They are in the prime of their personal and business lives but the residents are not business as usual. They want more than that.

The only way to know old is to be it. This is not a warning just a fact. There is no way to plan for it, which is true of any time in life, really. The fortunate get to know old, the last act, in which awareness abounds and that can be a harsh light.

Change never ages for life is impermanent, always requiring more of us, it seems, but change does not come empty handed. It offers us a different life lens, leaving the adjustment to us. These thunderheads dissipate in their own time.

Many residents have lived here since the complex opened some 15 years ago when the Internet was not quite the lifeline it is now. For many the Internet is an unwanted complexity making their flip phones obsolete. Now, it’s invaded their TV as well–management dropped the package it offered for $45 a month.

The director made the announcement without offering any information about choices residents might have, including programming or who to contact at the cable company. With unwitting transparency, the managers posted a public notice, admitting they didn’t know anything.

Then, residents were informed the cable company needed access to each apartment, whether or not residents wanted the service. New cable was strung for each apartment. It doesn’t sound like such a big deal but many of these apartments are ceiling to floor furniture, wall-to-wall.

My neighbor’s furniture is oak bookcases, bedroom dresser and chest of drawers with full mirror, two rolldown desks, and a magnificent painting of an eastern European forest in winter, stark, the length and breadth of the wall. These six and nine hundred square foot apartments hold what is left of a lifetime. That is not without its weight.

At the only meet, greet, and subscribe meeting with the cable company, residents were assured that if they signed up that day, they could avoid a $70-dollar technician fee. Maybe it was true or was a good intention gone awry, but the previous cable installation had not gone well (it was all but impossible to tell which cable belonged to each apartment), and a technician was required. It was that or no TV.

I am not a cable subscriber so it’s not my circus but it is my neighbors’. Still, I had my moment with the cable guy (I could tell that story here and almost did) but like the dumpster, it’s not the issue. Both the cable guy and I have had better moments. This time I was correct but the next time, it’ll be the cable guy. It’s not about correctness. It’s how we make each other feel, and it wasn’t good.

He started to mansplain, and I stopped him in his tracks. He was surprised, and I was not gracious. He tried to laugh when I described the furniture but I could see he was beginning to understand that people here did not move “every 2 to 3 years” as he had begun to explain. The sign outside our complex reads that we all “live happily ever after.” We don’t, of course, but we are no longer in search of that, either.

Two days later, I saw the cable guy outside my window, exhausted, sweat running down both sides of his face. His counterpart was in my apartment with a walkie-talkie, trying to figure out which cable to label. In frustration, they guessed. I am not a subscriber but by the time I leave, who knows what the technology will be.

Certain springs, owls come to mate and then leave, occasionally red-tailed hawks spend spring, too, but year-round there are the cardinals, resplendent red males and brown velvet females who let them pretend.

This year, more kits became rabbits, it seems, or they just feel better about staying around. The fireflies are fewer (I have to watch for them) as are the swallowtail butterflies but they still come. All this I watch from the window of my six hundred square foot, one-bedroom apartment.

There are many reasons to move but mine offers a window with a view and there are so few places left that do.

 

The View from Down the Hall

Posted on by KM Huber in #LongerView, Aging, Beyond Time, Consciousness

A lesbian lives down the hall from Connie, not that she cares.

It’s a label she has avoided all her adult life and now, at 88, a neurologist asks if she and Babs “are a couple of queers.” It isn’t the first time she has heard that question (in so many different words) for she and Babs lived together for over 40 years but now they live apart with separate lives.

Babs promised to stay but finally, she found a relationship with her daughter, who lived 300 miles away. And then there was the volunteer job as a docent at a local museum. Connie was invited to move, even offered a house, but Connie liked being the one with the money and doing the offering.

It would be five years before she moved to be with Babs in the same town but in an apartment. All their years simmer, a pot constantly stirred, frequently boiling over, their differences the only constant they have ever known.

In her remaining years, Babs is immersed in what it means to be in the workforce at 86. She kept the house, washed the pots, and cared for Connie’s every need for decades. She doesn’t miss the life but she misses the Connie “who could sell ice to an Eskimo.” Business after business, Connie was a success.

Now, her mind is a jumble. Intersecting thoughts, their edges jagged, her past seeping into her present, a rapier seeking its mark. She doesn’t know daydream from daylight.

“If this is me, I don’t want it anymore,” Connie says, turning her snow-white head from side to side, blue eyes red rimmed, but her thin face younger than her years. Babs took good care of her, it seems. Still, Connie’s snake-like spine increasingly betrays her with pain and immobility, but that’s nothing like the longing she has for Babs.

Connie never had to care for herself so she never learned how. She always had enough money to hire everything and everyone. “I just can’t do any of that,” she has told me time and again, and I have come to believe what Babs told me, “I waited on her hand and foot.”

Their bond was that they never tried to change each other. Their differences keep them plotting, stirring the pot, making sure the pilot light never goes out. They live as if life–this one right here–is eternity and they have all the time in the world to mold life as they need it to be, at times demand it be.

I admire that, I really do. Of course, I cannot  know their lives, only what I watch through my life lens (with my own boundaries and biases) but it seems a badge of love, this life, for Connie and Babs.

That’s the view, anyway, from the lesbian who lives down the hall.

Every Time He Shakes His Tail

Posted on by KM Huber in #LongerView, activism, Aging, Reflections, Writing

I was in my late 30s, finishing my Master of Arts thesis, when I finally understood writing as a process.

Admittedly, it sounds silly but in 1986, the “how-to” of writing was threatening an academic tradition once thought unassailable, at least in the English department at a small university in the Rocky Mountains.

It was the invincibility of that tradition that drew me to academia and it would usher me out. We would both find out of what we were made. Different stuff.

For the first time in my life I was consumed by my work, in complete awe of writing. It was alive, no longer an academic exercise in research. And for that matter, neither was I.

My thesis advisor, Jeanne, was having none of “my new process” and rejected the initial draft of my thesis after reading the first two pages. No matter what I said, she would not read more.

Jeanne was a friend, ever patient with my enthusiasm, but her life was the academic tradition. She railed against the canon of “white male fact” and was integral in establishing a women’s studies program but she knew her parameters.

So, stalemate.

In response, I drank my way to sobriety and an eventual decision. It seemed I was fine with not graduating. Writing was what mattered and that has never changed.

But no story ends without a twist or two, if we are true in the telling. We cannot be part of a tradition and simply pull away without consequence for others or ourselves.

So it was that my hands were in dishwater when the telephone call came.

“It’s Jeanne,” my then partner said, stretching her arm toward me, cordless white phone in hand.

“No.”

“She just wants to talk to you.”

I shook my head and looked down at my hands in the dishwater, a master’s graduation ring on my fourth finger, left-hand, gold in suds. My mom had it sent to me. She was coming for graduation. I would not cheat her out of this degree ceremony as I had for my bachelor’s.

Other than my partner, few outside my academic life knew about the thesis stalemate or a tangential twist, my formal charge of sexism and breach of protocol against a tenured professor.

It began with a question, as these things often do. The graduate level course was American literature, 1930s-40s, and I asked why there were no women writers included. The professor told me there were no major women writers. His words reverberated throughout the department.

His breach of protocol was reading the student evaluations before submitting his final grades. The professor all but grabbed them out of the office secretary’s hand, saying he knew “they would be good.”

I was the only graduate student to challenge him in class and in my written evaluation of his course. Accordingly, I was the only one to receive a B, everyone else an A. It is the only B on my graduate school transcript.

Confident in his tenure, the professor never denied any of the charges and a committee of his peers ruled against me, which proved to be the catalyst for a department showdown.

A number of professors threatened to bring my complaint before the entire department for a vote:  to overturn my grade (copies of my coursework were made available); to end the exclusion of women writers from all courses;  to censure the professor for breaching University protocol regarding student evaluations.

The vote never happened.

The head of the department removed that course from the professor’s teaching roster. He never taught in his area of emphasis again. The student evaluation procedure was completely revamped and finally, there was a review of department courses, something many members had been fighting for, including Jeanne.

My grade remained a B.

“You can appeal this decision, of course,” the department chair told me. Very carefully, he explained the process.

I nodded, hoping my tears would not spill over. Some part of me knew my grade was no longer the point, although it had been the initial pain.

“What you need to remember is that whenever he shakes his tail, this issue will make itself known for years to come.”

And it did for the rest of the professor’s life or so I am told.

Jeanne was not among the professors who outwardly supported me but for all of us there is more than one bridge too far in life. At least that has been true for me.

Of course, those were not my thoughts as I stood at the sink with my hands immersed in what was left of the soapsuds. Mostly, I thought about the many differences between my mother and me, specifically that 1986 MA class ring.

I took the phone call from Jeanne.

I did not really “defend” my thesis but ours was a lively discussion regarding writing and women. Some 25 years later, a thesis committee member told me there was some concern about my not defending the thesis.

KMHuberImage; oneness; St. Mark's Refuge FL

Jeanne knew I would travel a road not hers but she sent me with love (and a degree) nonetheless. As firmly, she stood in her truth, too, a world of the Venerable Bede, tawny port, and women finding their own way.

In the year of Jeanne’s death, she asked me to teach a session of her graduate-level women’s studies course, the one that gave me the idea for my thesis. It remains one of the greatest honors of my life.

The last time I sat with Jeanne was in the dark hours of a Wyoming winter morning, selecting the music for her funeral, her singing “this little light of mine.” She thought it a good choice.

Me, too.

I have now lived longer than the lifespan that was Jeanne’s. I cannot imagine her in the time of Trump. She thought the 80s impossible, “the me generation.”

Not surprisingly, that last year of graduate school was on my mind as I listened to Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony. Like so many other women I knew how it would end but I also kept hearing, “every time he shakes his tail.”

That, I know to be true.

How Not to Become a Zen Master

Posted on by KM Huber in #LongerView, Aging, Consciousness, Zen

“That’s right. Blame it on Zen,” my neighbor, Grace, says.

With Zen, I just don’t hold onto names or nouns anymore was what I was thinking, aloud it seems.

Grace is a Zen master not because she is 90 but because she is contemplative in all ways. She was born to it. And she attends tai chi twice a week. Her whole life is a practice. She would never label herself a Zen master.

We were in the middle of a project that began simply enough but soon involved another neighbor. Specifically, I opened a package that was not mine.

The package was one of four I was expecting but as you can see, there are five packages. The shocking pink garment stunned but it was the thank you card that intrigued–one American meme of gratitude after another, the length of a paragraph.

I read the card aloud to Grace.

“Which company?”

“Doesn’t say.”

All these packages were dumped in the mailroom of our apartment complex on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. They were there for the taking and so I did.

It was not until I straightened the cardboard boxes Grace had so beautifully broken down with her seriously sharp knife that I saw the name on the box of great gratitude was not mine.

And now I was writing a card of explanation to a woman whose name I kept forgetting. Grace selected the blank note card, rejecting the polar bear in favor of the fir of a mountain. Appropriate for any occasion.

“Well, when you decide to get dressed, I’ll take you.” Grace was sitting on my leather loveseat, waiting, with her small knife lying next to her.

She wasn’t taking me anywhere in a red polo shirt so large and so long it was more skirt than shirt, nearly covering my khaki shorts. The logo read Elder Affairs.

I finish writing the card and read it to Grace. “That’s classy,” she says.

“I want her to know what I did in case she’s not there when we return the package.” And with that, I pick up the flat cardboard box that is not addressed to me.

“You’re not going to tape that back up, are you?”

“Trust me, Grace. Perception is everything. I’m admitting my guilt but I’m returning a taped package.”

Just another of the many ways I avoid becoming a Zen master. I was born to it.

KMHuberImage; St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge; Florida; USA

And so, we began our journey to Grace’s car. I with my three-wheeled walker and the re-wrapped package tightly cornered into my walker’s lower bag, and Grace with her walking stick in one hand and under her other arm, four cardboard boxes now flat.

Grace decided who took what. She is Sicilian. We do things her way.

We drove halfway across the apartment complex before I told Grace, “I forgot the card.” We look at one another and then, Grace turns the car around.

Again, we drive across the apartment complex and we score the nearest accessible parking spot, the one near the elevator. As we ride to the second floor, I try to channel Grace, but I am who I am. Still, my focus remains mountain.

I tell the woman what happened, as it happened, all the while holding her package. She does not take it from me.

“Do you know how many people would not even bother to do this?”

I wasn’t clear. She doesn’t realize I opened her package. I should not have taped up the box.

As I look into the kind face of the woman accepting her package, I am determined not to burst into her life but I tell her my story, again, with profuse apologies and my concern about the boxes being left unattended.

“You’re an angel,” she says. I assure her I am not and introduce Grace who smiles and stays silent. We leave.

As we drive back, Grace says, “You know, I think she would have difficulty getting to the mail room.”

“I’m no angel.”

Grace laughs.

On this day I have Grace, and for that, there are not enough expressions of gratitude in any form.

Monday Morning 9 AM Social

Posted on by KM Huber in #LongerView, activism, Aging, Consciousness

Grace and I talk a lot about community (or lack thereof) within our apartment complex. There are four buildings, perhaps pockets of community within each, but together, we are factions.

Management sends out a monthly calendar of clubhouse events. Every Monday, there is a 9 a.m. social and has been for as long as Grace and I can remember. Her memory is encyclopedic.

Grace and I share an apartment wall. As she says, “it makes a difference if you know who is on the other side.” So, we decided to find out what a Monday morning social is rather than just surmising.

We meet outside the clubhouse, telling each other how nice we look, and we do. We have brought our own beverages, mine a lime-green insulated cup and hers, a silver thermos, which she raises as she whispers, “community coffee,” a flash of the ironic in her smile.

Ruddy-cheeked and wide-eyed at the world, she is captivating at 90, 20, 50, or 70. Tai chi three days a week. At 66, I am the one with the walker and “black tea,” now conspicuous in its lack of a label for the occasion.

“What does that say about me?” I ask both of us.

We are friends with rhetorical questions, Grace and I; they usually begin or end our conversations. We have little regard for answers, they of the limited run, always replaced by another question.

So on this Monday morning we are open to what we meet in the “kitchen area” of the clubhouse, three women intensely involved in a card game using a star-shaped board with pegs.

Five bid each other “hello,” and three return to their play. Grace and I choose a table in the middle of the room, and I take my walker to a side wall. All other tables are empty.

“Is this it?” Grace asks.

“I think so.”

We had given considerable thought not to arrive early (with Grace, one is never late) but as it turns out, we were on time. We had come to be social, which was not to interrupt the game. Their chatter immediately resumed after “hello” with counting and card shuffling.

Grace and I kept our voices low as we sipped our beverages, telling stories we had left untold during the visits to each other’s apartment, when talking over the phone, or sitting on the wooden bench outside our three-story, white stucco building with red shutters.

It was as if we were meeting for the first time, and that may have had something to do with our age difference.

I look older than my years. Grace is curious but would never ask. That would be rude. Besides, she enjoys putting together pieces of life, moving them around for effect. Until Monday, I had walked around her efforts.

When Grace began, “I am not sure exactly what age span is between us….”

“I am 66 and you are 90.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, and she let her breath out slowly, indicating the span with a spread of her arms, her arthritic hands still dexterous. Was it a bridge too far?

“I’m a historian,” I said, wanting worth I may not have.

She tells me a story of blackouts during World War II, of many nights sitting with her bed-ridden grandfather who said, sometimes, he wanted to die. Teenage Grace telling him he did not.

“My mother asked me to do it and I was glad to do it. I loved my grandfather.”

I don’t know where in New York State that Grace’s family lived but it was closed to an air field. With a bit of pride, she tells me how quickly she learned to identify the different planes and wing spans. Hesitantly, she admits “it was all a bit exciting.”

“It is the way of children, isn’t it?” I say, as if I know, but how else to get through a world war. And I think of Grace’s teenage angst buried in the memory of bombing drills and identifying warplanes.

I don’t know that but I have been reading many World War II war novels (The Women in the Castle) and biographies like Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.I tell Grace about them.

“Well, without the women in the war…” Deftly, she drops in an ellipsis and lets it sit. “They did everything. They kept it going.” She sips the last of her coffee. “And then,” she says, as she opens the palms of her hands to the sky.

“It is time for women to come forward again,” I say. “And I think it is beginning to happen. This time, there is no going back.” I offer this with more conviction than I carry most days.

Grace looks at me for a while before offering “Yes,” with the finality of belief that won’t bend with the wind.

And this week’s Monday morning 9 a.m. social ends, much as it began. The players still playing but now in silence and with a smile, they say “goodbye.”

Like Grace says, it makes a difference to know who’s on the other side.

Dying Alone

Posted on by KM Huber in #LongerView, activism, Inspiration, Oneness

My neighbor, Eva, and I share a wall. It divides our apartments, intersects our lives, leaving jagged the edges where we do not meet. One of those edges was Harriet, who shared a wall with Eva.

This past week, Harriet died. She was found in her favorite chair. It seems hers was a peaceful death but it required a police presence to prove, so for a while her apartment was a crime scene.

Our apartment complex is a 55+ community, and most of us are well beyond middle age. Death is part of the deal of living but in the tenor of these times, death by natural causes has to be proven when a woman dies alone.

We should have known is what Eva and I say to one another but we never know death’s arrival.

It is not that death visited, it is that death came and no one noticed. For days. And then, someone did.

When there was no answer on Harriet’s landline, an extended family member called the police. Later, Harriet’s son, Dave, arrived. To be fair, the police could get here more quickly. Dave lives an hour away

No neighbor checked on Harriet with any regularity, if at all. Eva tells me she is working through her guilt. She and Harriet have a history, and it’s a good one, but their daily strolls around the apartment complex are long gone, almost another lifetime.

Only a few walk with us for all our lives. Yet, living in a community where moving out usually means either nursing home or death, it seems as if connection–being good neighbors–would transcend our differences. It doesn’t.

Harriet’s death troubles me, too. Like Eva, I know I could have done more, much more. I didn’t try hard enough. When Harriet’s chihuahua, Hal, was dying, I did everything I could except give Harriet the one thing she needed, support.

She was angry, afraid, lashing at everyone. Losing Hal was losing her connection to life. All I needed to do was listen. I don’t remember doing much of that. Nor did I see her often after Hal died.

Son Dave took Harriet to her appointments, picked up her medications, and brought her groceries. He saw to her needs but he never came just to visit. That was not their relationship, and both accepted their differences. They loved, regardless.

Dave is not a talker. He just gets on with the next thing, which rarely works out for him. Like the time he brought Harriet a new-to-her recliner. She loved overstuffed recliners and wore out at least three in the time I knew her. It was where she watched TV, slept, ate, and smoked.

She all but burned up each chair. Harriet had congestive heart failure and terribly painful neuropathy. Heavily medicated, she would fall asleep in her chair, cigarette still burning. Eva tells me Harriet had all but quit smoking but just a couple of months ago, Dave brought another recliner. It had bedbugs.

As Eva says, some people are born under a dark cloud, and Dave is one of them. So it seems.

Pencil-thin, husky-voiced, and quick with a southern-spun retort, Harriet never pretended to be what she wasn’t, which is not to say she usually told the truth. Like all of us, sometimes her lies caught up with her, but she held onto them as long as she could.

I could have offered Harriet more. I didn’t. I live with that jagged edge, but in pain is the expression of experience. Mine is not to fix anyone or anything but to meet people where they are, as they are, and walk with them long enough to hear their story. In death, there are no more chances except for the living. Thank you, Harriet.

Eva says we should go no longer than two days without calling each other. Okay, I say. Maybe Eva wants Harriet to know that she, too, is grateful.

Note: For a bit more about Harriet and Hal, you might enjoy “Love Lives in Inconvenient Places.”

My Own Bit of Buddha Nature

Posted on by KM Huber in Consciousness, Lupus, Writing, Zen

Pre-spinal fusion surgery, I described my gait as ”a drunken Frankenstein’s monster.” My neurosurgeon thought it apt.

Subsequent surgery and yoga have improved my walk considerably but my gait is still ”spastic” so there remains a bit of Frankenstein about me and always will. My body is not in synch.

Both hip replacements are great but my spinal cord is damaged from prolonged pinching. I’m among the 70% who show improvement. Still, I stagger sometimes, clumsy comes easily.

My neurologist explains it as residual from the cervical fusion, nothing monstrous, merely minimal–that which could not be restored–so less is better.

Body hardware strengthens sensation–works with the residual–what remains after the damage has been repaired. With less I learn to do more with foreign body parts. That’s as good as it gets.

And that’s the way I live, in an apartment of two rooms–living area/kitchen and bedroom–with a shower/bathroom. Even a full Frankenstein can maneuver here.

And isn’t that what being alive is all about?  Learning to live in the skin we are in and then go exploring. For a time, walking my apartment with a slight stagger is sufficient.

Always, there is writing but with limitations.

There is not enough sensation in my fingers for actual typing. This has been true for the last two and a half years. In this regard, surgery provided no improvement, no change.

What remains is tingling/numbness in my arms and hands, all fingers and both thumbs affected. Yet, what does not change can be good news and in my case, it is.  No healing is possible so maintaining what I have is the goal, and that I am doing.

I’ve been using speech recognition regularly but speaking the written word is not the same as typing it. Sounds silly but the thought process is different, completely different.

For me, editing speech recognition is slow going. My brain commands my fingers–hunt and peck–but the keys they stroke seem to be their decisions alone.

Even so, I am book-building now, which limits the number of my blog posts but blogging is an integral part of my life, especially as I found myself becoming a bit of a Frankenstein.

How that happened is all here on this blog so I continue to post, from time to time. It’s comfortable here. I hope for you, too.

I am excited about this book because it is not like anything I have attempted before. There is a freshness in it. Like the residual that is me, much remains to be explored. And so, I am.

My one bedroom apartment is not the world, no matter how much the Internet introduces. Ironically, it is the online world that opens me to what is outside my door.

Quickly, I go nowhere without a walker but not the orthopedic wonders forced upon me after each surgery.  Companions they may be– to take me from one seat to another–but they are not friends, not wheels to the world.

I find my walker on the Internet, after much research, and I admit to hubris when it comes to the uniqueness of my wheels. So far, I have seen no other like it.

It feels more a motorcycle than a legged triangle on wheels with grocery basket and backpack. Silver handlebars bars with black, bike-like grips, it offers no seat but three gravel-gray wheels thick enough for trails, if I am careful, and I am.

I can zoom around people, snake though grocery store aisles. My mobility startles shoppers; free-wheeling I call it. Not my best moments, admittedly, but disability does not mean I walk with saints.

My walker may be my own bit of Buddha nature, my constant in the chaos. It is wheels for life–mine–as good as it gets.