Jim Klobuchar - The Hazards of Finding Direction in our Lives
Jim Klobuchar, Ecumen "Changing Aging" contributor: 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.
The Hazards of Finding Direction in Our Lives
Since the Neanderthals found their way around by tracking the sun, the make-life-easier industries have been tying to rescue us from simplicity.
We have graduated into a frenzy of automated route-finding symbolized by the GPS, sitting imperiously on millions of dashboards. It is the electronic successor to St. Christopher, who for decades was the patron saint of travelers until being downgraded from sainthood 30 years ago by the Vatican’s well-intended but somewhat rash housecleaning of border-line saints. My miseries of a week ago in southern Minnesota made me yearn for the now-mothballed services of.Christopher, who is sadly functioning now in the minor leagues of sainthood.
You know about the speed-of-light advances in direction finding since the compass and road map. The pioneers before the compass were craftier folk like Eskimoes and Scandinavians. They found that if you drew an imaginary line between the two outlying stars of the Big Dipper, and multiplied that distance by five, you would find your way infallibly to the North Star. This came to be called True North. That was an illusion, because there is another force of nature called magnetic deviation, which can be caused by the presence of mineral deposits on the earth, and can land you in the middle of a lake if you fly light planes and don’t know about deviation..
Later the on-line masterminds created interactive road maps that could take you from your doorstep to your favorite casino in the Mojavi Desert and, allowing for a pizza stop in Wichita, come within inches of measuring the precise distance and elapsed time. Like many, I relied on this flawless system until I found myself at night in the middle of a country bridge that literally led nowhere, abandoned two years before.
Nonetheless I bought my highly intelligent wife a $300 GPS for her birthday three years ago, knowing her fondness for the latest miracle devices but aware of her short attention span for gadgets. She uses it twice a year and we can now happily follow the GPS to the nearest Walgreen’s, a half mile and one left turn from our house.
So a week ago I was scoping out the route of a bike ride I organize annually, with a friend who enjoys these missions. Although we rode in my car, he brought along his personal GPS, realizing my high-tech limitations I told him I’d grown up in northern Minnesota where inventive iron miners developed makeshift devices to serve as compasses. One of theirs had run into another hunter from the cities. The city hunter noticed the local hunter staring into the reflectorized bottom of a snuff can. “Does that tell you directions?” the visitor asked. “No,” the local replied glumly, “but it does tell you who’s lost.”
As he drove toward a town in southeastern Minnesota I advised my friend to head for Highway 16. I dozed off but awoke to voices. It turned out there was a state AND a county 16, heading in different directions. And the authoritative female voice coming from the GPS was telling us to take Highway 16. But there were two voices, I swear. “The voice on the GPS is a robot,” I said to my friend, “why are you yelling at a robot? She can’t hear.”
He denied yelling at the invisible robot. I was conciliatory. “Probably mistaken,” I said. “Which route are you taking?”
“Highway 16,” he said cryptically. After considering a coin flip, somebody got out a road map. It worked.
You could almost hear St. Christopher applauding.
New Senior Housing? The MEDCottage
A Fairfax County (VA) official dubbed it "The Granny Pod.' He can't stand the invention a Virginia minister created to help people live at home when they need long-term care. But others look at it and say it's ingenuity for the Age Wave and a person's desire to live at home.
What do you think of the MEDCottage (it's not actually called the Granny Pod)?
A little background . . . According to a Washington Post article:
Rev. Kenneth Dupin, who leads a small Methodist church in Southern Virginia, has a vision: As America grows older, its aging adults could avoid a jarring move to the nursing home by living in small, specially equipped, temporary shelters close to relatives . . .
As senior minister at what was then Aldersgate Wesleyan Church in Falls Church, Dupin visited a shut-in named Katie. Her husband had served in the Eisenhower administration, and she liked to show off photographs of them dancing at a White House ball.
On one visit, Dupin found Katie in tears. Her adult children had arranged for her to go into a nursing home. Workmen were busy fixing up her home for sale. When he later visited her at the nursing home, she was miserable.
"When I got there, she was absolutely devastated, and she asked me if I could take her home. That stuck in my head -- the patheticness of it," Dupin said.
The MEDCottage, like an RV, could be hooked up to a house's electrical and water system. It could be wired with sensors and other technology and would lease for about $2,000 per month. Interestingly, an online poll (non-scientific) you can take here shows a majority of people would buy it.
Senior Housing Fear in Woodbury - The New York Times Version
Paula Span, who authors the New York Times' popular "New Old Age" Blog has a post todayon a vocal sliver of people in Woodbury, Minnesota, opposing senior housing for people with Alzheimer's in their neighborhood. Ecumen is a consultant to the project.
What's interesting is that in this era where another person gets Alzheimer's every 70 seconds, we still have a number of people who have big time misunderstandings about the disease. Sadly, if these misunderstandings take further root, they negatively impact the lives of others. Changing Aging means getting knowledgeable about Alzheimer's disease and finding a cure to make it go away.
Program, Here! Get Your Program! Program! A Shout Out to Art Tysk
"Program!" was the shout out at the top of Arthur Tysk's obituary in the local newspaper today. Ecumen's Lakeview Commons community had the honor of having Art as a customer. He died last Friday. Art was one of Minnesota's most recognizable sports vendors, selling T-shirts and game programs well into his 90s. Beginning his career in the 1920s, he had vending posts at the State Fairgrounds and at sports venues from Midway Stadium to the Xcel Energy Center. Art made his passion his purpose and was a model for changing aging.
Betty White and the Need for Older TV Stars
As America ages, isn't it time we had more older stars on TV?
Betty White made history this weekend, becoming the first 88-year-old host of Saturday Night Live. SNL attained its best ratings in almost two years. Here's to more talented older hosts in the future. Kudos, Betty, for Changing Aging, and having a sense of humor in doing it. (OK, Betty is a native of Illinois, but her Mary Tyler Moore role, which was set in Minneapolis, makes her an honorary Minnesotan.)
Marion Ross - native Minnesotan who starred in Happy Days was on Nurse Jackie, the Showtime hit, the other day. She played a hospital patient who was neglected by her home health care aide. Marion did a great job, but it would be nice to see her play other roles, too.
George Clooney Has Long-Term Care on His Mind
George Clooney is enlisting friends Matt Damon and Brad Pitt to try to save a nursing home in Hollywood. The nursing home is the Motion Picture and Television Fund nursing home, which cares for people who worked in film and television. I don't know all the ins and outs of the debate, but it looks like the nursing home, as many are in the U.S., is losing huge amounts of money, as Medicaid reimbursement continually gets cut. This same drama plays out - minus the Hollywood stars - in communities across the U.S., underscoring the need to transform how we pay for long-term care in the U.S.
The stars and others seeking to save the nursing home have created an only-in-Hollywood campaign complete with dramatic video at www.savingthelivesofourown.org. It would be great to have George, Matt, Brad and the other stars to bring their advocacy nationally and shine the spotlight in America that we need to build the infrastructure and financing system to support America's elders with dignity.
As U.S. Health Secretary Kathy Sebelius looks how to market the CLASS Act, America's new public long-term care insurance plan, perhaps these stars can come on board as they've got long-term care on their minds.
Grandparents Walking All The Way Around Lake Superior, Adventures in Aging Part 2
Two grandparents are walking all the way around Lake Superior . . . Mike Link and Kate Crowley departed Duluth, Minn., last week, near Ecumen's Bayshore and Lakeshore communites, and started walking toward Wisconsin . . . they're going to walk completely around Lake Superior by Labor Day. Mike and Kate will become the oldest circumnavigators to have hiked around the largest body of freshwater in the world.
Follow their travels here. This is very cool (glad to see they have their polar fleece).
When they get to Bayfield, Wis., they should stop in at the CORE offices, which we blogged about here. Also, here's another adventure in aging - Kara Buckner's 81-day trip around the world.
Good wishes to Mike and Kate!
Fear and Neighbors With Alzheimer's
NIMBY and Memory Care. It's a new one. Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Jon Tevlin has a column today about a Woodbury, Minn., neighborhood that has some residents that are opposing memory care housing. Ecumen is a consultant to the developer . Some have expressed fear of having their kids live near people with Alzheimer's.
I've seen NIMBY (not in my backyard) cases related to building size, traffic, parking, etc., but never because of fear with people with Alzheimer's. Has anyone else ever seen that?
Adventures in Aging, Part 1, Around the World in 81 Days
Are you including adventures in your aging journey? Kara Buckner is and she's taking a number of Ecumen customers with her on her trip 81-day trip around the world through her blog "Let's Karavan."
Kara quit her job, rid herself of her house and her her car, bought a ticket on Delta Airlines and is going around the world in 81 days. She's been to Antarctica, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere. Today she's traveling to South Africa.
If you visit the memory care apartments at Ecumen's Lakeview Commons community in Maplewood, Minn., you'll see in one of the gathering areas a large global map where customers are tracking daily the global travels of Kara, who is the cousin of Ecumen colleague Andrea Nye. Kara blogs daily on her adventures. I dig her posts and her evolving defintion of home, which she described while in Buenos Aires.
Leisure World's World is Changing
Some age-restricted communities have just awful names. Looks like Leisure World, which used to be all the rage in new-fangled senior housing communities is due for an identity update.
Leisure World began in 1960 as one of the country's first planned retirement communities. Several more were built in California. Now about 100 Leisure World residents are lobbying to get rid of the name Leisure World, saying it doesn't reflect who they are.
"The reason I believe that now is the time is because we are going to be getting a new demographic retiring, so-called boomers, and they don't want to be in anything that smacks of inactivity or retirement," said Anne Seifert, president of the Where We Live club, in the Orange County Register. "The 60-years-old people are (the new) 30."
The club is holding a community forum about the name update proposal on April 23 and May 14. The group is suggesting Leisure World be changed to Seal Beach Pointe, Seal Beach Highlands or Seal Beach Meadows.
"It's not very pleasant to say, 'I live here' and then you're the butt of the joke," she said. "The name no longer fits the residents who are here. Today's 60-plus residents are active in sports, volunteer and many have encore jobs," Seifert said.
Aging is Changing at Leisure World and in America.