Wait, Didn't I Already Have This Mid-Life Crisis?

On my 40th birthday, years away from finding out I was adopted, I felt badly for my mom.  Here was a woman, so I believed, who had tried for years to have children (I think that part's true) and finally had me when she herself had seen 40 come and go. I wondered what must it be like realizing this "late in life" baby was reaching the "welcome to middle-age" milestone. I assumed the answer was not great. I actually got her a present and gave it to her as we stood in line for dinner at Dave and Buster's, which is where she insisted we all go.

That day was memorable for a lot of reasons, many of which were not celebratory, so I don't think I even fully realized how much of a stressful day it was for her until literally right now, but the tell was that she had orchestrated it all around the things she wanted to do: it was her choice to go out and eat (and refused to take no for an answer) and where. Maybe she didn't give birth to me, but she could do the math, and if I was 40, that put her squarely in her 80's. There were a lot of people going through a crisis at that table that night, as it turns out. Any mid-life crisis I might have been having was the very least of them. The food, however, was surprisingly good.

When my husband and I were the same age my daughter is now, give or take, we lived in a modest house on the far north end of Austin.  The kids became friends with some of the other kids on the street, as children are better than adults at doing, and two of the families joined ours with having at least one member who had a late May, early June birthday (I was the only outlier in my family), so we would gather together and have a group celebration every year we lived there.  I don't keep in touch with the adults any longer, but I'm still in touch with one of the boys. His 40th birthday was the week before last. When the notification came up on Facebook, I stared at it for a minute, then blinked rapidly a few times, like maybe I wasn't seeing it right. My brain wasn't quite comprehending that here this young boy my girls played with was now older than I was when that was happening.

He stood in the front of the line to a lot of birthdays for that generation: my oldest daughter would have turned 38 four days later, my niece saw her own 40th a few days after that, and my youngest woke up to 35 a week ago tomorrow.

I gotta tell you, it's a mind(bleep).

It's not that I think they're old.  Or that I'm locked in to a vision of them only as children and cannot grasp that they are functioning adults. And it's not the same as what I think my mom was going through, which I believe was a fear of death (because she definitely was afraid of it). I'm actually not sure I know to describe what this feeling I'm having is precisely. 

I will say I thought of myself in my 30's as firmly entrenched in adulthood, meaning I perceived that I had been one for so long. After all, if I had been a football or hockey player, I would be referred to as a veteran at that point and people would be wondering when I was going to retire. When in fact, with this new perspective, I realize that wasn't the case. I was still pretty new playing this game of life. Nor was I as mature as I thought I was.  (I learn that I'm not as mature as I ought to be on an almost daily basis, so...you know that's not a new realization really.) As I hit 40 I didn't think of myself as old exactly, but I did, again, think that I'd been at this adulting thing for a good, long time.  Now when I see my generation's kids turning these ages, and I remember things they did, things they said, things they wore when they were in elementary school like it was just a few months ago, and it sends me reeling.

Pondering this further, I confess that there is some benign fear of being closer to the end than the beginning, but it's not that I think I'm about to fall off the cliff or anything.  It's more a matter of the fact that all has me realizing how precious time is, and how fast it slips through our fingers. And how, when I was in my 30's and 40's I was so busy just going and doing, I never stopped to just appreciate being who and what I was in that moment, and who I had in my life. At that age, it tended to be about trying to be something more than I was. To be fair, that wasn't just selfish, it was for my kids that I wanted that but I wish I had taken more time with them when they were young enough to still want my company, because I can see now how truly brief a time that is. But you can't get that back.  There are no do-overs.

Yeah, I think that's it.  That's the crisis: it went so quickly, and I was blissfully ignorant back then, but having all these "kids" turn certain milestones has removed that veil of ignorance. 

Bottom line is you think you'll have time. Time to save for retirement. Time to take vacations. Time to enjoy your children. Time to read all those books and see all those movies.  But to bastardize a line from one of my favorite songs, Time Does Not Stand Still.

For any readers in that 30-50 year old range, take note. Slow down and take your time now.

For my generation, all I can say to us is: don't squander what's left. Live, don't just exist.

A Weighty Subject

For me - for this family - the topic of weight is a heavy one in absolutely every sense of the word but since I sniffed around that pen in my last post where I referenced the Great COVID Weight Loss Campaign, I might as well dive in. 

The reality is I'm like others out there: women in our postmenopausal years that find we've got the stubborn belly fat, and metabolism that is going so slowly it's almost pedaling backwards. We might still exercise, but our weight seems to almost take that as a challenge to show us it can add more than we can sweat off. And, I'm sure if you're thinking, yeah, that's me then you also have at least one friend who still looks svelte and you sometimes secretly hate her. It's all very stressful, and as it happens, I learned a long time ago that I tend to eat my stress.

Despite "diet" being the ultimate four letter word in our family, I had gotten to a point where my weight was starting to not only be a cosmetic issue, but was beginning to lean into a health concern. My cholesterol was borderline bad, any kind of bad air quality day winded me terribly. And, yeah, I hated what I saw in the mirror. So when the Pandemic shut us all in, I decided I was going to do it differently than certain others under this roof. I wasn't going to binge watch streaming channels, and I wasn't going to binge bake (well, okay, I did a little). I was going to get healthy. I got help from a program from our insurance at work that allowed us to enroll in a coaching program for free that lasted a year called RealAppeal. Add that to the Peloton my husband had gotten us for Christmas the year before, and while it took the whole year plus some, I did it.  I lost 50 pounds.

Fast forward almost three years and where are those 50 pounds?  Well they're with me; I seem to have found them. Actually it's more like 20 found their way home, but enough to be depressing.  And I ride the Peloton with a religious fervor that exceeds what I was doing even in 2020-21.  So what happened?! Great question - but it's probably the ice cream. Maybe the chocolate stout beer I allow myself every now and again. Maybe it's the croutons I eat straight out of the bag (seriously, I got a "year in review" kind of email from Sam's Club recently and the number one item I bought was Member's Mark croutons). After 18 months of denying myself the simple little pleasures of The Oakmont Bakery, maybe I went a little hard the other way. Now don't get me wrong, I didn't park myself out at Oakmont or anything, it's still a special treat, but yeah, my granddaughter and I have made our way out there a few Saturdays. And, when I was counting out the number of times she and I went for ice cream when I was babysitting more than I am now...well, that might contribute to why I'm not babysitting as much now (seriously, the number of photos I could have chosen of her with ice cream in her hand was sort of an a-ha moment).

I know the science behind all of this, but this isn't a blog about the science of aging, it's the experience of it. I wanted us to share our WTF moments as we journey down the road, and what I realize as I contemplate my reaction to all of this is that all of these changes we're going through have made me want to react emotionally and impetuously, throwing reason out the window. I want the easy fix products like Golo promise. Man, I came so close to ordering that a few times, it's like my finger was hovering over the keyboard...and I KNOW there's not an easy button. Losing that 50 pounds was hard, hard work and a lot of giving up things I enjoy, like that pumpkin flavored cone Cookie's Creamery carries year round. Like not just enjoying it less but giving it up altogether - at least that's what it takes for me.

And it's not just women.  I listen to local sports talk every morning and in the last 30 minutes I've heard two different weight loss for men ads.

The decision is: do I enjoy life a little and just accept I'm not model thin, or do I want to have the body and not the ice cream?  So far, I've chosen to live a little.

What's the journey like for you?

Summertime

"Summer time, and the livin' is easy."

- Ira Gershwin / George Gershwin / Du Bose Heyward / Dorothy Heyward

Clearly the four people it took to come up with that iconic lyric had others doing their household work for them. Summer has it uses: hammocks, swimming pools, baseball (if you're not a Pirates fan that is, if you are then that's just a sad part of the season), ice cream stands. For me, it's a time when as a superstitious, ritual driven sports fan, I can choose whatever coffee mug I want because I don't have to plan it around "game day mugs". Of course that means there are no game days, so a bit of a double-edge sword there. But as a homeowner, it's anything but easy. And as an aging homeowner, summer will tell you a lot about where you truly are in your life.

For instance, when I just passively look at my yard, it's a slightly larger than average suburban yard on a gentle slope. When I'm mowing my yard, it's an estate built into the side of a mountainous incline. Want to watch a grandmother cuss like a sailor? Come watch me mow. I need to remember that the neighbors to the right of us have a toddler now and police myself, but the more tired and frustrated I get, the more the four letter descriptives about the work at hand come out.

Looks gentle, right? Yeah, right,

It's fair to ask why don't you just hire someone to mow it. There are choices one makes when supporting an aging adult completely, and our lawn service was one of the first luxuries to go (it helped that they stopped showing up regularly).  If you ask me to choose between going to a handful of hockey games or having the ease of someone else doing my yard, hockey wins every time.  But there will come a point where it's not a choice I get to make.  Our bodies will make it for us.  At one point last summer, hot, filthy, sweaty and smelly, feeling like I'd just come through the Battle of the Bastards (okay, maybe that's being slightly overdramatic), I looked at my husband and asked if we're there yet. But we're not there yet because there is the undeniable fact that if you're trying to stay active, mowing is a great way to get your steps in without ever leaving home. 

When I went through my COVID-let's-get-in-shape year, I insisted I do the mowing for that reason.  It wasn't pretty, I was hating it and myself every weekend, and the hubs made a lot of fun of me for how slow I would go, but I could get the whole yard done in a single session (with some notable breaks where I would look busy pulling weeds or trimming but was really just trying to recuperate a bit). After that summer we would split it from one week to another.  But this year, he's the one in the get-in-shape mode so he wants to do it, but he's tempering how he goes now.  Front yard one day. Backyard the next.  Rome wasn't built in a day. Our yard isn't mowed in one either.  Seems to be working better than my foul-mouthed all-out assault.

The family on the other side of us are also young parents, but their kids are a bit older and heavily into organized sports, so in true Yinzer fashion, their extended family steps in to help take care of things, and one of the dads (so roughly our age) does their mowing, and I notice he does the same thing now.  He can't make the whole yard in a single day (and it's smaller than ours but also with a deceiving slope). I saw him from my office window the other day walking up their front steps after he'd done half the front.  I thought the poor man was about to have a coronary right in front of my eyes.  In all candor, it's not age as much as he's got the beer drinker's paunch and could definitely stand to lose even more than I could, which is a fair amount.  Sorry if that sounds mean, but the truth sometimes packs a sting - a different kind of pack than we used to carry around on NFL Sundays, sadly.

That day, maybe the next, I was walking Carly in an affluent neighborhood not far from ours.  I love walking there, looking at the lovely old houses and their carefully manicured lawns and lavish gardens.  Some of those yards could fit two of ours on them with room to spare.  And as we walked past one such there was a man, roughly a decade older, painfully bent over walking his push mower slowly up and back, up and....oh-so-slowly...back.  I stopped by his house today and looked: his slope kicks my slope in the butt.  That's a hard yard to mow with a push-mower no matter who you are.

He clearly has some money or he couldn't afford the taxes on a lot like that, and our neighbor's family could pool together funds and just hire a lawn service for my neighbor. Why do we all continue to oh-so-painfully work that hard at something that I am willing to bet gives none of us joy at this stage in life.  I certainly don't see ecstasy on any of our faces when mowing.  I've decided it's because we just can't give in yet.  It would be admitting we're not the young, vibrant, capable homeowners who dreamed of how it would be to pamper our very own yards and groom them and put the stamp of our nurturing care on them.  We were the Kings and Queens of our castles and thought we always would be. We're not ready to step down from that throne. Even if, strictly speaking, being royalty means we would have people doing our dirty work...sometimes my logic is flawed, but you get the point, right? A lot about aging, I've decided, is about the battle for control.  And this is a big one.  And it's a bastard. So maybe I wasn't being overly dramatic before after all.

Baggage

I try not to live in my regrets. Mainly because I have so many. If I let them, it'd be like the poster for Drag Me to Hell - I'd be enveloped and sucked down by all the ghosts of the stupid shit I've done in life.  I've screwed up way more than almost anyone else who isn't serving a prison sentence. Maybe that's overly dramatic, but maybe it really isn't.  I always jokingly say when talking about my career that I learned by making mistakes.  I had a LOT of lessons in both my work and personal lives.  Not sure why I'm so prone to being a screw up - impetuous I guess.  I leap before I look a lot, or I did anyway. Sometimes I'd get so worked up or passionate about something, I failed to see reason. The list could go on. So best to just look forward and not back, trust me. But once a year as the calendar turns to May, it's hard as a mother not to stew in the juices of past mistakes. There's Mother's Day to ponder one's shortcomings in that role for one thing, but primarily it's because my oldest daughter's birthday is in late May. Of course she's no longer here to celebrate said birthday, and invariably I tend to wonder if she was, would she even have a relationship with me? Or would she have shut me out as the reason she struggled as a teenager.  She wouldn't be entirely right if that's how she felt, but she wouldn't be entirely wrong either. Of course, we'll never know because she's been gone almost 15 years now.

But why am I thinking about all this early when the calendar still says April? Well, ironically, it's indirectly due to a posthumous gift my daughter left me: Fall Out Boy. When we were organizing a fund raising art exhibit in her honor back in 2009/early 2010, I was trying to pull together the music for it and was going through all her CD's and sampling them. I knew about a lot of the bands in her collection but she had all these FOB discs, and I had never heard them before.  So I'd load them up and give them a go. And I loved them.  Where had they been? Why hadn't she done what she always did and try to get me exposed to these guys? Of course, half the time she'd do that with a band, and if I ended up liking them then she'd discard them as no longer worthy.  She hated it when a band got too popular, and I seemed to be the litmus test for that: if square old Mom liked a band, they'd peaked and needed to retire. The exceptions were Foo Fighters and Sigur Ros.  She survived me liking them but they were exceptions.  Maybe she'd kept Fall Out Boy to herself for that reason. Whatever the reason was, the cat was out of the bag. An acoustic version of What a Catch, Donnie made the playlist but maybe more notable I was hooked. And how. When they came through Pittsburgh recently when I had the migraine bout, I drug myself there. I told my husband there were only three bands I'd make it out the door for feeling the way I did. Rush, Foo Fighters and the great guilty pleasure band: Fall Out Boy.

A few days later my husband rewarded that loyalty by surprising me with a signed copy of the lead guitarist's autobiography.  Joe Trohman, it's no surprise, is a funny engaging writer, but he's carrying a lot of anger and resentment toward his deceased mother. His mother, he fully, clear-headedly acknowledges was the way she was because she had a brain tumor eradicated through radiation in the 70's. The treatment changed her and significantly altered the way she could express affection, among many other odd behaviors. In short, she was mentally ill. But of course that's not his fault, and for a young boy it was a rough way to grow up, admittedly, and he hopefully processed a lot of that damage in the writing process but the pages tell me he wasn't there yet when he started. And his mother herself apparently held onto a lot of resentment toward her parents. I'm sure if he could have kept digging into his family history, the cycle would repeat itself back to the cave dweller days, and I say that only because I think that's the way a lot of families are. And as I read all this written by a contemporary of Kelsey's about a mom who is of my generation, I'm thinking a lot about the amount of baggage I left my own children with. How could I not really? And then I can't help but ponder the mental weight I brought to the job of parenting that I had accumulated growing up with a father who self-medicated his PTSD with booze, and a mother who was complicated to say the very least. Sometimes the spouses of alcoholics have as much if not more to work through, let me just leave it there.

I swore I'd parent differently. All that meant is I made different mistakes.  It's not lost on me that I'm incredibly lucky that my younger daughter still has a relationship with me, including accompanying me to the concert the other day.

But here's something I know: there's no erasing the past. I can make amends where I can and should but that doesn't change history. Personally, all I can do is work through my own upbringing and find a way to make peace with it.  I did that work about my dad long after he died. Casting off all that resentment was liberating.  I feel lighter.  And I genuinely feel like I got my dad back. He'll never know any of this, but I know it, and I think it sends positive little ripples through the rest of my life. The history is still there, but I changed my future.

I hope that our children find that same release and forgive us for all that messy baggage we packed up for them to carry around. Not for our sakes. But so they find the same sense of release I felt.  But I also realize we can't make that happen, they have to do that work themselves. 

And we need to make peace that we weren't perfect humans. 

My Gum Band's Got No Snap!

urbandictionary.com

The 90th birthday celebration for my mother-in-law is officially now more than a week behind us. One would think I suddenly have all the time in the world to blog, read, and not the least of which is to catch up on all the Oscar nominees I couldn't see before the actual ceremony (I have done some of that: I can now discuss Poor Things and American Fiction with you if you're so inclined). But the reason I was lazing around watching movies after the party and the furious prep for it was over is part of a hard lesson I've had to learn about aging: one does not snap back easily once in the 60+ age bracket from illness, injury or just in general exhaustion. I have qualified for all three so far this April.

The two weeks leading up to the actual event were brutal. No one's fault.  Bad karma maybe, and definitely rough timing, but nothing anyone, including myself, set me up for. But the hits, once they started, kept coming. I ended up first with a brutal migraine that lasted well over 48 hours mid-week the week before. Then the grands came to stay for a couple of days, and I picked up something from them - likely because I was already sleep deprived and vulnerable because of the migraine. Flu? Maybe. I can tell you it wasn't COVID because we tested for that, thinking we might actually have to call the party off. All I know for sure is that by Easter Sunday I was the sickest I could ever recall being, and by Monday it was worse. Tuesday took it to a new low, and I ended up racking up the highest temperature I have ever had in my life, all while Mother Nature was hammering the entire region with freezing rain that flooded our basement and hit us with snow squalls when it wasn't raining.  By the Wednesday before the party, which was scheduled for the coming Sunday, I couldn't quite believe I was still so sick, but between whatever I was sick with added to the cold weather, absolutely everything ached. My head, my back, my legs. My toes hurt. I wasn't rebounding. Which meant that walls weren't getting patched and painted from where my mother-in-law bashed into them with her walker like it was a Sherman tank on the way to the Battle of the Bulge. Bathrooms weren't getting cleaned and spring flowers weren't going to grace our visitors as they walked up to our door. My husband in the meantime had his hands full with his mother 's care and keeping the water creeping into the basement at bay.

I sound like I'm complaining but seriously I'm not.  I probably was at the time.  My sense of self-pity was pretty refined at the worst of it.  But it's more that I just can't quite believe I couldn't push through it and will myself to be better. 

As a working mother who has always suffered from migraines, I adopted over time a Han Solo like toughness: never tell me the odds. I could power through - miserable and half-assed but still upright - just about anything. By Wednesday I realized my ability to snap back and gut it up through an illness coupled with miserable weather wasn't going to be a happening thing. I thought about the old rubber bands I'll come across in my office from time-to-time. So old they've lost their elasticity and they're just brittle. I felt that defined me in that moment: just a brittle old gum band ready for the trash.

In the end, everything pretty much did get done. The fever broke, and I wasn't a physical threat to anyone who came that Sunday. The sun even came out and it was a pleasant, mild day. And my mother-in-law truly loved her party, which of course was the whole goal, but the next day both she and I were exhausted.  I tried getting back on the Peloton for the first time in almost two weeks that morning and could only handle 20 minutes. Badly, I might add. More than a week later, I'm still not back where I was.  There's no life in my legs. I still have a cough that racks through me after I ride, and I still tire easily.

Is this what it's going to be like moving forward? Things will hit me hard and fast, but leave me only slowly and with a fight? If so, I think of all the things I've faced in the post 60-yr old landscape - wrinkles, gray hair, weird bumps on legs and arms and veins that look like a map of Middle Earth carving across my skin - this loss of bodily control is the hardest. Not just physically but mentally. 

But, for anyone else who has gone through something like this, I will offer what I always said as a migraine sufferer: the one upside is you would never appreciate how great just feeling normal is unless you get taken down by a migraine at least once in your life. I can appreciate that same sentiment now. Just sitting here now without every inch of my body aching is worth being thankful for.  Maybe there's some snap left in the old gum band after all.

The Tortoise

There's been a lot made about the age of the two Presidential candidates.  I don't want to go down the political road at all.  At all.  I know where my vote is going, you probably know where yours is too and debating it will only frustrate everyone, but yeah, I can't deny it's crossed my mind that the two likely candidates are both significantly older than me, and I'm pretty sure I could not lay down the kind of hours it requires to competently lead a country.  Particularly one facing the challenges ours does.  And after 16 or so hours of constant unrelenting stress every single day, could I remain mentally sharp? Not sure because my whole being screams at me to stop short of that any longer. Of course, I don't actually know if any sitting President has to work a 16-hr day, it's just assuming on my part that between formal events, world events unfolding inconveniently not on EST workday schedules, and the volume of work there must be, it's not a 9-to-5 gig.

Of course, they do have young, eager staffers at their beck and call, which I do not.  I have four aging collies and a husky who likes to sleep under my desk all day but really doesn't contribute much to the workload. But being more than a decade younger than either candidate, I'm here to tell you as much as I'd like to say you're as young as you feel, come around 9:00 PM these days I feel like I'm a 100. You would not want me in charge of the nuclear codes after 10:00 PM.  The world could be ending and I'd sleep right through it. Until I needed to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom that is - another fun part of aging.

Case in point: I was intent on finishing a deliverable one night last week.  Used to be if that took me to the next morning I was there until the next morning to get it done. That night I just hit both a mental and physical wall before it was even 9:00 PM. I just cannot lay down the number of hours I used to or even really need to. The brain just shuts me down. And it does feel a lot like some little munchkin inside my head just flips a switch and says, "Turn out the lights, your party is over." And I truly have to obey. It's hard to describe. But there's no option to shake it off or take a break and sit back down. Nope, I'm just done. That night, I was so intent on getting my task finished, I did try to fight with myself for a couple of minutes.  I lost.  My brain said, "You are solidly, 100% done for the day, I'm shutting it down."

I've read some articles that say older workers can work just as hard and be as productive as their younger counterparts so maybe something is wrong with me. There may be a correlation that older workers don't gather around the water cooler as much or show up late or ask to leave early, but when it comes to all-nighters, can we really still pull them off like a kid fresh out of college? I don't think so based on personal experience. I need time to rest and recharge now, whereas I could have made a great Energizer Bunny in my day. Well...that's not true. I was never the bunny, fast and energetic, I was the tortoise that just never quit.

Of course this opens up the whole work-life balance conversation.  One tends to wonder if I spent a little more time actually balancing the two if I could work longer and better now. But there's no telling. It's history. But this question isn't, it's as relevant as it probably was in my day, I just never asked it: is it right for companies to expect anyone - whether 22 or 72 - to pull down monster hours? Particularly if your position is anything less than leader of the free world?

As a young woman in the workforce intent on proving I could run with the big boy dogs, I somehow saw my worth as a worker tied to the number of hours I could lay down. Some of my employers over the years demanded it. Others might not have demanded it, but were happy to let me live with that mindset. Clients wanted us available at all times day or night, regardless of whatever else we had happening in our lives. I think looking back on it now I wish I'd put more boundaries on all of that and in turn worked smarter and proved my value that way. But, again, the past is history. Only the future is yet to be written.

And this chapter is done for the night. I am turning out the lights.

So how do all of you do it?  Those of you reading who are still in the workforce: how do you keep your energy up?

The Luckiest Generation

(Disclaimer: This probably should have been a Thanksgiving post, but you know - I'll likely forget about it, so you're getting it now.)

Masters of the Air, Apple TV

I've been watching Masters of the Air.  It's been a hard watch for me because my father was a B-17 and B-29 bomber pilot.  For any of you who saw Godzilla Minus One (and if you haven't: do because even if you're not into monster movies like me, it's a genuinely great film) the devastation Kōichi Shikishima returns home to...well, my dad did that.  He was one of the pilots on the fire raids over Tokyo trying to bomb Japan into submission. He was 27 at the time.

It haunted him until the day he died. He was pretty open about talking about the war unlike a lot of veterans, but he fashioned it the way he wanted us to hear it, not the way it really was. He always told my mom it was the safest of the armed services. He told me stories about the war as if he was narrating an Indiana Jones movie - he made it seem adventurous almost. I remember watching a war movie with Mom one night that I hadn't seen before. It ended up being particularly brutal to the point it made me uncomfortable thinking of her watching it, knowing she knew young men in those shoes who didn't come back. At the end of it I turned to her and apologized.  I'll never forget her telling me it was okay, she was just glad my dad had been a pilot. I nodded like I knew that was right. It wasn't until I read Andy Rooney's autobiography My War many years later and after Dad's death that I realized the extent to which he had lied. Rooney set me straight about the mortality rate of bomber pilots and what even the ones who survived endured. They called my dad's type of plane the Flying Fortress. It was a flying coffin for so, so many. My dad was incredibly lucky.  He suffered one minor wound, a tiny scar to show for it. But the horror he must have seen. The fear every time they left the runway. The anxiety. And he did it anyway. And then to live with the horror of what he was ordered to do over Tokyo. My heart breaks over and over and over again as I watch what seems to be a pretty accurate telling of the 100th Bombardment Group (a few issues here and there but overall it fits with what I know), and they're pretty frank about it being a brutal, deadly war. I never stop thinking of my dad.  But all from the comfort of my living room because never - not at 27 or now at 63 - did I have to face the things he did.

Credit: Joseph Louw

And that's made me think that for all my gritching about aging, I have a lot to be thankful for, having grown where and when I did. I was too young to have any of my classmates serve in Vietnam, and too old for the Gulf War.  I was alive during the Civil Rights Movement and remember the day Dr. King was shot, but sheltered in the bosom of the Rockies where the population was about as white as the snow in December I had no idea what really went on to try and secure basic equality for people of color.  I was in college in Texas before I realized there had been segregated bathrooms in my lifetime. Pardon the pun but I shit you not. I was WAY too young to sweat out the Cuban Missile Crisis. I became a Godzilla fan because he symbolized the threat of nuclear annihilation we all lived under growing up but I can't tell you I led a traumatized childhood because of it (I did have some intense dreams of trying to find shelter during various weird attacks though). But all in all I grew up in a time where we still accepted that things progressed in an upward trajectory, each generation righting some of the wrongs of their forefathers and making the world a better place. Talk about naïveté!

But I am thankful I lived in a time and a place where we seldom worried about locking the door at night. Where I could wander anywhere in the town my bike or legs could carry me and my parents didn't worry (there was a serial killer who lived on Sourdough Rd for a time however - David Meirhofer - and I had friends who lived on that street, so...yeah, maybe they should have).

I am thankful that I met many of my father's friends, most of whom were also war veterans, when they were middle aged and still full of life and generally willing to tell me their stories, glad I suppose that someone my age was interested. 

I am really glad I lived in a time before social media. I use it now like just about everyone, but it would have been so destructive to an immature soul like mine when I was young, and I would have been so destructive with it.  And while I would've been happy to have had a cellphone when I was very, very pregnant and stuck in traffic in Austin wondering what I'd do if my water broke while I just sat there going nowhere fast, I didn't appreciate at the time what a relief it was to just disconnect when the workday was done and should have. Now I answer emails and texts at hockey games.  You're never really off.

Don't get me started on the environment, or how crazy and divisive politics is now. Our great scandal was Watergate, which broke when I was in the sixth grade, my friends and I just starting to get interested in party politics.  It seemed so awful to us; that a sitting President would do such a thing! I wonder what those young girls would've thought of the January 6th Insurrection. 

Bozeman / MSU

While the world was far from perfect, it was a peaceful time in Bozeman, Mt. Later I would find that peace stifling, but I can be grateful for that time and place, and if I have any idealism left in me it was fostered there. I was indeed so lucky to have grown up when and where I did.

Now, of course, I worry about the time and place my grands are growing up in, and want to use my time left to make my childish belief that each generation leaves things better than they found them a reality.  Not sure I'll make much of a difference in a world so polluted, so full of hate, but they're worth fighting for so it's worth trying for.