We are each a combination of nature and nurture, but it does seems as though how we look and feel as we get older is a lot more dependent on “nature” — on the genes we inherited that keep our bones strong, our brains sharp, and our skin not too badly wrinkled.
How we take care of ourselves, of course, can make a difference. How we view ourselves or want others to view us also can make a difference.
A link in a comment left on Ronni Bennett’s post on The Appearance of Age got me thinking about how I have chosen to appear as I age.
The link takes you to this photo of a group of women over 50 who aspire to be models.
They all have enhanced their natural looks to give themselves a uniquely attractive aesthetic. My way of dealing with my aging face and body is to make a similar (although not as successful) effort. I still love clothes and shoes, I still get my hair cut by a professional, and I still wear makeup and style my hair if I’m going to be out in public. The way I look has always been important to me, and apparently I’m not changing in that way even as I approach the age of 70.
Ronni, on the other hand, has taken a more relaxed and less expensive approach. Her identity and self-image require less vanity than mine, and I envy her for that.
A cousin of mine sent me a link to the video, below, which gives a hearty glimpse of 88 year old Hazel McCallion, mayor of Mississauga, Ontario (a city without debt) for the past 31 years. Watching this video sure made me wish that I had had the brains and heart and courage to age as she has.
“Hurricane Hazel,” as she is affectionately known, still gets on the ice and pushes a hockey puck around. In the video, she gets to fulfill one of her dreams — to make a music video.
A comment on my previous post led me to this site featuring stunningly attired elders.
Appropriately entitled “Advanced Style,” this site is constantly adding photographs that illustrate just how creative, funky, and individual elders can be in the way they dress. I can’t help notice that many of the photos are of people who live in New York City, where style is queen.
As a tease to get you over there to look around, here’s a look at three of my favorites.
The site welcomes photo submissions of elders in full regalia — or even just elders with remarkable style. Send to Advancedstyleinfo at gmail dot com.
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At some point back in the early 70s I had a book called Native Funk and Flash. I wish I had held onto it, because here on Amazon, a collector’s copy is worth $100.
I copied several of the designs in the book into embroidered embellishments on clothing. I put one design on the bottom side of a denim skirt that I made. It was called “four faithful fish feeding on the bread of life,” with a circular braided bread image in the middle and four fish facing the bread, each positioned in one of the four directions.
My most elaborate project reproduced the rising phoenix (pictured on the butt of the woman on the front cover, above) to cover the whole back of one of my husband’s muslin shirts. I embroidered it all with various colors of metallic thread.
I still have that shirt in a storage bin in the cellar. I’m going to dig it out and post a photo of it because that glowing phoenix is one of the most beautiful things I have ever created.
Ah those 60s! Even though we were married and parents, we still had a lot of funk and flash.
It’s the first snowfall here in Massachusetts. If I were at the address that I am leaving, I never would have gotten out to enjoy the day. My daughter’s nuclear family went outside to play in the snow (and clear off my car). I just hung out, took some photos, and generally was delighted to be, finally, in the midst of laughter and play.
I will be driving back to my mom’s/brother’s tomorrow. It’s supposed to be a nicer day — for a drive, that is.
At least I didn’t fall down and break my hip, like fellow elderblogger Darlene of Darlene’s Hodgepodge. It might be cold here, but at least I’m comfortable, unlike Darlene who lives in warmer Arizona but is still in rehab. Mend soon, Darlene.
I feel as though I’m on vacation in my new space. I’m not totally moved in yet, and there will be a lot of organizing once I get everything here. But, for now, it’s slow, relaxed days and evenings — which is good in some ways and not so good in others.
It leaves me time to think. About my life and what kind of person I’ve been.
The truth is, in the past, I was neither a good daughter nor a caring sister. I was not a particularly good spouse or mother, either. I had my own ambitions and my own dreams, and I always managed to fit them in, even at the expense of others. I guess that watching my daughter with my grandson reminds me of all the things I never did for my kids as they were growing up.
Maybe these feelings are prompted, now, by my guilt over leaving my mother in my brother’s care, of forcing my brother into the position of having to figure out how to give/get her the care she needs or face legal consequences. If assume her guardianship, I will have to put her in a nursing home, and that will break all of our hearts.
Cold comfort.
Until I hear my grandson giggle or wake up from a restful night’s sleep. I can live with the cold.
After the death of her father, Melissa Volker discovered some uncanny similarities between her photos and the poems in a collected, unpublished work of his.
As a tribute and a tether, she brings them together here — a poignant sharing meaningful to parents, children, those who have lost, those who love.
Word and pictures. Together a common vision.
The above is the description of my daughter’s book, which she is publishing online through Blurb.com.
The title of this book of her dad’s poetry and her photos is the title he gave his collections of poems: “Seeworld: visions from the wonderground,” and you can get a preview of it here.
The poems are as much for children as for adults. They are filled with unique images that reflect the simple wonders of nature. The photographs visually capture that simplicity and that wonder, adding to the delight of the poems themselves.
“Seeworld” would make a great holiday gift for any family that treasures the special relationship that a daughter can have with her father.
(Of course, this proud mama just can’t resist plugging the publication.)
My 92 year old mother is up late since I am watching the election returns. Obama has won and is about to speak.
“Look, Mom,”I say. “That’s the new president of our country.”
I’m never sure she hears me and/or understands. But this time she looks hard at the television screen, taking in the crowds, the shouting, the man.
“Is he black?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer, explaining (now that she seems to be paying attention) that his mother was white and his father was black, and he is now the president of the United States.
She continues to look intently at the television screen as Obama begins his acceptance speech.
“Can you make it louder?” she asks and moves to a chair nearer the tv, where she sits and listens and watches until he’s done.
I’m not sure what it all meant to her, but I sure know what it all means to me. We have a truly democratic leader as president. On my daughter’s blog, she reflects on her feelings about the election and tells of how this election has been a unique “teachable moment” for my grandson:
This morning I explained to my son why this is so historical. Why it’s a big deal that an African American could be President. To do so, I had to introduce slavery as part of our history (mind you, he’s only 6 and in first grade)…he askes SO many questions. “Why did men take them from their homes?” “What do you mean, can you explain more about how they were treated badly?”
And as I explained the best I could in appropriate terms for a 6 year old, but also without sugar-coating the truth, I saw tears fought back in his eyes. Our SIX YEAR OLD felt the injustice those men and women must have felt. Our child felt the horror and sadness of it. “Just because of the color of their skin?!”
He was aghast and stymied. Disgusted and outraged.
The only way I could make him feel better was to assure him that in the end, other men felt the way he just did. Which led to teaching him a bit about the civil war, Abe Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. It helped a bit, but there was no totally shaking him from the sadness he felt to learn how human beings had been treated.
I told him I was proud that he cared. Proud that it mattered to him. And that in the end, that is why it was historical today.
Don’t tell me kids can’t get it. And don’t tell me a kid can’t help direct his learning. Homeschooling rocks!
And my son b!X parties in Portland, missing his Dad, who would have been overcome with joy at the reality of President Obama.
Yes, mom. He’s black and he’s our president.
How about doing something really nice for b!X, whose recent employment ended when a wall in the old building where he was working fell down, revealing a substantial lining of black mold. That was sort of the final obscenity in a work environment that had gotten steadily worse over time.
B!X birthday is October 25, and when I asked him what he wanted, he responded by saying that he wished all of my friends would by one of his photographs, which he has for sale here. They come 8X12, matte finish, unframed, and printed by a professional photography shop.
This is “Broken Circle,” one of my favorites. I even bought a copy for my new living quarters: Flickr photostream list of subjects and pick one of those — for example, from his cemetery series , or his green door series, or his central east side (Portland) series. If you want one from there, just let him know and he’ll move it to his storefront so that you can buy it.
It’s never a great time to be out of a job, but this time it has to be the very worst.
Actually, if you know anyone who owns a bookstore and needs someone who can do just about anything that needs to be done — from ordering to inventory to cataloging to shipping to stocking shelves — give them b!X’s web site, where he posts his resume (of sorts) under “about,” which I quote here, just in case…. (He says he’s even willing to relocate.)
About The One True b!X
An eleven-year resident of the Portland of Oregon, born nearly forty years ago in upstate New York, he is a devout agnostic and misanthrope who aspires to be an at least passable rationalist. He believes that cynicism only results from first believing people are capable of better and then repeatedly being proven wrong.
If events were pictures and emotions were sounds, his memories would play as silent movies.
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When he was very little, he learned the all-important lesson that adults don’t always know what the Hell they are doing, when he revealed to a number of grown men that the reason the ramp on the U-Haul truck his father was using to move out of the house was not steady was because they had failed completely to attach it properly.
During his senior year in high school, in response to an uncooperative student newspaper, he published several issues The Myra Stein Underground Press (named for an infamous teacher who one day disappeared without explanation), which despite being an anonymous publication he later saw sitting in his file on the guidance counselor’s desk.
His brief college career in the main was marked by the eruption of controversy over the playing of a bronze Henry Moore sculpture with percussion mallets, a debate which landed him in The New York Times and ultimately led to him writing (the night before it was due) a well-received term paper on social drama.
Prior to moving to Portland, in 1995 he helped organize the S. 314 Petition, one of the first large-scale Intenet petition efforts, which sought unsuccessfully to prevent passage of the Communications Decency Act, although it did yield him an appearance in Rolling Stone.
Shortly after moving to Portland in 1997, he become co-owner (and then sole proprietor) of the Millennium Cafe, which he then ignominiously proceeded to run into the ground, but not before holding two successful July 4th events at which people read aloud the Declaration of Independence.
From late 2002 through late 2005, he published the critically-acclaimed Portland Communique, an experiment in reader-supported independent journalism whose departure is still lamented by some today, although likely not by the people who falsely accused him of taking bribes in exchange for coverage.
Sometime in 2003, he discovered The Finger, a zine apparently published by Swan Island shipyard workers during World War II, which he made available online and for which he has perpetually-delayed plans to make available as an on-demand reprint.
In early 2006, he founded Can’t Stop the Serenity, an unprecedented annual global event consisting of locally-organized charity screenings of the Joss Whedon film Serenity to benefit Equality Now, which to date has raised more than $200,000, making it far more important than any of the many other Whedon-related fan efforts or websites for which he’s been responsible.
Late in the Fall of 2007, he helped launch Fans4Writers, a grassroots effort to support the Writers Guild of America in its strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, although he was involved only long enough to get the website up and running.
He no longer is employed at The Great Northwest Bookstore, and would not necessarily object to working at another independent bookstore if a full-time opportunity presented itself, and in fact might even be willing to relocate for it.
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He neither bikes nor dances nor dates nor drives nor drugs nor swims. He does, however, drink. Oddly, he no longer smokes. He is a life-long resident of Red Sox Nation who, when not wearing his baseball cap, enjoys wearing a porkpie.
We drove into the sun, with a pale moon still high in the sky, and we brought our father/grandfather/father-in-law/once-husband to the place he asked to be laid to rest.
The morning wind whipped around us, and the tide was beginning to flow, as we searched along the deserted beach for a place to leave him to the sea.
His daughter prepared the place.
His son placed him in.
Until that point, the small waves inching up the shoreline were a good ten feet away. Then suddenly, before he filled the hole, one wave reached and carried most of him away. Ah, we all thought — the sea is as eager for him as he was for the sea. It was odd, though, that none of the other waves had come up as far.
After they filled in the sand and were ready to place the flowers on the spot, another single wave obliterated all traces of where he had been placed. And so the flowers were left on the shore line and petals tossed into the spray.
Fences are a good thing
and walls, too, as long as
you can see over them.
They lay the line, the bounds,
hold space and sanctuary,
designate, define the personal.
Doors are necessary to
fences and walls, access,
of course, both ways.
But I wonder what is it about
closed doors that draws his eye, stark,
silent green doors..
What is it about closed outside
green doors, and only one nestled
in the green of spring.
elf 5/08
This is one side of the pillow I made for my mom to encourage her to “self-soothe.”
I used cotton poplin photo fabric on which to print out the 25th anniversary photo of my parents, my mother’s favorite photo of the two of them. Then I pieced washable satiny fabric around the photo to make the pillow the size I wanted it to be. The great thing about the photo fabric I used is that it’s washable.
On the other side of the pillow is a photo of what there is of my mother’s immediate family. (It’s the same photo I used in our holiday card.) I call it the “family pillow,” and she holds it while she falls asleep. She doesn’t like sleeping alone in her bedroom; she says she’s afraid (not unusual for people with dementia). But when I tuck the family pillow under her arm and remind her that she has the whole family with her, she relaxes and is able to fall asleep.
We all need ways to self-soothe. I’ve been doing it with chocolate. But that hasn’t been enough.
So, today, just as the heavy flakes started falling, I had my first visit with a therapist who uses approaches to which I respond better than “talk therapy” and who takes Medicare. I’m still processing what went on in this first session, but I will say that I felt much lighter as I left than I felt when I got there.
Maybe I will make myself a pillow with the images that I need to empower myself to relax.
Flickr photostream list of subjects and pick one of those — for example, from his 
