Indiana Oh Indiana

 I suppose that most of us have our own definitions for aging, and I’m not talking about fine wines. When we’re ten years old, we can’t wait to become teenagers who begin dating, partly because it means access to the family car with that jingle of keys in our pockets or purses and the joyful belief (or pretense) that we’ve reached a level of maturity that gives us carte blanche that funnels its way too often down to the freedom to imbibe in alcohol or appear grown up with cigarettes puffing up our frail egos in the pretense that we’re finally mature in that universal quest for independence.

Of course, as teens we don’t yet understand the burden of mortgages, utility bills, gas-guzzling vehicles or changing dirty diapers. That curtain doesn’t go up until most of us reach our twenties  and the sometimes bleak landscape of aging faster every year until our hair begins its quest to turn silver or simply leave the premises completely.

I recall that as a teenager, I heard wonderful stories and memories from elderly relatives so that now I comprehend why such shared recollections become significant parts of who we are. I’ve reached the stage where I can’t always recall where I placed my keys or a book I was reading, but I can remember vividly events and conversations from the 1950’s. Seeing the humor and similar happenings in the lives of my aging friends makes it possible for me to see that I’m not alone and that the TV remote has to be SOMEWHERE.  JB

Change happens. I think of my grandparents, who in the early 1900’s didn’t even have a telephone or radio. Their awareness of the world around them was based upon socializing at church, with neighbors and letters written by friends and relatives. Mailing letters cost only a penny in those days around 1900, but the amount of money spent on food and shelter was used with great care beyond our reckoning today. Living as they did until electricity and a telephone became available to them certainly restricted their views on everything that we today take for granted. They were great readers who owned hundreds of books, which were apparently the exception to the money they spent on stricter necessities.

I grew up respecting access to reading material from public libraries that my siblings and I borrowed from our local library that we frequented. Pop culture was extraordinary through television. Our first boob tube was a seven-inch model in 1949 and was amazing to me then, but I was only three years old, so to me it was pure magic. TV was mostly news and programs like Amos and Andy, and The Goldbergs, but being a child, I saw the entertainment almost as magic. The other programs I remember from the early 1950’s are Ding Dong School and Clint Yewel, the weatherman. The new and very effective punishment for us kids became our being sent to our rooms, missing our favorite shows like Howdy Doody.

In some ways, television has separated more than united us as a culture, especially when it comes to politics, but that is inevitable on both sides being viewed so that we can choose one and trash the other. I recall that by the 1960’s, my grandparents had a color TV which was a far cry from their not having even a radio so many years before. I would like to think that TV has united more than divided us as beings of the 21^st Century. As someone who will turn 80 on my next birthday, I can say that television has been a more positive thing in my life than a negative, in terms of information and entertainment. Of course, I’m happiest when I have the remote control.  JB

Time is a kind of abstraction. It’s not something you can hold in your hand (a watch doesn’t count) or save in the physical sense the way we save coins in a piggy bank. Nor is it something most of us ponder, except in celebrations of holidays (especially New Year’s Eve) and particularly on birthdays, blowing out candles that represent our current success at still being around and counting the years, like almost forgotten treasure.

As we age, the years accumulate memories that, even without physical presence, are saved up and brought back, like lovely old Christmas ornaments we dust off and display in December. Memories (good and bad) represent who we are, what we’ve done and what we’ve experienced. Signposts along the way remain in memories of weddings, births, deaths, our shining moments of achievement and regret. We are all living, breathing autobiographies, generally unaware of when our days here will cease, almost like very long movies of epic proportions with a great number of memorable cast members.

The elements of greatest power and importance remain our connections to other people who love us and whom we love. Every life is an epic of varied length and varied cast of characters that is hoped to merit some level of applause when at last the curtain comes down and we can look back at our lives with the words, “I really enjoyed that.”  JB

Many times, I have heard people say, “…but John, spiders are our friends.” Despite all the good things I have heard and read about these creatures, their friendship is something with which I am not the least bit reluctant to part. In the end, they are one of the taboos of my existence. The mere sight of a spider, however small and harmless, causes a chemical reaction in my body so that I become The Incredible Hulk, capable of great speed and tremendous feats of strength. I believe I could toss a grand piano across the room if I thought it would help fend off one of the eight-legged invaders.

My paranoia knows no limit regarding spiders. Sometimes I imagine the particularly large varieties of southern regions carrying hobo sticks and hopping freight cars just to come north right to my house. They don’t need maps. They ALL know where I live, and I can hear them saying, “Hey, you guys, let’s go down to Bolinger’s place in Florida. We can scare him out of town and take over his house without even a mortgage.”

When I was in Mexico, I was in constant fear that at night a scorpion or tarantula would slip into my luggage to lay eggs just to colonize the whole town when I go back. After I got home, I checked my shoes every day for weeks and shook linens out before bed each night. Even a plastic spider can make me convulsive. The only therapy I can accept is something I came up with on my own. I would gradually become accustomed to spiders by beginning with pencil drawings of cartoon quality. The next year, color drawings could be shown…then black and white photos. Color pics could be introduced when I’m in my nineties. That’s as far as my imagination would allow me to go with it at present, but the fear has spiraled over the years and certainly goes back to childhood.  JB

More than any other country on earth, America worships youth. Wisdom, generosity and experience seem to lag far behind the visual appeal of a person who is young and possessor of charisma attractive to the eye and worthy of envy from one who has silver, white, or no hair.

I suspect that most of us who are past the age of sixty may be envious of those who are enjoying (aware or not) of the years that we elderly can only remember from old photo albums or home movies. In America, wisdom and experience are less valuable than physical stamina and eye appeal. I’m not sure that this has always been the case throughout history, but I suspect that  it became much more powerful during the 1920’s when movies began their powerful influence based upon wealth, power and physical appearance.

It often takes time to appreciate the wisdom of the elderly and their vast experience, because current culture demands speed and  easy access to almost any level of insight and intelligence which, in importance, often lag behind our need for eye appeal, which can too easily disappoint us when there is little or nothing behind it.

Speed governs much of what we do. I believe the result over time has shortened our attention spans and diminished our ability to be sympathetic and patient. The greatest fear for the young of the current era is boredom from anything or anyone taking too long. For those of us fortunate enough to reach “old age,” we will need to understand the factor of speed that increases little by little so that finally, haste becomes our master as sympathy and patience diminish.   JB

Political views and their values are some of the most difficult things for me to understand. Their furor is almost religious in many of those who are displaying signs on front lawns but also their establishing social systems with mentally locked gates designed to keep out poisonous thoughts of the opposition. There seems to be an adrenalin rush in unsympathetic views of the opposition’s “other party” that gives people a false idea of loyalty based upon almost black and white interpretations of good versus evil more treacherous than facts.

Looking at Democrats and Republicans reveals a staunch kind of loyalty sometimes going back to parents and their own family members in a sometimes clan-like loyalty from our parents and other family members in a feud that epitomizes the “us versus them” ethic, going back hundreds of years in an almost hereditary acceptance of social superiority over factual data.

Emotions and facts too often wage war against each other in what would otherwise be comic shenanigans on Gilligan’s Island, maybe because self-righteousness is one of the oldest sources of true comedy.

I remember family gatherings when I was growing up that, among thirty guests, would occasionally find one uncle or aunt stepping on a political comment that in the group was like stepping on a landmine. Vocal volumes would rise until Grandpa would take out a brandy decanter to calm the men down while the women rolled their eyes in almost a comic despair.

The rancor always subsided by the wee hours when we were all prepared to face the cold winter air outside and return home to our warm beds and the fact that we had once again survived another familial bout based upon American politics.  JB

For the past two years I’ve had the feeling that I’m some kind of marionette floating around rather a small puppet theater, my strings controlled by someone else. I know I’m alone and that others everywhere yearn to participate fully in life again without the shackles of the pandemic’s safety net or the political rancor that was somehow a part of it.

Just as I was beginning to feel that the world was crawling back to “normal,” our economy experienced what, to me and many others, seemed like a collapse of independence, our political system becoming more and more a child-like war game based upon points and awful opportunities to sneer at the opposition. I developed the psychotic fantasy of everyone from CNN and Fox News being given weapons to obliterate each other as in some kind of computer game.

Then came news items about Vladimir Putin’s plan of attacking the Ukraine, the possibility of devastation and violence bringing me almost to tears. The world I thought I knew just a few years ago had become a cesspool of suspicion, snide political criticism and too many “truths” turning out to be like fake Rolex watches. Yet further reflection made me realize that the world really hasn’t changed very much over the past several years, at least when it comes to world politics. JB

Waiting patiently for my 80^th birthday to pounce upon me in a little more than a year, I still miss my parents and siblings (David and Connie). I think of them daily through reminders in almost every room of my house.

In the sunroom I see the China cabinet that holds a complete set of Mom’s dishes and, across the room, Dad’s mahogany clock that chimes four times an hour on top of a bookcase beside which is an oval-back French chair that was Mom’s favorite because of the blue flowers on the silk upholstery.

Upon a desk in the living room are two photos of my parents at age twenty before they were married. Such things are triggers of recollection that remain parts of my life, like lifelines of comfortable connection.

The hardest part of aging for me is that feeling of nostalgia for all those whom I have loved who are no longer with us, except in old photos and warm memories of happy times we’ve shared. It’s not that my life isn’t about other people and things that are still here. It’s about emotional and spiritual connections that remain through love that can’t be put in a drawer and easily forgotten.

Love isn’t something that can be closed like a wonderful old book and put on a shelf to be forgotten. It’s something that becomes part of us, even after the physical remnants are long gone but stay in an emotional way to remind us that it was real as a kind of optimistic view that we will meet again someday. JB

I suspect that in most homes, there are books of family photos. Such collections in many houses tend to be on top shelves of closets or even in attics where they sometimes become forgotten visual histories of the residents.

Those accumulations of memories are sometimes forgotten until a loved one passes away so that a powerful need for happier times arises as a kind of balm to help soothe the awful sense of loss over final goodbyes.

An irony occurs when most tears are shed over the funniest or most embarrassing images of us when we were most vulnerable at our youngest times.

Family photo albums are like time machines that can take us back to the recent or distant past as a reminder that time has taken us all on inescapable journeys back to both joys and sorrows that accumulate over many years so that images can bring back those whom we have loved and sometimes those whom we have forgotten over time. Those photo albums open forgotten doors of memory and experience that sometimes show us the width and breadth of lifetimes and open doors we may have thought were closed forever.

So the next time an annoying relative gets a camera and flashbulbs ready to capture a moment of unison for later on, just remember that someday the result may be priceless, even if forgotten, treasure to bring back for a precious moment those who loved us and those whom we have loved.  JB

Writing is something we can all use to save some of our thoughts and ideas. Whether the process uses a pen, pencil, computer or typewriter is of little consequence. It’s what we have on our minds that means a lot, as we all need from time to time a way to save what’s on our minds (and in our hearts), sometimes releasing it like poison or expression of love and gratitude even much later.

I still have letters written to me by my parents while I was away from home in college. Just holding the paper in my hands brings back more than I can express in words as goodbyes disappear while I’m reading the messages shared by them so long ago.

Though I appreciate the speedy convenience of computers and their efficiency, e-mails for me can’t capture the deliberate and physical creation of what was done by hand while I was still young, and my parents (and grandparents) were still in their prime. The passage of time plays a large part in the special value of such letters, like that of priceless antiques. They represent almost the same sentiments as old photographs or locks of hair, or Mom’s gentle perfume still residing in an old handkerchief.

The mechanism of memory is something we all share on one level or another. We can’t live in the past, but it’s rewarding to know that loving memories of both joy and sorrow still exist in the power of old photographs or letters and that loving recollections remain so that we are still somehow in touch with those we loved, even many years later through those dear, priceless remnants of younger days that we don’t always appreciate while they occur but become like buried treasure as we age.  JB