One More Way to Look at Old Folks - by Ecumen Blogger Jim Klobuchar
I met Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, more than 50 years ago on her last book tour as a public personality. She was often lampooned in her ungainliness and passion for causes, but also much loved for her commitments to social justice, world peace and other goals seemingly too far.
I was then writing for the Associated Press wire service in Minneapolis, assigned to interview her. Her escort at the book signing was a Democratic Party figure in the Midwest, Joseph Robbie, who later became the owner of the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League. Joe was there to insure that all protocols were observed and that Eleanor’s encounters with the newsman were amicable and touched with suitable respect.
The lady set him at ease. “Oh, I’m going to be all right,” she laughed. “I enjoy this.”
And so she did. I asked about her books and current causes, as well as her most recent role in party politics—she would be supporting Adlai Stevenson and not John Kennedy in the forthcoming scramble for the Democratic nomination. What I remember most vividly were her volleys of laughter, her unsinkable devotion to the uplift of women in this country and around the world—at the time not a subject overwhelmingly popular. Her escort, assigned to make sure all reputations were adequately protected, including the former first lady’s, seemed nervous when she insisted on staying a little longer than the initial schedule.
Joe could have saved himself the sweat. She was a delight. I thought of that morning at the book store a few days ago when a world-traveling friend of mine sent me a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt. It said: “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature. But beautiful old people are works of art.”
Please know this is not a commercial. I’m not applying for a corner wall at the Louvre to celebrate my membership in the octogenarians club. But what my friend was suggesting by quoting Eleanor Roosevelt was the fruits that are available to older folks today—assuming they have been wise in protecting their health and reaching out for the gratifications available to them in today’s world.
And what are those?
The literature on the subject is endless. Much of it counsels awareness and good sense in our treatment of body and mind. I’ve trekked and climbed with people in their 80s. That’s hardly an achievable goal for most, or, it might be argued, even a sensible one. So what is a reasonable goal, achievable by most?
On this my friend and I agree: that coming to terms with those questions is largely shaped by our interests, by our dreams and by our needs – and ultimately by what have become the important markers in our lives, so we do not have to ask: “Is this all there is?”
What most of us seek is a place where we can enjoy and even expand life in later years and – whether we are physically active or not—avoid be dogged by the mysteries and fears of what’s ahead.
This is not living for the moment. We’re mortal. We can be aware of our vulnerabilities. But age does not mean we need to abandon our curiosity to know what’s around the corner or over the hill. Nor does it mean we better be prepared for sieges of loneliness or abandonment. We’re not helpless in all of this. If we were sensible 40 years ago, or ten years ago we wouldn’t be worrying about it today. But even if we weren’t, we have sense enough to know that John Dunne was right all along four hundred years ago: No one is an island.
So let’s say we actually start over at the age 50 or 60 or 70 or more. And we now know all of these sensible paths that we ignored. We had allowed some of our friendships to disappear because of neglect or selfishness. We got fat and that curtailed fun and achievement and respectability and built resentments.
So there’s a really powerful temptation to watch television for eight hours and to sign off.
Put it in the ash can. Most of us have more choices than we realize. There is a marvelous earth here to be explored. We don’t have to be millionaires or 21st Century Magellans to do it. What we need are people in our lives who matter! It is called relationships, which do not magically give us solace or comfort when needed but have to be nourished. In one of the most primitive societies in Africa there is what we would call a medicine man. He’s not skilled medically but when he is asked to tend to someone sick with a condition the medicine man can’t identify, he will usually ask the ailing one, as his first question, the equivalent of “how are your relationships?”
My friend told of a trip to South America where she met a woman traveling alone. The woman had just turned 92. She was the last to board the boat for a cruise to Antarctica. “We all knew she was going to be the most fascinating person on board,” my friend said. “I remember sitting with her one evening at dinner for eight. A passenger, curious as we all were, asked if she had children. The 92 year old woman considered this question momentarily and then shouted, ‘Not yet.’ The table was in hysterics the rest of the dinner.”
When I talk to students who want to know what is the best way to seek success in life I tell them if I had any gift I could give them, it would be the gift of curiosity. Curiosity about the world, about the people in it, about the beauty and the mystery of it and about the choices available to us. Because from there comes discovery. And if I had any advice that would give them the greatest satisfaction in life and chance for comfort and success, it would be to nourish the relationships in their lives, and to be serious about it. Because out of that can come love, which opens our lives to what we call a fulfillment that lasts.
By Ecumen Blogger Jim Klobuchar - A Day in Court Unlike Any Other
A Day In Court Unlike Any Other
By the appointed hour of 8 a.m.the DWI courtroom in Minneapolis was filled with all of the required principals.
The defendants were there waiting their turn to testify about their progress or their troubles. The judge was seated and so was the court’s team of aids and trouble shooters—a DWI court coordinator, a prosecutor, public defender, probation officers, a treatment program specialist, a chemical health assessor, a treatment program expert, a victim advocate, law enforcement representatives and more.
When all of the court people and defendants were seated in the courtroom one of them shared a remembrance. This would have been the birthday of his late wife and the mother of his children. His refusal to give up drinking had led her to threaten to leave with the children unless he came to his senses more than 20 years ago.
He did and the marriage was saved. The testimony came not from the defendants in the court room but from the presiding judge, Gary Larson, one of the most respected in the Hennepin County court system and its suburbs.
For the judge it was reality and also thanksgiving for the ultimatum that saved his marriage and the course of his life. It was no stage effect to create an aura of democracy around this unusual gathering of violaters and upholders of the law. The primary issue here, and in courts like it around the country, is public safety. The guideline of DWI Courts is to find a more sensible way to reduce the carnage and the financial toll caused by drunk drivers by offering them incentives and tools that make sense.
More sensible than what?
Probably more sensible and ultimately less expensive than maintaining an assembly line of driving offenders with a long rap sheets of drunk driving convictions, jail time, accidents, more victims, longer jail time and more public expense.
On this day in the Hennepin County DWI (driving while intoxicated) court session 20 or so participants in the program appeared before the judge and the cadre of court connected advisors and monitors to bring the court up to date on their progress. The evaluations offered to the judge were mixed. So were the demeanors of the defendants. Some were sprightly and satisfied that they were making progress. Most gave brief testimonies that were largely upbeat.
But here was a woman who had struggled through years as a night club entertainer that made drinking part of the culture. She was trying, but laboring.The stresses so far had not driven her to drop out of the program. The others there to testify to their progress tried to empathize, and there a palpable sense of community about the gathering.
Is it working? The program workers in the Hennepin County DWI system offer figures to show that it is twice as effective in reducing repeat offenses as chronic jailing. Today in many parts of the country that maintain DWI Courts, offenders convicted of drunk driving are given their choice of jail time of varied length or entrance into the DWI Court system. Joining the system is hardly an open door to freedom and relaxation for offenders. They’re subject to random home visits by law people with breathalyzer equipment and other tests of sobriety. Curfews are enforced. Equipment can be installed in cars that will nail anyone who gets behind the wheel after drinking.
Nobody forces the defendants to stay in the DWI Court system if they want out. But the court records show that defendants who drop out of the system are nearly three times as likely to test positive for alcohol in random test than those who stay the course and graduate.
So is actually a kind of school?
Defined broadly, it is. If you’re arrested and guilty of drunk driving in Hennepin County’s Fourth Judicial District, which receives money from a federal grant for this purpose, you get a choice of standard jail time or joining the drug court part of the option. If you do that you’re actually free after token time BUT—
You enter into a bargain. No drinking. You’ll be tested. In the early going you have to meet curfew deadlines. Attend sobriety meetings where recovering alcoholics will welcome and counsel you. Home between 10 p.m. and 6 p.m. broadened if you advance in the program, If you tsry to game that system the curfew hours will be tightened, you may find community service added to the sentence or you may draw substantial jail time.
The people who supervise the program are basically telling the defendant:
We know these outcomes a little better than you do. We’re not only trying to help you rehabilitate your life, but we’re also trying to protect your potential victims. If you can’t see what we’re trying to do for you—but even more, for your innocent victims,--then we’re all better off if you do more jail time.
Here I have to offer a disclosure.
The Drug Court Judge identified earlier, Gary Larson, is the same judge who presided over my case of drunk driving 20 years ago. There was no DWI court then. I pleaded guilty, received the required day and a half sentence, entered treatment and have been free of alcohol since.
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’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.
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.
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.