The Aging of Aquarius : Page 2 of 29 : "What a long, strange trip it's been!"

November is Norway

Today is November 1, 2023.

I went searching for a pithy quote about November and this is where I stopped looking:

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
– Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson has always cracked me up. I know I know — she is widely considered to be America’s greatest poet. I’m a troglodyte when it comes to poetry. I’ve spent 25 years ridiculing the “Belle of Amherst” since I wrote a play making fun of her work on nearly every page. After I finished writing it I was shocked to learn that Harvard University Press still held the copyright on most of her creations and they insisted on reading my two-act mockery before granting permission for me to quote her.

Even more shockingly, they decided it was fine, go ahead and perform it!

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul…
– Emmy again

You can’t make this stuff up. Oh, I get it, in this famous piece, a bird is implied as a metaphor for hope. I just find most metaphors to be unnecessary and often unintentionally funny abstractions.

And yet, when I went looking for a pithy quote about November I was hoping to find a touching metaphor of life approaching its final days.

Since I turned 70 more than two years ago I’ve made an effort to think philosophically about aging. Songs and stories are always referring to May to December romances and such.

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you

– “September Song”, lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill

I retired from radio yesterday and I’m very happy about it. I have no second thoughts and no regrets.

I just wanted to say something pithy that would express my complex sense of aging and, quite coincidentally, of leaving one’s lifelong career in the past.

Norway would have never occurred to me.

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-You gotta love her, Emily Dickinson

I have wondered if it was sheer bravado whenever I heard retired people praise their retirement as the “new chapter” in their lives. Maybe it is for some, but I’m all in.

I’ve had a wonderful life and I still do. I’m more aware than ever of how fast my life has gone because I cherish every moment. I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean that literally.

I also know that I’m relatively close to the end of my life, but I’m not there yet.

Happily, I’m finally old enough to get it. These really are my golden years.

You’ll get it when you get here.

Transitions, part 2: Passages

by Dave Williams

The greatest joy of living is learning. It leads to loving life without needing to understand it all.

Big Tree Park, half a block from our home in Glendora, California.

My recent medical adventure is progressing nicely. I’ve finally been approved for disability checks, and as my cardiologist and neurologist continue to poke, prod, and scan the parts of me that interest their specialties, they’re still unable to find anything at all wrong.

The cardio doc just told me, “Your heart is fine.”

I can’t imagine a more glorious and yet understated diagnosis. Meanwhile, the neurologist says, “Well, you didn’t have a stroke, you don’t have a brain tumor…” and I didn’t hear anything she said after that.

I’m not religiously trained, but neither am I opposed to it. I do have a sense that something greater than my worldly self has guided me through life and nudged me toward major transitions.

Take my marriage proposals, for example. The first one sorta slipped out at a drive-in movie when we were both still in our teens.

“Someday, I’m going to ask you to marry me.”

I actually said that: “Someday…”

My high school girlfriend blinked.

“Is that a proposal?”

I don’t remember how I answered her question because by then I had realized how stupid it sounded and I didn’t know what to say next.

We did marry and ten years later we divorced, very amicably. We’re still close friends.

Seven years after that I was having a beer at a popup bar in a hotel ballroom in Santa Rosa, California. Without provocation or warning, the little voice inside my head ordered me, “Do it now.”

I put down my beer and walked directly to CarolAnn Conley-King, who was laughing and chattering with a group of our friends. I took her by the hand and led her straight through the first door I saw. It led outside to the stinking dumpsters. That’s where I popped the question, properly, this time.

“Will you marry me?”

The day I proposed to CarolAnn, March 1988.

I should explain we were in that hotel ballroom for a country swing dance team competition and we were wearing matching costumes that made us look like extras in the Robert Redford film, The Electric Horseman.

“What?”

She was apparently surprised by the question, as was I.

After making me repeat it CarolAnn simply replied, “Of course I will.”

Thirty-five years later we are still, as Paul Harvey used to say, happily-ever-aftering.

My point is, whether you credit God or some internal self-guidance system, I believe we are propelled by circumstances we create.

In her landmark 1974 book, Passages, Gail Sheehy explained the stages of life that define how we change and grow. Each stage is fraught with worry but we move on because we have no choice, it’s time. This is always a necessary and good thing.

As I often reflect on my countless blessings I accept a certain amount of credit. I brought myself to and through each of life’s transitions, partly by luck but mostly from having the good sense to recognize and attach myself to good people, and to learn from them.

Most importantly, when you fall in love.

When I blacked out in the parking lot of Mooyah Burgers July 31, I entered another passage. Now, eight weeks later, I’ve given up worry. I’m loving my new life of daily opportunities.

My blessings are countless.

Technically, I’m still not retired. But, I have stopped largely defining myself by my job.

I’ve stopped making plans beyond the next hour or two.

And yes, uncertain as I am of the big stuff, I do say a quiet prayer each night.

“Thank you for everything. Please give me another day.”

Transitions

by Dave Williams

For the past six weeks, I’ve been off work and stuck at home because of a blackout I suffered in the parking lot at Mooyah Burgers. Two MRIs and various other medical tests are inconclusive. I feel fine. I could have gone back to work after my one night hospital stay except that Texas law won’t allow me to drive for three months after blacking out and the company that employs me won’t allow me to do my radio show from home. So, essentially, I’ve been visiting retirement.

I sleep later than I do when I go to the job; I wake up to feed the dogs and fix coffee. Then, I chat with CarolAnn before kissing her goodbye as she heads to work. The day that follows is pretty slow. I deal with medical and insurance-related paperwork, do some writing, and take a nap. That’s pretty much it until later in the afternoon when I can anticipate my wife’s return home.

As much as I have insisted over the years on my need for time alone, my life right now feels kind of lonely and confusing. I’m not retired, I’m on disability leave with tentative plans to return to work. But really, I am retired in the sense that I’m completely cut off from my career of 54 years. It’s all in the rearview mirror, for now, at least. That’s not necessarily a sad thing. It’s a mixed bag, really.

And, confusing.

In recent years I’ve asked retired friends how they fill their days. I get as many different answers as there are friends. Some have undertaken new, second careers, others find things around the house to keep them busy, yard work and home improvement, for example. A couple of guys I know admitted to being bored a lot. One of my oldest friends and colleagues told me he’s learned how to make shopping for an avocado fill up most of an afternoon.

Sometimes I think the idea of “keeping busy” is a misguided insistence. I might be happy doing nothing. What’s wrong with that?

The problem with transition is the uncertainty of it all. Should I retire now or wait? Can I even go back to my old career or is that just snuggling under a familiar but old, worn-out blanket when there might be more I can do?

What would that be? What can I do?

And, why do I insist on doing more?

I know all of the suggested answers from writing to volunteer work and just deepening my budding interest (please pardon the pun) in gardening. Maybe there is no single answer. Maybe what I’m doing now, a little bit of this and that, will settle into a comfortable pattern. I don’t know.

I suspect this is a transition that will fulfill itself in time. It’s confusing right now.

If you’ve “been there, done that” or are asking yourself the same questions please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

I may not be looking for answers as much as I’m looking for company.

Golden Years

by Dave Williams

May be an image of 4 people — CarolAnn and I in Northern Ireland, last month: Giants Causeway.

Three weeks ago I celebrated my 72nd birthday and then blacked out in the parking lot of a burger joint after lunch. I woke up some minutes later in the back of an ambulance, was taken to a nearby hospital, poked and prodded just a bit, and sent home the next day with no diagnosis.

The hospital people were very nice. They wheeled me out and wished me luck.

Since then I’ve seen a neurologist and a cardiologist. Both have run tests, neither has provided me with any insights. I like and trust them. The problem is, I’m not their only patient and they have their personal lives to lead. I don’t begrudge them a moment, I just await their educated assessments.

Except for the second-degree burns I suffered from lying in the parking lot during a Texas summer, I feel fine. Oh, maybe a tad dizzy at times. The neurologist did say I suffered a concussion. It should go away. She’ll let me know.

Meanwhile, my wife of 35 years, the Lovely-and-Feisty CarolAnn Conley-Williams, is having trouble sleeping. She looks at me with a mixture of adoration and anger; her experience in that parking lot was the shocking belief that I was dying. I didn’t but in her mind, I still could. Understandably, that scares her and pisses her off.

The company I work for has just learned that Texas law doesn’t allow me to drive to work after suffering a seizure. They also understand that while I could work from home, their own recently enacted policy forbids it. So, they’re paying me to sleep in and, no doubt, counting the expense. I’m grateful for the time I’ve been welcome there, however and whenever it ends.

For a long time, I’ve understood that my career will come to an end eventually and that the glorious achievement of living to my golden years would bring some medical challenges.

I just didn’t expect it all to happen on my birthday.

Things can almost always be worse. We carry on in gratitude.

A selfie

by Dave WilliamsMe in a pensive pose, Bushmills, Northern Ireland, July 6, 2023

I like this picture, but my God I look old.

I’ll turn 72 in a handful of days. I know there are a lot of people older than me who don’t seem to give age a thought but I’m sure they do. How could they not?

Twenty years ago I began to wonder if old people think about dying. I never had the nerve to ask an old person, but now I am one and I’ve got the answer: You bet we do, but not in the way I expected.

The past is a great place and I don’t want to erase it or regret it, but I don’t want to be its prisoner either. – Mick Jagger, just turned 80

I think about dying just as I think about being born — I know nothing about either. I only know everything that has happened in-between. That’s where I live and always have. I wouldn’t change a second of it.

And, I’m not done yet.

Irish eyes are laughing

Our taxi driver was a riot.

“Happy 4th of July!” he said brightly.

“Yeah, thanks,” I replied. “About that, it’s a national holiday for us but not here in Killarney. Why are there American flags everywhere and what’s the deal with those cheesy statues of Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty?”

“Aye, that would be called licking arse!”

Killarney drags out Uncle Sam every 4th of July to flatter American tourists to open their wallets.

Carolann and I howled with laughter.

“We love American dollars,” he explained, “but we also like the fact that you kicked the feckin’ Brits out of your country. We did too, but it took us 800 years.”

The guy should have been doing standup, not driving a taxi. I told him that but he brushed it aside. He was just having fun and glad that we were, too.

Home from Ireland and Scotland, I can’t get the places we went and the people we met out of my mind. The images of the countryside and ancient cities are everything you imagine but even more glorious.

The people are delightful.

I know, I know – we’re tourists. They work at being nice to us, they kiss arse. But in watching the Irish and Scots interact with each other I love the fact that these hardworking, fiercely loyal family people are steadfast; they have many hundreds of years of common history and culture. They treat each other, and us, with the loving respect of kinship. They know who they are.

I envy them.

Paul Jimison’s old man pants

by Dave Williams

L-R: Ray Hunter, Pete Olson, Dave Williams, Jim Postak, Mike Worsham (bottom center)

When I was a senior at Highlands High School in 1968-69 I ran with a great group of guys, including my best buddy, Ray Hunter; our shared best buddy, Pete Olson; our other best buddy, Jim Postak; and the only kid I ever knew who was allowed to smoke cigarettes at home, best buddy Mike Worsham. We also had a couple of best buddies on call who had their own groups of best buddies.

Roy Johnson worked at the Der Weinerschnitzel hot dog drive-thru on Friday and Saturday nights. We’d pull up to the window and he’d give us an entire shopping bag filled to the top with french fries free of charge. We called Roy, The Lord of the Fries. We usually arrived close to midnight after a football game and pizza at Shakeys or an evening of mini golf and an hour or two imagining that four guys in Ray’s Ford Falcon might chase down some pretty chicks in a GTO. We actually did that once and cornered the girls in a cul de sac. We had to let them get away because there were four of us and just two of them, and none of us had the guts or the know-how to smooth-talk them.

Our other best buddy was our secret agent, Paul Jimison, who usually ran with the football crowd but was a good guy and always available when we needed him to put on his old man pants and head into the mom-and-pop grocery in nearby Rio Linda to buy beer for us.

The store was called Shop-and-Save. It was little more than a rundown liquor and convenience store in a sketchy part of what passed for a town in Rio Linda. We nicknamed it the Stop-and-Rob because it was accurate.

(You may remember Rio Linda as the Sacramento suburb made famous by my late friend, Rush Limbaugh. He spoke of every yard being adorned by a car on blocks and said he went there each Memorial Day to place a six-pack on the tomb of the unknown bowler. It was an apt description and the folks in Rio Linda loved the notoriety.)

Paul was our age but while the rest of us looked every pimply day of our 17 years Paul looked thirty-something in his little league uniform ten years earlier. When he let his beard grow out a bit, say four hours, he would put on his legendary “old man pants” (loose-fitting khakis, accessorized with muddy work boots and a too-tight flannel shirt) and could easily pass as one of our grandpas.

We were good boys, we really were. We loved our parents and respected our teachers. When we were lucky enough to go on dates we kept our hands and our dirty thoughts to ourselves; at the end of the evening, we were available for a polite good night kiss at the door but didn’t insist on it. We were all Richie Cunningham five years before the TV show Happy Days premiered.

None of that stopped us from occasionally being the bad version of good boys. That’s really part of the journey, isn’t it? Like our parents before us, we experimented with cigarettes and beer when we could get it, but that’s all. Even though this was during the late-60s hippy era we didn’t do drugs, not even marijuana. All we wanted for a rowdy night out was a shared six-pack of beer and a pack of Marlboros to make us choke and cough and feel manly.

That’s why we needed Paul and his old man pants.

In 1968 a six-pack of Coors cost right around $1.87. Cigarettes were 35 cents a pack. Seriously. The four of us ponied up less than a buck apiece and sent Paul inside. He was back shortly with the Coors, the Marlboros, and an assortment of Sugar Babies, Tootsie Rolls, and a pack of Sen-Sen. With 50 cents worth of regular in the gas tank. We were good to roll.

I have no specific memories of nights out with my buddies, just the lingering sense of camaraderie and joy I can still recall from the great times that Ray, Pete, Jim, Mike, Paul, and I shared our blossoming manhood as brothers.

Dear Jim Postak is gone now, the young victim of a hereditary bad ticker. He was a charming and talented singer, a friend everybody loved.

I haven’t seen or heard from Mike Worsham since we graduated. He’s one of those special friendships that seem to just wander through your life and disappear. I hope he’s well and happy.

The rest of us are still waddling along on creaky knees as old men are wont to do.

The Stop-and-Rob was eventually shut down after being busted for selling liquor to minors but it wasn’t Paul’s fault. Word of our success eventually spread to dumber teenage miscreants who assumed the store would sell beer to anyone tall enough to put their money on the counter.

The thing is, they didn’t know the secret of Paul’s old man pants.

(Today, June 20, 2023, is Paul Jimison’s 72nd birthday. Happy birthday, buddy. You finally look like a child.)

Grads & Granddads

by Dave Williams

Our grandson, Tyler Goold Williams, graduated from high school yesterday, June 9, 2023. Very sad that we weren’t there but we’re as proud as we can be.

The Highlands High Class of 1969 graduated June 10, 54 years ago today. Sandra Delaney and I delivered the commencement speeches. I wrote and delivered a soul-stirring celebration of the golden future that lay before us. It rose in power and passion, ending with a wise admonition to my fellow graduates: “You can take this world by the tail,” I told them, “but you must be quick, lest it leaves you holding the shattered fragments of a crystal dream!”

Our parents and grandparents leaped to their feet with raucous appreciation and affirmation. (I think my inspired use of the word, “lest” sold it.)

My classmates applauded politely, glad that I was finished. Somebody set off a bottle rocket. One guy near the front flashed his junk at me from beneath his robe.

As we age it is hard to deal with the twists and turns of societal influences and cultural whims. I’m happy to report that family values and traditions are still alive and well.

To my grandson, Tyler, in words my own grandpa might have said to me, “The world is your oyster, kid. Live it and love it.”

Beginnings, part 1: Isaiah

by Dave Williams
May 20, 2023

This weekend our grandson, Isaiah King, graduated from his U.S. Navy training and became a certified nuclear engineer. His first assignment will be on board the U.S.S. Harry Truman, an aircraft carrier.

He’s come a long way from the ten years he lived with us and grew out of diapers to become Captain Underpants.

Isaiah arrived at our home in Glendora, California, with his dad, Nathan, in the early oughts when he was barely 18 months old. They had driven down from Alaska in a beat-up pickup truck in the dead of winter. They needed a place to stay for a couple of months. As things go, they were with us for ten years. It was an unexpected challenge at the time but as I look back on it now, their arrival was a gift. Isaiah was our first grandchild, but also the baby CarolAnn and I would never have together. It also secured our bond with Nathan.

From my shoebox of Isaiah memories…

———————-

One evening when he was very young the three of us were watching TV together and the show we were watching had a woman about to expose her breasts. CarolAnn told her grandson to cover his head with a blanket and not look. He did as he was told. A few moments later, still under the blanket as we watched the show, he asked excitedly, “Are they HUGE?”

———————-

I was pecking away at my computer one early morning when Isaiah, age 7, came in quietly, picked up the phone from my desk, and rang his dad’s room on the intercom.

“Dad? Would you come get the peanut butter for me? It’s too high in the pantry and I can’t reach it. — Okay, thanks.”

“Isaiah,” I said, “I would have gotten the peanut butter for you.”

“I know, Grandpa,” he said wisely. “I just figured Dad needs to get up and get ready to take me to school.”

————————

“Nana,” Isaiah said earnestly, “I have diabetes.”

My wife and I had no earthly idea what he was talking about.

“What do you mean?” Carolann asked.

“I had to go potty real bad,” the five-year-old explained. “I have diabetes.”

CarolAnn and I stared at each other blankly for another moment or two until, as the Brits say, the penny dropped.

“You mean you have DIARRHEA?”

“Yeah, diarrhea.”

————————–

Sleep peacefully, America. Captain Underpants is maintaining our nuclear navy.

We are stardust…

by Dave Williams

Bobbi Ercoline died a few days ago. She was 73. Nick, her husband of 53 years, paid her a simple yet powerful tribute:

“She lived her life well and left this world a much better place. If you knew her, you loved her.“

I never heard their names before this week but suddenly realized I do know Bobbi and Nick, I’ve known them most of my life. They’re the kids on the cover of the iconic Woodstock soundtrack album published 54 years ago.

The picture of Nick holding Bobbi in a blanket on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York, freezes a moment in time that symbolized my generation’s place in history; we were naively idealistic kids who believed we could end war and hatred by simply declaring we’d have nothing to do with them.

They called us the Peace & Love generation.

“We are stardust, we are goldenWe are billion-year-old carbonAnd we got to get ourselvesBack to the garden”
– Woodstock: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Peace is elusive but Bobbi and Nick found lifelong love on a wet hillside in August of 1969.

Our generation is still hanging on to the dream.