Chick Magnet at Seventy

 

Joel and I at Prom

Being a bon-vivant was never a moniker I wore as a younger man.  Awkward and clueless were probably more apt descriptions of that confusing period in my life.  Just ask my girlfriend in high school or the one in college.  Over the years, I haven’t gotten much better.  Even at seventy-two, navigating that sometimes-treacherous landscape called male-female communications can still be a formidable challenge.

Saguaro Pool Party

It’s not that I live in a monastery here in Palm Springs.  The whole Coachella Valley is one fertile field for straight guys who are standing prone and self-supporting.  If they were cheetahs the valley would be a field of gazelles.  But sadly when it comes to finding a man, the single women are all quick to attest that “most of the inventory here is either gay, gray or leaving Tuesday.” (That’s a direct quote I’ve heard on more than one occasion.)

For those of us happily attached another issue can sometimes arise.  Communications between the sexes can sometimes be made more difficult because of the strange environment we all live in here in the desert.  It’s not the normal ‘work all day and rest at night’ routine.  Nor is it permanent vacation time.  Snowbirds, natives or part-timers; it doesn’t seem to matter.  We all still have to talk to one another.

Despite their occasional grousing about their spouse, I think most of the married women here are happy with their state in life.  What it really comes down to is the universal dichotomy between men and women.  Perhaps it’s the age-old survival of the fittest or in this case the smartest.  EI verses FA; emotional intelligence verses financial acumen.  Even if those obstacles are overcome, there is yet another challenge for us men folk here in the desert.

Coda Gallery

Trina Turk Building

                                                         

Case in point, the Coachella Valley is fertile ground for shopping.  From the plush designer shops on El Paseo Drive to numerous consignment stories, shopping seems to be an addiction that affects many women here.  For their spouses, not so much.  I’m a clear example of that.

I hate to shop…more clearly stated…I loathe the simple process of walking into a store…any store…for any reason.  Shopping is antithesis to my very being.  Even driving by a shopping mall can make my skin crawl…OK, I exaggerate a bit here but I don’t even like to be within any proximity to goods and services I’m not interested in.

Believe it or not, female clerks love helping me in this painful process.  I’m probably on their radar as soon as I stumble into their store.  ‘Helpless male in the building’ and all that.  I believe both parties win in the end.  I get the assistance I sorely need and they get to help a male in desperate straits.

A friend recently told me that we all have to be nimble, flexible and live everyday as if it were our last.  He said we’re all dying slowly…or put another way we’re all growing older.  So why not live a little faster.  Is playing this role of mine a bit mischievous on my part? Probably.  Is it dishonest?  I don’t think so.  I just want to savor life every day on my own terms.  Shopping is not part of that equation.

In my new incarnation as a storyteller I want to continue living vicariously into old age.  I want to ride out west or help a young developer in Palm Springs.  I want to give a few suggestions on real estate investments and participate again in the fall of Singapore.  I want to bike across the country with a new lady-friend and participate in a musical celebration at the wake of a lost companion.  I want to charm the ladies with every page I create in my minds eye and on the computer screen.  

Female clerks tend to think I’m cute …but still clueless.  It works for me.  Only my wife knows the truth and she just shrugs her shoulders and is happy I’ve found an illusion to cling to.  The only females who don’t buy into my act are a trio of strong-willed women ages four, six and nine.

It’s my granddaughters who don’t cut me a lot of slack.  They have expectations that I’d like to fulfill and assumptions that I know what I’m talking about.  My granddaughters have other male role models in their young lives.  But I get to fill the role of family elder.  

So if I’m going to grow old anyway I might as well relish the young lives around me.

My role as husband, father, grandfather, writer, explorer and romantic (in my writings) will be all the richer for it.

Who Did I Marry Anyway?!

Titles can be incredibly misleading. While some are intended to be that way, others are just the result of sloppy craftsmanship. This one was intentional…but it wasn’t personal. I simply wanted to point out that some couples find themselves married to someone quite different from the person they first met and fell in love with years earlier.

I’ve been lucky. For any number of reasons, not the least of which is my wife’s enduring patience, I’ve been married for forty-two plus years and it’s still going strong. I married a very intelligent people-savvy woman who continues to challenge my lifestyle, my writing and other associated idiosyncrasies. But for us it works and remains part of the chemistry that has held us together for all these years.

Over that time I’ve changed and evolved and a few might even suggest gotten a little more mature. I don’t claim credit for that latter accomplishment if it is true. I just grew older and continued my quest for lifelong fulfillment in a plethora of different areas. Perhaps if I were Native American it would be called my ‘vision quest.’

Luckily for me that fulfillment came in the form of child-rearing, writing, entrepreneurship, running, real estate and other sundry areas of interest. As I changed or recharged my areas of interest, my wife continued her own subjective host of activities and work/family involvements. Somehow it all worked out for the both of us. 

But that isn’t always the case for other couples.

This is the first generation whose retirement could outlast their working years. Many couples are not aware that they could well face another thirty years or more of retirement. It’s a whole new world out there for many couples and a lot of them aren’t prepared for it.

What I’ve witnessed over the last couple of years is a gradual growing apart of some couples or the stagnation of one partner at the expense of the other. Negotiating midlife together is a challenge. It can become a totally clouded vision when the partners are psychologically in different places in their respective lives. It’s sad to watch but fascinating none the less.

What was once cute and quirky in a partner is now a refusal to grow up or reluctance to admit that age and gravity are working against us. Perhaps it is one partner accepting their senior position in life while the other isn’t ready to give up quite yet. People change and evolve and not always in the same direction.

We used to have a handy label for it. We called it a midlife Crisis. But the fact is that only 10 to 26 percent of adults over 40 report having a midlife crisis. Perhaps midlife transition is a better moniker for the changes many adult couples are going through. Not surprisingly many of those changes facing both men and women are the result of physical, social and psychological issues associated with aging.

Many folks, especially men, use middle-age as a turning point for re-evaluating their life thus far. Too often reflecting on regrets of what could or should have been, they wonder how the second half of life might be different this time around. I did that with My Lost Years and then again In the Company of Old Men.

Amazon lists over 2000 books dealing with midlife. Men and women often navigate their middle years in different ways with different needs and challenges. It seems inevitable that for married couples the impact they have on each other is going to be dramatic.

Aside from the easily identifiable issues facing anyone who is aging, I think there is another issue many couples as well as individuals are unaware of and in many cases, totally oblivious to. That is the gradual erosion of meaningful activities in their lives. I tried to address that issue in my blog The Living Dead. But I also gave credence to a wonderful example of just the opposite in Sister Dorothy and the Myth of Catholicism.

The desert is full of retirees whose idea of a full day is visiting the post office, the supermarket, cards at the senior center and then an evening in front of the boob tube. It’s a life devoid of passion for anything beyond the evening news and repetitive sports reports. 

 

Many of these men are especially lost without their name badge and desk title to remind them of who they really were back then. Today they are just another statistic mad at the world for growing old. At first I thought their actions were quite out of character until they spoke of growing up with the feeling that something was lacking in their lives. 

I know several men who are still trying to prove to their fathers that they are worthy sons…except that their fathers have been deceased for a very long time now. I know of daughters who want to be worthy of their mother’s affections and not yet can’t accept the fact that there was no affection to give on their mother’s part…to anyone.

Swedish Psychologist, Eric Erikson in his well-regarded eight stages of psychological development seemed to confirm this observation. His studies confirm that some people carry unresolved issues from earlier stages in their lives to their later years. Being able to let go of the past is the first step in embracing the future. 

Finding one’s passion should be the goal for all of us. Settling for less should not be an option.

“Hope is both the earliest and most indispensable virtue inherent in the stage of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain even where confidence is wounded and trust impaired.”

         Erik Erikson

Chasing My Identity

I have a friend who conducts workshops on how to write your own obituary. The responses to her workshop always seem go one of two ways. The first group wrinkles their nose and responds with a frown “Oh, Lord, I don’t want to talk about my own death.” The more optimistic of that group then adds “and besides, I’m never going to die.” It’s denial at its most optimistic stance.

The second group recognizes that my friend’s workshops are an opportunity to make their own farewell statement. These folks realize that they now have an opportunity to say just what they want to say about their own lives instead of it coming from some boiler-plate funeral home ad or a template from the newspaper. They get to share with family, friends and associates just what was important to them and what they are most proud of for the time they spent here on earth.

I’m in that second group. I want to tell the world what I did with my life…once I figure it out.

At first blush I’d have to say I’ve been very lucky on so many levels. Then having said that I would also add that I’m unapologetic for past failures, mistakes, losses, missed opportunities and a wide assortment of sundry missteps that have also defined my life. At this stage of the game, I’m too old and too busy to worry about ‘what might have been’ or ‘what if’ or ‘if only...’

I guess my own story begins with a French Canadian guy whose parents came from someplace in Canada. He was a short guy with a pencil-thin mustache and (supposedly) a fondness for the drink. He went from Michigan and ended up in the Twin Cities. He was playing in a band in St. Cloud, Minnesota when he met my mother. She was just a young German Catholic girl recently off the farm.

So my heritage is French Canadian and German. But what does that mean in the greater scheme of things? It is a heritage that I have no affinity to nor interest in…because it has no roots. As was befitting the rural German Catholic culture of that time, my mother never spoke of my father either before or after he passed away. It was as if he never existed in the first place. If I had a past, it is buried in a mausoleum in Saint Paul.

I can lay out a few of the stats, facts and incidents that defined who I became. I was young and dumb and poor but open and honest. I’d like to believe that, much like my writing, I stumbled a lot but somehow kept moving forward.

I can talk about those men and women who had an influence on my life. I can talk about working from 7^th grade on and usually having two jobs going on simultaneously. I can talk about twenty plus years of working full time, running my business and managing several apartment buildings all at the same time. I can talk about near burn out and finally redemption on long bike rides, torturous trail runs and sojourns into the high desert.

It’s always a challenge to revisit that narrative in my head about my life up to a certain point. The facts are easy to lie out and document. I could put them into a flow chart or a neatly outlined diagram that lists important dates in my life. It’s neat and clean but still smells like an old tattered history book. Something is missing. The data would tell you how I got to where I am but it wouldn’t tell you how I ended up being who I am today.

There is a ‘60’s time warp in my head. A wonderful period of creativity with its music and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and hippies and personal liberation and milestones. But I don’t apologize for that. It is part of who I have become. It doesn’t take away from my life today but instead comforts and feeds me more material for my stories.

Do I want to share the joys of a life well lived or wax philosophically about past lives, past loves, past failures and hopes for the future? I guess it’s a combination of both.

I am not interested in ‘what if’s.’ Bob Dylan said ‘Don’t look back.’ I would add as a caveat unless you’re in a good place. Because if you’re in a good place in your life today then you can look back and see the success and the failure, the goals that fell short and those never attempted. You can look at your life as it truly was and not as someone else said it should be.

One friend recently commented to me that it was too bad I hadn’t started my writing career years earlier. I simply replied that I couldn’t have done that years ago because I wasn’t the same person that I am today. My head was in a different place back then. Neither better nor worse but probably not conducive to the focused passion I feel for my writing today.

I guess I’m foolish enough to believe that old cliché that it’s never too late to become the person you’ve always wanted to be. I am today the result of a million different experiences, episodes, loves, failures, losses, challenges and successes that rippled through my life over the last seventy years.

 

Zen and the Art of Running

I read a book recently called Zen and the Art of Running. The author pointed out that a runner changes every day and shouldn’t expect the same results today as he might have gotten last week or last year or ten years ago. Like many others, I am constantly changing and evolving and adapting to the nuances of each day.

I have another friend who has defined life in three simple words: Learning, Earning and Yearning. His position is that we grow up with certain knowledge. We make a living. Then (he claims) we yearn for what we didn’t do or don’t have or lost. I don’t think it has to necessarily be that way.

I can’t do nor do I want to do what I did before. I do not want to wear a younger man’s façade. The years of experience and joy and disappointment run lines across my face but I wear them like a seasoned veteran in the games of life.

My new identity is a moniker I wear with pride and is defined by the stories I tell. My blogs are just one step in that direction. They are personal, explicit, revealing, open and honest. But in the end, they are simply meant to be a snapshot of a moment in time in the life of…

My life in Pictures

My lost years

Snow white and the seven seekers

Howling monkeys

Ditching my son in the Amazon

Today I am much more interested in telling my stories and living my life vicariously through my characters. I want to share the fear of humping my hog through the boonies, riding old Apache trails and avoiding ambush in some narrow slot canyon. I want to mastermind the intricate workings of a modern-day courtship and look in on two women slowly falling in love. I want my protagonist to fall in love with a siren of my own creation.

I want the new me to splatter my keyboard with stories of past adventures, mishaps, wondrous experiences and my characters grand plans for the future. I want to live the life of a drifter out west and an adventurer on the Mekong Delta. And I want to do that until my ink dries up and my mind slowly fades away.

I haven’t written my own obituary yet but when I do, it’ll probably start with something like…

“He had a good life…and then it got even better.”