Mrs. Thompson lived in a little house on Ridgewood Avenue.
Her backyard bordered the driveway my family shared with our next-door neighbor.
The cemented area between our garages doubled as a whiffle ball diamond in the summer and a basketball court in the winter.
Because there was only a low hedge of bushes between our play and Mrs. Thompson’s yard, we regularly trespassed to retrieve one ball or another.
Mrs. Thompson was a small, stooped woman.
Often outside working in her garden.
She always wore a sweater.
Even in the summer.
I don’t know if she was ever married. Or had children.
I do know she never complained about us darting into her yard.
Not like Mrs. Weinswag.
She lived up our street.
And was protected from our stray balls.
But not from an occasional wet newspaper.
That I delivered.
After a few complaints, my mother told her to put the wet paper in the oven. Like mom did after I trudged up the street to exchange our dry paper for crabby Weinswag’s wet one.
Every Thursday night, I collected money from my 44 Times-Democrat newspaper customers.
Mrs. Weinswag never let me inside her house.
Mrs. Thompson always did.
Her house was warm.
Hot to a kid.
But cozy.
Mrs. Thompson died soon after I stopped being a paperboy.
*
I’ve been thinking about her lately, as I, at 73:
Replace my cotton sweaters with wool ones.
Nudge our house temperature to 75.
Investigate a warm destination for next January.
And purchase battery-warmed gloves.
About the gloves, I have Raynaud’s condition. You can read about it here. Below is a helpful diagram.
Photo of our Thursday breakfast group: left to right: Peter, Uwe, Ruth, Will, Dennis, Alan, Dale, the author, and Harland
*
I was born in 1949; my mother, Dorothy Thomas, in 1921; her mother, Florence Mullane, in 1891.
Florence died at 94, Dody at 96; I’m 73.
None of us wanted to belong to the country of the old. Florence and Dody never changed their minds.
This story is why I just did.
*
Look at that old lady.
Mom told this story many times. She and her mom would be walking in downtown Davenport, Iowa. Florence would spot an older person across the street. She would stop, point, and “Look at that old lady.”
Decades later, when mom was 88, we walked up East Street, the steep brick lane outside her house. Her left arm was linked to my right because he had a hip replaced three days earlier. Mom looked across the street and waved to Evelyn Barton walking down her driveway. Evelyn was also 88. Mom whispered, “Evelyn walks like an old lady.”
Mom conceded nothing to her age. No hearing aids, no walker, even after the hip operation, and no memory care unit until my brother had no choice.
I don’t think my mother or grandmother ever felt good about being old.
Ruby’s
Last Thursday, I had breakfast with a group of retired Luther College professors. That’s us in the photo.
On another Thursday morning 11 years ago, I was half listening to one of my mom’s stories. She was visiting, and we were out for breakfast at Ruby’s. I looked over and saw another cohort of Luther retirees eating and chatting. I recall thinking, that won’t be me when I retire.
The old are them and not me.
A country of the old
In 1926 60-year-old Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote Sailing to Byzantium with this first line:
That is no country for old men.
“That” had been his country, full of
The young in one another’s arms.
The poet feels old, soon to be
An aged man…a tattered coat upon a stick.
Yeats died 13 years later, at 73.
Sixty years after Byzantium, 70-year-old American poet William Stafford wrote Waiting in Line,* with this opening:
You the very old, I have come to the edge of your country and looked across…
Later, the poem’s narrator says
I have glimpsed from within the gray-eyed look at those who push, and occasionally even I can achieve your beautiful bleak perspective on the loud, the inattentive, shoving boors jostling past you toward their doom.
Stafford, dead at 79, finished with
You others, we the very old have a country. A passport costs everything.
My mom and grandmother strode to the edge of the country of the old, looked across, and turned away. Passports locked in purses.
I’m on a different path.
Turning Toward
About a year ago, I realized I was shaving with my sleep t-shirt on. No tattered coat, but I had covered my aging body. I didn’t want to look. I was turning away. Turning away is rarely the answer.
Slowly, this past year, I decided, without really deciding, that I would turn toward the country of the old.
Yeats and Stafford suggest this country is superior to the country of the young.
Yeats old man sails to Byzantium, a place, as one critic suggested, “where wisdom, art, beauty, and experience are honored.”
Stafford’s narrator sees in the old a “beautiful bleak perspective.”
Instead of sailing to Byzantium last fall, we motored to Cooperstown, NY home to Baseball’s Hall of Fame.
For a year, I’ve been reading biographies of my favorite players: Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax.**
Communing with these men at baseball’s shrine seemed fitting. Until yesterday, however, I had not understood what all this had to do with aging.
“He was complete”
A friend loaned me a book of essays by Roger Angell. Angell, who died at 99 last year, is considered the finest baseball chronicler. In the Preface to Once More 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.
Bingo
That’s why I’m absorbing baseball biographies. My perspective has changed. Today, I’m less interested in the records of my heroes than in who they became.
And in who I’ve become – the complete.
Only in the country of the old can I contemplate what complete means. Stafford’s last line:
A passport costs everything there is.
The mirror shows me the costs of aging.
But the gift is the possibility of making sense of my life.
*Stafford’s Waiting in Line is the 10th poem on this linked page.
**Biographies: Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy; The Soul of Baseball: A road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America by Joe Posnanski; Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen; The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy; True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson by Kostya Kennedy.
The power of an older, leaner, and craftier brain.
Photo by author
*
I’ve been thinking about this getting older gig.
Piling bits of mental activity on top of the hundreds of little problems my wondrous brain grapples with each day.
A shrinking organ, science tells me.
Smaller at 73 than at 23.
Every part of me is getting smaller, but my prostate.
Science tells me that, too.
My mother lived to be 96. During visits to my home, before we ventured outside, we spent minutes looking for her purse.
How often did I say, “now, where is that damn purse?” Out of her hearing, of course.
We always found the purse.
It hadn’t walked out the door.
Mom’s brain knew this. It put where is my purse thought at the bottom of the thought pile, inside her shrinking brain.
To be pulled out when needed.
Her brain was adapting to its aging, her aging.
My brain is now doing the same.
Yesterday I lost my car key
It stayed lost longer than usual.
I hear mom’s “I told you it would happen to you.”
“But it’s easier to lose a key than a purse. That’s why we buried the purse with you.”
When my mind puts me to the task of searching for a key, I systematically look at the flat surfaces throughout the house. Easy peasy. There it is.
But not yesterday.
I sat on a hallway bench in my thinker pose.
What problems had my brain solved today?
Peanut butter on toast for breakfast.
Yes, there is an 8:30 AM kettlebell session. Remember your shoes.
Loose brackets on the kitchen cupboard doors. Hmm.
We keep screwdrivers in a box that sits on a stairway shelf.
The photo shows you where my brain found the key, next to the screwdrivers.
Undoubtedly, my brain is slowing down. But it has 73 years of experience to draw upon. It distinguishes wheat from chaff better than ever. It knows to pause and reflect before rushing forward.
It favors the turtle over the hare.
Afterword
Before I took the photo, I needed to find my phone.
Photo of 5′ 7″ Lionel Messi by Hossein Zohrevand, from Wikimedia Commons
Role models matter.
*
Well, I don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
‘Round here
Forgive me Grammarly, but — don’t want no and not don’t want any — was how Randy Newman ended his most famous song, Short People.
I pay attention to Randy because he’s 6 feet.
I’m not alone stuck in a bias in favor of taller.
For over 100 years, Americans have elected Presidents 4 inches taller than the average male. (source)
Throughout my lifetime the average American male has been two inches taller than me.
I’m 5′ 7″ and the shortest male in at least four generations of the Gardner and Thomas clans.
I’ve grown up with a prejudice against short people.
That’s another reason I like Randy’s song.
It satirizes people like me, who think less of short people.
Even that 5′ 7″ on my driver’s license since 1966 was phony. Motor vehicle clerks believed what you told them.
But the nurses who measure height and weight before doctor’s appointments have always recorded the precise figure, as in five feet six and three-quarters inches.
Words instead of numbers dilute the pain, of being short.
Over the past month, I’ve watched too many World Cup matches.
But I can’t get enough of Argentinian and Barcelona star Lionel Messi considered among the greatest soccer players of all time. (source)
He’s my height.
*
I can’t go back and change how I felt being the smallest boy on the playground.
What if I had known then that another hero, New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, was a 5′ 7″ titan?
Last Thursday, I ate breakfast with my retired professor chums. We chomped, chatted, and chuckled.
Later in the day, Rebecca and I attended a lecture by another emeritus professor. She talked about living in the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991. What a gift, to hear insights from someone so experienced.
On Friday, we went to my former college’s Christmas party and hung out with other perennials. If you are wondering about the perennial label, I’ve written about it here.
I’m 73 and retired in 2018.
I recall sitting in another restaurant years ago, watching another retired cohort. I was with my 85 year-old mother, half-listening to one of her stories.
And asking myself whether I would join my retirement bunch for breakfast every Thursday morning.
I didn’t.
Not the breakfasts or the monthly lectures. At college gatherings, I gravitated to those still employed.
I was stuck.
Not only that.
One day, while looking in the bathroom mirror as I lathered for a shave, I realized I had started to keep my nighttime t-shirt on during this morning ritual.
I was masking my aging upper torso, from myself.
Stuck and hiding.
I was mourning two losses: my professional life and my imagined youthful body.
The foregrounded tree in the photo helped.
It is what it has become. Nothing hidden.
No pretense.
Nature taking its course. Living and dying.
Like the tree, I’m part of the natural world. Nothing special. No exception.
Today, I’m a proud emeriti breakfaster and lecture attendee. And occasional presenter. And last Friday, at the Christmas party, Rebecca and I caught up with several old friends.
Thankfully, it started at 3 PM.
And in a few hours, I will go to a kettlebell workout and stick-out like that tree.
Older amidst younger.
The large mirror in the front of the room will display my aging limbs.
That I observe with curiosity, acceptance, and pride.
Eight days ago the earth’s population topped eight billion people.
So many different smiles.
I want to add one more to the world’s smile mobilization each day.
After 73 years, it’s about time.
I don’t smile enough.
What about you?
Smiling takes effort.
I’ve learned when my mouth creaks upward, endorphins scurry off to my brain.
If I do this enough, my chances of dying from a heart attack are reduced 9%.
That’s better than the little Statin pill I take before bed.
*
Five years ago I tried an experiment.
One semester I crossed paths daily with another faculty member who I didn’t like because I thought she didn’t like me.
In the 20 years I knew her, she had never smiled at me.
Of course, I never smiled at her.
Do we ever stop being teenagers?
After a few weeks of curt nods at a sidewalk intersection, I smiled at Jo.
It was a ploy.
No, we never stop being teenagers.
I faked the feeling I hoped my smile was conveying.
Jo reciprocated.
One year later my partner Rebecca and I met with Jo in her office to talk about an off-campus program she had directed the previous year that we would lead later that year.
She generously provided many insights that would help us out. And continued doing so via email throughout our experience abroad.
Rebecca’s grandson Illan, with back to camera, granddaughter Irene, and son Jonathan. Photo by author.
It was 3:45 AM.
Our Uber ride, a white, lighted Hyundai with water vapor drifting from its tailpipe, was waiting outside to take us to the airport for a 6:20 AM return Flight to Kansas City.
*
Story One
My partner Rebecca and I had been in Marblehead, MA for a week to attend the Bar Mitzvah of Emily and Aviv’s son Illan.
I asked if I could take pictures during the ceremony and was told yes. The photo above was of an open Arc that had just received back the Torah scrolls. Rebecca’s granddaughter Irene and son Jonathan closed the chamber doors. Irene is a first grader at an Episcopal school in Houston, Texas.
Protestant Rebecca and Catholic Paul read a Prayer for Peace.
On Illan’s day of honor and commitment, another car stood guard outside the synagogue.
Photo by author
Rebecca’s daughter Emily married Aviv 20 years ago. He had come from Israel with his family a few years before they met.
A decade after they married, Emily converted to Judaism. Illan’s sister Sivan will Bat Mitzvah in two years.
Story Two
The driver met us and our three bags on the top porch step.
He looked about sixty and easily stuffed the bags into the SUV’s trunk.
Once we were buckled in, he moved the car slowly forward and told us how much he enjoyed early morning pick-ups.
His easy chatter gave Rebecca permission to ask questions.
In the thirty minutes to the Boston airport, we learned our driver:
Is Korean; came to the USA 40 years ago, after his parents immigrated; has five younger sisters; lived 20 years in Jacksonville, Florida and 20 years in Atlanta, Georgia; moved to Boston with his wife six months ago to be near their two daughters and grandchildren; one daughter is an Endocrinologist, the other Director of Medical Services; Ubers every morning from 4 – 8; and plays golf once a week with his pastor.
When he said pastor, I knew Rebecca would ask, “Are you Presbyterian?”
Our new friend said “yes, of course.”
You might ask how we knew.
Not only have we watched all five seasons of Netflick’s Kim’s Convenience, a series about Canadian Koreans who are Presbyterian, but Rebecca is Presbyterian and knows about Presbyterianism in South Korea.
Our driver “talks to Jesus everyday.” And worries that so many young people are leaving the church. But is more proud of his daughters’ religious values than their material successes.
Story Three
Rebecca and I were as comfortable with our new Korean American friend’s God-talk as with his compressed life story.
As comfortable as Christian Rebecca is with her Jewish daughter.
As comfortable as Catholic Paul is with Presbyterian Rebecca and his 33 years teaching at Luther College.
Jesus and Torah
Francis and Calvin
Side by side, in peaceful co-existence.
The wondrous consequence of the American Constitution’s religious clauses.
It’s easy to take this comfort for granted.
Last fall we spent three months in Romania. When Rebecca told one of our Romanian friends about Emily’s marriage to Aviv and subsequent conversion, he said neither of these would happen in Romania and followed with
America is thirty years ahead of us
Story Four
But the police car guarding the synagogue reminded us of another story that will not go away.
Maybe America is ahead of Romania, but it’s not yet to the promised land.
This fear of those not in our religious tribe is deep in America.
And not just among anti-semites.
It resides in our memories and families.
My first girl friend was Jewish. It was 1966. My Catholic mom was not happy and said “you know, you can’t get serious.” Her parents were also opposed but tolerated me probably thinking it would not last. It didn’t.
My mom would also have opposed me dating a Presbyterian, even an Episcopalian.
America then was like Romania now, where Christians don’t marry Jews and Orthodox don’t marry Catholics.
I don’t know what my agnostic, Protestant-raised father thought about Sharon, my Jewish girlfriend.
But I do know what he thought about Catholicism.
Dody & Paul Gardner on their wedding day in 1948, in front of the altar, at Sacred Heart Cathedral
Before he and my mom married in 1948, my father began meeting with a priest as part of the Catholic conversion process. Apparently the priest treated my even-tempered dad so badly my father refused to continue.
For him, this priest’s intolerance became a proxy for what was bad about organized religion. At the same time, he came to love the Sisters of Charity, BVM and particularly Sister Marilyn Thomas, his sister-in-law. I know he took solace in their prayers later, as he was slowly dying of cancer.
He tolerated his three sons being raised Catholic but his refusal to become one was always a tension in their 45 year marriage.
My dad died of sinus cancer in 1993. As our family left the funeral home parlor before the casket was closed, I turned around and saw my mom place a rosary on my father’s defenseless hands.
I’ve thought about that image for thirty years.
If I could relive that moment, I would have waited for my mom to leave the room, and removed it.
A Veterans Memorial commemorating the men and women from northeast Iowa who served in America’s Armed Services now occupies a small park across from our home. It sits comfortably next to a playground and picnic shelter.
My partner Rebecca’s father served America during WWII as an electrician on a Navy ship in the South Pacific. My father, in the same area, was a Medic in the Coast Guard. Jason, one of Rebecca’s sons-in-law, is a Colonel in the Marines and has deployed in Afghanistan.
The obelisk in the photo presents the memorial’s main idea: how freedom sometimes requires force, including the instrument of war.
Armed forces were necessary to stop Hitler and to slow Putin.
But freedom’s enemies sometimes entrench inside a country.
So one citizen must fight another to expand freedom to a third.
Luman L. Caldwell was a Civil War veteran and Decorah’s only Medal of Honor recipient. Mr. Caldwell swam across an Alabama bayou to secure a small boat that was then used by his company to attack and capture a unit of soldiers.
In America, war was necessary to destroy slavery.
After slavery, the U.S. Army occupied the 11 Confederate States to protect the rights of former slaves, now American citizens.
When the army withdrew from those states in 1877, southern governors, legislators, and Ku Klux Klans created through law and terror an American Apartheid that would last for 80 years. As a consequence, six million Black American citizens migrated from their southern homes to places north and west.
More than 4000 were lynched.
The nonviolent Black Freedom Movement arose to redress these grievances. Resistance to the expansion of freedom to African Americans was violent.
In 1962, President Kennedy ordered the Army and National Guard units to protect James Meredith as he became the first Black citizen to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
Resistance led by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett required 31,000 troops to quell the riots surrounding this effort to enroll an American citizen in an American university.
This new neighborhood addition shines its lights at night.
Photo by author
Freedom’s enemies, wherever they reside, require eternal vigilance.
A few days ago my partner Rebecca and I flew Southwest Airlines from Kansas City to Boston, with a brief stopover in St. Louis.
In St. Louis, all but nine passengers out of about 200 got off; that’s when I took this photo.
The seat pocket in front of me included an information card about our airliner: a Boeing 73 MAX 8.
This was the Boeing aircraft suspended in 2019 after two crashes killing 346.
You can read about why and the recertification process here.
Thankfully I was ignorant of that fact on the plane.
Which allowed me to focus on a performance by one of the three flight attendants.
He looked to be around 35, Asian, braces on his teeth, with a home base in Chicago.
And a style not to be missed.
We’ve flown Southwest for years and know its culture of humor and poking fun at airline routines.
Chicago was the best I’d ever seen.
One funny line after another, timed perfectly.
Delivered with the plane phone speaker propped at 45 degrees and dropped a bit between lines.
Three examples:
This Boeing is going.
If you leave something behind, you will find it tomorrow on e-bay.
And my favorite.
The pilots saw something on You Tube they wanted to try out on this take-off.
Uttered as we taxied to the take-off runway.
As the passengers deplaned in St. Louis, I noticed many still chucking and most made a point of eye contact, thanking, and saying good-bye to our Windy City friend.
When he closed the door for our continuing flight to Boston, for the matinee performance, I wondered whether his dialogue would be the same and whether it be stale.
Yes and no. Repeated and delivered with panache.
Performed for two hundred people strapped inside a narrow cylinder hurtling at 500 MPH at 30,000 feet, on a previously grounded Boeing.
.jpg){kind=link}
