HinesSight

My 76th birthday has me thinking about sending death letters before I die

For a while I've been pondering the notion of sending death letters to friends, family, and other people important to me -- not letters to be delivered after I die, but while I'm very much alive, not even sick. 

This idea has gained strength as I approach my 76th birthday. That sounds damn old to me. Which, it is.

My sister died at 71. My mother died at 73. My father, almost entirely absent from my life, died at 73 (best I can estimate; I'm not sure about the exact age).

So while I'm pretty healthy at the moment, having taken better care of myself than those relatives, I still sort of feel like I've living on borrowed time. After all, usually we have no way of knowing when we'll take our last breath.

Accidents happen. Unexpected heart attacks happen. Murders happen. The only way death is known in advance is if we commit suicide or if we have a fatal disease whose course is predictable.

My sister and mother died without me being able to speak with them. My father, the same, though we were so distant, I might not have wanted to talk with him before his death. 

I regret not being able to tell my sister and mother how much I loved them and would miss them. Hopefully they knew this, but we weren't a super-intimate family. I never told them things that I now wish I had, such as regrets about how I could have been a better brother or son, and my appreciation for all they did for me which, in retrospect, I took for granted more than I should have.

That's my motivation for writing individualized death letters to people I care about and sending them out while I'm alive and well, aside from some chronic health problems that are annoying rather than life-threatening. 

The letters would be a reflection of my deep feelings for these people. They'd allow me to say things more honestly and directly than I'm able to do in my usual communications with them. I'd imagine that I was on my death bed, even though I wouldn't be. What would I want to say to each of them if I knew that I only had fifteen minutes of living left?

For sure it wouldn't be aimless chit-chat. It would be heartfelt, real, emotional.

That's the spirit I'll try to put myself in when I write the death letters. Of course, if I end up living quite a bit longer, I might want to write a second death letter to some people. (The Social Security Administration says a 76 year old man lives another ten years, on average.)

I wouldn't expect a response to the death letters.

In fact, I see this as a downside of sending them while I'll alive, because I don't want people to think that I'm looking for them to say nice things about me after I've said nice things about them. However, to be honest, it wouldn't bother me if that happened. I just have no expectation of it happening, as I want my words to reflect how I feel about the person, not how I want them to feel about how I feel.

Anyway, this is something I'm planning to pursue over the coming months.

If I ever have a sudden massive heart attack or find a big semi-truck about to hit my little Subaru head on, I don't want my last thought to be, Damn, I never told _____ how much I care about them.  I'd rather have it simply be, Fuck! I'm about to die!

Oh, no! Just learned that yuppies were baby boomers. I'm crushed.

Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation.

And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am.

What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned the hugely annoying Young Urban Professional who worshipped money and conspicuous consumption. That was so not me or my hippie generation. We danced to the different drummer of liberal causes, caring for the planet, equality for all. 

Imagine my shock, then, when I read "What Happened to the Yuppie" by Louis Menand in the July 27, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. (Title in online edition is "When Yuppies Ruled.") This is a book review of Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppie: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.

In the first part of the article I came across some facts that undermined my confidence that I was part of a generation of hippies.

The demographic that the term was intended to pick out—professionals under forty living in cities—was fairly small in 1984, something like 1.2 million people. But there were not a lot of bona-fide hippies in the nineteen-sixties, either.

In 1967, only one per cent of college students said that they had tried LSD, and in 1969 Newsweek estimated that there were ten thousand people living in communes—probably a lowball estimate, but, whatever the number, it was not huge, and communes tend to have a short life span.

Hippies and yuppies signified not as political constituencies but as social types. A social type stands for something that people think is important to identify either with or against. As with the Swiftie. There are people who really want to be Swifties, and there are people who can’t believe that there are people who really want to be Swifties.

But, no matter how little you care about Swifties, you have to have an opinion. Even professing indifference is an opinion. And your view on Swifties says something about you. You’re the kind of person who says whatever it was you just said about Swifties—or yuppies or hippies. It all hangs together.

Okay, that left most of my hippie self-image intact. Sure, most people in my generation didn't identify as hippies, but at least we were highly sympathetic toward the elevated values of hippies -- which were ever so different from the crass materialism of the yuppies.

However, reading onward in the article, I learned something highly disturbing: the yuppies that I looked down upon were baby boomers, my generation. And they didn't change from being hippies to yuppies; they had yuppie-dom in them all along. Yikes! I felt self-image ground crumbling beneath my feet.

McGrath is insistent, even a little overinsistent, on making sense of the yuppies as baby boomers. The idea is that, having been dissidents and countercultural idealists in the nineteen-sixties, the boomers flipped in the nineteen-eighties to embrace capitalism and materialism.

McGrath presents this less as a sellout than as a colorful new chapter in the history of postwar America as the pig passes through the python.

But, once you do the math, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The baby boom began in July, 1946, and ended in December, 1964—representing approximately seventy-six million people. Almost none of those people were actively involved in the political, social, or cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties. They were much too young.

It’s the difference between listening to the Beatles and being the Beatles. Most of the baby boomers had nothing to do with the civil-rights movement or the launch of the women’s-liberation movement, and only a few who were born before 1950 had much to do with the antiwar movement.

When the first U.S. combat troops were deployed to Vietnam, in 1965, the oldest baby boomers were nineteen, and still in college. The youngest were not yet one, and teething.

On the other hand, the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers. The yuppie, not the hippie, is the baby boom’s contribution to postwar American social history.

Sigh... This is probably true. I hadn't thought much before about the leaders of the 60's social change movements being considerably older than us baby boomers, even those like me who were at the leading edge of the baby boom generation.

I always thought that we were revolutionary hippies. But the article argues that we're better thought of as traditionalist yuppies. Best I can come up with is that my generation is a mixture of each. I'm good at wishful thinking. 

After five months, I finally get medical treatment for my severe sciatica

If you've ever had severe sciatica pain, you'll find this blog post a heck of a lot more interesting than if you haven't. Usually that nerve pain is produced by problems with the spine, either degenerative or following an injury. 

I wrote about my current bout with sciatica back on March 23 in "If you're wondering about my absence, the answer is sciatica." An excerpt:

It can be an extremely annoying pain. My worse moments have been in the middle in the night when I need to use the bathroom, or when I get up after sleeping. A few times I was almost unable to move from my bed. When I tried, the pain was so intense I'd cry out uncontrollably, and needed help from my wife to just put my pants and shoes on.

Now I can do that on my own, though I use a single crutch to hobble into the bathroom, the pain is so bad. When I'm asked to rate the pain on a scale from 1-10, I say that at its worst, it's a 10. 

Given the occasional high intensity of that pain, which otherwise is just really annoying (though I'm doing better now, perhaps thanks to acupuncture), I've been highly motivated to get the health care system moving as quickly as possible toward treatment for the sciatica. 

However, aside from physical therapy, which I got after only a 5-week wait, and acupuncture, which I got on my own with less than a week's wait, it took me a bit over five months from when I first contacted my primary care doctor about the increased discomfort from the sciatica that I've been dealing with since 2020, until today, when I got two epidural steroid injections. 

In pain time, it felt a lot more than five months. But in health care system time, this is all too typical. Maybe even better than typical, since I have a Medicare MedAdvantage plan that is fairly generous and pretty responsive to referral requests.

Still, there are annoying hoops to jump through all along the way. For example, my wife has had three epidural injections that have helped her sciatica pain a lot. For me to get one, my primary care provider said that I needed a Lumbar Spine MRI. And in order to get the MRI, I needed six weeks of physical therapy, a Lumbar Spine X-ray, and something else that I've forgotten.

After that, of course, it took more time to be seen by several specialists. Some of them were clearly understaffed and overworked. In one case, I was shocked when I was told that it would take a week and a half to two weeks to schedule an appointment. Not to be seen at an appointment, just to schedule an appointment. That was a first for me. 

And our health care system isn't under the stress of Covid as it used to be. When I first got severe sciatica in 2020, I could understand why it wasn't possible to schedule a lumbar spine MRI, given that so many resources were going to care for Covid patients.

Now, though, the health care system seems to be under "normal" continual stress. My aging baby boomer generation must be partly to blame, given our increased medical needs. But my wife and I are both finding that now it takes much longer to get doctor appointments. Something is stressing the health care system, and i'm not sure what it is.

Here's my chronology.

December 8, 2023. I ask via MyChart for a referral from my primary care provider to Salem Health Rehabilitation Center, saying:

Dr. Gyuricska, sorry to hear that you're leaving Salem Health soon. I'll miss you. Wish you the best for your new course in life. I'm messaging you because I'd like a repeat referral to Salem Health Rehab Center for my right leg problem. The sciatica continues. What concerns me now is a different sensation in the right leg, some transitory unsteadiness/weakness after sleeping or sitting in a soft chair. Sort of weirdly, the sciatica pain is a bit less. The new problem might go away soon, but with the holidays upon us I figured that a physical therapy referral now would mean I could be seen after the first of the year. If I wait until January, naturally the wait to see a physical therapist, hopefully the same one I saw before, would be even longer.

December 11, 2023. Referred to Salem Health Rehabilitation Center for physical therapy.

January 5, 2024. Medicare wellness exam. Got advice to use BioFreeze to reduce stronger sciatica pain, which, sadly, isn't "going away soon" as I'd hoped on December 8.

January 15, 2024. Had first physical therapy session.

February 23, 2024. Primary care appointment about sciatica. Referred for Lumbar Spine X-ray which I got on same day.

March 9, 2024. Had Lumbar Spine MRI. Numerous problems found, including spinal stenosis. 

March 12, 2024. Referred to Salem Health Spine Center by primary care provider.

March 13, 2024. Had last of six physical therapy sessions.

March 14, 2024. Notified by Salem Health Spine Center to make appointment with Capital Neurosurgery Specialists neurosurgeon.

March 14, 2024. Referred to Salem Pain and Spine Specialists by primary care provider. 

March 18, 2024. Had scoliosis X-ray at request of neurosurgeon. 

March 26, 2024. Had appointment with neurosurgeon. Epidural steroid injections at two spine locations were recommended as first therapeutic step, which also would have diagnostic value.

April 8, 2024. At my request, referred by primary care provider to Portland doctor who performs MILD (Minimally Invasive Lumbar Decompression) for consultation about this possibility.

April 10, 2024. Had appointment with Physician Assistant at Salem Pain and Spine Specialists. It was agreed that I should get epidural steroid injections.

April 16, 2024. Had appointment with Portland doctor's Physician Assistant. 

April 29, 2024. Had first acupuncture treatment, which I chose to do.

May 9, 2024. Had second acupuncture treatment.

May 13, 2024. Had two epidural steroid injections at Salem Pain and Spine Specialists.

July 1, 2024. Follow-up appointment scheduled with neurosurgeon. 

If you're wondering about my absence, the answer is: sciatica

There's lots of painful medical conditions. In my 75 years, I'm only become intimately acquainted with one of them: sciatica. 

If you're unfamiliar with the term, I'm glad for you. Because sciatica pain, which for me is in my right leg, hip, and buttock areas, can range from mild to excruciating. I'm familiar with the whole range. 

Injury or pressure on the sciatic nerve creates the pain of sciatica. So sciatica is a symptom of an underlying medical problem. However, that can be tough to figure out. Thus I tend to view sciatica as the problem, though I realize to be rid of it, whatever is causing it needs to be identified.

I've had sciatica since early 2020. It was extremely painful back then, which led to me getting physical therapy. This was at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. That prevented me from being able to get a MRI of my lower spine, which often is the culprit when it comes to sciatica.

Eventually I got better, though the pain in my right leg never went away completely. For four years, whenever I was on my feet, I felt the pain. But it didn't stop me from doing what I wanted to do and needed to do.

In December of 2023, though, it started to get worse. The pain from Sciatica 1.0 was just in my right leg. Once Sciatica 2.0 emerged, pain was added in my right hip and buttock. That made it quite a bit more painful to stand, walk, or otherwise move around.

I got more physical therapy. I do those exercises twice a day, twenty-five minutes or so in the morning, then the same in late afternoon or early evening. At first I could keep going to the Tai Chi classes that I've enjoyed since 2005. For about a month now, I've been unable to go to the classes. Too much pain.

Same with going to meetings of the Salem City Club and other gatherings. If I sit on certain chairs for too long, the pain worsens when I stand up. I'm fairly stoic about my sciatica pain, but sometimes it is difficult not to groan. So I've been avoiding gatherings where my pain could disrupt things.

That's my basic explanation of why I haven't been going to places I usually am at. I wanted to write a blog post about this in part to let people know the reason for my absences, and in part to express my sympathy/solidarity with other sciatica sufferers.

It can be an extremely annoying pain. My worse moments have been in the middle in the night when I need to use the bathroom, or when I get up after sleeping. A few times I was almost unable to move from my bed. When I tried, the pain was so intense I'd cry out uncontrollably, and needed help from my wife to just put my pants and shoes on.

Now I can do that on my own, though I use a single crutch to hobble into the bathroom, the pain is so bad. When I'm asked to rate the pain on a scale from 1-10, I say that at its worst, it's a 10. 

On the plus side, I've gotten a lumbar MRI, though I haven't learned from a doctor what it means yet. I have an appointment with a Salem neurosurgeon, Dr. Kafka, next Tuesday. Then I should learn what treatment options are open to me. 

In case you've never experienced nerve pain, it's very different from muscle pain. Much worse, in my experience. It's sort of akin to the difference between being sad, and being clinically depressed (which I was, in 2017). Nerve pain and depression simply exist on a different scale of suffering from muscle pain and sadness. 

So to those who suffer from sciatica, I feel for you. May we all find relief. I just wish I'd bought stock in whoever makes the generic Tylenol and Advil I've been using copiously. Those substances help some with the pain, but not a whole lot.

By the way, a Regence advice nurse gave me a good tip for using Tylenol and Advil. She advised alternating between Tylenol and Advil every four hours, using two 500 mg Tylenol capsules and one 200  mg Advil capsule each time. That produces 3,000 mg of Tylenol every 24 hours and 600 mg of Advil, both within the recommended daily limit.

Health care workers, it's the system that bothers me, not you

Way back when (to be more specific, the 1970s and 1980s), I was, in order of my career moves, a research associate in the Oregon Medical School Department of Family Practice, a manager with the State Health Planning and Development Agency, and the executive director of Oregon Health Decisions, a pioneering community-based bioethics effort.

As I like to say, I must have done a terrific job, because now our state's health care system is running perfectly smoothly with no problems.

Of course, that's a blatant falsehood. Oregon, along with the rest of the United States, has a disjointed health care system marked by inefficiency, inequality, and crazily high costs.

However, most people are satisfied with their health care providers. I know I am.

The dissatisfaction is mostly with the system that these providers have to work in, and under. Often this doesn't become obvious until someone has a medical problem that is causing them a lot of distress, so speedy treatment is desired, and the health care system moves with decided unspeediness.

As you probably have guessed, one of those someone's is me. After suffering from sciatica in my right leg that started off very painful in 2020, when I was a youthful 71, then got better though it never went away, the sciatica has morphed into being very painful again now that I'm 75.

So I've been seeing my primary care provider, a physical therapist, and the staff who have gotten me a lumbar X-ray and MRI. I like all of these people. It's the system that isn't working so well.

On the most basic level, there's a disconnect between a person with a medical problem, me in this case, and policies that are a buffer between what people and their providers want, and the insurance that pays for most of health care.

I don't mean to burst the bubble of those who are looking forward to becoming old enough to get Medicare, having tired of the B.S. private insurance companies engage in. I used to be in that bubble myself. I couldn't wait to rid myself of my Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance.

However, when I became eligible for Medicare, I decided to sign up for a MedAdvantage plan, as that seemed, well, advantageous. Kind of amazingly, I chose Regence MedAdvantage -- you know, the same corporation that offered the private insurance I detested for so many years.

It seems to me that with every passing year, Regence MedAdvantage introduces more barriers to getting needed care, probably due to cost containment pressures. What particularly irritates me is how third-party contractors are used by Regence MedAdvantage to assess referrals made by my primary care provider.

This doesn't happen with every referral, but often enough. For example, today I had an appointment with my physical therapist. He'd given me exercises to do over about five visits, and offered some great advice about how to manage my sciatica. 

Since it seemed time to stop our visits, he started to suggest a plan for how to maintain an ability for me to see him again if I needed to.

Then he glanced at his computer screen and said, "Oh, but you have _______ as an intermediary. If we don't close out your case, and I see you again, they'll only approve half the visits they did this time, like from eight to four. And after that, they'll keep cutting the visits, like from four to two. But if we close your case, after 60 days they'll treat you as having a new problem and grant the original number of visits."

OK, I got what he was saying. However, it seemed strange that we weren't talking about what would be best for treating my sciatica problem; we were talking about what would be the best approach to dealing with my insurance problem.

Again, I have Medicare. I'm much better off, bureaucratic B.S. wise, than people who have private insurance.

But "much better" doesn't equate to pleasant. It bugs me when my primary care provider orders, say, a lumbar MRI to find out what is going on with my spine, then I have to wait for an approval from either Regence MedAdvantage or whoever Regence contracts with to decide if an MRI is warranted.

I realize this is a crazy idea, given how our health care system (actually a non-system) is set up, but it sure would be great if health care providers were the ones making the decisions as to what is appropriate care, with outsiders getting involved only if there's an obvious problem with what has been ordered for a patient.

Currently I'm waiting for a referral to a pain and spine clinic to be processed. I've been told that the referral has been approved. It just hasn't been processed, whatever that means. So I bug my providers, asking them what's taking so long, and they've been patient with me. I try to assure them that I'm not unhappy with what they're doing.

It's like when I hear my wife calling her MedAdvantage company when there's a problem with a prescription or care being denied. After explaining the problem, she always says, "I'm not irritated with you; you just work at ________; I'm irritated with management and your company's system."

 

Our 2023 Christmas letter is about cars that act like old bodies

Here's our 2023 Christmas letter, hot off the press of my mind this afternoon after I decided that I really wanted to write it, notwithstanding my wife having said that we shouldn't send one out this year, because there's nothing interesting to report on in our lives.

To which I thought, What?! How could that be, given all that happened with us in 2023? What she meant, I think, is that we haven't gone on any exciting trips or done anything noteworthy. That may be true, but exciting and noteworthy is in the eye of the beholder.

Plus, that's not the point of a Christmas letter. Or Holiday Letter, as we prefer to call it.

The point is to give people a glimpse into our lives that they wouldn't have otherwise. Also, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, and I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2023 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2023 Christmas Letter PDF

Hearing "Hey, Old Man!" got me thinking about people treated as an object

Above is the short version of what happened to me yesterday in downtown Salem (Oregon). But since I'm a wordy Old Man, I'm going to share a longer version. 

As background, I am indeed old, 75. And a man. 

So it doesn't bother me when my Tai Chi instructor, whom I've known for about 22 years, beginning with his instruction in a hard style martial art, refers to me in class as Old Man. For I'm the oldest man in the class, though my instructor is 70, just five years behind me.

But it did bother me when I was crossing Court Street at the mid-block crosswalk, heading for the Pacific Martial Arts studio where my Tai Chi class was about to begin, and a young guy who was part of a small group of teenagers yelled at me from the sidewalk.

"Hey, Old Man!" 

My instant reaction was irritation, because his attitude wasn't friendly, even though I'd never met the guy. I felt like saying something back at him. But within a second or two I decided to ignore him and keep on walking.

That spurred the guy to say something else. I can't remember what it was. Something along the lines of "I'm talking to you!" Which I also ignored.

I then spent the first part of the Tai Chi class conjuring up things I could have said, but didn't. Not that I had any doubts that I did the right thing by walking away. That's the first rule of traditional martial arts training: walk away from a fight if at all possible.

However, I enjoyed coming up with alternative scenarios. Like, "Sorry, man, I'm on my way to where I earned my karate black belt quite a few years ago. No time to talk. Just want to point out that while it may be fun to insult old men, keep in mind that some of them might be able to kick your butt. Have a good day."

Later I thought more calmly about what had happened to me. This was the first time in my life that I'd been treated negatively as an Old Man Object by a stranger. Driving home, I realized how common it is for other people to have the same thing happen to them.

Meaning, being treated negatively as a Woman Object, a Person of Color Object, a LGBTQ Object, a Muslim/Jewish/Other Religion Object. Or Whatever Object. Being a white male, I wasn't used to being insulted by someone I didn't know just because I had a characteristic they didn't like.

Now I know how it feels. Not good. For as I first learned from my reading of Sartre way back in my college days, we are subjects to ourselves and objects to other people, since no one else has direct access to our feeling of what it's like to be us.

That's what makes ageism, or sexism, or racism, or any other sort of prejudicial "ism" so disturbing. It strikes at the heart of a person's humanity, that which they have in common with every other person, by reducing them to a caricature of who they truly are.

So I guess I should feel sorry for the guy who yelled "Hey, Old Man!" at me. I don't know why he said this. Maybe he'd had too much to drink. Or was inebriated by something other than alcohol. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he was simply a teenager acting like a jerk (something I remember doing, for sure).

Anyway, the lesson I'm taking away from this little episode is to be more considerate myself both toward people I don't know, and those I do. Life is difficult enough without me getting irritated at someone whose turn signal has been on for blocks, or who is taking forever with a banking transaction as I wait in line. 

I did the right thing by not reacting to the guy who yelled at me. If it happens again, perhaps I won't even get irritated. Perhaps.

I'm thankful for a 98 year old guy I barely know

With thankfulness in the air, given that Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I feel a push to make this a theme of my daily blog post (I have three blogs and write something for one of them each day.)


I don't want to run through a litany of all the things in my life that I'm thankful for. That's boring, and I'd end up feeling that to balance things out, I should also mention all the things in my life that I'm not thankful for.

Which also would be boring. So here's one short, simple moment of thankfulness that happened to me this afternoon.

Whenever I go to our athletic club, almost always three times a week, I see an elderly man who is there about the same time I am. When our paths cross in a machine circuit training weight room, I say hello to him. And that's basically been the extent of our interactions for quite a few years.

Sometime this year I noticed that a friend was accompanying him during his workouts. I assumed this was because the elderly man (meaning, he looked quite a bit older than me -- I'm 75) couldn't drive any more.

Today the elderly man, whose name I don't know, had gone into the cardio/aerobic room to ride a stationary bike while I and a few others, including his friend, were still in the weight room.

I overheard part of a conversation between an older woman and the man's friend. The woman was asking about the elderly man. I thought I heard the friend say, "He's 98." Wow, I thought, is that really correct? He looks much younger to me.

Becoming part of the conversation, I asked the friend if I'd heard correctly. "Yes, he's 98. And in good shape. Very sharp mentally." He went on to tell us some things about the elderly man.

"He served in the Pacific during World War II. While there he got a disease. Doctors told him to exercise every day. He's kept that up his entire life. He comes to the club every day. He used to work for a state agency. He walked to work every day from his home."

I found this deeply inspiring. I don't like getting old, and I'm 23 freaking years younger than this man -- who uses a cane when he walks, but otherwise moves quite well. 

When I went to my Tai Chi class in downtown Salem after exercising at the athletic club, I told the instructor and fellow students about the man. Warren, the instructor, said, "I hope I'm able to still do chores on our rural property when I'm 98."

Me too. Learning how old this man is, and how he's made exercise a daily part of his life for a very long time, made me feel thankful that his friend shared some information about him. He's now someone I look up to and want to emulate.

And I'm going to tell the man that next time I see him. There's unsung heroes everywhere. We just need to recognize them.

Why we're still postponing living in a retirement community

Recently someone emailed me, saying that they'd Googled "hippie retirement community," apparently found my 2013 post, I'm 65. Where's my "Aging Hippie" retirement community?, and wondered if my wife, Laurel, and I had downsized or moved into a community.

Short answer. No and no. 

A bit of arithmetic, which thankfully I'm still capable of, reveals that if I was 65 on November 24, 2013 when I wrote the earlier post, and today is November 14, 2023, then I must be 75 now. 

Bingo! Right on. Nobel Prize in Mathematics please.

I was going to reply to the email message with the reasons why Laurel and I were still living on our ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem, Oregon, rather than somewhere seemingly more fitting for our mid-70's ages.

Then I had the bright idea of searching for my previous blog posts on my subject. (Appropriately, they're in the Retirement Community category of this blog in the right sidebar.)

Up popped a 2016 post, Why it makes sense for seniors to postpone living in a retirement community. Though it was written seven years ago, when Laurel and I were a more youthful 68 or so, what I said then resonated just as strongly with me today. 

A few excerpts, including what I disagreed with in a retirement community's pitch to move there:

My wife and I are in our late 60's. For 26 years we've lived in a 3,200 square foot house on ten non-easycare acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. We've visited four retirement communities in the northwest, and browsed numerous others online.

It's tough for seniors to decide when to leave a beloved home because it's become too damn difficult to maintain. Various factors enter into that decision: health status, where children and other family members are living, how attached one is to a current location -- all kinds of stuff.

We've mulled over the reasons to stay where we are, and the reasons to move to a retirement community. Our conclusion: it makes sense to keep on living in our home for as long as possible. I like to say, they're going to have to tear my DR Field Mower out of my cold dead hands. 

[NOTE: I tore that walk behind mower out of my warm alive hands a few years ago, getting a John Deere X394 mower that I like a lot, being capable of mowing both lawn grass and taller field grass. And it's much easier on my aging body.]

OK, here's what I disagree with.

(1) "There are advantages to making the transition at a younger age." This assumes that seniors know the future. Which, of course, nobody does. I don't know how long I'm going to live, or what the cause of my death will be. What if I moved into a retirement community that I wasn't really wild about because I envisioned myself growing old and infirm there -- then died in a head-on crash with an out-of-control semi on the freeway a year or so later?

My last thought would be, "Shit, I shouldn't have moved, because I could have spent my last year happier in our rural home, rather than in the retirement community, and now I'm about to di..."

Us baby boomers came of age in the live for the moment 1960's.  Now we're in our 60's. Planning ahead is fine. However, so is enjoying life right here, right now. Finding the balance between planning for a possible future, and living in the reality of the present moment, this is a central dilemma for seniors.

Our leaning is toward now, a more vibrant reality than could be.

(2) "Being able to enjoy the freedom that such communities offer." Question is, freedom from what? Apparently, Hutkin means, in large part, freedom from home and property maintenance.

But my wife and I enjoy the freedom of living in our own house and making our own decisions about how to maintain it. As noted in the post linked to above, I even enjoy the sweaty, dusty, muscle-fatiguing work our property requires.

Recently I was up on the roof of our house, walking along the edge of the gutters, blowing out debris with a Stihl backpack blower. I would really miss doing this in a retirement community where most of the chores are done by others. It makes me feel free to do difficult, even semi-dangerous, jobs around our house.

[NOTE: a few years ago we had Leaf Blaster gutter covers installed, another concession to aging in place.]

Sure, I realize that there may come a time when we aren't physically able to do what we're doing now. But as long as we are, why shouldn't we keep on doing what we enjoy? 

(3) Moving when you're younger and more able-bodied also allows for the opportunity... To be with older and less able-bodied people in a retirement community. This is a fact.

My stock line when we talk with a salesperson who has just shown us around a retirement community is, "Thanks for the tour. You've got a nice place here, but I'm freaked out by how many old folks we saw."

That's meant to be humorous. But I'm also serious. 

It's depressing for me to see old people getting around with walkers, and sitting at card tables playing something-or-other on a nice warm sunny day. I realize that this often is what happens with increasing age. But since my wife and I are pretty darn healthy at the moment, and don't feel as old as our driver's licenses say we are, we look upon retirement communities with a decidedly wary eye.

Still do. Interestingly, recently we've been contacted by two of the retirement communities that we toured and put deposits down for standalone houses, Capitol Manor here in Salem and Mary's Woods in Lake Oswego.

When told that a house was available, we replied to both places, "Thanks, but the time isn't right to sell our house and move to your community." The Mary's Wood person agreed with me when I told her that if we weren't absolutely certain joining their community made sense for us, we should stay put. 

She said that in her experience, unless an individual, or in our case, a couple, doesn't feel completely sure about moving to Mary's Woods, they won't be happy there. I appreciated that advice.

But she also told me that if we're still in our current home three or four years from now, we should start thinking more seriously about making a move, since around 80 is when many people start heading downhill more steeply, health-wise.

Also good advice. 

I'm an old man who wears purple

It was a good day for me to wear purple. But I didn't know that when I chose a jacket to wear on a decidedly cold February day here in Salem, Oregon.

It felt like a Patagonia jacket day.

I have quite a few colors. Green, orange, black, blue, gray, and my very first Patagonia jacket, a purple one that I got for half price, probably because Patagonia had figured out that not many men wear purple.

I like the jacket. I like purple.

However, the first time I wore it to my Tai Chi class, someone said, "You're brave," because the color isn't what most men wear. So now, in a (very) mild case of PTSD, every time I look at the jacket I think of that comment.

I also can't help but think of the poem by Jenny Joseph whose famous first line is, "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple." Hey, what about old men? Can we also wear purple?

Well, obviously we can. And today seemed like a fine day to wear purple on my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping expedition. 

In the morning I'd started to re-read Anthony de Mello's book, "Awareness." He was an iconoclastic Jesuit priest who, according to the back cover, mixed Christian spirituality, Buddhist parables, Hindu breathing exercises, and psychological insight.

The book starts out with:

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

l feel more awake and alive when I wear my purple jacket. The color jolts me out of my usual slumbering routine. So reading de Mello helped spur me to go with purple. I had some matching Allbirds shoes.

Walking to my car, a feeling popped unbidden into my mind. Too much purple. You're overdoing it. The old purple jacket PTSD again. I shut up that feeling by asking myself, "Do you enjoy wearing a purple jacket and shoes?" "Yes," said the voice that speaks inside my head.

Case closed. Decision final. This old man was headed to Trader Joe's clad in purple.

Shortly after I entered the store, heading for the organic raspberries, I saw a female employee wearing a purple tutu as she stocked the refrigerated fruit shelves. I felt like telling her that we needed to form a purple club.

Soon it dawned on me that all of the Trader Joe's employees were wearing tutus. When I got to the checkout line, I snapped a photo.

I told the man wearing the purple tutu that the store dress-up day made me feel good about choosing to wear purple myself. He then clued me in to what the day was, which, if I'd given it a bit of thought, I guess I could have figured out myself.

"Today is 2/22/22. And it's a Tuesday. So Trader Joe's is celebrating all these twos by having staff wear tutus. This date won't happen again for 400 years." (In 2422.)

I felt much more comfortable in my purple jacket and shoes as I went to several other stores to complete my grocery shopping. Which is strange, since there's no reason I should ever have felt the least bit uncomfortable.

I enjoy seeing people wearing colorful clothes. I like it when women dye their hair purple, or blue, or whatever.

So why, at the age of 73, when seemingly I should feel free to do whatever the hell I want, given that there aren't all that many years left to live my life in any fashion, there's still a self-conscious sense when I put on my purple jacket?

I'm not sure. Maybe we all feel a need to both stand out from the crowd and blend in with the crowd, and those conflicting impulses pull us in different directions depending on our mood and surroundings. 

On my Strange Up Salem Facebook page, I use a photo I took at the wonderful Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, outside of Eugene. It shows one of the exuberant parades that wind through the fair periodically. 

At the Oregon Country Fair, a counter-culture celebration, it's impossible to feel like you're wrongly dressed, given the astounding variety of dress (and undress) by those attending. 

Trader Joe's helped me remember that doing what you feel like doing, which includes dressing however you like, is a pretty good general guide for life -- with the caveat that sometimes you have to do what demands to be done, even if you don't feel like it.

I told the purple tutu clad employee who checked me out, "Seeing how you and the other staff are clad today, I feel underdressed." He said something like, "Here at Trader Joe's, you can wear whatever you want. That's partly why I enjoy working here so much."

And why I enjoy shopping there so much.

Time has a different flavor for old folks like me

Remember when you were three? Probably not. I recall what that age was like via my memory of what my young daughter and her friends would say when asked how old they are.

"Three going on four." They were so eager to be older, they'd fudge their age to get the next birthday into the answer.

Believe me, those days are long gone for us old folks. I'm fine with saying "73" when asked my age. What's more annoying is having to scroll down through history when a web site wants me to select the year I was born.

2000's, gone. 1990's, keep going. 1980's, around halfway there. 1970's, graduated from college. 1960's, high school. 1950's, childhood. 1940's, ah, finally reached the promised age-land. Which reminds me that World War II had only been over for a few years when I was born in 1948.

Dude, you're ancient! I'll say to myself.

For sure you'll never hear someone my age say "Seventy-three going on seventy-four." We've already got plenty of reminders that while time marches on for everybody, it feels like it's sprinting after you qualify for Medicare.

Every night just before I go to sleep I read a few pages from a book in the Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva. Allon is an Israeli government assassin, counterterrorist spy, and world class art restorer. The twenty books in the series are so compellingly well-written, at first I never wanted them to end.

But now that I've read eight of them, I'm getting worried that I'll die before I finish the series. A thought like that wouldn't have crossed my mind when I was younger. Hey, there's plenty of time to do whatever, including reading books.

I used to just read a couple of pages every night. A few months ago I switched to four pages so I could finish a Gabriel Allon book twice as fast. Hopefully I won't get a terminal cancer diagnosis. However, the good news, aside from impending death, would be that I'm a rapid reader.

Last November I got a glaucoma diagnosis. Unsettling, for sure. However, medicated drops have lowered my eye pressure considerably, so I've been told it's pretty unlikely that I'll go blind or even lose functional vision.

Last month my eye doctor referred me to a glaucoma specialist in Portland. After I had a bunch of tests, the ophthalmologist sat down with me and talked about my condition. 

"I think we're going to be able to get you across the finish line," he said. I let those words sink in for a few seconds. Then I replied, "Given my age, 73, it sounds like you're saying that I'm going to die before losing my sight -- not that I'll be raising my hands in victory as crowds cheer me across the finish line."

"Correct," he said. So what I can look forward to is being able to see on my death bed.

Such is how medical care tends to go after a certain age. A friend who's younger than me, but still old, related how his doctor told him that prostate cancer no longer is a big concern, since probably he'll die from something else before the slow-growing cancer got him.

I don't want to give the impression that old age is only about disease, disability, and death. It is true, though, that us old folks tend to have lower expectations for what a good day consists of.

There's a front desk person at my athletic club who likes to ask me "How was your workout?" as I'm leaving. If I say, "fine," he'll reply "What, just fine? Not great!" A few days ago the question was asked again.

After hearing "How was your workout?" this time I said, "Absolutely amazing. The most enjoyable experience I've ever had. Nothing will ever compare to the joy of this gym visit." The point I was trying to get across with my sarcasm is that fine is pretty damn good when you're over 70.

Covid has magnified the differences between young and old. I feel this when I'm exercising on an elliptical trainer in the athletic club's aerobics room, N-95 quality mask firmly affixed to my face, watching young people walk by mostly maskless.

They have that air of confidence, a strut, really, that wordlessly screams to me, I'm fit, healthy, and young; the coronavirus scares me not at all; masks are for fearful old folks.

I envy their attitude, even though it doesn't accurately reflect the full picture of the public health reality. I just remember what it was like to have time stretching out before me as if the years remaining would never end.

Time is relative. Not in an Einstein'ian sense for us non-physicists, in the sense expressed by a man who wrote a moving essay for The Atlantic, "A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death." Highly recommended, though obviously it isn't the cheeriest reading. David Linden writes:

While I was recovering from surgery, the pathology report came back and the news was bad—it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma. Because of its location, embedded in my heart wall, the surgeon could not remove all of the cancer cells. Doing so would have rendered my heart unable to pump blood. The oncologist told me to expect to live an additional six to 18 months.

...If someone had told me one year ago, when I was 59, that I had five years left to live, I would have been devastated and felt cheated by fate. Now the prospect of five more years strikes me as an impossible gift. With five more years, I could spend good times with all of my people, get some important work done, and still be able to travel and savor life’s sweetness. The point is that, in our minds, there is no such thing as objective value, even for something as fundamental as five years of life.

I recall what a modern practitioner of the Stoic philosophy said in a recording I listened to: "We are all living the dream life. Because no matter how bad our life may seem to us, it would be a dream life for someone in a worse situation."

Linden would rejoice if he had five years to live, even though that prognosis would have appeared dismal before his cancer diagnosis. This is one of the bright sides of growing old.

I'm much better at appreciating the present moment now, because at 73, I'm well aware that there's no guarantee how many moment-filled years remain to me. As my (fairly old) dentist says when I ask how he's doing, "Keeping my head above water."

Not swimming the English Channel. Not training to break a personal 200 meter time. Just keeping the head above water. Sounds good enough to me.

Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma

I thought the day started off badly when our dog threw up three times on our living room carpet.

But it got considerably worse when I exited my visit to Retina Consultants here in Salem with a probable diagnosis of glaucoma.

Well to be exact, Dr. Justin Baynham told me that my test results were "suspicious of glaucoma." 

I'm trying to look at the bright side. Maybe it's good that my optometrist at Eye Care Physicians & Surgeons, Dr. Rebecca Chung, also wasn't completely sure that I have glaucoma.

That's why she referred me for a consultation at Retina Consultants. 

I've had an annual eye exam for most of my life, since I wear contacts. One year a while back the pressure in my eye was elevated, but it went down the next year.

In 2020 my previous optometrist, Dr. Betsy McDowell (now retired), didn't see any damage to the optic nerve, so it was a surprise when a field of vision test last Monday showed that my right eye sucks when it comes to peripheral vision.

However, Dr. Baynham told me this afternoon that 50% of people with glaucoma don't have high pressure in their eyes.

On the darker side, Chung noted some damage to my right optic nerve, and Baynham confirmed that after I had a test where some sort of dye stuff was injected into my upper arm, where it quickly found its way to my eyes, which allowed images to be taken of the optic nerves.

Not good, especially in my right eye. My left eye had considerably lesser damage.

That's irreversible, unfortunately. So the goal is to keep my possible/probable glaucoma under control to prevent further damage, which Baynham said would occur by lowering my eye pressure from 21 to 14 mm Hg. 

So I've got a prescription for Latanoprost eye drops, which hopefully will reduce my eye pressure from the high normal level of 21 to the low normal level of 14.

The big message I want to convey to others is this: Get a regular eye exam! 

Not just a vision test, but an exam that checks y0ur eye pressure and dilates your eyes so the doctor can see if any optic nerve damage in occurring. This is especially important if you're over 60, have a family history of glaucoma, or at high risk for getting this disease.

I had no vision problems other than my usual nearsightedness when I went in for my annual eye exam on October 28. Though my peripheral vision is bad in my right eye, I hadn't noticed this.

A generally positive web page about glaucoma (things can be fine if it is detected and treated early) has this to say:

People with glaucoma who manage it well can live a normal, independent life. A big problem with glaucoma is that in the early stages, people with glaucoma live their lives largely unaffected by the condition while it is all the while progressing silently.

Problems with vision can at first be subtle and many people are able to manage life well with mild to moderate visual impairment. Visual loss can even go unnoticed until it becomes severe, at which point much of the damage caused by glaucoma is irreversible.

As a doctor treating hundreds of individuals with glaucoma, my goal is to pick up on early changes and use timely and effective interventions to prevent loss of vision.  Nothing warms my heart more than to hear how my patients’ vision has become stable and that they are getting on with normal lives, being productive at work, enjoying their time with family, friends and having great experiences.

...I am grateful that we can detect glaucoma at its early stages. When my patients get a diagnosis of glaucoma at an early disease stage, I am able to keep them seeing well throughout the course of their lives.

Of course, my first reaction after hearing that I probably have glaucoma was, oh, no, I'm going to go blind! That seems unlikely, now that I've been able to have more rational reactions. 

If you have glaucoma and could share some thoughts about how you've dealt with your problem, please do so in a comment on this post. Especially if things have gone well for you. No offense, but if you've gone blind from glaucoma, I'd prefer not to know this.

Is 94 degrees hot? Ask your inner child.

I just got back from a 2-mile hilly walk around a road loop in our rural south Salem neighborhood. The thermometer tells me it's about 94 degrees. 

But it can't tell me if that's hot. 

Hot is subjective. Temperature is objective.

The difference explains why I'm often asked by a Starbucks employee, when the temperature gets over 80 in our part of Oregon, if I want my grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte iced or hot.

I try not to sound too heat-superior when I reply, "Why, hot of course. I don't believe in drinking an iced coffee no matter what the temperature is."

Sometimes I add, "I grew up in a California town where it often was over 100 degrees in the summer, so the temperature here in the Willamette Valley doesn't bother me much."

Now, that town was Three Rivers.

It lived up to its name with three forks of the Kaweah River running through different parts of Three Rivers. So along with the summer heat came summer swimming -- a nice blend of temperature yin and yang.

I'm not sure whether my current tolerance for 90+ degree days stems more from psychological or physical factors. Maybe both. 

Regardless, my theory -- which I readily admit may have no scientific foundation -- is that whatever climate we grew used to as a child leads us to be more comfortable with that sort of climate as an adult.

So when I went for that two-mile walk today, 72 year old me in Oregon was reliving part of the experience of 12 year old me in California.

Feeling the hot air rising from the road and adjacent fields, I certainly was reminded of similar sensations when I walked or biked around Three Rivers. It felt natural to be walking along on a hot asphalt road, like I'd done this many times before.

Which, of course, I did in my youthful years.

It also isn't out of the realm of possibility that thanks to evolution, stresses in the early years of our life -- extreme cold or heat, for example -- cause our body to become adapted to those circumstances, making it easier for us to deal with similar situations in our adult life.

That said, it looks like we've got another string of 90 degree days coming after a respite in the 80s tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday.

My inner child may be fine with that, but my old man self wishes it wasn't going to be so damn hot.

Memo to future self: Why our ten acres captures me

I'm 72. For thirty-one years, since 1990, my wife and I have lived on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem, Oregon.

Well, for the first few years we had five acres.

But when the lot next to us became available, we bought it -- not wanting to run the risk of someone cutting down beautiful large firs and building a house there.

I've been the one in our marriage who has been more eager to move to a house in town as we've gotten older and our property feels increasingly like a pain to maintain.

However... that one word says a lot. Because we're still here. For some good reasons.

Ten days ago I had hernia surgery.

Not being able to do most of my usual exercises and chores for a while, I've been going on an extra one mile nature walk in the early afternoon to supplement my usual two-mile hilly dog walk on a road in the late afternoon. 

Being mildly depressed at the restrictions on what I used to be able to do during the six week surgery recovery period, I was pleasantly surprised at how much better I felt walking on our ten acres.

Nature is a great healer. 

And I feel deeply fortunate to have such beautiful natural surroundings right outside our front door. My post-surgery walking through our property to Spring Lake, a nearby nine-acre community lake, has, at least for now, changed my attitude about wanting to move.

In case staying here at our age, and older (sadly, we won't be getting younger), ever comes to feel like a bad decision to my future self, I took some photos today of how my daily nature walk looks.

Here they are, along with some narration.

My walk starts from our back yard. This old oak, probably well over 200 years old, lost two large limbs in a February ice storm this year. But it's still alive and growing. The oak is a good friend who I'd miss a lot if we ever move.

This path leads to our "other" lot, also known as the Rose lot, because way back when, Mrs. Rose owned it before she sold it to us. 

There's a mix of large firs and medium-sized oaks on the Rose lot. We've left it almost entirely natural, so it has a different feel from the lot our house is on, which gets mowed in places.

In warm sunny weather, like today, these trees feel all friendly. In cold dark winter weather, they can feel quite creepy. I like both sorts of feelings.

Trees have so much character. They all have their own personality. As with the oak in our yard, it's easy for me to feel like they're my friends -- albeit occasionally creepy friends.

The Rose lot trail curves around until it reaches our house lot near Spring Creek. We planted these redwoods maybe five years after we moved here. I look forward to seeing them grow even taller.

Looking up toward our house with some mowed areas. 

The trail heads down a slope toward Spring Creek. Laurel, my wife, has put in stepping stones for when the trail is wet and slippery. 

There's a little creek somewhere under all the ferns and other vegetation. It runs strong in the winter. Now, it's just a trickle, given how record-breaking dry spring has been in northwest Oregon.

We planted redwoods on the other side of the creek also. 

The trail on our property leads to one of the community trails on easements that are on most of the lots here in Spring Lake Estates. This is called the Evergreen trail, for an obvious reason.

Gnarly bent old trees appeal more and more to me as I become increasingly gnarly, bent, and old. This giant fir on our property close to the easement never fails to awe me. 

The variety of greens on the Evergreen trail are spectacular. Deciduous vegetation blends with evergreen vegetation in a multitude of ways.

Approaching the lake, the trail passes between some trees that feel like sentinels to me.

Spring Lake appears after the trail wends its way out of the woods. There's something calming about a calm lake, not surprisingly.

Someone planted irises near the edge of the trail that circles Spring Lake.

The lake looks different every time I walk around it. Also, the same.

A gnarly old damaged oak that's still oak'ing along. Naturally, I love it.

Water lilies, like lotuses, have that rooted in mud with flowers in the sun vibe. One of the more philosophical flowers.

I like to see young people fooling around on the dock, having a good time. Wholesome fun, to complement their unwholesome fun at other times and places.

I grew up in Three Rivers, California, which featured the Kaweah River running through it, fed by cold snow melt from the Sierra Nevadas near Sequoia National Park. So playing around in water was a big part of my youth. It's nice to see young'uns doing the same thing.

Walking around the lake back to the Evergreen Trail reveals a different perspective on Spring Lake. I believe the  bright dot in the boat is an inflatable pink flamingo, but maybe this was just a flashback from my LSD days in college.

There's a large collection of wild rose on our house lot. 

Speaking of our house, as I neared our home Laurel was working on the second row of three wood racks we got to hold a copious amount of oak logs that were split for us by workers who cleaned up tree damage near our house from the ice storm.

We also presciently had a large oak cut down in the dog yard behind Laurel, as it had branches overhanging our roof and side deck. There's a good chance some or all of it would have fallen on our house during the ice storm, so we felt good cutting it down, though it always hurts some to kill a tree.

Anyway, this was my walk today. Which will be my walk tomorrow, and the day after. The older I get, the more I appreciate the nature that surrounds us.

And by us, I don't mean just me and my wife. I mean everybody. We're just fortunate to be surrounded by more of nature than most people have nearby. 

That's a big reason -- really the only reason -- why I won't be surprised if Laurel and I are still living here when we're much older than we are now. I used to wonder why old folks were so reluctant to leave their difficult-to-maintain homes.

The walk I went on today offers up a big reason why.

My hernia consultation goes well (if I ignore scary stuff)

About two weeks ago I got a hernia diagnosis, which I memorialized in "Now I can scratch 'get hernia' off my bucket list." 

The diagnosis wasn't a big surprise, given the large bulge on the right side of my groin that appeared suddenly while I was sitting in a dentist's chair a few days before I got the official diagnosis based on an ultrasound. 

I've been trying to be as positive as possible while waiting for a surgery consultation. But as today's consultation approached, my mind veered off in some decidedly negative directions.

My hernia is large; maybe it is too large for surgery. I have to use an intermittent catheter to pee; maybe this will be difficult to do after surgery. My family physician said it was OK to exercise while wearing a hernia belt; maybe the surgeon will say this made my hernia worse.

Well, as often happens it turned out that none of my fears came to pass -- though the surgeon did bring up some scary stuff when describing what could go wrong with my hernia repair.

The Salem Health surgeon I saw today, Hsinchen Lin, M.D., made a great impression. Here's a screenshot from her official You Tube video.

Personable. Caring. Good communicator. And best of all, almost, Dr. Lin used the term "OCD" about herself while describing part of the hernia procedure. 

That's exactly what I want in a surgeon -- someone nice who also is obsessively compulsive about the details of the surgery she's performing. Especially when the surgery is being performed on me.

Dr. Lin started off by saying she didn't have her usual visual aid with her, so she'd have to draw me a diagram of the hernia surgery. She offered it to me as I was leaving. I grabbed the piece of paper, saying, "I'll keep this memento in a scrapbook."

Or, blog post. 

Those are my legs down at the bottom. The dot is my belly button, and the lines above are the three laparoscopic incisions she would be making.

My private parts are in the middle of the groin, though not drawn to scale, I hasten to say. The round circle on the right side of the groin is the hole where some of what should be inside me, like part of my bowel, has crept outside. 

Dr. Lin said that men are especially vulnerable to inguinal hernias due to the way the testes descend into the testicles in a boy baby. Then the wear and tear of aging can create a hernia in that already weak spot.

Plastic mesh is used to shore up the weak areas in my groin area. I penned in the word "sew" in the area where stitches would be used to fasten down the mesh. That can't be done on the lower side, for a reason I only vaguely remember.

Something to do with blood vessels and such that have to be left clear, I believe. So scar tissue forms over the mesh to keep it in place in those areas. And natural lining from my body also covers the mesh.

Early on in the consultation Dr. Lin used the term "robot" in describing the hernia surgery. For a bit I hoped that a robot would be doing the surgery, like an internal Roomba. Lin explained, though, that she controls the four robotic arms.

The laparoscopic approach is preferred by Dr. Lin over open surgery, though she said there was a small chance she'd have to go the open route after starting with laparoscopy. 

She told me that 50% of her hernia patients don't need pain medication after the procedure, which was great news, given how some Googling yesterday revealed that sometimes the post-surgery period can be quite painful. 

My scribbling is almost illegible, but I think Lin said that I shouldn't lift more than ten pounds for six weeks. Or maybe two weeks. Guess I'll find out after the surgery. Six weeks seemed to be the usual recovery period, with a two-week follow-up to see how things are going.

I mostly blurred out in my mind the obligatory explanation of what could go wrong with the surgery. The only note I made was "Chronic pain 1-6%." I'll focus on the one percent, liking those odds.

Pleasingly, this seemed to be a rare occasion when using a catheter five times a day to empty my bladder fully (I can pee some on my own, but my bladder basically went on strike four years ago) is a plus.

Dr. Lin said that sometimes the bladder works slowly after hernia surgery, and a catheter is required. But since I'm already using a catheter, problem solved! 

I double-checked with Lin about exercising while waiting for surgery, including chores like mowing the grass on our ten rural acres with a walk-behind mower. She said that'd be fine so long as I wore a hernia belt, which I've already been doing.

Now I have to wait for Regence MedAdvantage to approve the surgery. After that I'll get a call to schedule the hernia repair. 

At the end of the consultation Dr. Lin said I should consider whether I wanted the surgery, since I'm not experiencing any pain from the hernia at the moment.

It took me about two seconds of considering to say, "Let's do it."

High schoolers today, here's what I went through in 1962-66

Every generation faces its own challenges. And the challenges we faced in our youth color how we view present-day challenges. 

My granddaughter will be 14 in a few days. I sent her a card (and cash!) today, saying that she timed her entry into high school next fall quite well, since the Covid crisis should be mostly over by then.

I feel for high school students who have had their lives disrupted by the pandemic for over a year. This will be an enduring memory for them, no doubt.

Being a senior citizen, I'm well aware that tales of the Old Days don't mean a whole lot to young people today. Assuming, of course, that they even read blog posts like this one -- a highly dubious assumption.

Nonetheless, I feel like taking a trip down memory lane into my own high school years.

After all, who knows how long my memories will be intact? At some point I might need this blog post to remind myself. 

So here goes my attempt at You think you have it tough, young 'uns, let me tell how it was way back when in 1962-66.

I lived in Three Rivers, California, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains from, no big surprise, Nevada. 

The last above-ground nuclear test in Nevada was July 17, 1962, soon after I graduated from eighth grade. Sometimes we didn't get milk at elementary school lunch time because radioactivity had seeped into the grass California cows ate.

Few people worried about what the above-ground tests were doing to people. After all, we had the damn Soviet Union Communists to worry about. 

I and an eighth grade friend published our elementary school newspaper, mimeographed, of course. We polled our classmates about whether a nuclear war was imminent. Most students thought a war was going to happen soon. 

Fallout shelters were common. Nowadays in Oregon we worry about ducking and covering from an earthquake. Back then, we practiced doing this for a hydrogen bomb attack. 

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis at the beginning of my freshman year in high school. The Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Newly elected President John F. Kennedy managed to barely avoid war with the Soviet Union. 

But Kennedy was unable to avoid being assassinated on November 22, 1963, my sophomore year in high school. Without warning, the 500 or so students in Woodlake Union High School were summoned to an assembly.

We were told President Kennedy had been shot. It was a somber bus ride home. A few days later, Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed Kennedy, was himself murdered by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

On the plus side, the Beatles came to the United States on February 7, 1964. On the negative side, boys in my high school were forbidden to have Beatles haircuts with longish hair. (Some tried, though.) 

Girls couldn't wear pants. They took Home Economics. Boys took Shop. No mingling of the sexes in these classes. Homosexuality was never mentioned in class, since it was viewed as an illegal perversion back then.

Yesterday I saw a mention of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on MSNBC. I don't recall any classroom discussion of it, nor of the blatant discrimination against Blacks in southern states that was still common in the '60s.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1966, the Vietnam War was going strong. I'd always planned to go to college, but getting a student deferment from being drafted was an additional inducement to head off to San Jose State College. 

When the draft lottery came along in 1969, I was fortunate to have my birthdate come up far enough along in the lottery to avoid being drafted.

So, yeah, my high school years were interesting, for sure. Also, stressful. I'm not saying my high school experience was more interesting or stressful than what young people are going through today.

Just different. Remember what's happening to you, high schoolers of 2021, so you can write about what things were like back then some fifty-odd years later, as I just did.

Now I can scratch "get hernia" off my bucket list

Trying to find some humor in the hernia diagnosis I received today, this cartoon reminded me that, hey, I only have a single hernia, so lucky me! 

(I also have taken to wearing joggers much of the time rather than regular pants, which qualify as skinny jeans. And sure, I've got a lifetime supply of bitter regrets -- which now includes getting a hernia. But it's a stretch to say I'm in midlife, since I'm 72.)

As befits my age, I don't have a great story to tell about how I ended up with a right-sided inguinal hernia.

No, I wasn't bench pressing too high of a weight. I was sitting in a dentist's chair for about 90 minutes, the first part of a lengthy session involving three fillings and a crown replacement.

During the time the new crown was being fashioned by a 3-D printer in my dentist's office, I decided to visit the restroom. When I pulled my pants down I was met by a shockingly large bulge.

Ordinarily I'd be pleased by such a bulge in the region of my groin. But this bulge was to the right of my penis, a bit less than half the size of a baseball. So impossible to miss.

I decided to ignore it for the time being, since my focus was on getting through the rest of the dental appointment. When I got home, I phoned my family physician's office.

Not surprisingly, their best guess was a hernia -- which somehow decided to manifest in a dentist's chair, since I'm certain the bulge wasn't there when I took a shower earlier that day.

I was able to see a nurse practitioner the next day. He asked if I had any pain. No, I told him.

He then stressed that if I did feel a lot of pain, that was a danger sign that should cause me to go to the ER, since a strangulated hernia where part of the colon gets deprived of blood can lead to gangrene and other nasty stuff.

I was scheduled for an ultrasound at Salem Hospital. That was done yesterday, and I got the results this morning. Not cheery findings, but pretty much what I expected.

There is a large right inguinal hernia containing fat and bowel as well as a small amount of fluid. Hernia sac measures up to 5 cm. Fascial hernia defect measures up to 3.4 cm. Hernia is partially reducible but not completely reducible.

What immediately worried me was that the nurse practitioner had said I should get a hernia belt, what used to be called a "truss." (And maybe still is, by some.) I'd ordered and gotten several belts from Amazon. 

They all said "for a reducible hernia." Meaning, the protruding stuff can be poked back into the body, thereby reducing the protrusion to nothing or almost nothing. 

So I phoned my family physician's office.

Pleasingly, I was told by a nurse to not worry and go ahead with wearing a hernia belt, which I did today. Since my hernia protrusion mostly goes away when I lie down, I put on the belt while lying prone on a bed.

The hernia belt is pretty comfortable. I went on my usual two-mile afternoon dog walk while wearing it with no problem. It gives me more confidence while I wait for a surgery consultation, which is in the works.

All in all, I'm feeling mostly OK about my new health problem. 

Hernias are much more common in men. (Thus they really should be called "Himnias.") Some Googling revealed:

Researchers estimate that about 27 percent of men and 3 percent of women will develop an inguinal hernia at some point in their lives.

OK, I've reached that point. Now I'm looking forward to getting past that point. Hopefully it won't take too long to schedule a surgery.

Reading recent Amazon reviews of hernia belts caused me to realize that many men who were diagnosed with a hernia last year around springtime had to wait quite a few months for surgery, since elective surgeries weren't being done during the first wave of Covid cases. 

I guess my hernia picked a good time to pop out for a visit. 

I'm also grateful that my family physician responded promptly to several My Chart messages I sent her with hernia questions.

Pleasingly, she said it would be fine if I kept on with my daily exercising with the Monkii 360 ball and resistance bands, as I've gotten addicted to this enjoyable wear of working out. She also told me I could continue doing physical therapy stretching exercises for my sciatica problem.

The only caveat is the same thing my physical therapist kept telling me: if it hurts after you do something, stop doing that thing. And obviously I shouldn't be lifting heavy weights.

In an attempt to be positive about having a hernia, I've discovered that when you have a couple of longstanding health problems, getting a new problem tends to shift the focus of your mind off of the old problems and onto the new problem.

Thus my sciatica isn't bothering me as much anymore. Yay! Only problem is, my hernia has become a bother.

I finally fill out an Advance Directive. But not a POLST.

Well, it only took me about forty years. Better late than never, as the saying goes.

Tomorrow I'm taking an Advance Directive to my family physician when I go for my annual physical exam, so it can be made part of my medical record. I've had this booklet from Oregon Health Decisions sitting at the bottom of a pile of papers in my office for a year, at least.

This booklet replaced a previous booklet that I lost or threw away.

It's kind of strange that I've been so reluctant to make my end-of-life wishes known, since I was the first executive director of Oregon Health Decisions in the 1980s, when this pioneering citizen-based bioethics organization got off the ground after a brilliant psychiatrist, Ralph Crawshaw, worked to get it going with the help of me and many other Oregonians.

In fact, I wrote the first advance directive booklet published by Oregon Health Decisions. Since back then I was in my 30s, whereas now I'm 72, it made sense that I'd put off filling out an advance directive for quite a while.

And I readily admit that as I grew older, I did my best to avoid thinking about the not-so-cheery prospect -- a certainty, actually -- of my eventual death.No longer. Yes, I'm still pretty damn healthy, though I have a couple of health problems. Most people do at my age.

I just felt it was time to do the Advance Directive thing. Probably the Covid crisis helped spur me to do this, since the prospect of being kept alive via a feeding tube, ventilator, or whatever when there is no hope of recovery isn't an appealing notion. 

What gave me the most trouble was deciding whether to complete the brightly colored POLST form that had been inserted in the booklet. That stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. My wife, Laurel, has a POLST even though she also is healthy with just a few relatively minor medical issues. 

Laurel is convinced that she doesn't want CPR, should this ever be a consideration. I believe Laurel is correct that the view of CPR in movies and TV shows, where a person recovers nicely after getting this potentially live-saving procedure, often doesn't reflect reality. For example, one CPR web site says:

Overall, all of these side effects mean that, if a person does survive CPR, their long-term health could suffer and they may be alive, but it is possible that their overall health and quality of life is significantly affected. Additionally, the psychological ramifications of a near-death experience can greatly affect a survivor, leading to anxiety, stress and depression, among other psychological conditions.

A POLST appears to be the only way to make sure that you don't get CPR, since a POLST becomes part of a registry available to medical professionals, and you can carry a POLST card with you. 

On the other hand, the POLST form says that it "is usually for persons with serious illness or frailty." And POLST.org has this FAQ about which patients should be offered a POLST form.

The POLST form is not for everyone; a POLST form is appropriate for patients who are considered to be at risk for a life-threatening clinical event because they have a serious life-limiting medical condition, which may include advanced frailty. For these patients, their current health status indicates the need for standing medical orders for emergent or future medical care.

Also, these are the patients at the greatest risk of having a medical emergency but who may not want our standard of care (standard of care currently being that everything possible to attempt to save someone's life must be done). For healthy patients, an advance directive is an appropriate tool for making future end-of-life care wishes known to loved ones.

So I decided to complete an Advance Directive, but not a POLST. I can always go the POLST route later, should this seem like a good thing for me to do. 

My wife thinks I'm crazy. This is normal, right?

I have direct experience of being married to only two women, Susan and Laurel. In between Susan and Laurel I got divorced, to set aside any conjecture about polygamy. 

So I'm having to extrapolate from this small sample size to the much larger universe of wives.

Both Susan and Laurel thought I was crazy. Not clinically, but in the sense that sometimes, and maybe often, the way I looked upon the world baffled them. My strong suspicion is that this is normal.

Meaning, almost all wives look upon their husbands as crazy. I hope so, because otherwise I'm a husbandly aberration.

This came to mind today as I was going off to fight in the Leaf War. Since 1990 we've lived on a non-easycare property in rural south Salem. Our house is surrounded by large oak and fir trees.

The firs drop needles all year round to some extent. The oaks drop their leaves in the fall, of course. This being late November, I've been battling the leaves for some time.

But here's the thing: I enjoy the fight. Heck, sometimes I can even muster up admiration for the opposing force, as I wrote about ten years ago in "The Tao of leaf ranking." 

Last weekend I slipped into my old habit briefly when I interrupted my work for lunch, then said to Laurel, "Well, I'm back to the leaf wars." That was the old me speaking. The new me manages to mostly look upon the leaves as friends who simply need some nudging to get them into their proper places, since they aren't able to move purposefully on their own.

I actually look foward to dealing with the leaves.

Now that I have a system, albeit a constantly evolving one in accord with the ever-changing Tao, the three hours or so it takes me to do a complete run-through of our yard (which needs to be repeated several times in November) is a largely pleasurable opportunity to follow the Zen'ish adage "chop wood, carry water, rake leaves."

Which should have been called The Tao of leaf blowing and raking, because my weapon of choice always has been a blower -- raking alone, given our yard, being way more than the proverbial "bringing a knife to a gun fight." It'd be like bringing a toothpick to a gun fight.

Now that I'm 72, Laurel has been saying more often, Are you sure you don't want to hire someone to deal with the leaves? I always reply, No way, as long as I can physically do this, I want to keep on doing it.

Well, actually I'm going to still want to handle the vast amount of leaves in our yard even if I'm physically incapable of doing the job.

This is something wives find difficult to understand about their husbands -- again, I'm assuming that my experience is typical of many or most male-female marriages.

By and large, Laurel is eager to turn over a household chore, like carpet cleaning, to someone else who is wiling to do it for money.

I'm fine with this also up to a point. It just seems that my attachment to certain manly chores, such as spending several hours dealing with fallen leaves in our large yard, is greater than Laurel's attachment to certain womanly chores.

That seems to be the root of the question about how crazy I am. I am really reluctant to have someone come to our house and do something that I'm fully capable of handling, even if that thing takes a lot of time or is somewhat dangerous. 

Like, cleaning our gutters by walking along the edge of our roof with my Stihl backpack blower. 

In both cases, gutter cleaning and leaf removal, I explain to Laurel that it is simpler to do it myself, in part because the jobs are much easier when leaves and other debris is dry.

And it's hard to predict when dry days are going to occur in the fall, since this is Oregon. So I can leap into action on a dry day, while we'd need to schedule somebody else well in advance, most likely, so it could be raining when they come to do the job.

But that's not the whole story. If it was, I wouldn't seem so crazy, because that reason is rational. 

The truth is, I'm irrationally attached to certain chores that I've been doing since Laurel and I got married thirty years ago. I don't want to sit in the house and watch someone else do those things. To paraphrase Charlton Heston, they're going to have to pry my Stihl backpack blower out of my cold dead hands. 

Which admittedly could literally happen if I keep on blowing out the gutters past the time I'm able to balance on the edge of our roof.

Anyway, it doesn't bother me when my wife thinks I'm crazy. I think the same about her at times.

Men and women are different. Heck, all people are different. It's amazing that we understand each other as well as we do, given that the only mind we ever know directly is our own -- and that only partially.

Old photos make me realize life is way more complicated than photos show

Today, December 25, I decided to use my free time (since my wife and I no longer celebrate Christmas, or accept presents) by going through a box of photos that's been sitting on a shelf in a mostly unused closet for, I don't know, forever. Or close to it. 

At first it was bittersweet to pull out old photos from the envelopes that contained prints and negatives, which, young'uns, was how people got what their camera had taken back in the distant days when rolls of film had to be developed.

Having turned 70 a few months ago, it was both pleasurable and painful to see how much younger I looked when, not surprisingly, I was much younger. 

Pleasurable, because many photographic memories brought a smile to my face. For example, this photo helped grease the skids for my relationship with Laurel after we started dating in 1989 following my separation, and then divorce, from my first wife. 

The initial time she came to my house Laurel saw this photo sitting on a shelf.

She said, "Oh, you used to have a beard! I like men with beards." I instantly resolved to grow it back, having shaved it off, leaving a mustache, after believing that attracting women in my newly single life would be easier if I didn't have a beard, since I'd read somewhere that most women don't like them.

But Laurel did, so this photo helped jump-start our relationship, since she later told me that when we first met, she thought I looked too conservative.

Which was true. Letting my hair grow longer, adding the beard back, and allowing Laurel to choose (or strongly advise, pretty much the same thing) my clothes dealt with that potential problem.

Other photos, though, got me to thinking that my life must have been much better -- happier, more carefree, more interesting -- in the past as compared to now. 

After all, now I have a chronic  bladder problem that makes it difficult for me to travel long distances. So looking at photos of trips to Washington, D.C., Fiji, Hawaii, and other far away places caused me to long for the younger Brian. Until...

On a dog walk late this afternoon, when getting out in nature tends to settle my mind and see things more clearly, I realized that the photos I'd spent hours sorting through and putting into albums all showed me (and others) smiling, doing fun stuff, looking like we didn't have a care in the world.

But obviously this wasn't the full picture of what my life was all about back then. 

I didn't have any photos of arguments with my first wife, nor of the tense times following our separation. I didn't have photos showing me bitterly disappointed when a reorganization at work left me demoted, supervised by someone I thought was incompetent. And I found zero photos memorializing my anxieties over whether we'd been raising my daughter correctly, when she veered off course several times in high school and college.

(I'm pleased to say that fairly soon after graduating from the University of Arizona, she got on the right track that has brought her much success and happiness in her adult life.)

This realization that the photos I'd been pouring over were nowhere close to an accurate portrait of my life from high school up to 1990, when I got married to Laurel and she took over our photo album duty, doing a much better job than I ever could, produced a big sense of relief in me.

It's a frequent criticism of Facebook and Instagram that most people only post photos that make their life look oh so wonderful. However, this applies to old photos as well, taken long before modern social media came into being.

Doesn't someone taking a photo almost always say "smile" to their subject? How often have you heard, "Show me how you're truly feeling right now." In my case, never. Thus photo albums almost always contain highly selective vignettes from our past. 

Which probably is as it should be, and will always be.

I doubt people will run and get their camera, or smart phone, to create a photographic record of their suffering, disappointment, pain, despair, and such. Or even of ordinary moments, where nothing special was going on other than daily life.

Maybe this would be good to do. It's just human nature to want to look on the bright side, even though this provides an incomplete view of what life is all about.

Regret and hope are luxuries for the young

I'm on the cusp of a decadal birthday. Tomorrow I'll be 70. So I've got just a few hours to say something wise about turning 70 before I'm actually there, and then can only talk about what's it's like to actually be so damn freaking old. 

I came up with the title of this blog post yesterday, when I was musing about what, if anything, I've learned over these many years.

In a bit of synchronicity, this morning I was reading Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics, "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence."

I liked the mention of time travel in Pollan's discussion of the difference between an expanded and contracted consciousness.

When, for example, I'm feeling especially generous or grateful, open to feelings and people and nature, I register a sense of expansion. This feeling is often accompanied by a diminution of ego, as well as a falloff in the attention paid to past and future on which the ego feasts. (And depends.)

By the same token, there is a pronounced sense of contraction when I'm obsessing about things or feeling fearful, defensive, rushed, worried, and regretful. (These last two feelings don't exist without time travel.) At such times I feel altogether more me, and not in a good way.

At my age, obviously there is much less in front of me than in back of me. The years I've already lived number far fewer than the years I have left to live -- unless I live until I'm 141.

Which isn't realistic to hope for. 

In fact, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that after a certain age, and I feel that I've passed it, both hope for the future and regret about the past are luxuries for the young. 

Why?

Because most young people have many more years to live. They have plenty of time to learn from their mistakes and to plan for a better future. So it makes sense for their psyche to do the sort of "ego feasting" Pollon speaks of.

What made this relationship fail? How did I end up in such a crappy job? Where do I want to live when I'm tired of this town? Should I have children, and if so, how many? Why doesn't my life seem truly meaningful? How can I make friends with people I really care about? How great will it be after I lose 20 pounds?

There's so many questions. Good questions. Great questions.

Our past and future are filled with them. As Pollon said, it is easy, and often fun, to time travel our way into regrets about the past and hopes for the future. Or other sorts of thoughts about what was and what may come to be. 

There's nothing wrong with doing this. But there's a cost. We can't be here and now when we're in there and then.

Now, actually we're always here and now, because there's no other possible place to be. But our present moment attention can be doing the time traveling thing, leaving us less aware of what exists in the reality that's staring right at us, as opposed to a memory of the past or an envisioning of the future.

Along with most people, from what I can tell, the older I get, the faster time seems to fly by.

Of course, this is a cruel feature of human psychology, since 70 year-olds like me (OK, soon to be me) have less years left to live than, say, a 40 year-old, so fairness demands that time pass slower for us senior citizens, so we can make the most of those limited years.

Unfortunately, this sort of fairness isn't a feature of the cosmos, so us old folks need to take time into our own hands. 

Psychedelics are one way to do this. Michael Pollan describes in his book how LSD, psilocybin, and the like shake up rigid mental faculties like a snow globe turned upside down. Old ways of seeing the world take a back seat to fresh vistas. Here and now becomes a wonderland, while past and future lack luster.

Tripping out on psychedelics was something I was pleased to do in my college years, but not now. Marijuana, a mild psychedelic, is as close as I want to come to revisiting my Glory Days with LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. 

So this is why I'm paying more attention to what I pay attention to. Sure, I still have regrets about my past and hopes about my future. But just as people make New Year's resolutions, I'm making a New Decade of Life resolution:

The past is gone; the future isn't here yet; and I have no way of knowing how much future remains for me (no one does); thus it makes sense to mostly focus on what is right before me, at this moment, at this place, rather than filling my head with time travel fantasies to a remembered past or possible future.

Yes, this is Mindfulness 101. But I'm eager to take that class. And to repeat it, over and over.

Why I don't like the term "new normal"

New normal is a term that's bandied about a lot, but to me it needs to be retired. Wikipedia says that new normal implies that something which was previously abnormal has become commonplace.

OK. Makes sense. But I still don't like the term.

For one thing, what the heck is "normal"? Often this word is used in a moralistic or judgmental sense that is much different from, say, a doctor informing a patient that her test results are normal -- meaning, within a typical range.

Not long ago normal sex was considered to be between a man and a woman, not two men or two women (much less additional combinations that are familiar to any viewer of porn videos). Now most Americans have broadened their view on this.

Also, "new normal" presumes that our lives go along in pretty much of a steady state until some rare jolt pushes us into another manner of living.

Well, I don't know about you, but I can say that my own life has been marked by many episodes that I never thought of marking a new normal, because I hadn't considered my previous state of being solidly fixed in place.

I've gotten married. Then divorced. And married again. 
I've had a child. Who grew up. And had her own child.
I've worked at various jobs. Until I retired. 
I believed strongly in an Eastern form of religion. Then I deconverted from it. 
I've enjoyed good health. Until I got a chronic condition. But I'm still otherwise healthy.
I've lived in cities. Then the country. Might move back to a city one day.

It's tough for me to point to any point in my life when things were so stable, inside or outside of my psyche, that I could confidently say "This was my normal time." 

Further, I've never liked the general notion of normality -- at least when applied to human lives. As noted above, often "that's not normal!" is used as a personal insult, not a dispassionate observation about behavior that lies outside of some statistical average. 

Albert Einstein wasn't normal. Barack Obama isn't normal. Martin Luther King wasn't normal. Lady Gaga isn't normal.

Exceptional people aren't normal by definition.

Thus it shouldn't bother us when our own life is viewed by other people as "abnormal," so long as we are content with ourselves and aren't causing harm to others. Yet as Wikipedia observes, new normal typically is viewed as a change from a more desirable to a less desirable state of affairs.

Well, who's to say?

Why don't we speak of people having to adjust to a new normal when they fall in love, get a promotion, lose 30 pounds, or graduate from college?

Each of these experiences, or milestones, is a marked deviation from a previous way of being. They require adjustments, fresh thinking and acting, lifestyle course corrections. Yet rarely, if ever, do we hear talk of these sorts of events requiring a transition to a "new normal." 

In my view this is because most of us have an understandable bias toward positivity. We consider that life should be a mostly continuous upward path that leads toward more happiness, more contentment, more success, more...more...more. 

This isn't usually the case, though. Ups and downs are ubiquitous. Disappointments, commonplace. Unwelcome surprises, a regular occurrence. 

Since longterm normality is abnormal in most people's lives, I'd like to see "new normal" pitched into a cultural wastebasket. There are better terms, for sure. Here's some suggestions:

New phase
Fresh direction
Current course
Latest turn in life's path 

Here's some things to look forward to in old age, young people

I'm 69. When I was a youngster of, oh, 50 or so, I'd look upon the age I am now as so impossibly, horribly, inconceivably old, that I'd shudder at the thought of becoming, cursed be the name, a senior citizen. 

So now that I've become what I once dreaded, an old person, I figure it's my duty to point out to young people some of the good things that come with geezer'ness.

In no particular order, young un's, because my mind no longer works well enough to encompass the concept of ranking, here's some of the marvelous delights that await you. 

No more worries about repeating yourself. Everyone has felt the need to introduce a spoken thought with, "Now, be sure to let me know if I've said this before," because it's embarrassing to bore a group with a repeated story.

But here's some great news: after a certain age, you won't need to ever say this again, because not only will you be unable to remember if you'd said something before, none of the people you're talking with will be able to remember either, since old people congregate with other old people, like schools of fish where everyone swims with the aid of a cane.

Say goodbye to fears of being trapped in a room with old people talking about their health problems. This is a nightmare for young folks, having to listen to excruciatingly detailed renditions of how a hip replacement went, or what foods work best to deal with constipation. 

I'm pleased to report that once you become an old person yourself, there's no way you can avoid this, because all of your friends are going to be close to your age, and they'll love to talk about what ails them. So let go of the fear and jump into the deep end of the pool of medical problem obsession. 

Even better, or maybe worse, you'll be way more interested in all this health talk than when you were younger,  since you'll be thinking, "I need to pay attention, since I'm probably going to develop ______ myself before too long."

It's sayonara to sexual performance anxieties. When you're young, it's natural to worry about measuring up (sometimes literally) in the sex department. Am I doing the right thing at the right time in the right way? Yikes! Maybe I'm not!

Well, those worries will fade away to near-nothingness once you're a senior citizen.

Then your sole criterion for "good sex" will be, was that really sex, or something else, like cuddling? Once you pass that low hurdle, you and your partner will feel that any sex is good sex, particularly if no one had a heart attack or threw a joint out of whack. 

You'll no longer ask, Was it good for you too?, because if both of you are still awake at the end of sex, that's an A+ performance. 

Plenty of reasons to tell tall injury tales. Young people are hampered when it comes to telling mind-blowing stories about an injury. First off, and most importantly, they don't have all that many of them. 

Skateboarders and longboarders for example, somehow can have a horrific crash, then walk away laughing. But sometimes young people do get hurt, like when skiing. Then, when a friend asks why you're wearing a knee brace, you can say "Took a tumble on a black diamond run -- hit a patch of ice on the landing after I skied off a cliff." 

OK, maybe that wasn't totally true, but it's believable. Makes for a good story, at least. How often, though, do youngsters get to tell such a tale?

When you get old, your ability to do this will skyrocket. Because after a certain age, you'll hurt yourself just by getting out of bed. Or putting on a sock in the wrong way. And sometimes, actually a lot of the time, you won't even know why part of your body hurts. 

It just will. Then you'll be free to make up a good story about that knee brace. And believe me, other old people will love to hear it. (See the "Say goodbye..." item above.)