Category: Al-Anon

Somehow

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…

Somehow, my parents from broken homes gave me a whole one.

Somehow, I met the right teachers at the right time.

Somehow, I fell into a vocation I loved instead of a job I endured.

Somehow, I survived my child’s death. 

Somehow, I stopped trying to drown my problems in cheap scotch.

Somehow, I learned to listen.

Somehow, I discovered joy.

Somehow, I no longer feel ashamed of being human.

Somehow, I’ve kept going even when I feel I’m walking in a circular trench.

Somehow, I’m still alive.

Somehow, I’ve not only survived, but grown.

Somehow, I remain hopeful.

Somehow, I believe, is another name for Grace.

…

The Old Lesson

Published on by geriatric pilgrim5 Comments

~

71 years old,

lungs aflame,

lower back throbbing,

I rest on my hiking poles

halfway up 

still another hill 

at an iron gate

amid gorse and nettles, 

trying to pick 

out the path rising 

through a herd

of cows grazing on 

gangrenous grass between me 

and another gate 

and the trail that 

winds through woods

to tonight’s B&B

and the joy of a hot bath.

~

The gate clangs as 

I trudge into the herd,

which parts before me 

like the red sea

except for one

brown and white cow,

legs tucked beneath her,

who stares at me 

impassively,

before lifting her haunches, 

and dropping a steamy 

pile on the path

already strewn with

“chips,” “dung,” 

“flaps,” “muffins,” 

“patties,” “pies” —

choose your euphemism.

            ~

The pasture’s a mine field.

 I zig, zag, circle, 

back-track, hop—

marching thirty yards

to advance ten.

Fog mists my glasses.

Sweat soaks my shirt.

The air smells of decay.

At this rate,

I’ll still be 

hiking after dark.

Panic attacks like

a squad of minges.

            ~

Then, like an aging general 

roused from his nap

to lead me once more 

into battle against 

my old foe, Avoidance, 

comes the prayer: 

            ~

God, grant me the serenity

to accept those things

I cannot change …

            ~

I keep to the path, 

hear the squish,

feel my boots slide, 

raise my eyes 

to silver clouds

billowing over a line

of ancient trees,

glimpse red sandstone,

            ~

the courage to change

the things I can …

            ~

squish, slog, slide,

watch a brown hare

scamper to a stone wall

adorning the hill

like a necklace,

            ~

And the wisdom

to know the difference. 

            ~

Now at the gate

to freedom,

I bow to the sky,

having learned 

yet again

that to get to joy

you often have

to walk through shit.

            ~          

(after David Whyte’s The Old Interior Angel)

Sonnet for the new Year

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The hemlocks in the hollow all have toes

That curve and claw down into rocky ground

To keep them anchored when the north wind blows,

And waters rise as heavy rains come down.

But overhead, these trees sway in the gale,

Dancing a jig to nature’s stormy song,

As if in celebration while winds wail,

Of their sure faith no tumult can last long.

Great lesson, that, especially this year

When God knows what strange winds will blow ‘round me:

Grasp on to love, trees say, instead of fear;

But sway, be supple, let adversity

First rev and race and then run out of gas.

Keep faith, my soul, that this as well shall pass.

#

On Hope: an Admonition

Published on by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments

#

Stop confusing it with expectation.

You’re going to be disappointed,

resentful, angry, pissed off at God

because the cancer didn’t disappear,

you didn’t get that new job you wanted,

Hurricane Hattie flooded your basement.

#

(Write this down: Don’t hope for anything

you can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.)

#

And even if you do get to come home

from the hospital a day early,

or the car coming right at you swerves

away at the last saving second,

or your friend’s stock tip pays off enough

to finance an Aruba vacation,

please, please, please don’t proclaim to the world

how God in His goodness answered your prayers.

You’re only setting yourself up for

future resentment, not to mention

guilt and shame for having somehow displeased

His Royal Holy Hood.

#

Instead, divest, dismantle, ditch, doff, dump

expectations, anticipations, wishes.

Take a deep breath, and go for a walk

along that path you’ve been walking all

your life. Don’t worry about what’s ahead

—Here be dragons, right?—

but have a seat on this old tree stump.

Take more deep breaths, turn, look back

at all those times when, despite all your

mistakes, your blindness to injustice,

your embracing each Seven Deadly Sin

as if your happiness depended on it

while breaking all Ten Commandments

like you were making a hash omelet,

times when, despite your screwed-up family,

the hereditary overbite,

hip dysplasia, and weak heart,

times when despite the ugly divorce,

your daughter’s even uglier death,

all those goddamn operations,

the loss of lung capacity and libido,

you love the woman you wake up next to,

you sing to Sirius FM’s ‘Fifties Gold,’

you savor your morning hot chocolate,

you look forward to lunch with old classmates,

you feed the birds, play the banjo, plant

a garden, enjoy Wordle and Brit Box,

worshiping in silence, dabbling in poetry,

watching the grandchildren grow up.

#

Hope is not about getting what you want,

it’s about seeing what you already have,

the force that makes life worth living,

that same power that is pushing new growth

from this dead tree stump you’re sitting on.

#

Now, go get those dragons!

The Snows of Christmas Past

Published on by geriatric pilgrim5 Comments

#

After years of counseling and going to meetings, remembering Christmas when I was a kid now feels like peering through my frosted window at a soft and steady snow covering up dead leaves, discarded pumpkins, and broken branches under the diseased hemlocks beside the house.

My family’s disease was alcoholism. Mom’s memories of her drunken father passed out on Christmas Day, her shame at not being able to bring friends home, Dad’s bitter memories of Christmases in a Home for Wayward Boys and in the Army during WWII, his sense of being victimized by a social system he saw based on greed—feelings he tried to wash away with a pint of Old Crow—the arrival each Christmas of my mother’s mother, Nanny C, a large bitter woman whose acid tongue could peel paint, permeated our house during the holidays like their cigarette smoke.

In the weeks before Christmas, I’d hear Dad’s grumpy voice through the register in the floor of the bathroom asking where the hell were they going to get the money and Mom’s brittle reply they were just going to have to find a way; her children weren’t going to have the shitty Christmases she did. And I’d know it was up to me to make sure the holidays were happy. So that Christmas morning when Dad groaned because his head hurt, and Mom and Nanny perched on the edge of their chairs hovering like crows on telephone poles watching my younger brother and sister and me open our presents, and I ripped off Christmas wrapping to find a rainbow-colored wool hat that only a girl would wear, I said, “Oh, I love this. Thank you!” 

Ah, but here come the snows of nostalgia, which, I’ve discovered, is not all bad, especially when it brings memories of wading up to my knees in in the white stuff to help my father cut a tree, the smell of fresh fir as Mom and Dad set up the tree on the porch, decorating it with ornaments I still have 70 years later, popping corn and stringing it on the tree, smelling Nanny C’s fudge and Mom’s cookies and bread, and hearing my grandmother playing carols on our piano.

Or of walking home from sledding in the 5:00 p.m. darkness, carrying my Flexible Flyer past the drug store and the hardware store, their neon lights shimmering, casting shadows on the snow banks, past the big white Georgian houses on Main Street with their candles in the windows, then down Bridge Street, seeing my house and our lighted tree on the back porch, and feeling the Christmas excitement when the possibilities of happiness were as many as the stars in the frozen sky.

Or of helping my father, who moon-lighted as sexton in our church, get ready for the Christmas service by picking up last week’s bulletins from the Sanctuary, alone in this great empty space, the whistling of my corduroy pants as I walked echoing in a great and holy silence, and somehow feeling safe—held, enfolded by a Great Presence.

Then Christmas day: giggling in bed with Jaye and Roger, as we wait for 6:00 a.m. when we can wake the grownups, not knowing that Nanny C is in the next room listening to us with tears of joy running down her face—“Oh, you kids are so good, God bless you!” Christmas dinners of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, homemade bread, and cranberry sauce (which is what I ate. Let the grownups eat the squash and turnips and beans), followed by Mom’s pumpkin, apple, and blueberry pies topped with Sealtest Ice Cream. In the afternoon, Dad slept off his hangover on the couch, Nanny went back to the piano and she and Mom sang “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” while I played with my new model airplane or helped my brother or sister put together their farm or showed them how to play the new Parcheesi game or took my new skates (but, gee, I forgot my new hat) which Mom and Dad had bought on time to the town rink behind the movie theater or went up to my room to read the book I’d received: maybe Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Herb Kent West Point Fullback, a Hardy Boy’s mystery, or Zane Gray.

On Christmas night I went to bed with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, turning on the radio to my favorite programs, most of which were having Christmas specials: Jack Benny exclaiming after having spent the last thirty minutes buying the cheapest gifts he could find, “Good night, everyone, and merry Christmas!” George Burns telling his wife, “Say good night, Gracie,” and her reply, “Good night, Gracie, and Merry Christmas,” and of course, a version of Dicken’s “Christmas Carol,” probably starring Lionel Barrymore. I ate, finished my milk, and crawled completely under the covers with the cookie crumbs, following Scrooge on his journey from “Bah, humbug!” to “God bless us, everyone!”

 While outside the window, at least in my memory, snow fell in great white, silent flakes.

My sister, Jaye, circa 1954, with her new poodle skirt, doll, and whatever it is on her wrist.

# #

Family Triptych

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Weilburg

Traveling 3500 miles to a town in Germany

smaller than the one in Maine where I live—

no tours, no souvenir shops, 

no one speaking English except back at the hotel, 

I stand by Neptune’s Fountain 

in Market Square beneath the God of the Sea 

thrusting his trident into the head of some leviathan, 

my lungs still burning from climbing the hill to get here, 

trying to imagine 25-year-old Johann Frederich Weil 

wandering the square 

before leaving for Halifax, Nova Scotia, 

lured by the British Government’s offer 

of free passage, free land, & a year of free rations, 

knowing from Ancestry.com 

his descendants will anglicize the name & populate places 

like Wile’s Lake, Wileville, & Wiles Road, 

until the turn of the 20th Century 

when Lyman & Lester Wile 

leave Canada for a shoe factory 

in Marlboro, Massachusetts 

where Lyman will marry Edith Conrey 

& sire my father who 

because his mother left Lyman when Dad was 4 years old

(apparently because of spousal abuse) 

didn’t give a shit about his father or his family. 

Then Johann dissolves—

if he was ever here in the first place—

into the salmon & cream-colored two-story buildings, 

round-arched arcades, & a matching-colored four-story Italianate castle 

as my wife and I join the half-dozen folks in leather & wool 

sipping beer & coffee at outdoor tables by a small restaurant. 

Still, walking back to the hotel 

looking down the hill 

at the Lahn River, a small waterfall, an old stone bridge, 

I think of the hill I grew up on, the bridge below my house 

over a similar river by a similar waterfall, 

& I feel a weird calm, 

connected by currents beyond my ken.

The Royal River Grill

Walking into a restaurant 

with large windows looking out on the harbor 

& soft lights meant to look like candles, 

I see Buzz & Chuck & Ted sitting at a long oak table. 

A shiver of both anxiety & eagerness 

& the next thing I know it’s 1953, 

when this building was the site of the Stinson Sardine packing plant 

& I’m ten years old & in fourth grade 

& I’m going to my first meeting of Mike’nBuzzie’s Gang 

at Mike’s house just up the hill from here, 

because earlier that afternoon 

when it had been my turn to stay after school 

to erase blackboards, 

as soon as Mrs. Croudis left for the teachers’ room, 

Buzzie’s brother Craig ran into the classroom. 

“We’re getting a gang together 

for an apple fight with the uptown kids! 

Big meeting at Mike’s house! Let’s go!”

Dropping the eraser, I ran out the door—

the first time in my life I’d ever disobeyed one of my teachers. 

But for the first time in my life I didn’t care. 

A timid kid, raised in a family 

where a miasma of alcoholic anger & anxiety 

hung over us like the fumes 

from the neighboring paper company,

I’d lie awake mornings before school 

afraid of the day ahead, 

of having my arm twisted or my face washed with dirty snow 

by sixth graders like Mike’nBuzzie,

and now they want me to join them! 

Never mind that the apple fight with the uptown kids never happened, 

or that Mike now has Parkinson’s & stays home 

& that Buzz & Chuck & Ted & I, and later, Allie & John, 

have little in common these days 

except our L.L. Bean khakis & plaid shirts. 

I laugh & reminisce. 

At home. 

Still part of the gang.

The Cemetery

Under gnarled & broken maple trees, 

I walk around my family cemetery plot, 

taking pictures of the wedding—

of the bride, who stands 5 feet 

& maybe weighs 100 pounds, 

her upper chest tattooed with angels, 

her dyed magenta hair, & flowing black gown, 

& the groom, my stepson, 

probably 6’4” & 270, 

black lipstick & kilt, red-haired & bearded, 

standing in front of the family stone, 

originally part of the cellar of my mother’s grandfather’s house, 

while my second wife, 

an ordained Deacon in the Episcopal Church, 

performs the ceremony. 

My stepson’s two daughters stand as ring bearers 

near the memorial stone for my daughter, 

who died at 18. 

My wife’s ex-husband & his wife 

stand between my grandmother’s granite stone 

& the memorial stone for Nanny’s ex-husband. 

Not far from my great-grandfather & great-grandmother’s marble stone, 

my stepson’s nonbinary stepson from his first marriage 

& their partner also take pictures. 

The bride’s parents view the proceedings 

in front of my mother’s bronze marker 

between my father’s & my stepfather’s bronze markers 

while my second wife’s sister, her daughter & son-in-law 

watch both the wedding and a grandson 

climbing the near-by gravestones 

of my barber, my favorite teacher, 

a classmate killed in Viet Nam,  

& my little league baseball coach—

all of whom, I imagine, 

rolling over in horror at this spectacle 

of everyone dressed in black, 

everyone smiling, 

one big happy family.

#

Beginning Again

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#

I’m walking the grass loop around our housing development. Under the power line toward the community garden, I pass through what is now a shoulder-high host of Queen Anne’s Lace, golden rod, milk weed, bracken, and many other plants I can’t name. The flies swarm. The sweet songs of the cardinals and tufted titmouses (titmice?) have given way to the screeching of blue jays and crows. Monarch butterflies flit from flower to flower. The air smells ripe. Shadows crawl like the incoming tide over the landscape. Summer is ending.

And I feel myself coming alive. Beginning again.

The reason is simple. For seventy-five years—as a student, as a teacher—the golden rod, the lengthening shadows, the Monarchs, have meant the beginning of another school year. More than New Year’s Eve, more than the first warm day of the year, this is the time when, at some deep cellular level, I can feel myself waking up, ready to start anew.

It’s a good feeling. At my age, it’s easier to focus on endings than beginnings. I now celebrate—if that’s the right word—more birthdays of the dead than of the living: my grandparents, my parents, my daughter, my first wife, close friends. Ended are my long hikes, long distant driving, lifting anything over forty pounds, staying up after midnight, jumping into bed with my wife after a sexy movie (jumping anywhere, for that matter), five-course meals, Cuban cigars, Laphroaig Scotch… the list grows longer each year.

But as T.S. Eliot wrote, “In the end is my beginning.” (Hey, I’m an old English lit teacher, I remember stuff like that.) You can’t begin something until something else ends. School can’t start until summer ends (Yeah, I know, there’s summer school, but I’m trying to make an analogy. Don’t confuse me with technicalities.) It took the end of a disastrous year of studying forestry in college for me to begin my studies in English (which is why I’m quoting T.S. Eliot and not The Journal of Forestry.) It took the end of an unhappy 20-year marriage for me to begin a happy going-on-forty-year one. It took the end of a career in public education for me to go back to school for an MFA, write a couple of books, a bunch of essays, and going on nine years’ worth of blog posts.

So, what will I begin this year? Well, Mary Lee and I have a couple of trips planned (knock on wood: last year, we had three planned and they were all canceled). I will scrape and repaint my front door and clean out the garage. 

But the biggest change I want to make is with The Geriatric Pilgrim. 

When I began these blogs, I was fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage: how a pilgrimage differs from a vacation, or from going on a retreat, or from study programs (what I called “edu-cations”). Besides traveling to retreat houses and other spiritual sites in the United States, Canada, the British Isles, Israel, Turkey, and Africa, I collected pages of definitions of pilgrimage and of common characteristics of pilgrimages. I read a raft of books about various pilgrimages people had made.

Along the way, I became intrigued by my fascination with pilgrims and pilgrimages. What was in it for me?

Stature of a “Jakobspilger,” or St. James’s pilgrim: Speyer, Germany

Well, probably the main thing at the time was the idea that pilgrims are often searching for a source of healing. As you know if you’ve read these blogs, I was looking for healing after the death of my eighteen-year-old daughter from a rare cancer. And I found writing about the various pilgrimages Mary Lee and I had made even more healing than the pilgrimages themselves.

Gradually, I began to realize that pilgrimage is a frame of mind—an attitude of curiosity, detachment, wonder. It’s “traveling light,” as one writer says, of risk, of living in liminal space—leaving one location but not yet arriving at another—of exploration, the end of which, to quote T.S. Eliot again, “Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

Since COVID arrived, with all its restrictions on travel, followed by my 80th birthday, with its expanded waistline and diminished abilities, my blogs have focused more on applying the lessons of pilgrimage to my current life of walks in the neighboring woods, planting peas, tomatoes, and pumpkins in our community garden, and of exploring the twelve steps of my Al Anon program. This, too, has been healing.

 But now I find myself no longer as interested in finding new ways to describe my pilgrimage, as I am in describing and exploring in more depth the landscape through which I’m traveling, a landscape that is always changing, sometimes in ways that please me—autumn color is just around the corner, the grandchildren are growing—sometimes in ways that piss me off or frighten me—the start of my favorite woods walk has been clear-cut, I’m finding it difficult to sing without coughing.

Writing about these joys and sorrows, I find I’m writing more poetry. I’ve just finished an on-line workshop for poets, and one of the highlights of my week is another on-line group of poets from all over the country, where we share our favorite poetry as well as poems we’ve written. I’m now subjecting my longtime writing group here in town to my poems.

So, I’m going to be posting more poetry here in these blogs as well as other experiments—prose poems, flash fiction and nonfiction—trying to look more closely at the physical and emotional landscapes through which I’m now traveling.

The way I see it, my pilgrimage continues, but the lens through which I’m seeing it and the voice in which I’m describing it is changing.

I’m excited to see where this journey will take me. 

And hoping you’ll continue to join me.

So, let part of my life end, and another begin.

As Quakers say, when one door closes another opens.

For all my losses, I’ve also had wins;

let part of my life end and another begin.

Sure, it’s tempting to focus on what has been,

but I don’t want only to go through the motions.

Let part of my life end and another begin,

as one door closes and another opens.

# #

Another G… D…. Learning Experience

Published on by geriatric pilgrim6 Comments
Henry Fonda as Norman Thayer lost in the woods behind his house.

#

It started when I left my phone behind. 

I’ve always known that my phone provides many of the same comforts cigarettes used to. My phone fits easily into my pocket so it’s handy. It gives me something to do with my hands if I’m nervous or bored. If I’m waiting for someone, I can check on how the Red Sox did, or when I need to use a bathroom, I can do something besides look out the window, assuming there is a window, and if there isn’t, I don’t care because I’m checking my email on my phone. 

But until now I’ve never realized how, like cigarettes, psychologically addictive a phone can be. All that weekend, I felt tense, anxious.

Now, the reason I suffered for an entire weekend was that Mary Lee and I spent it in Vermont celebrating my sister-in-law Anne’s birthday. I couldn’t very well say, “I left my phone in our bedroom. Would you excuse me while I drive four hours back home so I can see how many ‘likes’ my last post got on Facebook?”

And for those of you who don’t live in New England, the reason it takes four hours to go 160 miles, as the crow flies, from Maine to Vermont is that you can’t go by crow. The most direct route cuts through western Maine and central New Hampshire—a narrow two-lane road through small towns and past lakes and cabins and antique shops and combination hardware stores/greenhouses/ice cream parlors—and takes two hours longer than the quickest route which is to first drive south for 85 miles then west for 31 miles, then north for 69 miles, then west again until you get lost. 

 And you will get lost, because while the first 185 miles are doable if your car has a GPS and you follow the signs, once you get to Vermont, you’re driving through small towns and along one lane dirt roads through mountains that baffle even the best GPS systems. At least, you do if you want to get to my sister-in-law’s place.

View from Anne’s porch.

But although I left my phone behind and got lost for a bit that weekend, I remained reasonably calm. It was a nice day and Vermont was beautiful. As I often do (hence these blogs) I tried to think of the trip as a pilgrimage, this one honoring my past. I lived in Vermont for four years and my first teaching job was actually in the town just down the mountain from Anne’s. The wide, shallow streams paralleling the roads, the cow pastures under the green hills, the sweeping vistas were worth dead ending in a driveway. Especially when the nice lady there gave us directions to Anne’s, saying, “You couldn’t follow the damn GPS even if it worked… not unless you have a Humvee and a chainsaw.”

Still, while we had a lovely weekend celebrating my sister-in-law’s birthday, the anxiety of smart phone withdrawal grew. It was like I wasn’t me anymore—a feeling that metastasized when I tried show Mary Lee the first apartment I ever lived in. It was as if someone had moved the street to a completely different part of town. 

It certainly was hidden. (I lived on the second floor.)

By the time we headed back to Maine, I was feeling unhinged and uncertain. To regain my manly sense of mastery (at least that’s the only reason I can think of) I decided I didn’t need any help from any GPS getting from Anne’s to the paved road to the interstate to the Maine Turnpike to home, thank you very much.

Setting the car radio on “50’s Gold,” I drove south on the interstate, missing the exit for New Hampshire and Maine, and continuing for another ten miles before I turned around and headed north. After an hour of ignoring Mary Lee’s suggestion that it might be time to find out where we were, I pulled off the interstate and plugged our home address into the GPS, which informed us that we were almost fifty miles north of where we should be. Surrendering to that damn voice (which I swear was snickering)— “In one half-mile, prepare to turn left… turn left in 100 yards…turn left”—we eventually came to that cow path I talked about earlier through New Hampshire and Maine, the one that got us home two hours later than we would have if I’d used the GPS the way I should have. By that time, my hands were shaking, my stomach was in knots, and my head was pounding. Even the familiar roads near home looked strange and forbidding. 

At one point on that interminable drive home, we drove by Squam Lake, where the movie On Golden Pond was filmed, and since then, I’ve been thinking about Henry Fonda’s 80-year-old character getting lost picking strawberries in a place he’d been going to for years, stumbling through the forest, become more and more disoriented, more and more frightened. 

And I ask myself: Is that who I’m becoming?

I’m trying not to panic. I tell myself that as I’ve become 80, I’ve been focused on my physical diminishments, and maybe God of my not Understanding is telling me it’s time to prepare for the mental changes ahead—that I should think of that weekend as—to use a 12-step term—another “Goddamned learning experience.”

I’ve just read David Shields’s book, The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. Normal geriatrics, he says, don’t have poorer memories, but it does take us longer to retrieve those memories. We’re more susceptible to distractions, have trouble coordinating multiple tasks, and suffer decreased attention spans. In simple duties and common situations, we’re fine, but when stress is added (loss of a smart phone, for example) we often struggle. “Perhaps,” Shields writes, “this is why some older people, finding it harder to cope, tend to start searching for comfort rather than excitement.”

I’m tempted, but I’m not ready. Instead, I’m going to send my ego to the store for a quart of milk and do what Mary Lee does and make a checklist for when I travel: 

Underwear?    Check. 

Pills?               Check.

Phone?            Check. 

And at the top of the list, I’m going to write: 

Don’t assume you know where you’re going. 

Ask for help.

Actually, that sounds like pretty good advice for any pilgrimage.

# #

Physical Therapies

Published on by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments
PT After Heart Surgery

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A few weeks ago, after seeing a doctor about increased soreness in her knee, my wife Mary Lee began a new regimen of physical therapy: quad stretches, hamstring stretches, mini squats, wall sits, looped elastic band hip extensions. These to go with exercises she’s been doing for years to restore movement to her right shoulder. (I like the one where her hands look like frightened spiders scampering up the wall, and another one where she uses a can of Great Northern beans.)

Because I’ve been doing various daily exercises since back surgery in 1977, mornings at the Wile residence resound with creaking bones, tendons rubbing on cartilage, occasional grunts punctuated by yawns and a “meow” or two from our cat, who has taken on the role of personal trainer.

“Faster! Move it, move it!”

Our bedroom looks a bit like Rick’s Sporting Goods, with two sizes of exercise mats, two sizes of weights (in addition to the can of beans), rubber stretch bands, and folding chairs. A treadmill resides in the guest bedroom across the hall. 

Physical therapy after my back fusion was deceptively simple: walk ten miles a day for three months. Every day. Sun, rain, snow, sleet, hail. And since I was operated on at the end of December, I walked through it all. Sometimes in the same day. But you know, I grew to love those walks (Well, Route One got a little boring but at least it was clear after a snowstorm), and I kept walking—maybe not ten miles every day, but often five or six. 

Twenty years later, after bi-lateral hip surgery, my physical therapy involved water exercises; walking back and forth for 30-45 minutes in the shallow end of a pool, pool dumb bells, and gloves that made me look and feel like Aqua-Man. But it worked. On a trip to Florida to visit my parents over school vacation, two months after the surgery, Mary Lee pushed me through Newark Airport in a wheelchair to get to our connecting flight. On our return a week later, after spending most of my time walking the swimming pool, I strode through the same airport feeling like Hercules Unchained. 

That led to yoga, tai-chi, back to walking, this time with my hiking poles that I named Waldo & Henry (To learn why, go to https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2020/02/07/waldo-and-henry/), which led to the hikes and pilgrimages that became the blog you’re reading.

Flash ahead another twenty years: open heart surgery, and more physical therapy at a rehabilitation center, where three times a week for six weeks, I taped on my heart monitor, rode a stationary bike, walked a treadmill, and lifted weights. When the program ended, I bought the treadmill that sits in the guest bedroom (great for watching TED talks, but I still miss those cute nurses at ReHab) and the weights that I use instead of cans of Great Northern Beans.

I don’t do the Kettlebell Squat Swings

But I’m falling apart more quickly these days. Over the last two years I’ve added breathing exercises to help my “moderate” COPD, more stretches to help with the bursitis that seems to have camped out next to both my bionic hips, daily exercises at the computer to ward off Carpel Tunnel and something called Ulna Nerve Entrapment, and weekly sessions with a Feldenkrais instructor.

As Thomas Jefferson said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Or in the words of my old PCP, move it or lose it.

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Before Mary Lee and I begin our morning grunting, stretching, creaking, and moaning, we sit in contemplative prayer for twenty minutes, a practice I’ve maintained since my daughter died 35 years ago, when, after raging at God for several years, I decided I needed to listen to what God had to say back. This listening—with my whole body, with all my senses—is what I continue to try to do. As I think about it, this, too, is a kind of physical therapy. 

Starting the day

I’m reading a lot these days about quantum physics and spirituality. As I understand it, quantum physics posits that the universe is conscious, if by “conscious,” one means a system that can communicate or process information and then use this information to organize itself (which is what all those protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up the atoms that make up all matter do). So, mind and body aren’t two separate things but rather two aspects of the same cosmic material. 

Modern writers about spirituality, such as Richard Rohr, Diana Butler Bass, Phillip Clayton, and Ilia Delio, seem to me to propose that this cosmic material, this “consciousness” that resides within me as well as around me, is the incarnational presence of God. So that in meditation, I am trying, as I am when I do my stretches and lift my weights, to reestablish pathways, strengthen relationship with what 12-steppers call a Higher Power. 

Besides meditation, I do other exercises to strengthen my spiritual muscles. My Feldenkrais sessions, focusing on integrating eyes, head, shoulders, ribs, pelvis, legs, and feet to facilitate ease of movement, remind me that one of the great spiritual lessons is that everything is connected. And that my job—my “exercise,” if you will—is to recognize and facilitate these connections.(And for more about the importance of connecting, go to https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2024/02/01/connecting-the-dots/)

One of my character defects that keeps me from connecting is trying to control everything and everybody. So, at the suggestion of my Al Anon sponsor, I’ve been taking Waldo and Henry for walks without having a destination. When I first started doing this, I felt lost. I walked in circles. But as I persisted, I discovered roads in the neighborhood and paths in the woods I’d never noticed before. Which is leading me to try to approach other activities, such as meetings, book readings, and potential confrontations with family and acquaintances with the same curiosity, trying to surrender presumptions, looking for the sacred in situations I’ve always avoided and spiritual teachers in people I’ve always disliked.

Probably more than anything else, it’s the physical act of writing which connects me with the Sacred. The only way I can even begin to understand concepts such as quantum physics and the ideas of those spiritual writers I’ve mentioned is to first put the ideas down in my own words on a yellow legal pad with my bold-ink pen. I can write second/ third/ fourth/ ad infinitum drafts of my blogs on a computer. I can edit on a computer. But first I need to work those pen and paper muscles.

Of course, the ultimate integration of mind and body (and what I’ve been working my pen and paper muscles on for the last eight-plus years) is the pilgrimage. Last week, a friend sent me a recent article in The Guardian about the increasing numbers of people making pilgrimages. (In the early 1980s, for example, the number of people who walked the Camino de Santiago—the most famous of all pilgrimages—was in the low hundreds; last year, the number was 446,000.) I’m delighted that people are finding that this combination of physical and spiritual activity can be healthy, healing, and holy.

It sure is for me.

In a California red wood forest

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Ice

Published on by geriatric pilgrim8 Comments

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Last Palm Sunday, Mary Lee and I were supposed to begin a two-week retreat at a monastery in the hills of California. We’ve been going on retreats now for thirty years and I was eagerly looking forward to having more silence, being more aware of the world, doing more reading (I’m on a Buddhist kick right now), drawing closer to God of my not Understanding. Then, two weeks before we were supposed to fly to San Francisco, we received word rockslides had closed the roads, and that the monastery won’t open again until at least May. 

So instead of flying across the country on Palm Sunday, we spent the day encased in ice.

The previous evening, thanks to a day of snow changing to freezing rain, we lost power. That Sunday, we cooked oatmeal on top of our gas stove and wrapped in blankets in front of our gas fireplace. While the ice bent the trees and bushes lower and lower, Mary Lee and I read the Palm Sunday service from the Book of Common Prayer, wondering, along with the Psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” 

For the next day and a half, we ate beans and rice, read, played Scrabble and cribbage, drove around the neighborhood to charge our phones, and finally gave in and stood in line at a restaurant in another town for breakfast. 

All in all, it wasn’t bad. Still, it’s hard for me to find much nice to say about ice. 

I like ice cubes in my water. I use ice packs to help the bursitis in my hips. Some ice sculptures are pretty. I’m glad to have a freezer in my refrigerator to preserve food. But that’s about it. When I used to go skating, I’d divide my time between flailing my arms to keep from falling and lying prone on the ice when I did. The one time I went ice fishing, I was days warming up.

Ice has all kinds of nasty connotations. It can mean frigid, as in sexually inadequate. It can mean unfriendly, reserved, aloof, rigid, inflexible. Fear sends icy chills down our spines. We hear about the icy fingers of death.

Speaking of death, while Hell (which is where some of my Fundamentalist friends tell me I’m going to go when I die) is usually pictured as a place of fire and brimstone, in Dante’s Inferno, the center of Hell is a vast lake of ice, in which Satan, along with sinners who committed treason and betrayal—such as Brutus, Cassius, and Judas—is incased.

from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, I Hell, translated by Louis Biancolli, 1966

Makes sense to me. Ice is cold. Ice is heavy. (The reason we lost electricity was because ice-laden trees fell on power lines). Ice prohibits movement. During the most hellish part of my life, after my daughter died, I couldn’t get warm. I felt as if I were carrying a 20 cubic foot freezer on my shoulders. My body was rigid and tense. Only after I’d had two or three large tumblers of scotch did I feel as if I were thawing. 

And yet. For someone who dislikes ice, I realize that one of my tendencies is to want to freeze experiences and beliefs, preserve them the way we preserve meat and vegetables. 

After those hellish first years when Laurie died, my life began to get better. I thought I was learning to live with loss. But five years later, at this time of year, it was as if my daughter has died all over again. I plunged back into rage and tears. I spent evenings drinking my tumblers of scotch (or maybe it was Wild Turkey 101 proof, at this point), going through old photograph albums of the two of us and listening to Laurie’s old tapes of Tracy Chapman and the Grateful Dead. The only difference was that those I was most angry with were people who talked about their own grief. I remember being at a retreat at a monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts where a woman talked about almost losing her son in an automobile accident. A spasm of rage surged though me. I thought, What are you moaning about? He’s alive, isn’t he?

Then on Easter Sunday after this retreat, I heard a sermon based on the Gospel of Mark’s account of the Resurrection, which, unlike the other gospels, ends with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, fleeing from the empty tomb, “for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Why fear, asked the preacher. Well, there might have been a lot of reasons—fear of soldiers, fear of grave robbers—but he also wondered if it wasn’t human nature to fear the unknown, to become used to, even comfortable with, our lives even if they’re full of pain and suffering. We prefer what we do know to what we don’t.

And I realized that over the years since Laurie’s death, I had grown comfortable with my image of myself as GRIEVING PARENT; I had made Laurie’s death MY STORY, trying to preserve memories of her, as in the old photograph albums I’d been perusing. And if anyone else had a similar story, I felt threatened. 

In other words, I was trying to freeze my sense of myself and Laurie rather than let them evolve, flow. I wasn’t angry about the death of my daughter, I was angry at the possible death of my grief, thinking it was grief that was keeping me close to her. 

That Sunday afternoon, sitting in Harvard Square amidst cigarette butts and pigeons, looking up at the sycamores and the brick buildings, listening to voices babbling in a half-dozen languages, I tried to focus on my daughter in the present moment. I don’t know where you are, Kid, I remember praying, but at some level I know you’re fine, and I want you to know that I love you.

And the sights and smells and noises of the Square seemed to fade and I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I knew it was Laurie’s.

I don’t care whether that hand was from another dimension or from my imagination. What I do know is that the great spiritual traditions are right: love transcends death. That is, if you don’t try to freeze it like leftover meatloaf.

But I’m still learning. Working a 12-Step Program, I’ve discovered traits that I developed to survive growing up in an alcoholic family—judgmentalism, people-pleasing, perfectionism—traits which no longer serve me, but have, in essence, remained frozen, damaging my relationships with others.

And I’m wondering if I may be trying to freeze my retreat experiences, and that Life, the Universe, or God of my not Understanding isn’t telling me by having this retreat in California canceled that I need to let the retreat experience—the silence, the awareness, the reading, the closeness to God— flow into my everyday life, here at home, even in the middle of an ice storm.

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