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A Goodbye Without Tears - Almost
A few weeks ago I ended my ties with a biking community—one rather close to my heart—that has lasted nearly four decades. The community is moving on. It has my love and a few of my tears. It was more or less my creation, but it can and will do very well without my prodding; and certainly without my wake-up whistle in the campground at 5:30 in the morning.
A disclosure: my introduction to the cult of bike riding occurred in the early 1970s when a colleague at the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, Barbara Flanagan, invited me to join her in one of her weekly rides around Lake Harriett in Minneapolis. She said it was both scenic and therapeutic. She said it not only rescued you from the bedlam and smoke clouds of the newspaper’s city room, but also invited the biker to perform some introspection, probing your goals in life while you were admiring the swaying willows and the swans.
That it did, although I also had to point out that if you were riding that close to the lake there was also a potential hazard. While you were introspecting you could capsize into the bay trying to get in touch with your id.
But the allure of riding beside and through woodland and listening to its sounds, to romp beside cornfields and beneath eagles’ nests , eventually turned me into a kind of serial biker, attracted by long distance goals. I once biked solo around Lake Superior in seven days, 1,100 miles; not to prove it could be done, but also because I had commitments on either end of it. It also introduced me to the lively antagonisms that had developed between hard-headed cyclers and equally assertive semi-trailer drivers. I was pedaling along the white line that defined the edge of the pavement on the long three-mile hill near the St. Louis River in Canada. My saddle bags were bulging with my rolled-up tent, sleeping bag and spare clothing, when I heard the blasts of an air horn behind me. The guy was hauling steel and wasn’t overjoyed to be sharing the road with a flimsy bicycle. He kept hammering the air horn.
When he passed me his rig wasn’t going much faster than my bike. The passenger window was open. I yelled that that there was no shoulder on the road, I was entitled to the white line and he was some kind of head case. I also called him every unflattering name I could think of, a few of them in four-letter words.
When I neared the top of the three-mile hill he had parked his rig and was standing on the road with his hands on his hips, ready to fight, and actually not much bigger than I was. I was smoldering and said, “Ok, let’s go.”
As it turned out, he thought it was time to end the comedy and got back into his rig. Ten miles down the road I stopped for breakfast in a small Canadian cafe. There was only one seat left at the counter stools and I sat down, to a blast of guffaws from the guy sitting next to me. lt was the semi driver. “You know something,” he said. “I gotta buy you lunch. That show back on the highway belonged in the circus.”
But by then the allure of cross country biking broadened in America, the equipment advanced and readers began writing, asking whether they could join my next trip. So the newspaper promoted one of the earlier week-long group rides in the country. In the first years it was hardly a cultural trailblazer. One rider showed up in cowboy boots and sombrero and sang Willie Nelson ballads until he was deflated by his third flat tire of the day. Panniers loaded with rain jackets, towels, change of clothes and jars of mosquito juice hung from whatever exposed surface was available on the bicycle. One little old guy wore a beanie on his head topped by a mini propeller that spun erratically, depending on the wind and the grade of the next hill.
But an idea developed as the years progressed. The equipment was better, women in sizeable numbers joined the group and a concept slowly evolved among the riders, meshing with one I admired. A community was evolving here. The riders found themselves renewing the experience each year in early summer. Friendships had developed, not casual or notional but renewable, not only on the ride but also away from it. What happened in Nancy’s life, or Fred’s, mattered to the others. At least two marriages were performed DURING the tour. A professional musician on the ride played the wedding march in Mankato, Minn., and the couple, arriving on a tandem bicycle, entered the marriage hall through a corridor of crossed tire pumps. The membership in the ride reached 150, a nice figure all around.
So it offered laughs along with renewal, and consolation in the face of solemn news. Years ago when I was about to retire from the newspaper, I brought the folks together to explain that since the sponsorship was ending we would have to close the bike ride. I thanked them for the hours we’d traveled together, what we had shared. Three or four days later I began getting phone calls at strange hours of the night - 2 a.m. and worse. “Bad things could happen,” the voice would say, “if you drop this bike ride.” An hour later, another voice. Same message. It was guerrilla warfare. What else. They wanted to keep the ride going. So I took it over to manage in my retirement. Some years later the Adventure Cycling Association presented our group with its Pace Setter award, citing our ride as “a pioneering effort to get people out of the cities and into beautiful areas of rural Minnesota (and neighboring states) teaching people to become bike tourists, to meet personal goals and to help them become more active by building relationships.”
On our last night of the ride a few weeks ago I turned over the management to a friend with the thought that it was time for someone a little younger than my 85 years. There were hugs, and some tears, including mine. I told them the thanks instead should be coming from me, for all of the friendships that had evolved in my life because they were there, and for all they had brought into my life. Somehow I think the semi driver would have enjoyed the scene, and happily joined in with his air horn.
Photo courtesy of Dan Hicks via Flickr.
Ecumen & Mill City Commons Appear in UK Financial Times
Minnesota senior housing companies - including Ecumen and Mill City Commons - gained international attention this week in a UK Financial Times article.
Mill City Commons is a leader in the grassroots movement to create senior lifestyle neighborhoods. Ecumen helped establish the membership-based community in 2008. Read more about how Minnesota is creating Baby Boomer-friendly living in the article "Minnesota Targets Baby Boomers with Specialist Housing Options".
Photo courtesy of UK Financial Times.
Ecumen Leaders to Serve on State Committee, Board
Two Ecumen community leaders have agreed to represent the senior health care profession with two state-wide groups.
Janet Green, executive director at Ecumen Detroit Lakes, has agreed to serve on the Governor’s Workforce Development Council - Career Pathways Committee. The group develops policy and strategy recommendations to help grow, align and sustain career pathways in Minnesota. One issue the group will address is the mismatch of workers’ skills and job openings that are most prevalent in manufacturing and health care.
Green has served on various local and regional workforce boards and initiatives over the past 15 years, including the area’s Workforce Investment Board; the Rural Minnesota Concentrated Employment Program (CEP) which serves 19 counties in west central region; and the Minnesota Workforce Council Executive Committee. She has been with Ecumen since 1994.
Nathan Johnson, executive director at Ecumen North Branch, was appointed by Governor Dayton to the Minnesota Board of Examiners for Nursing Home Administrators (BENHA). The board is responsible for setting the qualifications required for licensure, reviews complaints against licensed administrators, and refers consumer-related issues to other state and private agencies.
Johnson, who has been with Ecumen since 2011, will serve the Board as one of two non-profit nursing home administrators. The other is Jennifer Pfeffer, executive director at Ecumen Pathstone Living in Mankato.
Jim Klobuchar: My Friend, My Sherpa from Shangri-La
A friend phoned the other day with news from a land which the two of us whimsically call Shangri La. It was the mythical place of towering snow mountains and exotic green valleys where goodness reigned; and the people were blessed with long and quiet lives of innocence and mutual respect, with no wars and no bank overdrafts.
The land of Nepal is no such paragon. It is one of the poorest countries on earth, squeezed now between the powerhouses of China and India with scant natural resources except for the magnificent Himalayas, with their lofty silver summits and forests of rhododendrons that inspired the fictional tale of Shangri La.
Among the visitors who come to Nepal each spring are hundreds of climbers and trekkers who invest their energies either in high altitude mountaineering or in hikes that lift them thousands of feet into incredible scenes of high altitude fir forests, glaciers and snow summits.
I’ve been one of those. Over time Nepal has become part of my life, not so much because I have climbed there and escorted trekking friends there but because of the admiration and trust I’ve found in the Sherpa companions with whom I’ve walked; that and their fundamental decency.
One of my trekking partners in Minneapolis called with news that a Sherpa guide of the mountain village of Phortse, who had led my trekking parities for more than 20 years, had been diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease by doctors in the capital city of Kathmandu. They were said to have suggested chemotherapy and other treatments that might be available to him.
“They said he declined. I don’t know if it’s his Buddhist faith or he just doesn’t want to stretch things out for his family,” my friend said.
A few minutes later I fumbled fruitlessly with my cell phone, knowing it couldn’t carry to Nepal and a mountain slope nearly three miles in the sky beneath the summits of Everest, Lhotse, Ama Dablam and Themserku. He had built a little tourist lodge there, his home village, where my trekking groups often overnighted. He had built it with his guide money after raising a family of six children. The oldest had become a Buddhist monk in the historic monastery of Thangboche. One of the youngest, is now a high altitude Sherpa guide and load carrier who has reached the summit of Everest at least 15 times.
But his dad is old school Sherpa, still guiding beyond the age of 60. We met in the years when he had just graduated into the role of lead guide and not completely comfortable with it because of his uneasy grappling with the English language. In the years when he was apprenticing, the Sherpa kids rarely went beyond a few years in grade school, some of it in the schools built by Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand in gratitude for the fame he acquired being the first to reach the 29,000 foot summit of Mt. Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953. So while today’s modern Sherpa guides are relatively fluent in English—which opens them to opportunities and relationships their forebears lacked—my friend had no such ease of access.
But we became genuine pals. I admired the care he took with those in my groups who were intimidated by the altitude or the sound of a distant avalanche. He was a simple man, totally committed to the safety of those he led, and a man of devotion in his Buddhism. Often we walked together. He would recite while touching each bead of what Catholics would call a rosary. And after a time, stirred by the joy of the trail and the immensity of the Himalayan geography, I would join him with an amusement he understood, having memorized the words he recited each time he touched another bead. All of this was done in good will and fraternity. And after awhile we would recite together, “Ohm mani padme hum.” In this form of Buddhism from the Sanskrit, the prayer seeks a kind of purification through generosity and patience. It amused him to hear me joining in his chant but he understood it was being offered respectfully.
We were less guide- and- trekker than two friends drawn from separate cultures and religious practice. By now I know his family and he knows our vulnerabilities; also out habits and our observances. A few years ago we woke up to breakfast on the trail on what we would call Easter morning and found little woven baskets containing ribbons of plastic grass filled with candy eggs. A few years later one of my trekkers organized a secret birthday party for me in the dining tent. My friend the Sherpa got wind of it and, worried that his Sherpa hosts might commit some kind of high altitude faux pas, he rattled my tent before dinner. Realizing he was blowing the cover of the party schemers he asked, “Jeem. “where can I find 82 candles?”
I told him one medium size candle would probably do the trick.
He has spent a lifetime of service to men and women from parts of the world where luxury, although declining, is still available on a scale he couldn’t imagine. His younger Sherpa partners are now much better educated than he is. But there is a sense of welcome among the elders of the Sherpa clans that I cherish. I discovered it years ago when I learned there is something more in that extraordinary land than the might of its mountains reaching five miles into stratosphere. We were hiking in the Annapurna Range through the refracted light of a forest of sycamores and hanging moss. The late afternoon wind and swaying trees created eerie sounds, secret moans and creakings. In my childhood I would have imagined these as sounds of a witches’ forest. But in the Himalaya this was not the domain of the wicked queen. Annapurna ruled here, the goddess nurture and harvests in the natives’ observances. Some of the trekkers felt uneasy.
But the reality I remember most vividly from that forest was a Sherpa guide named Ang Nima, in his 40s then, a man who years before had refused to leave the bodies of four climbers struck by an avalanche. He stayed through the freezing night, praying his mantras, keeping his vigil, faithful to his commitment. He was a quiet little man walking the trail with us, making himself useful. As we neared camp, close to his village home, he disappeared into the forest and emerged a few minutes later, his brown face in a smile. In his hand he held three wild orchids, and gave one to each of the three women in our party. It was a bouquet; a gift of the forest that said, “this is from my house to you.”
One of the women wept. As I remember, so did I.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Ecumen Opens New Senior Community in Omaha
Ecumen recently opened a new senior living community in Omaha, Neb., that it developed with owner Esprit Memory Care. Read the complete article on our Senior Housing Development blog.
Ecumen Leader Kathryn Roberts Honored by Minnesota State University Mankato
Congratulations to Ecumen President and CEO Kathryn Roberts who was recently honored by Minnesota State University Mankato with its 2013 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award. The award is presented to graduates who have achieved high rank or honor in their professions, have a widespread effect on their communities, and are recognized for their achievements over the course of their careers. Kathryn earned a Masters Degree in Continuing Studies from the school. And we feel very fortunate to have her as Ecumen's leader in the work of changing aging.
The Innovator's Dilemma Sure Isn't Aging
Most of the country's entrepreneurs and innovators are older, which challenges a significant U.S. stereotype. Read more in our new blog post at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
An Ecumen Adventure with Governor Al Quie: Taking the Reins of "Rambler" and Aging
I recently had the honor to ride horses with former Minnesota Governor Al Quie. He shared with me some fantastic horsemanship and how aging has become another adventure in his life. I love what he says about learning. Learn more from Governor Quie in ourChanging Aging YouTube video.
By his estimation, Governor Quie, the 35th Governor of Minnesota, has taken the reins of a horse approximately 13,104 times in his 89 years. Governor Quie began riding at age 3. His first memory is of his father lifting him up to sit on his Morgan mare’s back. He recalls the warmth of the horse’s neck on his fingers. He also remembers unhitching and walking a team of horses into the barn while his father watched. By the time he was 8 years old, Governor Quie had a pony of his own. Throughout his life – working as a senator, a State Representative, the Governor of Minnesota and a Congressman in the 85th-95th Congresses – Governor Quie has made time to ride horses about three days a week.
In addition to his love of horses, he’s still very involved in his love of Minnesota public policy. He recently led what has become known in our state as The Quie Commission, a citizen’s commission, focused upon gaining bi-partisan support for taking the politics out of Minnesota judicial elections. The goal is to avoid expensive, often brutal, campaigns, and offer voters better information. The core of the Quie Commission’s recommendations is the creation of "retention elections." Under the proposal, governors would appoint judges, and their performance would be reviewed by an independent merit selection commission. Based on the panel's finding, voters would decide whether to keep or oust the judge. Minnesotans of all political perspectives are joining Governor Quie in this effort through the Coalition for Impartial Justice.
The morning I spent with Governor Quie, he rode a beautiful young gelding named, “Rambler”. As I borrowed a horse from his barn, and rode with Governor Quie, I saw how his political negotiating skill ties to his horse handling. Governor Quie is a “horse whisperer”. Many of the horses he’s owned or trained have come from friends and acquaintances, which after struggling to train the horses themselves, are told “The only person I know who can train a horse like that is Al Quie”. A friend came to him and asked if he’d train Rambler while he was out of the country. Governor Quie hesitated. He was 88 years old. Did he really want to risk his wellbeing for this horse? Governor Quie found he couldn’t resist the challenge.
Over the last year, the Governor has taken Rambler from being a horse that refused to move to one that confidently walks, trots and canters through the arena. Governor Quie likes to train the horses to move off of his body’s cues. The horse’s movements are almost imperceptible. It’s really something to behold. Governor Quie told me he had a dream when he was younger that he would ride horses at 80. At 89, he’s fulfilled this wish and then some. Here’s to many more rides, Governor Quie.
Jim Klobuchar - About Getting Old, Read My Lips
The calendar doesn’t negotiate with us or offer rewards. One of its chores is to make silent announcements, like: “one more birthday , friend.”
Let’s say the day comes when you graduate from your jolly 70s. That simple fact may not be worth launching a drum and bugle parade downtown or taking a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times.
Consider the possibility that the celebration can be simpler and a lot less expensive.
A few days ago I finished one of my bouts with the treadmill in the fitness center nearby. It’s one of those modern and progressive sweat boxes that gives major discounts, in some cases a free ride, to aging card holders in one of the major insurance companies.
The idea behind the insurance company’s gift to sweating geezers is the essence of shrewd humanitarianism. What they’re saying is: Stay healthy folks, so we don’t have to pay the hospital bills (out of your premiums). Which in one swoop makes (a) the customer healthier and (b) the insurance company richer.
Sometimes the system does work.
When I finished a half hour on the treadmill, I took a pair of 10-pound weights, lifted them over my head, alternating arms, and put down the weights after 15 minutes. After watching CNN bringing us the latest calamities for a few minutes I headed into the hallway leading to the locker room and showers.
A fellow was sitting on a chair at the head of the hallway, towel around his neck, a pleasant guy I’d met before. We exchanged greetings. He was breathing harder than he probably should have. He looked around to see if there was anyone else in earshot and asked: “How old are you?
I said I was 84. He nodded and smiled in a way that was intended to convey some sort of confession. “I’m 61,” he said.
I offered congratulations. He seemed to want to continue the conversation. He may have been imagining himself at my age, but without a lot of joy because he wasn’t especially proud of where he was physically and perhaps psychologically.
I had the impression he had time on his hands. From earlier conversations I knew he was reasonably well off, may have lived alone, a man stumbling in search, getting older faster.
All of those years had taught me some minimal discretions about giving advice. My paths to fulfillment, if that’s the correct word, might be 180 degrees from another’s. Other folks aren’t necessarily bashful about lighting the way for us. In my book stacks at home is one written by a Dr. Walter M. Bortz published by Simon and Shuster. In it Dr. Bortz challenges the men of the world: “Dare to be 100.”
I’ll admit that’s a reasonable goal. The doctor offers the challenge with energy and hustle, sprigs of humor and some genuinely sound medical advise based heavily on the idea of involvement with the world around us. He offers 100 suggestions ranging from keeping order in your life to being a good loser to convincing yourself that it’s never too late to be totally delighted with life heading into your 80s and beyond.
I would be the last to argue.
I couldn’t possibly have been there to talk about life with my friend in the fitness center if I hadn’t brought an end to my drinking 20 years ago with the help of friends, colleagues and my family and a burst of common sense.
I couldn’t possibly have been there if I didn’t have the brains to walk into a hospital three years before that and discovered that I had heart blockage of 90, 95,90 and 100 per cent, and needed surgery almost that very day.
Nor could I have been there unless I addressed the enticements that pulled me into a life of self-gratification. My time, my agendas.
I don’t know if the fellow in the chair outside the workout room knew all of that or would be interested if he did. I turned to leave, but I stopped and shook his hand, and he seemed about to ask a question.
“Work on your friendships,” I said. “rekindle some of the old ones. When it’s all said and done it’s the relationships that matter most. Travel when you can. Embrace the world, if it’s no further than the North Shore of Lake Superior. Think about somebody who needs your help and pick up the phone. And come here and take care of your body. Think about somebody who needs your help.”
So I went back to the treadmill and did ten minutes more.