On the way home from a friend's house this afternoon, I heard an interview from the 1990's with A. E. Hotchner who wrote the definitive biography of Ernest Hemingway, "Papa Hemingway" which, of course, like most of the intellectually active people of my age and time, I read. In fact, I read every book Hemingway wrote too, and saw every move made from his books. In case you don't remember them, some of them were: For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms, To Have and Have Not, Across the River and Into the Trees, Death in the Afternoon, Collected Short Stories, etc.
A. E. Hotchner has just died at age 102!! He lived 41 years longer than Hemingway who died at age 61. One of the things my friends and I were talking about today was adapting to aging. We got onto the subject of overcoming the natural despair that accompanies all the losses we suffer as we age.
Speaking for myself, some of those losses have been my mobility and flexibility, days without pain, eye sight, hearing, teeth. My back is deteriorating (I have desiccated disc disease), my knees are going (same problem - disintegrating cartilage), my corneas are failing (Fuch's Dystrophy) and I have notice my hearing is failing. I have a terrible time going up and down steps, cannot stay upright for too long or my back has a pinching pain (stenosis) and I am stiff all over. I have lost my looks, am overweight with a weight that will not stay off no matter how I struggle to get rid of it. I lose it and turn around and it is back again, like a bad ghost. My once lithe and beautiful body is lumpy and pouchy, brown spotted and misshapen and I stoop.
However, I always console myself by saying that my brain is still good. For the time being, I can still read, and I can still walk, and for all I have lost in moving or dying family and friends, I have also made new friends and I have many long-time friendships such as the two friends I saw this afternoon. The heartbreak of the loss of the company of family and friends is a very heavy dark cloud. It is best to not look back on the happy family times we had when my family all got together with my parents in West Virginia, playing board games, hiking, watching tv together and eating together. Those days are gone forever, along with my childhood and the childhood of my daughter who lives in Brooklyn.
Things I say to myself: "If you can't be with the ones you love, love the ones you're with." And "ADAPT AND EVOLVE" are some of my favorites. Planning helps. Ten Year Plan: I am working on paying down all my debts by doing double payments each month (the home equity loan for my heater, for example) so that when the pets die I will be able to go into assisted living if I need to. Hopefully I won't need to. When the day comes that I can't read, I will listen to audio books. I have already adapted to my inability to read tv menus by watching netflix and amazon video on a laptop (the one I am using to type this blog). I have a cane now and I am working on adapting some of the very few steps I have, which I struggle with now. Also, I have hired help, a cleaner and a yard-man who come once a week. They may, I hope, get my through my early 80's. I hope I can live to 90, as my father before me and his mother before him.
My 75th birthday is coming in the autumn. Many of my friends are free of the disabilities that hamper me, but some of my friends have far worse things. I have a friend with dementia and two friends with cancer. I have also had friends who have died. So I am not in the bottom third, but perhaps in the middle.
Anyway, I finished an Art Project for Celebrating 2020 the 100th anniversary of Suffrage in America, that was inspired by Judy Chicago's A Dinner Party. Neither of the friends I saw today had seen or heard of it, so I brought my book, all dusty from the shelf, to show them. Sadly, they were less than impressed, and I felt that the work was somehow dated - a kind of relic of a feminist era that has morphed into something else entirely. It seemed to blatant and overstated. I was hurt that something that had meant so much to me was gross and unimpressive to them.
It reminded me of a Hemingway experience I had. I had loved, in my late adolescence A MOVEABLE FEAST, by Hemingway. I bought it for my brother, ten years or maybe 20, later. He hated it, so I read it again and I hated it too. I had changed so much it didn't appeal to me anymore and it seemed so out of date. It reminds me of a quote I ran into recently "Sometimes you go back to a place you once loved and you find you have changed."
Happy trails, into the woods, into the past, into the world of thought!!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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