Tag Archives: Aging

Reminder

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Reminder

Use it or lose it is advice that you might find
in books of pithy phrases or others of their kind.
Though trite, it seems to really work in matters of the mind,
which we should always try to use when we are in a bind.

Unfortunately, panic too often enters in
and takes the place of where our minds really should have been.
Our fears and doubts and terror creating such a din,
distracting us and so we lose what otherwise we’d win.

“I’ve lost my mind” are words that I have often overused.
(Another phrase the use of which is really much-abused.)
And although exaggeration is a sin widely excused,
it’s hyperbole when meant to mean that we are just confused.

I don’t think  we had these problems when we were in our prime.
Our minds were so much emptier and we had so much time.
We used our minds for calculus or conjuring up a rhyme.
Our wheels were always spinning and could turn upon a dime.

But later on in life our minds are full to overflowing.
We remember where we’ve been but often forget where we’re going.
We try to still go fast when it is fact we should be “Whoa” ing.
and letting life evolve away from simply being knowing.

A baby sleeps within the womb and out of it as well.
He ruminates and plays for years before the school bell.
And so perhaps re”tire”ment is a story we retell–
recalling us to rest and play  before that final knell.


The Prompt:  Use it or lose it.  https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/use-it-or-lose-it/

I’ve Come Undone

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I’ve Come Undone

If I could undo anything that’s happened in my life,
I would not undo enemies or illnesses or strife.
For all led up to my life now that really isn’t bad.
All given, I am happy, and frequently I’m glad.
My palm trees may need clipping and my dogs may have the mange,
but all in all there’s really only one thing I would change.
I’d undo one tequila or two or three or four.
I think that that is all I drank. I can’t remember more.
And after that, that dance I did as others ringed the floor?
I fear I chose to party when I should have chosen the door!

And that knee I rocked on back and forth, remembering the twist?
I fear I chose to overdo instead of to desist.
My friends did not remove me, but cheered me on instead.
And now I have a throbbing knee and needles in my head.
That knee I’d earlier injured when I fell on cobblestones
had healed, I thought, relieving all that aching in my bones.
But now I’m hobbling back and forth–gimpy once again,
for you gotta pay the piper when you choose a life of sin.
I know my knee will heal and that this agony will end,
but please remind me next time that tequila’s not my friend!!

The Prompt: If you could undo something, what would it be? Discuss why, potential repercussions, or a possible alternative.

Mexico Adventure, No Fatalities

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Mexico Night Adventure, No Fatalities

Leaving that swinging small
coffee house art opening of a friend
with the party still roaring
behind me,
I shift to uneven cobblestones
to avoid the nightly
taco stand set up on the sidewalk,
knowing I must be careful,
but pitching forward anyway,
face-down in the dark street.

Seconds later,
still in thrall to the fall,
thwacked shoulder,
scraped palms.
As I lie in the street,
a crowd gathers
like otters to survey
this new intruder to their world.
I can’t stand up.
Lie groaning in the dark.

They offer twenty hands to help me up,
but I need to lie a spectacle  in the street.
Should they call an ambulance?
Can I not rise?
They ward off cars, enfolding me
in their curious and protective circle.
No way with any amount of help
can I push myself up from the street
on this pounding knee.
I become their Saturday night
entertainment.

At last, unable to bear the shock
of pressure on any part of either leg,
I scoot myself over on my bottom to the curb,
hoist myself up to sit on it,
and from there
my right leg can get contact with the street to push.
Two hands help me up and go around me
as I hobble the half block to my car.
Yes, I can drive.
But everything hurts.
“Muy Amable, Senor, y muchas gracias.”

At  home, a straight-legged hobble down the stairs.
Neosporin on the skinned and swollen knee,
Rum and Coke, Advil, Reumofan
in that order.
Arnica and Peyote gel rubbed in sore parts.
The safety and warmth of bed.
and eight hours respite
until that long climb up the stairs
to the last day of my own art exhibition.

It is hard getting old in any country,
but in Mexico,
cobblestones furnish
their own private Hell
that all gringos fall to,
sooner or later.

(The prompt was to tell about the last time someone was proud of you, but It’s hard to be proud in the dark on cobblestones in Mexico.)

Offers

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Offers

When he asked me to marry him
and when we had to bury him–
these times inevitably set
wherein we find that we must let
nature have its way with us.
It does no good to rant and fuss.
Life’s made to reward, then abuse.
Its vagaries we can’t refuse.

All is part and parcel to
the next thing that we’re meant to do.
Good comes from bad and bad from good.
Birth, courtship, marriage, parenthood
fill our lives in marching order,
but every joy must have its border.
Birth leads to death. Love’s often lost.
To release life’s pleasures is the cost

of having and enjoying them.
Coal under pressure becomes a gem.
Remembering this must get you through
the next trial that’s set up for you.
Every day’s  an offer  you can’t refuse–
another pleasure to gain, then lose.
Life’s losses are also its seeds.
We lose our wants to gain our needs.

The Prompt: Set the timer for ten minutes and then tell us about an offer you couldn’t refuse.

“I” Tunes (My week in song)

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“I” Tunes

Tuesday: I met old friends Jim and Ellen (who moved away a year ago) at Adelita’s for ribs and a year’s worth of talk.

Wednesday: I finally met up with the Mac computer repair guy who comes from Guadalajara to pick up sick Macs for repair.  I have my fingers crossed  that they’ll be able to save the Mac Air I spilled a full Coke on.  Later, I made it to my “Not Yet Dead Poets” meeting.

Thursday: It was a “gas” when my stove broke and I couldn’t get the pilot light clicker to go off.  The repairman had just been here, but I couldn’t find his number and panicked until eventually it just wore itself out. Still, please don’t use that back left burner.  Now it sets off the clicker on the burner in front of it!!  I certainly hope nothing bad happens.

An additional thrill for the day that many of you made your own was  “The Thing“ that appeared on my garden wall.

Friday: I met my friends Betty, Liz and Larry at Viva Mexico for one of their enchiladas and a naughty tiramisu and one of their killer margaritas.  Later, I felt . . .

Saturday: It’s been so long since I’ve seen my friend Audrey,  but we spent a few hours at the new quirky cafe named Chillin’ and talked about planning a summer camp for kids in San Juan Cosala and Chapala.

The highlight of the week, of course, was the revelation of just exactly what “The Thing” was.  Laura M. beat out a few close contenders for the prize by naming my newest addition to my home the “Lurkin’ Merkin.”  This is what it really was.

And that, my friends, concludes my week in song.  Please hit the links to hear the music.  —Judy

The Prompt:  Describe your past week by compiling a playlist of five songs.

The Sticky Fingers of Things

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The Sticky Fingers of Things

Over the past year, I have started to feel so encumbered by things that I feel like they are choking me.  Even my art-filled and carefully arranged house, which I love, has started to make me feel like I’m trapped in one of my own collages.

I once wrote that I like to do assemblage because it is an arrangement that is glued down so other people can’t rearrange it, but recently I’ve begun to feel like one of those objects.  I just can’t get myself unpinned from my present life.  It is not that there is anything terribly wrong about it.  Just that I no longer have a feeling of freedom..

Recently, I was asked what I would save if my house were on fire and I could only save five things.  My answer would be an album of childhood pictures, an album of pictures from Africa and Australia, my computer and two backup drives.  Then I’d put them in storage, buy a new computer and go on another trip around the world with no planned itinerary and no planned start or stop dates.

Why can’t I do this on my own?  Who knows why we let ourselves be controlled by things? Maybe it is because we know we can’t take them with us and so we strive to get as much pleasure out of them as possible while we can.  Perhaps it is because we fear that without things, we ourselves are nothing.  Perhaps it is because we cannot see that the beauty is within ourselves.  Perhaps it is because we fear that others give us value simply because of the things around us.

I once heard my eleven-year-older sister tell someone that she liked to visit her younger sisters because they both had such interesting lives and friends.  I felt so sad that she hadn’t said that she loved to visit me because I, myself, was interesting and loved.  I think this has influenced my feeling for her ever since.

My sister is now in the stages of dementia where pretty much everything has been taken from her.  She no longer knows what most common objects are for, but my niece recently told me that she had been given a life-sized baby doll that she holds and rocks and talks to and that the other day she called it Judy. I guess she waited too long to express any feelings of love she might have felt for me. Now, she is seemingly expressing that love toward an object when all these years she could have been expressing it to the person who could have returned it.  Is this what I’m doing by refusing to surrender the objects that fill my life?  Maybe it is time to find out.

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The Prompt:  What five objects would you \save from your burning house?

Leavings

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Photo by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Leavings

Do I walk the long kilometers of beach
to look for the next shell
or stand stable, like that woman
casting and recasting her hook,
patiently waiting to pull her world
in to her?

I’m gathering things
that I’ll collect into stories–pinning them down
to use like words.
Nothing wrong in finding meaning
through a piece of driftwood, a stone or shell.
Objects are only things
we cast our minds against
like images against a screen–
a shadow glimpsed crossing a window shade.

My shadow cast in front of me
is such a different thing
from one I cast behind.
In the first, I am constantly hurrying
to catch up to what I’ll never catch up to.
In the other, I am leaving behind
what I can only keep by walking away from it.

I take this place along with me
in clear images–
not as they were,
but as my mind has cast them;
so every picture
taken of the same moment
is different,
each of us seeing it through our unique lens.

We cast these things in bronze or silver-gelatin,
stone, clay
or poetry.

A grandma
holds out pictures of her children
and her grandchildren.
See? Her life’s work.
And then this and this,
without further effort on her part.

I share stories of children I don’t know
who gently unwind fishing line from a struggling gull,
hearts found on the beach
or other treasures
nestled in a pile of kelp.
I find my world in both these findings and departings;
the leaving each morning to go in search of them
the part I find most exhilarating–
perhaps teaching this
woman of the death-themed night-terrors
not to worry.
That longer leaving is just a new adventure.

People who do not remember
let me slip away
when I would have held on,
given any encouragement.
Yet fingers, letting go, flex
for that next adventure.

Life is
all of us letting go
constantly–
taking that next step
away from
and to.

A white shell.
I have left it there
turned over
to the brown side,
so someone else
can discover it, too.

Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt: Image Search—Pick a random word and do Google image search on it. Check out the eleventh picture it brings up. Write about whatever that image brings to mind. (Although the eleventh image was of a shadow on a beach, I’ve elected to reproduce my own photo here.)

Remember Me By This

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In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “For Posterity.”

The Prompt today was to write a post that you want to be remembered by. I’d like to try something different.  Instead of my telling you what post I’d like to be remembered by, would each reader please post a comment telling which post you would most remember me by?  It’s possible to search by topic if you don’t remember the title, or you can just scroll back through two years of prompts until you find your favorite.  This would be very very interesting to me, might help you find some posts you’ve never read, and also give me a day off from the frustration of searching and searching for ways to learn and remember PC ways.  Yes, I’m getting there, and I am beginning to think there was a reason for this painful lesson that forced me to learn how to coexist with my Acer.  Last night my Mac came alive for a few minutes several times before shutting off, which led Duckie to believe the problem might be in the fan. It has resided in the rice bag for most of the time since it came back from Daniel the dismemberer and is back there now, with my camera, which I also got to work for a few minutes, so perhaps not all is lost and praise be to the restorative powers of rice.  Remember this if you ever soak your camera or computer! I think the salt air is also a big contributor to computer demise. My next-door-neighbor Daniel (different Daniel) says his computers usually only last a year!  Okay, on to your assignment.  Please, please.  Judy (aka Jury)

Update: I finally answered the prompt as written here.

Bearings

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Bearings

“I’ve lost my bearings,” she said to me, perplexed. She was sitting alone in her room, piles of clothing on the bed and floor around her—the collapsed small tents of abandoned full skirts, the shards of scarves and small mismatched clutterings of shoes.

She had been abandoned in a world that only she lived in, that she knew less about than any of us who tried to visit her there. For her, even changing clothes became an insurmountable obstacle—a challenge that rivaled childbirth, her master’s thesis, an unfaithful husband, an addicted son, an autistic grandson. It rivaled the war she’d staged against her much-younger sister—the power she held over that sister by her rejection of her. It rivaled her efforts to enter the world again as a single woman and to try to win the world over to the fact that it was all his fault. It rivaled her insistence that it was the world that was confused in refusing to go along with all her beliefs and justifications.

She had barely if ever left a word unspoken when it came to an argument. It was so simple, really. She was always right. That everyone in the world, and more particularly her younger sister, refused to believe this was a thorn in her side. The skin on her cheek itched with the irritation over the unfairness of the world. She had worn a path in it, carving out a small trench so that the skin even now was scaly with that road traversed over and over again by one chewed-off fingernail. “Are you she?” She asked me, and when I admitted I was, she added, “Oh, you were always so irritating. Even as a little girl. Why could you never be what anyone else wanted you to be? You were always so, so—yourself!”

It was my chance, finally, for an honest conversation with this sister 11 years older—more a crabby mother always, than a sister. A chance if she could keep on track long enough to remember both who I am and who we both once were.

“So what was wrong with how I was, Betty? With how I am?”

“Oh, you were always so—“ She stopped here, as though struggling for a word or for a memory. I saw her eyes stray to the floor between the door and the dresser. “There’s that little fuzzy thing there,” she said. I could see her eyes chart the progress of this creature invisible to me across the room.

“But me, Betty. What do you find wrong with me?”

Her eyes came back to me and connected, suddenly, with a sort of snap that made me think we were back in the same world again. I tried to keep judgment out of my own gaze—to keep her here with me for long enough to connect on at least this one question.

“You were,” she said, and it was with that dismissive disgusted tone she had so often used with me since I was a very small child. “You were just so mystical!”

I was confused, not sure that the word she had used was the one she meant to use.

“What do you mean by mystical, Betty?” I sat on the bed beside her and reached out for the static wisps of hair that formed a cowlick at the back of her head—evidence of the long naps which had once again taken over her life, after a long interim period of raising kids, running charities and church prayer circles, and patrolling second-hand-stores, traveling to PEO conventions and staying on the good side of a number of eccentric grandchildren.

“Oh, you know. All those mystical experiences! The E.S.P. and all those other stories you told my kids. And Mother. Even Mother believed you.”

Then a haze like a layer of smoke once more seemed to pass over her eyes, dulling her connection to this time and reality and to me.

Her chin trembled and a tear ran down her cheek. She ran one fingernail-chewed index finger over and over the dome of her thumb and her face broke into the crumpled ruin of a child’s face who has just had its heart broken, the entire world of sadness expressed in this one face. I put my arms around her, and for the first time in our lives, she did not pull away. We rocked in comfort to each other, both of us mourning something different, I think. Me mourning a sister who now would never be mine in the way that sisters are meant to be. Her mourning a self that she had not been able to find for a very long time.

“Oh, the names I have been called in my life,” I was thinking.

“Oh, the moonshadows on the table in the corner. What do they mean?” She was thinking.

The last time I gave my sister a fortune cookie, she went to the bathroom and washed it off under the faucet, chuckling as though it was the most clever thing in the world to do. She then hung it on a spare nail on the wall.

When I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom, she nodded yes, and moved in the direction of the kitchen. Then she looked at the news scroll on the television and asked if those were directions for her. If there was something she was supposed to be doing. And that picture on the wall. What was it telling her she was supposed to do?

In the end, I rubbed her head until she fell asleep, covered her and stole away. I’d fly away the next morning and leave her to her new world as she had left me to mine from the very beginning.

Still Life With A Small Town Girl

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The Prompt: Sparkling or Still—What’s your idea of a perfect day off: one during which you can quietly relax, doing nothing, or one with one fun activity lined up after the other? Tell us how you’d spend your time.

Still Life With A Small Town Girl

For many years when I was small and far into my teens,
my summer days were filled with little else than magazines
and books and all the other things a girl in a small town
brings into her summers just to make the days less brown.

Day after day of reading soon led to dreaming, and
my shade beneath the cherry tree became a foreign land.
I did not know the name of it, but in this foreign place
the people did such lovely things. They kept a faster pace.

There were many things to see and people who liked doing—
circuses and carnivals, badminton and horse-shoeing,
imaginings and plays and travels. People who liked dancing.
Instead of trudging down the street, these people would be prancing.

I dreamed such dreams of bigger towns, and far-away towns, too.
All summer, I lay in the grass, dreaming what I’d do
when I was so much older and could go out on my own.
I’d wander off into the world. Explore the great unknown.

Now six decades later, I have done it all—
so many of those things I yearned to do when I was small.
I’ve been to places far and wide—Africa and Peru.
In England, France, Australia—I found so much to do.

Plays and concerts, dances, films, museums, garden walks.
Lectures, movies, workshops, classes, roundtables and talks.
Tours and treks and trips and sorties—guided meditations.
Somehow life seemed fuller packed with exotic vacations.

But now that I am sixty-seven, I’d appreciate
if all this activity would finally abate.
I dream of slower days that I’d spend dreaming in the shade
where all my memories of days spent doing would just fade

into the past and leave me to dream here in this place,
swinging in my hammock, at a slower pace.
Leaving my activity to stream from head to pen.
Filling up the page with all the places I have been.

And making some sense out of why I had to go and go,
speeding up the days that back then seemed to me so slow.
I guess I had to travel to find others of my kind
to teach me that life’s riches are mainly in the mind!