I stole the title from my partner, Rebecca, who frequently loses her phone. As Bob Dylan, someone even older than me, says, it’s OK to pilfer material if you make it your own. Whatever that means, but hey, cut him some slack, he’s 84.
Rebecca’s 74, and I’m 76. Occasionally, we feel our ages, our precise chronology. Not the pretend timeline we both hide behind because of favorable genes, and, at least for my sweetheart, jeans.
We could each pass for 65. That’s a sad sentence, isn’t it? It’s so easy to talk ourselves into the advantages of elderhood, the wisdom hard won, the experience hard earned, and the freedom hard fought, which results in the exaltation to care less about what the world thinks of us.
Sorry, I’ve momentarily lost my train of thought. Why is that U-Haul photo there?
This lapse happens to everyone, doesn’t it?
But, of course, dear imaginary reader, you’ll forgive me. Like I forgave Bob. I see the patronizing gaze in your eyes. It’s the look I naturally gave my mother, who, at 90, told me she had to get home to take care of her father, who had died in 1944.
“I’m projecting,” you think.
You’re probably right, as it seems transferring my unconscious thoughts to you is hard-wired. You really don’t see me as a doddering old fool. Needless to say, if you’re of my dotage, your natural empathy for me might be inhibited because of what it might say about you.
I’m getting tired of thinking about this, so I’ll get back to the U-Haul in the first photo and the filched title. When I parked the truck in our driveway, I had driven 323 miles from southwest to northeast Iowa. We are downsizing from two homes to one. More about that in another story.
After I unloaded the cargo, with help from two Luther College wrestlers who run a moving service, I drove the moving van to the local U-Haul outlet.
The next day, as I prepared for my 10,000-step daily hike, I could not find my sunglasses. The case with the specs was nowhere to be found.
Photo by the author
Unless, I thought, I had left them on the seat of the truck. I remember thinking about putting them on the day before as I was driving the six hours from one home to another. Fortunately, my lorry was waiting for me in the parking lot to search and seize, if only I could find.
I knew it was mine among the five identical fleet marked 15-footers because I found the half-eaten cheese sandwich Rebecca had prepared that somehow had migrated to the well area behind the driver’s seat. However, no sunglasses.
Photo by the author
When I came back a third time, yesterday, the owner gave me that look. He tried not to. But it was there.
So I hoisted myself up yet again into the cabin you see in the first photo. It has to be here. As I crawled into the driver’s seat on my knees, my eyes caught sight of the triangular prism of the case wedged into the area you see below.
I knew it!
Photo by the author
As I slowly edged my butt out, making sure to find the drop step to the ground, I turned around and waved the prize to the owner, who, with a smile, said
Welcome to my world. Let’s call it the country of the old, from William Butler Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium. It could also be your world. If not today, someday. I’ve got a Green Card, with a permanent document on the horizon.
About our ticket to this ‘foreign country, another poet, William Stafford, wrote
A passport costs everything there is.
Some days, I feel old, and some days I don’t
Every few years, I bend over the wrong way, pull the Iliopsoas muscles on my lower back’s right side, and feel like the old, falling-apart tree pictured above.
I asked my friend Alan, 78, who is dealing with a more serious back problem, how this condition influences the way he thinks about himself.
Who am I? Am I the 78-year-old who enjoys playing golf, leading workshops, going to rotary and the film festival, or am I a person whose back pain affects my range of activities and limits my world? I now have two senses of identity; whichever one is dominant is driven by a level of pain.
Alan’s right; pain matters to identity.
So does age. Alan has had a handicap since childhood. Decades of putting weight on one leg have now resulted in pressure on the sciatic nerve.
I first pulled my SOAS muscles stepping out of a car at 34, 40 years ago. The pain forced me to my knees. Three days later, I was fully recovered.
Now, at 74, the recovery time is two weeks, during which my identity, like Alan’s, focuses on my physical limitations, the limitations of an aged person.
Some days, I feel old, and some days, I don’t. This experience and Alan’s thoughtful answer have made me think about how important age is to my identity.
So, I asked other friends.
Here are some excerpts.
Age is everything to my identity. That may be because I am 78, and age and identity seem symbiotic, reflecting the other in everyday life. (Dale, 78)
Being older is not important to my identity at all. I am still working as a university professor. Mentoring students keeps me mentally and psychologically young. (Jim, 67)
Now, on the edge of 80, I live in awe of my age each day, even though many of my 80-year-old friends take their age in stride. (Ruth, 79)
Age is quite important to my identity [because] I have too many regrets and wasted years, [so] having 10–20 years available doesn’t seem the same as it did 20 years ago. (Wade, 67)
Much of my identity at this age is satisfaction in reflecting on all the different things I’ve undertaken and as an explorer of what life has to offer.(Peter, 82)
I’ve gotten to the top of the hill and got perspective. (Rebecca, 72)
Isn’t it a gift to have thoughtful friends?
Like Alan’s reply, my friends’ answers helped me develop two more ideas regarding age and identity.
They may also trigger your thoughts and stories. Please share them in the comment section.
Chronological and Psychological Age
Jim is a university professor who plans to work for another five years. He introduced me to the distinction between chronological and psychological age.
He writes:
I mentor quite a few students, which helps keep me mentally and psychologically young. Psychologically speaking, I don’t think of myself as 67, probably in my late 40s or early 50s.
And elaborated:
The concept of psychological age is real — Pam [Jim’s wife] and I are chronologically the same age as many of the people with whom we are interacting, but in terms of our behavior and psychological age, we are much younger.
I retired in 2018 at 69 after 40 years of college teaching. At my college’s Christmas party that winter, I looked around at the crowd and, without thinking about it, gravitated toward my younger, still-teaching colleagues. That’s who I identified with. I wanted nothing to do with the country of the old — not even their company.
For about a year, I did not enrol or teach in my college’s Lifelong Learning program, join retired friends for Thursday breakfast, or attend the monthly emeriti lecture series.
And then, one day, while shaving, I noticed I had kept my sleep t-shirt on while lathering up. I had covered my aging torso. I was turning away from what?
A part of who I had become. Turning away rarely works. At that moment, I pivoted toward the country of the old.
That’s me below, in the red hat, a few months ago at a lecture by a retired colleague.
Photo taken by Rebecca Wiese
I’m also a student and teacher in Lifelong Learning seminars, a regular at the Thursday morning retirees’ coffee klatch, and at this year’s Christmas party, I looked over at my younger colleagues and felt sorry for them.
I like to visit their country occasionally. But there’s no dual citizenship.
Experience and Wisdom
Why did I feel sorry for my younger colleagues?
My friend Dale, 78, describes one reason.
When I turned 65, my age allowed me to control my life completely.
For Dale, a ceramist, that meant new hobbies, including hiking and fishing.
In the country of the old, trails, streams, and libraries are always crowded.My friends still in the country of the young have to go to work in the morning.
But there’s something else at play. It’s why I also lament my younger self. My friend Wade wrote about how regret looms large in later life.
Across the breakfast table, my partner, Rebecca, answered the question in the title of this story with the top-of-the-hill quote. I asked her to say more.
My life experiences have solidified my position on many things. I know more things, including that having the wrong position is okay.
Rebecca speaks for many of us.
Not all older people are wise. But many, including me, are more perceptive than we were. Age builds a free lending library of experience.
Peter weighed in.
I have spent a lot of time in 80+ years exploring what I think the nature of reality is, and have sought philosophy and science in that pursuit, and with the conclusions I have drawn, which give me satisfaction if not ultimate truth. So, being an elder feels good.
“He Was Complete.”
Roughly corresponding to my turn toward the country of the old years ago, I started to read biographies of my sports heroes: Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Koufax, Bill Russell, Buck O’Neil, and Roberto Clemente.
I didn’t think much about why I was doing this until a friend loaned me a book of essays by Roger Angell, Once More Around the Park. Angell died at 99 two years ago and was considered the finest baseball chronicler. In the preface to Around the Park, he’s contemplating the retirement of relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry with these words:
He had closed the book, and in that moment had become fresh and young again, and…wonderfully clear in my mind. He was complete.
I no longer cared about my heroes’ athletic accomplishments. I was more interested in the kind of people they had become, just as I’m now more interested in the kind of person I’ve become.
That’s the wonder of accepting this transition. So much is behind, it’s finally possible to see and make sense of one’s life.
The Buddha counseled acceptance. Resistance, he said, only makes things worse.
Jesus pleaded for us to love our enemies, human and edible.
No is a form of resistance to what and who we dislike. Occasionally, our human enemies feed off our hatred. It makes them stronger.
My mother, God love her, eventually accepted the eatables that each of her sons would not touch, without gagging. For Peter, it was applesauce. For Pat, nuts. For her eldest, me, it was a triumvirate of solids: peas, mushrooms, and eggs. And milk, oh Lord, how I hated milk.
Two days ago, Bruce and Michelle served Rebecca and me a phenomenal home-cooked meal of 24-hour-brined, grilled pork chops cooked to 144 °, thick, tangy-sauced baked beans, crunchy, golden-browned roasted potatoes, and, according to Rebecca, the tenderest sauteed mushrooms she has ever had, followed by just-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies.
Whenever serving plates were passed, I took more of everything but the fungi to hide my NON-ACCEPTANCE.
Yesterday, at a kettlebell workout to drop the two pounds I gained, the sign on the counter read,
I wrote this story several years ago. It is my favorite reflection on my mother. I’ve continued to update and rework it, as a loving and dutiful son would. Happy Mother’s Day, 2026.
Lying has always been hard for me. And, as difficult as it is to admit from the vantage point of 76, I was a bit of a mother’s boy. So, lying to my mother came at the cost of round-the-clock guilt. But, hey, I was building a self.
Grass
How do I start my story with “I remembered the sharp scent of freshly cut grass as I waited at the dining room window for Sharon,” when the only photo of my childhood home is this one I took five years after my mother died and 58 years after the events I will describe?
You’ll have to imagine a lawn full of grass. It’s almost impossible, I know, given this replacement monstrosity. My story is about the sin of lying. What do you call this trespass?
I wanted you to see the first-floor dining room window on the right, my second-floor bedroom window on the left, the outdoor steps, and the brick street. And smell the grass I had just mowed before Sharon showed up.
I was the oldest of three sons, so mowing the front lawn was my first outdoor chore. At 13, my dad taught me an up-and-down system using a long piece of cloth rope tied around the mower handle to serve as a pulley.
The first time I tried it alone, while Dad was at work, the rope slipped under the mower and was shredded. So, I put my Pony League baseball cleats on and pushed the green Lawn-Boy across the lawn without the machine and me rolling into the street.
My first teenage triumph. The second would come three years later.
Sharon
It was an early spring day, and, as you know, the smell of grass was in the air. I was 16, and Sharon and I had just started dating.
I opened the first-floor dining room window on the right to smell my accomplishment, listened for the soft rumble of Sharon’s pale aqua-blue car on the brick, and turned toward my mother.
My brother Peter and I shared a bedroom behind the second-floor dormer window on the left. When I was younger, my dad was often away on business trips. I had the bed closest to the window. On warm nights, I would open it to hear the sound of his car on the brick street as it turned into the driveway. Then, I would fall asleep knowing my dad was safely home and my mom would be at peace until his next trip.
“You can’t get serious about her, you know,” my mother says from the kitchen across the Sunday pot roast dining room table after I told her I was waiting for Sharon.
Sharon was Jewish and the daughter of my Baskin Robbin’s boss, Wendell. We were Catholic. By “we,” I mean everyone but my dad, who was raised Protestant. My mom would have said the same thing if Sharon had been Presbyterian.
I knew this story. Before they married in 1948, Mom talked my dad into going through the Rite of Christian Initiation for adults to prepare for conversion to Catholicism. Dad gave it a try but was treated so poorly by the priest that he eventually said, “No more, not ever again.”
Even at 16, I knew the religious difference was a source of tension between them. When Mom said to me, “You can’t get serious,” I knew she was serious.
Lying
Hearing the honk and saying nothing, I leave my mother and walk out the front door and down the steps.
Sharon and I dated for two years. That was the last time she picked me up in front of my house. And the last time I told my parents what I was up to.
A few months later, we started Saturday night drive-in dates. Fortunately, by the mid-1960s, my family had two cars: a mid-size sedan and a small Fiat. The Fiat had bucket seats, so I needed the Pontiac.
My usual line was “I’m picking up Jerry, Ed, Pat, and Mike, and we’re hanging out.”
Riding in that same car to Sunday mass burdened me with guilt and fear about whether there was any evidence of my deception.
It was all so easy.
Too easy, as it turns out.
It was an early evening at Duck Creek Park’s Little League Diamond #1. My little brother Pat is playing, and my parents are sitting in the bleacher section behind home plate. My dad, in his Fiat, met us at the game. I needed the sedan for a date. I’m sitting next to my mom.
“Can I have the car?”
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Jerry Spaeth’s.”
She turned her head, looked directly at me, and said quietly,
“Paul, I know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t.”
Mothers and sons
Dody Gardner died in 2017 at 96. At the lunch after her funeral, I met one of her long-time friends. I knew John Bishop from the bridge parties my parents hosted. John, a physician and lifelong bridge player, told me my mom was the finest player he knew.
During lunch, I asked a few of Mom’s younger friends, all bridge players, about this, and they nodded. “No one was better,” Peg said.
Even as Mom was sinking into dementia, she continued snapping down cards in triumph or disgust while playing solitaire.
Good bridge players think strategically. Mom knew my personality, that I could not rebel directly. I needed to lie to grow up. To separate myself from her and my dad. She was confident I would discard the disreputable means when I no longer needed them.
“Why don’t you write a book?” came the voice loud and clear. In a hectoring tone, it continued, “You’ve written more than 800 Medium stories in three years, that’s Moby Dick. Why don’t you pile the pages on top of each other instead of scattering them here and there?”
When you hear a voice, in the silence of 4 AM, is it your mother’s? Dody Gardner, smart as a whip, with a tongue to match, an English major who earned her degree in 1940, didn’t even read books except to her three boys as they were growing up.
But when her spirit tugs, I listen and engage.
“Mom, I’ve thought about this. My writing life is a kind of managed ADHD, the many instead of the few. I write about this, that, and the other because I’m interested in so many things.”
Photo of the first hole at Silver Springs Golf Course in Ossian, Iowa
I am an average golfer and photographer, at best. But magic is possible, if rare, for the less-than-talented. Rarer still is a pairing of perfect shots.
Sixty years ago, in high school, I was number four out of the six who played matches on a mediocre varsity golf team. That said, I know the game and, occasionally, hit a shot that would not embarrass me if Arnie, Tiger, or Rory were looking on. A few days ago, I hit a drive for the ages, or at least for aging duffers like me. Back to that in a moment.
My iPhone counts 11,941 photos, with 100s more deleted. On the golf practice range, if you repeat a flawed swing, your strokes don’t improve. Quantity might not improve quality.
Because the same must be true for photography, I took a three-day beginner’s course a few years ago. I retained a couple of ideas: each photo should tell a story, and the rule of thirds, which means breaking an image into three segments vertically and horizontally.
For example, in the first photo, I wanted the bottom half of the picture, the tee area where the first shot, a drive, occurs, to be the most prominent. The middle segment, the light-green fairway, bends right toward the green where the hole is located. The horizon includes the tops of the trees, indicating the right-to-left direction of the wind.
I took the photo before I teed off, with my golfer’s imagination seeing precisely the flight I wanted my tee shot to follow. Start the ball to the right over the two pine trees and let the 21 MPH wind bring it back into the fairway. Which is exactly what happened.
I hope, at this point in the story, you perceive me as a reliable narrator.
Here is a rough diagram of the flight path of my ball, which landed about 220 yards from the senior tee, leaving an 80-yard pitch shot to the green.
Photo by the author
Of course, I flubbed that shot, ending up with a bogey, one over par, on the hole.
But I’m proud of this photo and my tee shot.
In this world that humbles us even in our games and hobbies, we need to pat ourselves on the back occasionally. Besides, that movement of the arms, elbows, and shoulders toward the posterior is also the perfect stretching exercise for the golf swing.
I understand, dear reader, that neither my links nor camera actions are perfect in any objective sense. However, my comparisons are with myself, not with others. That’s one of the niceties of old age.
A long time ago, I realized the people in charge are no smarter than the rest of us.
My little town in northeast Iowa has a seven-intersection shopping area with a signal light at each crossing that commands go (green), slow (yellow), and stop (red), with walk and don’t walk for pedestrians. Two weeks ago, they decided to change to a continuous flashing red light.
Here’s my letter to our local newspaper about this change.
Cancel Decorah’s Flashing Red Light District
I live on Water Street, a few blocks east of downtown, so I walk and drive it several times every day. Yesterday, 5% calmer than usual after my new 15-minute meditation routine, I got in my car to get a Snickers tornado at Whippy Dip.
On the way back, I crept up to the intersection of Mechanic and Water, second in line for take-off. The eastbound car in front of me had its left turn signal on, as did the westbound car across the intersection, with a chorus of three pedestrians waiting off stage.
No one knew what to do, precisely the opposite sensation you want when driving, walking, or biking.
I thought about snatching my Tornado or checking my phone to calm my nerves, but as a law-abiding Iowan for 76 years and a newly minted meditator, I cleared my mind and recalled the hands-free law passed by our state legislature, rightly concerned about Iowans’ health.
When I pulled into my driveway, I was 10% more unsettled than usual.
TO MY PAULMUSES.COM READERS–THANK YOU. TODAY, I TRANSFERRED MANY STORIES THAT HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ON MEDIUM TO THIS BLOG SITE. TOO MANY, SO IF YOU ARE READING THEM IN ORDER I APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE AND PERSISTENCE.
I love living in a hoof-friendly community, following in the striding footsteps of my mother, who marched three miles a day until she was 90.
A hip replacement slowed her down to a stroll until, at 94, she forgot who she was and what she liked to do.
“Moving at a regular pace” was the last of her habits to fade away, after coffee and ice cream, just like Glen Campbell’s songs stayed with him longer than the cities he was performing in, as shown in the poignant documentary “I’ll Be Me,” about how he and his family managed his Alzheimer’s during his last tour.
Yesterday, I made the mistake of prematurely stepping off the curb onto this crosswalk before realizing I’m not in Florida anymore.
Photo by the author
Of course, the closest car slowed to a stop to accommodate a pedestrian. I’ve given up waving these altruistic strangers on. Now I give them a thumbs-up and hope the cars behind are paying attention.
Two weeks ago, I spent six days in Winter Haven, Florida, taking care of my late brother Peter’s estate. This community sits between Tampa and Orlando. Below is one of the sidewalks across from my hotel, which I hiked down each day. In that week, I saw one other pedestrian. And no bikers.
Photo by the author
As I walked through intersections, watching the timer count down from 20 seconds, I felt like a stranger in a strange land; this feeling of alienation was heightened by the darkened windshields, which are illegal in my state of Iowa.
Sadly, at the end of each daily walk, I felt more, not less, anxious. Ironically, the people I met in the hotel and restaurants, at my brother’s church and assisted living facility, in bookstores and coffee shops, were all, without exception, friendly.
For me, walking is a therapy session. My couch is Palisades Park, about a mile from our house. This is the waiting room.
Photo by the author
Occasionally, we’ll have a group session.
Photo by the author
As you can tell from the incline, it’s not for the faint of heart. But the personal insights sometimes take my breath away, particularly when I’m helped to gain perspective and take the long view.
Photo by the author
However, my guides always tell me at the end of each session, “Be careful out there, and take it one step at a time.
Last night, meaning three hours ago, because I checked our upside-down clock light projector, I dreamt of writing a story of 150 words. It was only a snippet of an image, but it stuck. You know how that is, sometimes night memories linger upon waking, and sometimes not.
When I fell back to sleep, another vision prodded, of our French coffee thingies. Below is the real assembly line.
Photo by the author
The first photo is today’s finished product.
It is now 6:14 AM, and I’ve been writing for over two hours. I’ve yet to check the New York Times or The Economist, so that’s a sign my writing muse is in the house.
On the lap desk, in a red Moleskine notebook propped under my right arm next to my MacBook, is an open page listing dates for photos I will use in two writing projects, neither of which was this one.
A few years ago, I fell into the daily habit of walking around a local forested park a few blocks from our house.
Yesterday, on the way to Palisades, I took the first picture and thought, what came first, the root or the sidewalk?
You’ll notice a fenced playground across the street. It used to be the parking lot for a funeral home that is now a Montessori School.
The genius of recycling.
When I entered the park, I was primed to discover other examples of survival. Isn’t this old timer magnificent?
Photo by the author
And these guys don’t give up.
Photo by the author
Five years ago, Rebecca and I built a back porch that required a new sidewalk, so we moved the birch tree you see in the middle of the photo below from its birthplace along the sidewalk path. We carefully dug under the root ball to give the tree a good chance of surviving. We needn’t have worried.
Photo by the author
Both of us remember the first Earth Day in 1970, Joni Mitchell’s environmental anthem, “The Big Yellow Taxi,” and her admonition not to cover more of the earth with concrete.
Well, we sinned.
That’s one reason we have planted 10 trees on our property and why my daily walk through a forest is penance, pleasure, and enlightenment.
Trees can get through the most challenging environments.
That’s a lesson worth pondering for other living things.
