The Great Purge Part 1

We bought our house almost ten years ago. Dick was still in the last years before retirement from corporate life and I was still teaching in the final years of my graduate studies. But we were thinking about retirement and planning to move back to my home town when the time was right. Then our house came on the market and even though the time wasn't right, we recognized it as home.

The move took two years, and it wasn't tidy. We made the four-hour drive between the two houses nearly every weekend, always with a car load of stuff. We did little of that sort-through-and-throw-away that we should have done. We moved it all. And on our trips down the 200 miles of I-55, we passed through some great antiquing territory. And since our new house was a three story Victorian, well . . .

I wonder if that’s how it usually is in transition spaces. You have the detritus from the old and the gathering necessaries of the new.

Even transitions as quotidian as the changing seasons bring stuff. There’s the sweater that should have been thrown away at the end of last winter. Plus the pretty new sweater you just bought. On sale!

Every new season of life leaves clutter from the last. The more seasons to your life, the more clutter. For instance, bicycles.

I have a "city" bike that I bought years ago. 

At some point, I didn't feel safe trying to balance with such a high bar. 
I replaced it with a lower bar girl's bicycle 

When swinging my leg over even the lower bar became too difficult for my arthritic hip, 

I replaced the girl's bicycle with a special, step-through, easy-boarding bicycle. 

So far, so good. But that makes two bicycles I’ll never ride again, one in the basement, one in the garage. Somebody could use those bicycles, I tell myself every time I see them. 

And to make things worse, we now have a lot of undesignated space that makes it way too tempting to bypass difficult decisions.

                                     Me: What is this?

                                     He: I don’t know.

                                     Me: Do we need it?

                                     He: Maybe.

                                     Me: What for?

                                     He: It might go on something.

                                     Me: OK. I’ll put it on the third floor
                                                          . . . (down in the basement)
                                                          . . . (in the east bedroom) 
                                                          . . . (back in the drawer). 

It weighs on me. I like things tidy. True, I don’t have to go up to the third floor or down in the basement and I rarely go in the east bedroom. But I know that stuff is there. I smell the cardboard packing boxes.

So the purge is on. We’ve started. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I'm off to Paris!!! Who knows what I'll bring back.

Book Review: SPECIAL EXITS by Joyce Farmer

The difference between comic and graphic novels is debated. I'm growing used to the phrase "graphic novel" though it used to make me cringe. Isn't that what we called pornographic novels? 

Regardless of the term, a graphic novel, or long comic, is a story told with drawings. But you can't speed through them the way you used to speed through Archie and Veronica. 

The drawings are dense and meaningful, performing the same task as descriptive passages in traditional novels. The subject can be quite serious.

Joyce Farmer's long-narrative comic, Special Exits, chronicles the final years of the lives of Lars and Rachel Drover, stand-ins for Farmer's own parents in this semi-autobiographical novel.

At a solid 200 pages, this is an intense read, both for the drawings and the subject matter.

Isolated in their south Los Angeles home, the Drovers leave the house only for groceries and medical appointments. In their home, they no longer even try to manage the events that surround them. 

Lars’ arms are covered with Band-Aids where the cat has scratched him. The garage door won’t close. The laundry isn’t done. 

In one early, explosive frame, set in a Sizzler Restaurant, Rachel cries, “If I could, I’d go live in a old folks home!” 

But they can’t, Lars explains. They would have to sell the house and their money might not last. They’d have to get rid of their beloved hobbies - her dolls and his rocks and books. The changes would be too big to manage - they’re stuck. 

They’re even more stuck when Lars, daydreaming of his youth, has an auto accident. 

Enter Laura, their daughter, stand-in for the author. Her parents don’t care to have strangers in their house and so Laura visits more and more often as the novel progresses, shopping, scheduling appointments, dealing with bureaucracy, and cleaning, always cleaning.

There’s nothing sentimental here. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that by the final pages, both parents have passed, and their final exits don’t come at home, in bed, surrounded by loved ones. 

The long comic genre is excellent for this story. The pictures are densely drawn and uncompromising in their portrayal of the accumulation of years of dust, cat hair, and stuff in the house, the garage, and the surrounding grounds. 

I would have liked more exploration of the relationship between Lars and Rachel. Rachel’s decline comes first and Lars takes patient care of her. We see brief episodes of anger, but nothing more. And how could we? This is ultimately Laura’s story. She is the hero. The elders are the conflict. It is an excellent story of taking care of your parents in their final years. It doesn’t pretend to be nor does it need to be anything else.

Maybe this is currently your story as you deal with aging parents. Someday, it may be your children's story. As for me, my parents died young. If this is my future, I wonder how I will get there. Is this your story? Is it your future? Please feel welcome to chime in with a comment.

Tales From the Inside

I used to live down the street from Edison Middle School. Every spring the EMS band marched in the local Memorial Day Parade. They practiced their song indoors all year, but at some point during March or April, the Edison Middle School Marching Panthers would take to the street.

The grade spread was, still is I think, six through eight. I estimate this to span ages eleven through thirteen. At that age, on the border of puberty, those marching bodies didn’t appear to be of the same species. 

There were of course differences in height and girth. But from the perspective of my living room window, their bodies appeared to be put together in wholly different ways, of only similar parts. Some were still children, compact and tightly hinged. Others were mostly torso; still others, mostly arms and legs. Their hands and feet operated like semaphores. 

I could pick out 8th grade girls. They were smallish adults having grown into maturity over that mysterious summer between the 7th and 8th grades. But the others, the boys and the younger girls looked like they’d been assembled out of parts from a can of Tinker Toys, and not all from the same can.

Maybe not even all Tinker Toys.

What I didn’t realize then was that this oddball assemblage of disparate parts would reappear. 

From the end of puberty through young adulthood, householder years, middle age, we humans all look fairly similar. We differ in height, weight, even limb length and laugh lines, but proportionately, we’re pretty much the same. 

Then somewhere, maybe as early as age 60 for some of us, we start to disassemble. Our torsos thicken, our shoulders round, our heads go forward, we lose muscle in our legs and plumpness under the skin of our arms, hands and faces. Our fingers stiffen and curl. Our limbs are supplemented by canes, walkers, scooters and wheelchairs.

We look like old middle schoolers. The Edison Middle School Marching Elders.

And like middle schoolers, we’re treated as one-size-fits-all. 

Plenty of advice is being written about aging. How to stay young, look young, think young, feel young. How to care for your aging parents. How to deal with your aging body. What drugs to take. How to grieve the loss of your spouse and your friends, over and over. All good, I’m sure. But all one-size-fits-all.

What we need are stories from the inside. Whaddya say? Let’s write our own. Let’s be the heroes in our own narratives.