The power of an older, leaner, and craftier brain.
Photo by author
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The photo shows the front of our house, yesterday.
And the front of Hazel’s house, our 90 year old neighbor.
You can see Hazel down the sidewalk, with her little dog.
America’s midterm elections are next week and so there are political signs all over town including in front of both houses.
The five signs planted in our yard support candidates and an issue that align with our interests, values, and world views.
The two signs residing in Hazel’s yard do the same for her.
Hazel and I have never talked politics in the 15 years we have been neighbors.
But our signs tell us of us and the 100s of cars, walkers, and bikers that travel by our houses each day on our city’s Main Street that we support different sides.
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Photo by author
In this photo, you can see another sign announcing the academic Department I taught in for 33 years.
When I think about Politics, I begin with two people.
Not Donald and Joe.
Hazel and me.
We each have different interests, values, and world view.
The reasons for our differences like include: personality, upbringing and parental influence, religion, income, gender, education, occupation, marital status, ethnicity, race and sexual orientation.
I’m sure you can add several I missed. That might account for your own Politics.
Last fall my partner Rebecca and I lived in Romania for four months.
For almost 40 years, until 1989, Romanians lived under Communist dictators.
Politics died under Communism because freedom died.
The freedom to form different interests, values and world views.
The freedom protected in the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights and the 1991 Romanian Constitution.
Freedom means nothing if we can’t express our interests through support for candidates and issues that are extensions of us.
Hazel’s and my freedom require more than signs. It mandates a ballot.
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Photo by author
The photo above shows the new Winneshiek County Veterans Memorial at 4 AM across from our houses and signs.
The central idea of the Memorial is that force is sometimes necessary to protect freedom.
The Memorial’s eternal light guards our signs which express our differences which are a manifestation of our freedom.
It doesn’t protect just my freedom. But also Hazel’s.
Freedom’s value is best understood when absent, by those who don’t have it.
Hazel’s mother and my grandmothers could not express their interests through a vote until 1920.
It was not until 1965 that America’s Black citizens across the country could cast a ballot.
About the franchise, Martin Luther King, Jr. said:
As long as I am unable to exercise my Constitutional Right to vote I do not have command of my own life. I cannot determine my own destiny for it is determined for me by people who would rather see me suffer than succeed.
America’s true Politics is only two generations old.
One generation older than Romania’s.
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Politics honors freedom, difference and voice.
It is built upon a moral idea about the equality of all citizens.
Hazel might be richer, smarter, or more moral than me, but Politics sees both of us as precious and unique.
Our outer differences melt away to expose what the late Political Scientist E.E. Schattschneider referred to as “the warm, breathing, feeling, hungering, loving, hating, aspiring, living being with whom we identify ourselves.”
During the summer of 1968, I heard for the first time, my father express doubt about America. I was 18.
Martin Luther King ,Jr. had been assassinated on April 4, Bobby Kennedy on June 6.
Assassination is a form of anti-Politics, as is a dictator like Romania’s Nicolae CeauČ™escu.
Those who assaulted (not the protestors) America’s Capital on January 6, 2021 rejected Politics.
Those who rioted (not the protesters) in American cities after George Floyd’s murder rejected Politics.
My father’s lament in 1968: what is happening to America?
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Like my father 50 years ago, today, I am often discouraged about the particularities of America’s Politics. The Romanians we met last year felt the same about Romania’s Politics.
It is hard to love the Politics we see around us, particularly the nastiness.
But it is impossible to love the anti-Politics. And that is good. Some things are worthy of hatred.
Remember that Politics gives us an honest reflection of who we are, as a People.
The mirror does not lie; that makes it valuable.
Recall the alternatives to Politics: Ceaușescu in Romania, in America, assassinations, the assault against the Capital and counting of votes, and riots.
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