This is the road I walk late in the afternoon, when my mom is calm or napping. This is a perfect road to walk, devoid of traffic, the cloudless sky a sunny blue, the shadows cool, the trees still full and just starting to color. Two hawks glide on the currents above the mountain, but they are too far away to catch with my camera. This road is one of the reasons I can live here, where her tears run endlessly like the stream that feeds the pond beyond the soundless forest.

Just before 4 p.m this afternoon., I was channel surfing to try to find something on tv my mother might sit down and watch. We had just watched Bonanza on TVLand. I thought she might sit a while for the Ellen DeGeneres show, so I punched in NBC.
Instead of Ellen, a news report was on. A plane had just crashed into a building in New York City, and the screen showed flames pouring out of the windows of the bujilding.
OMG. Not again! I could feel my stomach clenching.
No, not again.
This time it’s a small private plane that came down nose first into an apartment building and crashed into the street. Four people dead; one still strapped into a cockpit seat.
The newscasters get on the internet and start searching for the type of plane, the owner, etc. etc.
I watch the fire blazing from the 40 something floor of the building, the black smoke billowing out, the fire engines rushing to the scene. When I actually post this later tonight, I no doubt will have links, but right now, it’s still happening.
There just seems like an awful lot of bad things happening in NYC. Last week or so, a building mysteriously “detonated.” This week, the plane, the plane.
We get the NYC news here in the Catskill Mountains. Each night we are innundated with killings of all kinds. If it’s not the killings in Iraq, it’s the murders in New York City. No wonder I escape these days into Adriana Trigiani’s books about Big Stone Gap and Big Cherry Holler — filled with people who don’t kill and live deeply and uniquely in a world that I’m sure must still exist somewhere.
It is almost 7:30 p.m. now, and they’ve identified the pilot of the plane. Cory Lidle, Yankees pitcher, is already being memorialized on the Internet. I heard on the television news earlier that four people were dead, but Lidle seems to be the only one at this point being mourned.
My mom doesn’t like living here in such an isolated piece of the woods at the foot of the mountain. She’s afraid of the dark.
That is not the kind of dark that frightens me.

I couldn’t make up news like this:

Often I look in the mirror and I can’t believe it’s me. My mind’s eye sees me as I was 25 years ago — with an actual waistline and strong, slim legs; with wide eyes and energy to burn. Growing older is unavoidable. One can avoid growing wider and droopier, but that takes determination, perseverence, and lots and lots of exercise, lotions, and pampering. If you can afford to go that route, that’s just fine. Me? I have not the time, energy, or resources. Anyway, it’s easier to let time take its toll and learn to laugh at the ignominy of it. Like Maxine.
Over at Time Goes By Ronni continues to protest the stereotyping of older individuals. Her latest post on Frailty and Stereotypes is excellent, providing references to research that indicates that we can do things to avoid becoming frail. Yes, ofen we can — again: systematic excercise, good nuitrition, optimistic attitude. In the best of all personal worlds, that’s the ticket. But many of our personal worlds are far from even good. I, for one, find it difficult to keep an optimistic attitude. Like Maxine.
Now, some might say that these Maxine cartoons perpetuate a negative stereotype of the “old lady.” Except there are grains of truth in them. And they are funny. And it’s therapeutic to laugh at oneself.
But that can’t be the end of it, and it’s how we feel about and deal with the realities of getting older that make the difference in how we are perceived — and will be perceived — by younger generations.
I found a post on ZDNet very telling in relation to how many “elders” relate to all of the rapidly evolving Internet offerings:

…only a few of the faculty members I questioned about YouTube knew what it was. For them, the phenomenon of user-generated video was something abstract. This highlights a knowledge gap between the twenty-somethings that attend the university and the 30-60 year-olds who teach there.
If community-based sites are the bread and butter of Web 2.0, then it’s mostly the people who grew up with the ‘Net who are participating. Most older folks have their communities and they’re not online. What’s that mean for business models as the ARPA crowd gets steadily bigger with the influx of baby-boomers? Are we going to settle for part of the population, or will someone break the age-barrier with online communities?

Phil Windley, who posted the above, also links (from his Technometria) to a suggestion by Google’s Adam Bosworth:

Interestingly, Adam talks about content in the context of community (no big surprise there) and spends a great deal of time talking about the health care industry. Adam claims that there’s a growing need for tools that allow patients to add value to health-care related communities by sharing information and experiences. These tools could lead to better predictors of health conditions, earlier diagnosis, and more successful treatments. And we’d save a lot of money too.

“Elders” like my 90 year old mom with increasingly disturbing dementia will continue to avoid anything new, especially technologies. But those others who have avoided technology so far can be lured in by offering them the kind of online community Bosworth has in mind — IF the offerings are constructed to be solidly elder-user friendly.
Meanwhile, little (or not so) old ladies like me, who make every effort to keep our “mind’s eye” image of ourselves as vital as possible, will always keep up with whatever new “YouTube” type fancies rise up from the younger Net set. We’ll keep blogging and wondering and giving our finger to the stereotypes that try to limit what we are and can be.
And meanwhile, some of us will always think that being an old lady can be a real hoot! Like Maxine.

I‘m really tired tonight, having had a rough few hours with my mom, as she obsessed about my brother going out to dinner with friends this evening. She paced and ranted and cried, insisting that he probably drowned or was murdered our was out with some girl and I should call him and don’t I know where he is and who he’s with until I finally just let her go on and on while I turned on my laptop and left a comment over at Ronni’s, where there’s a great piece (and comments) about how the entertainment media still stereotypes “older” individuals.
[Gasp. Gasp.]
However, I can’t call it a day until I post about having a Skype chat with Doug Alder, way up there in Canada. He has a web cam, so I could see him. (I’m not sure I’m ready to mount a web cam here yet; I would have to make sure my hair is combed and I don’t look like I just finished a wearying three hours with my mother.)
I only know Doug from his blog, but talking with him felt as though we were old friends. We just hung out and chatted. It’s happened that way for me before, like when I talked to Jeneane Sessum on the regular phone and later, at various times, had a chance to meet other bloggers in person :Betsy Devine, Halley Suitt, Frank Paynter, and Dave Rogers.
Now that Doug has helped me get more comfortable with Skype, I’m going to make plans to talk with Ronni. She’s up in Maine.
But for now, yawn….

PhoneCon, Blogblab, call it whatever you want, but make every effort to be there.
Jeneane lit the Phone Con fire, and now Ronni is burning to launch an Elderblogger PhoneCon.
On October 24, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Ronni will host a blogblab fest for anyone who might like to join in.
Get the offical info here and check in with Time Goes By to keep up with the pre-blab chatter.
Many of us know each other from our blog “voices.” Ronni’s blogblab will give us a chance to hear the voices behind the voices.
I’ll be there, probably even relieving Ronni’s hosting responsibilities every now and then.
Got my Skype. Got my headset. I’m clearing my throat and clearing my calendar (such that it is.)
‘Hope to hear you there as well.

Two posts over at Blogsisters are worth your time. Both are about how important it is to connect with other people in a meaningful way.
This one called “Look Them in the Eye and Smile.”
The other requires both looking and listening, and it actually made me choke up a little.
I send (((H))) to you all.

No, this post is not about my mother. It’s about letting go of stuff. Physical stuff. My stuff.
My brother is cleaning out his basement, and I still have stuff in there left from when I moved here more than a year ago. One of the boxes held what I came to think of as my “professional portfolio,” e.g. many of the articles, grant proposals, profiles, etc. etc. that I had been paid to write over the course of my professional career. I kept them in case I needed to look for another job. I never intended to spend 20 years with, and retire from, the state’s Education Department.
Tonight I threw it all away. It no longer matters that one of my funded proposals was used by the National Science Foundation as a model. It no longer matters that the Chairman of the Biochemistry Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sent me a note thanking me for turning my lengthy interview with him into a well-written and interesting profile. And so into the trash went everything I wrote for other people that got them what they wanted. All of that no longer matters.
What I did save was a box of stuff about my kids — newpaper articles, writings, report cards, and, suprisingly, my son’s (that’s b!X) assessment report from his year at a Montessori Pre-School some thirty-three years ago. What his teacher said about him then is pretty much what those who know him would probably say about him now. Except maybe for one thing — which might or might not still be true: “frequently bursts into song.”
When my daughter and her family come to visit here in a few weeks, I will give her what I have saved about her. It’s time for her to begin amassing her own box documenting her history that will get stored in her basement.
My brother tells me that I have one last box in his basement that is labelled “craft stuff.” I have no idea what’s in it, but I’m readying myself to let it go.

Driving home through the mountain dusk, I glimpse, out of my eye’s corner, a young stag waiting between the tree line and the road. He is the color of shadows, and it is a miracle that I notice him standing there, still as the mountain. I slow down, look into his eyes that are looking into mine. At moments like this, I really do know what the word “frisson” means.
I am the only car on the road, and he waits until I pass him before he starts to move out. I can see him in the rear view mirror as he trots across the road and through someone’s dark yard. Unlike me, he is singly attentive to where he’s going — unlike me, who is still looking at where I’d been.
I am driving home through the mountain dusk on the way back from taking my mother to Mass. That, in itself, is a minor miracte. She’s been asking to go for several weeks now, but this is the first Saturday that she’s been in any mental shape to get dressed and go out in public.
In my lifetime, I have been to hundreds of Masses in dozens of churches, and it’s been what seems like another lifetime since I connected with the maybe miracle that the Catholic Mass is supposed to imitate. Tonight, I sat and watched the rote rendering of what is supposed to be as moving as any poetry, remembering that, as a child, when I got bored during Mass I would turn the pages in my Sunday MIssal to the Gospels, where I would pick up on the continuing saga of the miracle maker. Unfotrunately, the missals provided in the pews tonight were gospel-less, so I resorted to literally twiddling my thumbs, stopping only to help my mother stand, sit, kneel, stand, sit, kneel….
A stag waiting in the shadows for me to pass — more moving than any Mass.