1977 Redux: Part 1

These are my actual diaries and writings.  

I can tell you with absolute certainty that on Friday, March 18, 1977 I enzymed my contact lenses. I also know that I went to school that day, came home, did homework, spoke to my boyfriend.  Then I babysat my brother and sister while my parents went to the doctor. I wrote out thank you cards to guests of my Sweet Sixteen party two weeks prior.  I took a bath, got dressed and went to dinner with my boyfriend.  It was a lovely night, and so we walked home, holding hands.  Finally, I enzymed my contacts, recorded the day's happenings in my diary and went to sleep.

It is, in hindsight, quite astonishing that I recorded nearly every single day of my high school years in exactly this way, but it's true.   It's all there in the books pictured above: what I did, who I saw and sometimes, even what I felt and thought.  My moods are evident in the handwriting which is mostly neat and orderly but when upset, might be scrawl, almost illegible, and written into the margins when the space given was too quickly filled with words that couldn't contain my passion or anger.

I don't really know why I felt compelled to document these years, and many others in varying degrees later on.  I think the portrayal of John Boy Walton writing in his journal on television might have given me the initial idea.  But also I think the young girl had some inkling that her future self would find these writings to be a treasure one day.  And she was right about that.

In reading what took place in 1977 recently, I was struck by how many times the memory of a moment, or an hour, or a day, returned to me; often vivid, sometimes vague, but nearly always these memories had been lost to me until the written words on the page supplied the key to where they were locked in my memory.

Here's some of what I know about that year:  The summer was hot.  Son of Sam struck in our neighborhood, killed a girl and blinded her date.  There was a blackout for days in New York City.  I was sixteen years old.  I had girlfriends I loved.  I had a boyfriend I loved.  My boyfriend did not love my girlfriends; they kindly returned the favor.  We fought.  We laughed.  We loved.  We learned.  

Here's an example of what we were doing on Tuesday, July 19, 1977.  This is more or less what I wrote for that date:

Is called.  At 10:00 we (likely Is, Barb, Di, Carol P, Carole D., myself, maybe others, I don't recall) went to Manhattan Beach.  It was so hot and crowded that we left the beach at 2 pm.  It reached 102 degrees.  When we got home, we went into Carole's pool and had a ball.  Got home at 5, went out to dinner, then the girls (probably the same girls) came to my house, and we watched the movie Love Story on tv.

This is a typical day that hot summer.  I likely would not recall anything at all about this day if it had not been recorded in my journal. After reading this entry, I can recall most of what is written here and through these memories, reach other forgotten details about that particular day and others like it, details not written down, like how hot and uncomfortable it was on the bus-ride home when we were sunburned, thirsty and chafing with sand.   There is a kind of sensory memory, if that's even possible, that comes along with the primary memory, a flooding of knowledge about what it actually felt like to live that day.

This is what it was like in Brooklyn, NY in the summer of 1977.  Most of the buses were not air conditioned.  We stood on our feet most of the way home, beach bags between our legs or hanging from our sunburned shoulders. There were at least two different buses, or maybe one long ride, I'm not sure. But I am sure we were over-heated and dehydrated;  I recall feeling light-headed and faint on the bus-ride home that day.  We probably did not take food or water with us.  We were young; we didn't worry about those kind of things.  We probably had only enough cash with us to pay for the bus-ride home.  These are the thoughts and memories that return to me in a flood when I read the entry for this date.

I remember that Carole's pool was a cool oasis beckoning us home; we could not wait to get into that pool and feel the cool waters close in over our heads.  I can remember this as though it happened yesterday, not 37 years ago; the relief from the heat granted by that pool on that day so long ago.  I am in fact surprised I remember this as vividly as I do after all this time.

And oddly enough, I don't recall the rest of that day at all, though I know what I did because I recorded it.  I seem to have gone to New Corner's Restaurant for dinner and then - apparently we hadn't already had enough of each other at the beach and the pool -  the girls met again at my house that night to watch Love Story and when it was over, they walked each other home.

As I am writing this, I realize how very different my city childhood in the 60's and 70's is from what my kids experienced here in suburban New Jersey in the 90's but that is a blog entry for another day.

We were independent and free.  That is what I am reminded as I read about my experiences that year.  We went everywhere with mass transportation and there were no cell phones or texting for parental check-ins every hour.  Our parents survived, and thankfully, so did we.

In those days, we did everything in a group.  To be on the outs with one in the group, did not disqualify you from the friendship of the entire group.  We just worked it all out in the fullness of time.  I learned a lot about love and forgiveness from my girlfriends, having been on both sides of the loving and forgiving equation and it always meant a lot to me to be a member of that special group of girls.

I still feel that way.  Though I don't see them except through Facebook (which I am so very thankful for), I will always feel connected to the girls I grew up with.  I hope they also feel that way about me.  Nothing can ever replace those once-in-a-lifetime days we shared.  I am happy to have a record of those years in these diaries, a link to the past both immediate and poignant.  To read these is a bit like time-travelling with my younger self as guide.

So this is what I plan to do with these journals:  read, remember, and be truly grateful for the many wonderful days I have had in my life with people whose love and laughter are engraved in my heart forever.

I will have more to say about 1977 and other years in posts to come.

The Sound of Silence

A fun fact, as my son would say:  I have reached the point in my life where I hear sounds that are not there and don't hear sounds that are.

I can be walking in a hallway at work, someone is behind me and I think suddenly that I've heard this person call my name.  I turn around to ask what they want because I definitely don't want them to think I just ignored them - that would be worse - but I can see from their surprised expression that they are thinking, "Geez, where did THAT come from?"  We both shrug and I think, "Oh my goodness, where DID that come from?"

Another recent example of this phenomena:  my son Dennis says something to me about who-knows-what while standing next to me in the kitchen as I fry cutlets. I don't really catch what he says but I am feeling brave,  "Did you just say, Alex ate escargot?" I say this despite thinking it highly unlikely that my traveling-abroad son actually ate snails in a pub in England.  Dennis thinks it is amusing how far off the mark I am.  Lucky for me, I think so too.

Just as an aside, Alex eventually did eat escargot, but it was in Paris a few weeks later, so maybe I'm just clairvoyant and what I hear inside my head is not just made up stuff.  Now, if I can only hear the lottery numbers.  Please.

I can also effectively block out the entire world if I wish to.  I have honed this art to perfection while living with children, dogs and very, very loud macaws.  I can create a bubble around myself no matter where I am or what I am doing and just float happily inside, neither listening to nor caring what is going on around me.  This is a nice trick that comes in handy and amazes anyone who witnesses it first-hand though these same amazed people are usually also annoyed that I just completely ignored them.

For most of my life I have had good hearing at the high notes and bad hearing at the low.  This state has changed recently.   After my last hearing test,  I was told that the higher pitches are also now tanking. Since hearing lost is hearing never to be found, it appears I am one step closer to the Miracle Ear.

And while we are on the subject, I might as well confess that the rest of my physical senses are also only shadows of what they once were.  I don't drive any place unfamiliar at night because I can't read the road signs until I am right under them.  The glorious scent of the sea which once had the power to make me instantaneously blissful, is almost totally lost to me.  Pain exists in more parts of my body than I can get pleasure from, so enough said there.  Thankfully, I can still taste food fairly well, at least for now, and maybe that's one reason my weight seems to rise with my age.

But the point of mentioning all this is not to lament the losses inherent to aging but to celebrate what the loss makes room for.  There are certainly plenty of worse things in this world than fading senses.  In fact, what I have found to be true for me is that as the external physical senses have faded, the internal, eternal sense is growing. And this is a darn good thing.

The internal, eternal sense is the ones that scientists don't know exists.  But it does.  It's just like when we were growing up, scientists did not know why the dinosaurs disappeared.  There had to be a cause; everyone knew there had to be a cause.  Now we know what that cause was: a giant meteor from outer space landed in Mexico, wiping them all out.  In 1968, who would have thunk it?

One day, maybe scientists will be able to identify the sense that grows in place of the ones that fade.  And I'm guessing that maybe they'll call it: wisdom.

When I was younger, my eyes saw only what was plainly in front of of me.  Now I can see further into the shadows where things are hidden.  Where once I trusted only what was "out there;"  now I can trust what lies "in here." Where once I sought to BE beautiful, smart, successful; now I seek these things for others.  Where once I might have done wrong because it was easy; now I am inclined to do right regardless of cost.   And where once I could not block out the madness of the world; I can finally hear the silence within.

There is peace in all this, and a sense that aging is not quite all the loss I expected it to be.

In The Blink of An Eye - In Ictu Oculi

A scalped specimen of hydrangea, looking down into where the
branches should be.

I finally found someone to help me with the heavy gardening chores.  He is just starting out and eager for business, so I get someone to cart around soil and mulch and do all the gardening work that my aging body prefers not to do.   That's the good news.

The bad news is:   he has a great deal to learn about old fashioned garden plants like hydrangeas.

Proof of his ignorance is pictured above.   Dear Readers, I am sure if you know anything at all about hydrangeas, you know that most varieties only bloom on old wood.  Say goodbye to old wood;  say goodbye to blooms.  For years.  It's as simple as that.

While I sat in my kitchen bingeing on season three of Shameless, a decade or more of old wood and all  the blooms that would have brightened my garden all summer long were snipped away.  Not a single bush escaped this fate.  If the weather had been better that day, I might have been out there supervising, and maybe, just maybe, I could have saved my hydrangeas from this fate.

In ictu oculi.  In the blink of an eye, all of it, gone.

I was dumbstruck as I wanted to use words like:  catastrophe, tragedy, idiot, moron, but I settled for: no, no, no. Didn't he realize I have been carefully tending to those hydrangeas for years, adding coffee grounds and tea leaves and aluminum sulphate in the soil around the roots, watering every night religiously in the heat of the summer so they would not want for a drop of water.  Now, they were all gone.

He says, no problem, they grow back, oblivious to my point that they won't BLOOM and that's why I grow them.  Maybe with the language barrier he didn't even understand what I said.  He's a nice guy, well-meaning and hard-working.  Too hard, maybe.  I am ok with a messy yard in April if it means it will be glorious in July.

Apparently in the NJ suburbs where I live,  messy yards are verboten and that's all he knows.  To him, they are ugly brown stems in need of removal.  He doesn't know what's in my heart; the memories of the hydrangeas of my childhood, giant mounds of deep green leaves covered with blue flowers, planted by my great-grandparents smack in the middle of their Brooklyn yard where I played happily as a small child.  He doesn't know that what I reach for in my own humble attempt at a garden is a mere hint of the security and beauty of the childhood that I know I can never touch again, except in my mind and heart.  He doesn't know that with his clippers, he just pushed it even further away than it already was.  What could you possibly say in the presence of a gulf so wide between us?

I know it is totally silly and I knew it at the time but I just couldn't stop obsessing over these plants.  Finally, I went online and ordered four varieties of hydrangeas that DO bloom on new wood and made myself feel a little bit better.  I will get blooms on my new hydrangeas this year and eventually those clipped hydrangeas will bloom again.  Time and money come to the rescue, as they do most of the time.

But then last Sunday something happened that time and money can never fix.  My beloved Tara was killed by my dogs while I was outside in that very same garden I fuss and fret over.  Another blink of the eye that I want back with every cell of my being and can never have back.  A few unguarded, careless moments on my part, and my little hen is gone forever.

I know that people who don't live with birds don't realize that each one has a unique personality, just as dogs and cats and all living things.  She was my five ounce green bird nazi.  She ran my household with her demands and her calls.  You never had to wonder what she was thinking or what she wanted.  She was bold, fresh and demanding, but she was mine.  I fed her with a syringe when she was a chick and had she lived, she would have turned eleven this year.

Undoubtedly, I was her favorite human.  She never wanted anyone else if she was within earshot of my voice.  I planned on spending the rest of my days with her as Hahn's macaws can live to 40 years old.  We would be two old, tough hens living our last days united in our arthritis and affection.

But that was not to be.

In ictu oculi.  In the blink of an eye, she was gone.

She loved me and trusted me and I let her down and she paid a horrible price and now I'm paying a different kind of horrible price.  I clipped her wings so she couldn't fly and when she needed to fly to save her own life, she could not do it.   She died while I chatted outside, totally unaware what was happening inside.  I cannot and will not describe for you the scene when I realized the mess on the kitchen floor was not the stuffing from a pillow, but my dear Tara's feathers.

In ictu oculi.  The blink of an eye, and a lifetime of regret.

So many times in the past I had merely bent over to scoop her gently off the floor when she fell from her stand and a gate was the only thing standing between her and the killing jaws of four dachshunds.   But I left her alone and somehow, she fell off the stand, the gate opened, the dogs lurched, and I wasn't there to rescue her.

She had the right to be safe in her own home, and I failed her.  I want with all my heart to turn back the clock and put the dogs in their crates before I walk out that door.  I want to take back that blink of the eye that robbed her of thirty years of life and make it right, but of course, that can never be.

When I am done punishing myself, and I will eventually,  I will set her spirit free and treasure the time we had together.  But right now, I am holding tight to both her little birdie spirit and my big human regret.

In ictu oculi.   In the blink of an eye....

It is something we need to be reminded of over and over again because we treasure the illusion of permanence.  We need the illusion of permanence.  Big things, little things, in-between things, in the blink of an eye, it is gone, as we will all sooner or later be.  Gone.

So renew your commitment to live in the moment, really LIVE.   Love and cherish all the people, and animals and things that give your life joy and meaning.  We never know when they or ourselves, will be gone in the blink of an eye.

In this season of Lent, we are reminded that from dust we came and to dust we shall return.  I used to believe this was a pretty crappy fact to be reminded of every year, but that was youth talking, when death and loss seemed so very far away.

Now, with six decades on these treads, I see it differently.  I am reminded that not only our happiness and joy, but also our pain and sorrow are like dust to be blown away in the sands of time.  When things feel the saddest, or most unfair or exhausting, I think, what will this matter when I am dust, and sometimes it helps to keep me from getting swallowed up by despair.

Tara, I will love you always, and I am so, so sorry.  I hope to see you again one day, and let you hang out on my shoulder, your favorite place to be.  I am fighting hard not to get swallowed up as I long to hear you call for me and to feel your soft and warm birdie body under my neck.  So long for now,  my feathered friend, until we meet again.

In ictu oculi.

Loving Dogs

People who don't have dogs wonder why people do.  They wouldn't trade their perfectly clean, fresh smelling homes for what I have:  an always somewhat dirty, sometimes smelly home with a yard that at this time of year, is full of frozen poop and yellow snow patches.  I do see their point, however, especially when I am cleaning up the umpteenth so-called "accident" of the week.

Believe me, dogs don't come cheap.  Veterinary care is outrageously expensive and I have never learned the art of nail clipping, so even though I have short haired dogs, there are still grooming expenses.  My dogs eat quality food - read expensive here - and my Mika is a special needs girl on a prescription diet. Without doubt, I could take at least one extra vacation a year with the money I spend on my dogs.  And I love vacations, so that is quite the interesting trade off for me. Ultimately, how much you spend on your dogs depends on how much money you have and how many dogs live with you.  I have six at the moment so enough said.

This week the crushing end-of-life scenario hit our family once again.  At eleven years old, my dad's greyhound was getting up there into the old-greyhound-danger-zone.  In October, she presented with some kidney failure and was put on a specialized diet and did well until Wednesday, when she vomited several times.  Regular vet, then emergency vet and by mid-afternoon on Thursday, we were dealing with a terminally ill dog.

Hemangiosarcoma is an extremely aggressive cancer of the blood-vessels that causes internal bleeding and spreads rapidly.  At most, she had only weeks to live and would grow steadily weaker.  The blessing in all this - and there usually is if we look for one - is that the emergency vet made it very clear to my dad that if Janie were his dog, he would put her down that very day.

So while we needed to deal with the shock of a terminal diagnosis, at least there was no agonizing over what to do or what not to do about it. This kind and wise doctor made all the difference. If only  there were more like him in the veterinary world!

The final episode in a dogs life is a familiar one to dog owners.  A nurse laid a quilt out on the tile floor in a small windowless room where Janie was led in.  The doctor explained the procedure and what to expect. My dad sobbed his goodbyes. I sat down next to her on the blanket and told her, as I tell all the dogs in those last moments, to go on ahead and we'll catch up with her down the road a bit.  She breathed her last with tears of grief falling gently onto her soft fur.  She takes them with her to the life beyond.  We loved her and we will miss her.

Janie's life may be over but she is one of the lucky ones:  she was cherished in life and will be remembered in death.  Dad will get a little better every day and sooner rather than later, I am certain he will take another dog into his heart and home.

So why then, with all the expense and the crushing weight of letting go, do we do it?  And do it over and over and over again?  For me the answer is quite simple and I can tell it best by relating how I came to understand it myself and then explained it to my children.

When they were young, we had a rough collie named Rebel.  She was such a good dog with the children, just as you would expect from a collie and we all loved her very much.  She suffered from Lyme disease - try finding a deer tick on the skin of a rough collie. In time, the Lyme and normal osteoarthritis took a toll on her hind legs.  After the decision was made to euthanize her, I brought the kids to the vet to say goodbye to her, which they did, quietly and tearfully, and then I led them into the waiting room while Bob stayed with Rebel to the end.  We left the vet's office with nothing but her collar and our tears.

Rebel after a shave

Later, when reflecting on our loss with the children,  I explained that the price we paid for the love we shared with Rebel over the years was our pain in losing her, but that the pain was nothing compared to the love and joy she brought to us, every day, for eleven and a half years.  I counseled them that they could not NOT love because they are afraid of inevitable pain and in explaining this to them, I came to understand it for myself. Since that time, more than two dozen pets have come into the family, mostly dogs, some cats and even three birds.  Clearly, we have accepted the mathematics of love and loss.

It is my deep belief that dogs lives are brief to remind us that our own lives are all too short.   In loving dogs and sharing their lives, we are reminded to live in the moment as they do.  They don't worry and they don't hold grudges and they are made infinitely happy by the simplest of every day things:  a ball tossed, a walk around the block, some ice cream; all qualities that if we could only grasp them, would lead us to the happiness they live every day.

 In living with dogs, we learn to be more fully alive, maybe even, to be more fully human.

So we put up with the mess and the expense, and we love and we lose and we love again.

And couldn't imagine life without them.

In Search of a Timeless Masterpiece

Marcel Proust. He and I have been meeting secretly in my bedroom almost every night since November of 2012.  We spend maybe an hour or two together and then I go to sleep.  

Our relationship is not always the same.  Some nights I am fascinated by him, hypnotized, almost in love.  Other nights, I think he is a complete jerk and only stay with him because I know things will get better.

His rich and arrogant friends are ridiculous and so not worth his time.  He needs to stop torturing himself over his mistress whom he can't face is a closeted lesbian.  Every night that we meet, I hope to hear that he has taken charge of his life, but sadly, he seems content to waste it on silly people and a woman who won't or can't love him.

Still, I relish the moment I lay upon my bed each night and switch on the light. Lately a new sadness has crept into my evenings; a recognition that soon these quiet nights of beauty will end in a mere five hundred pages.  I have been in this Proustian universe for twenty-eight hundred pages and fifteen months, and in a mystical sort of way, wish I could remain in this universe forever.

Marcel Proust

And so it is with the best literature that a relationship develops between author and reader where the laws of physics do not apply and two minds can meld just outside the limits of space and time.

Proust himself knew this about the relationship between reader and writer and included these words among the more than one million in his life's work.  “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”

Without doubt, this work is bursting with truth and has stood the test of time for this reason.  It is one of those multi-layered classics filled with sad irony that you have to read once so you can experience the whole cloth of it and then again to pick up each individually woven thread and maybe again, and yet again as you age and can read anew from different perspectives.

There is much to enjoy here, some of it quite salacious:  obsession, self-delusion, deluding others, class distinctions, snobbery, aristocracy, arrogance, titles, parties, sex, lies, growing up, growing old, the value of art, music, literature, friends, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, servants, bordellos, male prostitutes, courtesans, the beach, lesbianism, homosexuality, arrogance, laziness, death, churches, sunlight, the sea, grief, cookies, memories, sleep, humor, absurdity, hawthorns, fashion.  Seriously, the list would be much shorter if I listed what is not somewhere in these pages.  

Yet, that's not to say every word is riveting.  Sometimes it does seem to lapse in focus, or at least my focus lapsed in reading.  Sometime, I found I was just not able to connect with the text.  For instance, having no musical intelligence at all, I find the descriptions of music tedious but others with musical sense say they can almost hear the musical notes rising from the text.  

What I admire most about Proust's work are the brilliant aphorisms which bring to light very subtle observations about the human condition. These truths may be known to us, but lie submerged in our consciousness and may never emerge into awareness without Proust.  A great example is, "It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying," 

My goodness, isn't that true?  Haven't we all always known that at some level but have never been aware of it with enough clarity and form to put it into words?  This is the magic of Proust, at least for me. 

Here is another that might resonate,  “Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.” 

There you have it folks.  Our secret is out.  And while I never thought of it in terms of enfeeblement, per se, maybe that word hits the mark, after all. 

Have you ever had a memory or a dream of someone or something from your past that was so vivid, and so real, that when you awaken you carry it with you for hours into the day, to the point you feel disoriented and a bit lost in your normal waking life?  It is a strange and uncommon sensation which makes me believe that my self or my soul or whatever it is that defines and identifies me, lives almost outside time; that those memories and those dreams cared not that thousands of days and nights had intervened and swept me away from those people and those moments that still whisper to me in the deepest night as if from only yesterday, not ten or twenty or thirty or more years in the past. 

The desire to experience what an artist could do with these themes of time and memory is what led me to take up In Search of Lost Time. Like most people, the only fragment of In Search of Lost Time I had been familiar with was Proust's famous madeline moment when, upon dipping a madeline in tea, he experiences a flood of memories and emotions tied to his childhood.  I hoped for more and was not disappointed.  Here are two exquisite passages related to the experience of memory and time to give you an idea of the whole:

 Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time.

For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another.

It just doesn't get any better than this anywhere in literature. Everything I encounter in my reading life from now on will lie in the shadow of this masterpiece.  To the list of languages I wish I could read, I now add French so that I could experience In Search of Lost Time directly, without translation, as I have wished I could read Russian for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Italian for Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. 

Though the overarching themes of In Search of Lost Time tend towards the sad and ironic; that time passes, that we often forget and sometimes remember; that nothing stays the same, especially not people as we age and ultimately, enter into the oblivion of death.  And yet the message is not hopeless for Proust believed immortality could be reached through art and that only through art does one transcend the feeble limitations of a lifetime. 

No one would disagree that Marcel Proust, through In Search of Lost Time, has achieved the immortality he believed possible and with this masterpiece, has transcended the feeble limitations of his lifetime. 

A joy indeed, to read this, and something I could not have done at any earlier stage of my life.  Thanks for allowing me to share this joy with you.  

Hello and Welcome to Fifty is Nifty Says Me

Hello everyone. Welcome to my new blog! I entitled this blog Fifty is Nifty Says Me because it truly is!  Could I ever imagine I would feel this way when I was thirty or even forty? No, I could not and in fact, did not. But now that I am about to begin my 4th year in this decade, I can honestly say to those of you getting close to the big 5-oh: fifty is nothing to fear.

Aside from the fact I am prescribed an arsenal  of maintenance medications, go to bed at 8 pm and get creaky in the cold, fifty really IS nifty.

And here's the reasons why.

The importance of this first reason cannot be overstated : the hard work of raising children is OVER! Yeah for me! My adult children are living their own lives now - with some funding and occasional support from mom and dad of course - but nonetheless - they have their own cars, go to school, work, have a significant other, meet with friends, in short, do all the things adults do with very little help from Bob and me. For those who may be worried about empty nests and not having young children at home, I can tell you that is is intensely gratifying to see the result of all the years of dedicated parenthood. Nothing as miraculous as having fully-grown, healthy, competent and happy adult children could ever result in sadness or regret of any kind, at least not on this mom's blog.  I have honestly never felt anything but pride and joy - and yes, even relief - as my children take on the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood.

The next reason fifty is so nifty also took a lot of work, but a much more painful kind of work than raising children because unfortunately, I didn't get to discover who I am until I first discovered who I am NOT.  By who I am, I mean: a fully-integrated, self-aware human being who knows exactly who and what is important and never forgets it.  And at least for me, and like many people I know, it took a good 45 to 50 years to be able to make that claim.

It's a brutal process. You do something - or don't do something - and then you feel badly and you say to yourself (if you're lucky) - oops, don't like how that feels - won't do that again - and you might have to do that several times to get the message and all along, your life is changing and the situations are changing and you are changing and it's all very confusing. When you think of the sheer number of things that have to be done or not done over the course of a lifetime, you start to see what an enormous task it is to know oneself, thoroughly, or even just well enough to get by happily.

I don't think this process ends until the grave, and maybe not even then, but there's a lot of reference data in my memory now and it is a really good thing to have. I make decisions and act based on what I've learned about myself  - and here is where we need a drumroll, please -  no matter what the consequences or what others think. Period.

Seems remarkable it took so many decades and so much suffering to figure that one out. The path to self-knowledge may be different for each of us, but fifty is nifty because most of us have gotten to this point and it is certainly good to have arrived.

And that's not even the fun part of being fifty.  Yes, we even have fun in our fifties and though I am sure it is not the same kind of fun we had a few decades ago, it is still fun. What better time to pick up your old hobbies and interests and invent a few new ones?

I have a pretty long list of favorite things. There's my dogs, birds, gardening, restaurants, wine, knitting, reading, cooking, and now, perhaps blogging. Oh, and I love to travel and stay in really expensive hotels pretending I'm the 1%.  But of course, I'm not because I pay taxes. You might try writing out your own list just to see if you've got enough stuff on it, and if not, work on that a bit.

So who really needs those busy years between thirty and fifty? There are too many choices, too much to do, too much that can go wrong and too many years ahead to worry about. I may need hair color every four weeks now,  and I can no longer keep up with dance music so zumba is out, but then so is yoga because even being in one position for 30 seconds is apparently too much exercise for me. But I don't want to focus on what I've lost over the years. That's no fun at all.

I have started this blog to focus on what I have gained over the years and to celebrate life and its infinite beauty. I'd be honored if you followed me in this journey of celebrating what makes fifty so nifty!

P.S.  I recently discovered that it is INCORRECT to type two spaces after typing a period. WTF!  I have been doing this since junior year of high school when taught to do so in typing class - btw on a manual typewriter. (Only the business majors got to use the electric.)  I am not able to do this. Just. Not. Able. I have to go back after I am finished typing and remove the extra spaces, so sorry to offend you if I've missed any. Crazy, right?  Nothing stays the same. Yodels now the size of my pinkie.  What next?