Growing Old

At fifty-four, I am past the mid-point of my life. If I am lucky enough to live as long as my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat, 48 years old was the mid-point of my life. My grandmother died in 2006 when she was 96, and I was 48 years old. My grandmother was 48 years old when I was born. If I were a numerologist, I might take comfort in those numbers. Since I am not, I have to take comfort elsewhere, beyond magical thinking. I keep a cut-out black and white image of my grandmother taped to the frame of my computer screen to remind me how to grow old gracefully, but I still wonder what growing old gracefully really means for me. For I am realizing that growing old gracefully is an individual experience and that not everyone will exhibit "grace" in the same way. I am on a journey to discover and to create my own way, and that way may be much like my grandmother's but different in some choices I make or behaviors I exhibit.

The topic of aging and how to approach one's physical and mental decline is on my mind because of an article I just read in Salon titled "Old Ladies who Didn't Love Me," by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The writer is thirty-six years old, a mother of a 14-month old baby, and she is obsessed with growing old. She begins to recognize that all the dreams of her youth will never be realized, that as one ages, doors close behind one. In this, I sympathized with the writer. I, too, had my children relatively late in life, in my early to mid-thirties, and thus child-rearing came right in the middle of my career and at the beginning of that stage where one is still fully engaged with the world while at the same time beginning to see the first signs of aging. And one's lovely children hammer home the contrast between youth and age.

Children are expert observers. One morning when we were dressing for the day--I was blow-drying my hair while my son was playing around at my feet--my son looked up at me in surprise. "Mama," he said, "you have spider webs in your hair!"

I looked quickly at my image in the mirror and saw the glint of, not spider webs but, gray hairs. I laughed and told my son that my hair was graying. I was thirty-three years old.

Some years later my daughter would look at my hands and pull up the skin on the top of one hand, noticing how loose it was, how it puckered briefly before assuming its duty as covering for the bones and veins underneath. Then she pulled at the skin on her own hand; it was firm, returning immediately to its previous form. She was fascinated with this difference between my aging skin and the elasticity of her own youthful skin.

So, yes, I sympathize with the writer who sees in her own child her approaching old age. Poets and philosophers have sung this song for millennia:

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw night, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them..."(Ecclesiastes 12:1) So the old man tells the young man.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old Time is still a-flying,/ And this same flower that smiles today/ Tomorrow will be dying.... (Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time")

But then the writer loses me in her self-absorption. She joins an exercise swim class, not a class of people her own age, but a class of women many years older than she. This is not an accident. She has watched these women from her vantage point in the gym, where she contrasts her own youthfulness with their age: "I knew the class was populated by old women; I had a view of them from my treadmill, where I’d exercised back when I was young and could run for my health, bounding like a deer toward a television that only played shows about the Kardashians. Beyond that TV were the old ladies, splashing and working out."

The old ladies. She joins this group because she wants to use the backdrop of the old ladies's  wrinkled necks and sagging bottoms to validate her own youthfulness: "I would take water aerobics and emerge feeling young, grateful for the plump of my skin, the relative tightness of my jowls. We’d all be buoyant in the water, but only I would remain so as we dried off."

She sizes up her competition: " My poolies, the ones at my gym, had necks that had long since defied definition. Massive freckled cleavage became neck became chin became face and so on. They wore bathing caps with plastic flowers and swim suits with pointy foam bra cups. Underneath, their hair was teased and thinning in shades of copper and yellow."

Yet despite this self-absorbed motivation and unkind, condescending comparison, the writer expects these women to embrace her immediately, to be her wise friends who will shew away her fears of aging as a grandmother would shew away a child's fear of the dark. She expects them to be as interested in her life as her grandmother was, to subsume their own desires to her desire to be loved: "I'd remind the old ladies of their daughters. They’d pass on wisdom. I would confide that I didn’t think I could wear a miniskirt anymore, at my age. They would snort and hoot and tell me what a child I am. I’d realize how silly I’ve been. I would learn that I had plenty of time."

In a culture where youth is worshiped, perhaps it's not surprising that the writer expects these old women to worship her, too. She compares the less-than-friendly greetings of these old women to her yoga class, "where people applauded when you just showed up."  She seems to be a victim of our culture's promotion of self-esteem above self-knowledge, in which everyone gets a trophy no matter the level of performance.

And so she is crushed when these old women do not live up to her self-centered expectations: they hoot with laughter at her inability to keep up with them in their exercise routine, they point out her own imperfections (the unshaven legs) even as she is silently cataloging theirs (the sagging skin), their teasing has a mean edge to it. To her credit, the writer, in retrospect, admits her embarrassment and shame, though it is accompanied by self-pity. She is embarrassed because she suspects the old women realize, at least partially, her motivations for attending that particular exercise class and refuse to be diminished by the comparisons she is making between her youthful appearance and their old age. She is also shamed by her own self-absorption, for expecting that any old woman would embrace her as her grandmother did, wholly, without reservations, with immediate love and self-abnegation:

They were old people and they were tired of being called cute by young people. They had become mean. No one was safe here. My grandmother’s friends had seemed so much kinder, so much more, I don’t know, grandmotherly. Had it all been a show? Had it been a front for grandmothers everywhere? I had come here to seek the gratuitous validation that only grandmothers can provide, and learned it was only my grandmother who would provide it.

In the end, the writer swims alone, "under the cover of late afternoon."

And here, perhaps, is where the writer approaches something close to wisdom: that aging is an individual experience. We cannot expect our culture to validate our existence as we age, and while some cultures are more accepting of the elderly, all struggle in one way or another to deal with how to view those whose aging bodies remind us of our own mortality.  Also, old age does not necessarily bring wisdom; some people do, indeed, grow mean and bitter. The trick is discovering how to age without bitterness and how to accept one's own sadness over one's impending mortality without projecting that sadness onto others.

I have discovered that, for me, moving outside of myself, beyond introspection to action, helps me cope with aging. Imagining, planning, and physically creating gardens provide me with activities that exercise my mind and my body without reinforcing the tendency to dwell on what I cannot do or on regret for what I did or did not do when I was younger. Working with my hands is therapeutic, whether it be with a hoe or a crochet hook or a paint brush. This is what I learned from my grandmother, who gardened until she could no longer walk outside by herself, which was just a few months before she died. She crocheted until she could no longer see to knot the stitches. She engaged with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who visited her.

I also take photos to accompany haiku that I write in response to those photos. I have written poetry since I was in third grade, but haiku strips away poetic pretension or self-indulgence. Writing haiku-- traditional haiku--forces one to look at the thing itself and reflect on that object, perhaps to see connections between the object and oneself but not to wallow in the pool of one's self alone:

Basho's death poem:
   Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
   the withered fields.

Issa's dealing with his father's approaching death:
   Last time, I think,
I'll brush the flies
   from my father's face.

Issa's reflection on poverty:
   The holes in the wall
play the flute
   this autumn evening.

Haiku leave no room for self-pity.

Other people have different ways of coping with aging, of accepting the inevitable.

Once I asked my grandmother how it felt to grow old. She said that when she looked in the mirror, she didn't really recognize the face that stared back at her; she was still fifteen years old inside.

I look in the mirror and barely recognize the face staring back at me. The face that I remember as my own is captured in first-grade and seventh-grade photos of a young girl with an enigmatic smile. But this aging face IS mine. I acknowledge it and hope to shape those inevitable wrinkles into ones that exude grace and acceptance rather than bitterness and self-pity. Only time will tell.

Racial Stereotypes

Reading about the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia reminds me of a craft booth I saw yesterday in a local arts and crafts festival here in Louisiana on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain. The vendor, who was white, had created all these "Mammy" items and had them proudly displayed for sale. I don't know if anyone bought anything. I quickly walked past the display, startled and shocked--though I shouldn't have been shocked. Maybe I should have stopped and asked the vendor a few questions to try to discover her reasons for using such stereotypes in her craft or to discern whether or not she even realized these were racist stereotypes. But I just didn't have the heart at the time for any kind of confrontation.

If you're white, and especially if you're from the South, confronting racism in others dredges up so many uncomfortable memories and experiences. Suddenly you're confronted with your own racist past and with the struggle you might have had to try to get beyond it. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, a church whose hierarchy and congregations sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War. As a child, I thoroughly took to heart the hymn we sung about Jesus loving the little children...all the little children, and I struggled to harmonize the beauty of that belief with the reality of our worship. My childhood church had an all-white congregation; the only time African-Americans attended our church on the Gulf Coast of Texas was during Vacation Bible School or a community gathering at Thanksgiving. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention finally got around to apologizing for its racist past, but by that time I had already left the church.  I might have left sooner had I not gone off to college and joined a large university church with a more liberal-minded pastor.

If you come from a family that didn't have much to pass down to succeeding generations, it's a little easier to wipe the memory slate clean concerning any racist past. All the bad stuff gets edited out in the oral stories of the family: until one day, someone lets slip that a great-grandfather fathered a child or children with an African-American woman--yes, I was recently told this, but I don't know the accuracy of the story--and suddenly you're questioning your family's past and whether or not one continues to be responsible for that past, for the actions of others long dead. Are there cousins the family didn't or won't acknowledge? Should you try to locate them? Would they want you to or care?

If you come from a Southern family that kept records in letters and memorabilia, however, it's more difficult to ignore those records that detail racist attitudes: the description of theatrical events where great-grandmother dressed in black face and wrote and recited poetry in a Southern black dialect; the high society programs describing the wait staff at such events as "sons  of Ethiopia"; the recipe booklet from a great-grandmother's collection with its "Mammy-shaped" cover.

What do you do if this is your family's past? If you are like me and my husband, you recognize and acknowledge that past. You cannot deny its existence and the corrosive power of the its values, but you repudiate those values. And you do your best to pass on different values to your children.

In his collection of items that reflect the Jim Crow era of the South, David Pilgrim reminds us that we are so very little removed from our racist past. It stares back at us every day, from the products on our supermarket shelves to the crafts on a table at a local festival.

In the Garden of My Memory

Years ago I created an art car on which I was inspired to paint and illustrate an original phrase that came to mind when I was thinking of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and all the women who have to re-create their worlds when war, natural disasters, bad relationships, stunted aspirations, or a myriad of disappointments change their lives: "Because she remembered her grandmother's garden, she planted her own. Flower by flower she remade the world." This is now a phrase I live by. Actually,  that idea directed my life--often literally--before I was aware of it, for in all the moves we've made to improve our circumstances, the one thing that has remained constant is the energy we put into creating a garden immediately when we've settled.

As I noted in this post of January 17, I set for myself several art, craft, gardening and writing goals for the year to see me through the presidential election and beyond. The stupidity of the election cycle can be so astounding that any thinking person keeping up with the news has to find a way to balance illusion and fantasy with reality, venality with generosity, amoralism with ethics. Work helps, but I am unemployed since I left my last job a year ago to move to the state where my husband had begun some months previous to my moving a more monetarily-rewarding job than I could acquire. So sustained gardening,  craft, and writing do that balancing act for me now.

One of my projects is the altered art journal that I described briefly in that January 17th post. I keep all the materials on an antique table in my study and work on the journal as I find the time from other projects and as inspiration strikes. It's the work of an amateur, but it gives me joy. The journal has become not just a record of 2012--rendered in paint, collage, poems, even sewing, embroidery, and crochet--but a memoir. The journal entry of this week focused on gardening, and I created two tiny, hand-stitched booklets to place in seed-packet pockets that I glued to the pages. In each booklet I wrote an essay about the flowers of my childhood and my gardening memories.

This is one of those essays, with minor editorial changes:

My earliest memories of gardening have almost disappeared into some inaccessible compartment of my brain, but I remember hoeing weeds in our garden in Old River, Texas. Mostly, however, I remember my father working in the garden. When I was very young, he had a couple of plow animals that he used to cultivate his garden, donkeys he called Jenny and Jack. I remember standing barefoot on our front porch, watching Daddy hitch up the plow and head the donkey on a straight run through the garden to create a row for planting. Sometimes the donkey didn't comply, and Daddy would begin to curse. This is where I first learned curse words though I didn't use them myself until I was much older.

I also remember gathering okra and eating the fresh, raw pods as I delivered a batch to the kitchen for cooking. Our household was a traditional one, and we girls did most of the housework while my brother, six years younger than I, did many of the outdoor chores when he was old enough to take them on. I would have much preferred hoeing in the garden, I think, to washing and folding clothes. One summer when I was a teen, I decided that the grass growing around the cement blocks under our house was unsightly. We didn't have a weed-eater, and there were places a lawn mower couldn't reach. I spent several days in the hot Texas sun hoeing that grass away from the house. It was work I initiated and thus work that I liked.

One of the funniest and yet not-so-funny experiences from my teenage years occurred one day when I was picking field peas with my grandmother Ruby Scott Benton. Grandma Benton was a short, fat woman; she was in her sixties at the time and suffering from ailments associated with her weight. She could not lift her feet very high off the ground, and when she tried to step over a row of peas, she fell flat on her back in the sandy soil. I was horrified, but Grandma started laughing, and then I did, too. She looked like a June bug waving its limbs around, trying to roll over to right itself. Grandma Benton was a very even-tempered woman, easily moved to laughter, and it was easy to be happy in her presence.

The first garden of my own was one my husband and I planted when we were students at Texas A&M University at College Station. We were living in married student housing, and the university owned some undeveloped land behind the apartments which the administration designated as a gardening area for married students living in university housing. In the spring, someone would disk the property and divide the land into small garden lots. Married students could choose a plot to garden. 

Tom and I worked very hard in that first garden. Tom would load up our Ford Ranger with free chicken manure from the Ag Center, and we added that manure to our garden to amend the soil. We also weeded assiduously. I remember getting down on my hands and knees to weed, trying to make that garden as weed-free as possible. We were rewarded with such beautiful plants and bountiful vegetables that our gardening neighbors began to comment on the lushness of our garden. Some of them assumed--and told us--that we had "lucked out" in getting the best gardening spot. So one year someone beat us in choosing that patch which we had amended with manure, and we got one of the least desirable plots on the edge of the disked land. I have a photo of myself in that garden that Tom took. I am standing near a row of corn as high as my head, smiling triumphantly. We had proven, if only to ourselves, that our dedication and hard work could turn a plot of land that no one else wanted into a productive garden. 

That might have been the year that someone stole all our vegetables, leaving behind the knife with which he had done the deed.

When Tom and I went to Nova Scotia last September to visit the land where my ancestor Abraham Dugas (Dugast) had lived in the 1600s, we learned how the Acadians had turned marshy land into productive farm land by building dykes to drain the land. They also farmed all up and down the Annapolis Valley and the shore along the Bay of Fundy. Google search "best farmland in Nova Scotia" today, and web pages will pop up describing Kings County, Nova Scotia, as having the best agricultural land in the province.

But perhaps the Acadians were too successful in their farming and gardening. They, too, lost their produce to a neighbor--the British government, which confiscated all their property and exported them to other British colonies. Stripped of their farmland wealth, the impoverished Acadians had to start over in foreign lands. Some made their way to Louisiana, carrying with them a love and skill of gardening. 

Perhaps my Acadian/Cajun genes explain in part my own love of gardening. And a natural disposition to be wary of those in power and those envious of the success--however slight--of others.

Briefly....

So glad this guy's not going to be President: "Gingrich Walks out During Interview with Student Reporter," in Slate. I mean, really, petulance doesn't wear well in a leader. Imagine four years of stunts like this.

But here are the people who disagree with me: The Atlantic's video of the day. Bully for them.

As Kevin Drum says, not much of anything new was added to the George W. Bush and the National Guard story in Joe Hagen's article in the  May edition of the Texas Monthly , but, distilled, it does deliver some cautionary reminders:

• The rich, powerful, politically-connected are not like you and me, and don't forget it. If drafted, their children don't go to war, and they don't have to flee to Canada to avoid deploying. While someone less fortunate serves and dies in their place or lives the rest of his life in a foreign country, they get safe assignments and (finally) grow up to be President.
• Career politicians (often, and selectively, perhaps) look out for other politicians, even those in the competing party. This is how they bargain; this is how they accrue power.
• Powerfully rich and influential people can destroy lives or hinder the aspirations of others more admirable: Walter V. Robinson, Boston Globe reporter: "...the only [2004 presidential] candidate who ended up with a serious credibility problem about his military service was John Kerry, who had absolutely nothing to hide or be ashamed of."

Useful reminders.

Faith, Hope, and . . . . Anticipation

Nothing exemplifies faith and hope as much as a garden, I think. To begin gardening is a step into faith....faith that one can do the job, faith that the weather will be beneficial, faith that the outcome will bring pleasure or, at least, sustenance. One plants those dry little seeds hoping that they will sprout and that predators won't decimate the crop. Of course, one hopes a garden can generate charity, too: we all love our neighbors as ourselves when the cucumbers over-produce. On the other hand, charity withers when one spies a worm on a tomato leaf.

And oh...what anticipation as one daily observes the sprouts growing and bearing fruit.

Here are a few photos I took in the garden today that exemplify all of these emotions--and more.

Anticipating eating the Creole tomatoes

Nasturtiums for beauty and salads

This is how I feel in my gardens.

Thai basil sprouts (Queenette)

Uh oh....daily maintenance required

beautiful but not wanted

kumquat ripening

just-set satsuma fruits

sweet oranges

young sunflower sprouts

a dwarf gardenia

crooked-neck squash sprouts

more basil sprouts--lettuce leaf or Genovese

tiny arugula sprouts

Despite the pointed bamboo stakes, Persephone finds a shady spot.

The Worth of Physical Labor

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, temperatures and rainfall were much above normal here in Louisiana. Consequently, in February and March, I found myself working against weather to dig and to plant the flower and herb beds that I had planned during the winter. I spent most of March digging, weeding, planting, and embellishing the landscape, as illustrated by the accompanying photo of the bamboo backdrop I created for my Japanese lantern. The previous owner of this property planted a line of bamboo along the property line (more or less) at the back of the three lots that we have purchased, and I cut the bamboo to make this screen, an edging to a flower bed, and stakes for our tomatoes. My labor in the bamboo patch had dual purposes: to create material for my gardens and to remove what bamboo was leaning over and touching the roof of our workshop. The pest control guy told us that termites could travel from the overarching bamboo limbs and damage the wooden walls of the workshop. 

Unless I choose to create another flower or herb bed, the most laborious part of gardening is over for the season. Now I'm in maintenance mode: watering sprouts, protecting sprouts from birds, weeding (which I do a bit at a time every day), gathering the fruit when it's ripe, and enjoying the beauty of blooms. 

I relished the physical labor, for it got me out of the house, away from online commentary and the stupidity of the campaign season. One has less time to brood when one is working hard.