The last thing I'll say about being 60

About 10 months ago, I had the idea that I would start recording what it was like to approach age 60 and beyond. I was sure that it would be monumental.

Here is some of what I wrote:

August 10th 2006

On this hot summer day, I realize that six months from now, on a surely cold and snowy day, I will turn 60 years old.
I want to celebrate that. My daughters Diana and Naomi think a girlie winter vacation getaway is a good idea, and so does Lorne, who hates to sit on a beach anyway. That’s something down the road.

Meanwhile, as February approaches, I will add thoughts that come to me so other women turning 60 will feel hopeful and possibly I will feel hopeful too.

August 11

I mention to my friend Cynthia my goal to record the next six months. I’ve created the folder, I say. It’s empty.
“You’ll have more to say looking back,” says she who has already passed this milestone. “Six months after, instead of six months before.”

August 12
Daughter Diana and I volunteered at a triathlon supervising the bike turnaround on Colonel By Drive near our house. When the last cyclist had passed, the two motorcycle officials offered us rides to the finish line on their bikes, and we each hopped on.
“You’re pretty cool,” Diana said to me in disbelief.

August 13
Two fisherman beside the Canal showed me the wide mouthed bass one had caught with a plastic worm, and then they threw the fish back in the water.
That’s what I want for 60. You can catch me, show me 60, and then throw me back in the pre-60 water.


August 20
The Battle of Brockville

As I ran across the finish line at the Thousand Islands triathlon, Mike the announcer pointed out to everyone that my friend Kristin had already beaten me, finishing the race 4 minutes ahead.

Rubbing it in, he announced that the two of us have an ongoing rivalry to avoid last place, and this time she had won.

Indeed she had, improving on her swim and bike, so that it was impossible for me as usual to “reel her in” on the run.

And even though I was last, for me it was a huge accomplishment just to be there when only a few years ago I was quivering in the Try a Tri in the Carleton pool, and never envisioning I would actually be smiling in the choppy waters of the St. Lawrence River.

I thank the kayaks circling me like sharks at the swim for not just hooking me into the boat and heading for shore. As usual, I had trouble sighting, complicated by waves that blew up on the return swim, enhanced by a nearby large boat. I couldn’t see the furthest buoy; one kayak told me to keep left or I’d be caught in the current, another told me to keep right, and I flopped around like Flipper until I ultimately reached the three powerful “pullers’ who yanked me over the very slippery boat launch exit.

It was not hard to find my bike.

And it’s funny, I was afraid of not being able to see because of water in my swim goggles, but in fact they were fine. It was the raindrops on and in my glasses as I biked that were a minor annoyance.

I didn’t know until after the Brockville Triathlon whether I’d want to do a race report. That’s because my training for this event was even more bizarre than usual.

I had spent the first three weeks of July walking around Europe in 40-degree heat, and doing no running or aerobic exercise at all. And then I spent two weeks before the triathlon enrolled in CycleFit Boot Camp trying to force my unused muscles back into shape.

Hence on Saturday when Kristin and I headed to Brockville (great accommodation at St. Lawrence College for $34 each, including breakfast), I was even more sore and creaky than usual. I had read Rick Hellard’s advice to athletes that there’s nothing they can do to improve themselves in that last week before a race, only make things worse. I wondered if I would become a negative example of that philosophy. He was obviously a positive example of his own advice – he won the Olympic Tri.

And when you’re last, it’s hard to know what makes any difference.

The reason we had even entered Brockville was as step one of a pact we’ve made to do an Olympic distance Tri when we both turn 60 in six months. The Sprint Tri swim at Brockville is one 750 loop, and the Olympic there is two. This was to be an information reconnaissance to see if Brockville merits our symbolic efforts next year.

We’re still working on that decision, but we were pleased that the variety of races meant company most of the time (except when I was swimming). It buoys the spirits to feel you’re not alone, and many of the Olympic Tri people were very friendly and supportive as they passed by on bike or run.

Meanwhile, rematch to avoid last place at The Canadian on Labour Day Weekend!

August 22
I report to a younger colleague that a former freelancer of ours has a letter in the Citizen complaining about sidewalk cyclists in Stittsville. “Is he a cranky senior?” he inquires. My first reaction is, ‘no, he’s my age.’ My second reaction is, ‘I better not be cranky any more.’

More recently, a Citizen news editor announces at a meeting that the Ottawa Senators are so popular that when they were put on the front page, the paper didn’t receive the usual letters from “little old ladies” complaining about sports being given major coverage.

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And you know what, that clinched it. I didn’t want to be focussed on age any more. I am who I am, and that’s more important than chronological age. This blog will contain things I like or have written, book reports and bits and pieces that haven’t appeared anywhere else. I have seen 60, and it’s no big deal.

The Real Oliver Twist - a moving book

I spent the holidays reading a book that has continued to haunt me, The Real Oliver Twist/Robert Blincoe: A life that illuminates an age, by John Waller (Icon Books, 2005).

The author is a historian who lectures in the department of history and philosophy of science at Melbourne University.
In 1832, John Brown, a British campaigner to release young children from the servitude of the textile mills, wrote a memoir of workhouse orphan Robert Blincoe in a popular pamphlet.

The author of The Real Oliver Twist uses that memoir and a 22-page bibliography to re-create the times of poor Robert Blincoe, born in 1792 in rural St. Pancras Parish and abandoned at four to a “work’us” (workhouse) never to see his family again. At seven he was sent 200 miles north to work in the horrendous and unrelenting abuse of the cotton mills.
“The Memoir details the cruelty of masters and overseers, the weakness of the law, and the harsh realities of a child’s life dictated by the relentless rhythm of machines and the clanging of the work-place bell…He was remembered, if at all, as somebody who fought bravely against the cruel vicissitudes of life. But his own hard work and his devotion to his family eventually achieved for them a degree of respectability beyond the wildest imaginings of anybody who had known him,” writes John Waller. “as a bruised, lonely and desperately unhappy parish apprentice.”

According to Waller, there is strong textual evidence that Charles Dickens read Blincoe’s Memoir shortly before writing Oliver Twist, and the parallels are striking. “Blincoe’s Memoir must have had a deep impact on a man who had been sent to work in a bleaching factory aged twelve and never reconciled himself to his family’s loss of gentility,” he says. “And it would also have yielded rich background material that Charles Dickens’ own life didn’t provide but which the plot of Oliver Twist required.”
He writes that “making children like Blincoe work was almost universally agreed to be a good thing. Schooling, on the other hand, was seen to have its dangers. Juvenile, sweated labour inured poor children to their ‘inferior offices in life’, but education threatened to give them ideas above their stations. This was a real concern in the highly-stratified world of 18th –century England, in which everyone was meant to have their place upon a vast hierarchical chain stretching from the most degraded humans – beggars, actors and minstrels – on to artisans, shopkeepers and tenant farmers; next to bankers and merchants; and finally arriving at the dizzy heights of squires, barons, earls, dukes, archbishops and, at the very top, monarchs.”

And as bad as the work’us was, apprenticeship as a ‘sweep’s boy’ and indentured work in the mills, was worse.
“When Parliament set up a committee in 1816 to inquire into the ‘State of Children Employed in the Manufactories of The United Kingdom’, it was revealed that few mills worked their child apprentices for less than eleven-and-a-half hours. Many forced them to labour for fifteen hours, with minimal breaks for refreshment …Lunch eaten next to the machines.”

As the book continues, “only at nine or ten o’clock at night, after more than sixteen hours of work, and with less than half an hour to rest, did the wheel finally come to a stand. The absence of milk in the diet, combined with near-constant standing during the day and the awkward motions required to operate the machines, took a heavy toll on Blincoe. At the age of fifteen, as he entered puberty and needed proper nutrition to build up healthy bones, his legs began to bow… Continuous standing and monotonous movements ensured that for the remainder of his life Blincoe would walk with difficulty on buckled legs.”
It would be nice to think that the world has changed, but in so many ways it is evident that it hasn’t, as the children suffering throughout the world in child labour, the sex trade, orphans of AIDS in Africa attests.

This book, about a time hundreds of years past, is a reminder and an impetus to care about children still in need of advocacy now.

The Orange Juggler

The following story I wrote won first prize winner in the City of Ottawa 55 Plus Fiction Writing Contest in 2002:



The Orange Juggler

“... May I reach
That purest heaven; be to other souls
The cup of strength to some great agony,
.. So shall I join the choir invisible
whose music is the gladness of the world.”
• George Eliot

He loved that she quoted poetry all the time. When it wasn’t her own poetry it was George Eliot, or it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning... “How do I love thee...I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

Like a massive ballet troupe, hundreds of runners were stretching against trees and walls and lying waiting on the grass. Music from a radio station trailer clashed with loudspeaker announcements. He wondered how she would have described the chaos.

Grabbing his left running shoe in his right hand, he stretched lightly and alone, alternately bending each long leg behind him.

He managed a wan half smile, a soft little ‘hmph’, sort of a laugh, his closed lips curling up at the corners, straight into his prominent cheekbones.

A beautiful big grin, she described it. Like punctuation between his ears.

She loved his smile. He loved her poetry.

He loved the wavy bangs she was always brushing out of her round, sad eyes. He loved her favorite lemon yellow sweater that smelled of her perfume. He loved her laugh. He would laugh for her.

He leaned against the tree to steady himself.

“Sorry about your wife.” A runner in a red jacket, a staff member he knew from the Y, stopped in front of him. He nodded back, his heart pounding. What could you say. He’d only decided to enter the race last week, because it supported the Breast Health Centre. The running would be no problem, he was certain of that, but he was so afraid he’d be paralyzed by thinking about her.

The ‘five minutes to start’ warning startled him.

Bending down, he pinned the race number on his white singlet. 404. Daniel Allan Stone. Male. 36. Then he hurried back outside and waited for 9 o’clock.

The air was a damp combination of spring mud and wet grass. He shivered and shifted his weight to keep warm.
He glanced at the timing chip on his shoelace, then at his watch. At 12:30 he’d be done.

An instant later, he was gone, swept away in a sea of runners. A huge quiet mass of arms and legs, heading down the road.
The grass was so green, shockingly green.

There were few spectators, just the beat of a solitary boom box under a little gray tent at the side of the course.
11 a.m. He stared ahead, already battling tension and fatigue. Perspiration and sporadic drizzle matted the thick brown hair around the nape of his neck. His chest heaved, his lean arms and fingers were too heavy to lift. His salmon shorts clung in wet wrinkles to his body. The runners had long ago strung out, and he had his own space.

11:45. Ten kilometers to go. “Just 10 kilometers. Just 10 kilometers.” Shaking his head, his dry lips shifted to mouth her words instead, as his aching legs churned along, fighting the urge to stop:

A moment in time

Drifting. Drifting.
A bittersweet interlude
Hanging in the air
In the damp heat of summer
suspended in time.
A perfect note of music,
a red canoe
going nowhere.
No future, only memories.
Knowing it will never end.
Knowing it will never be the same.
• Emily Stone, 1999

“Knowing it will never be the same,” he repeated, picturing their last perfect weekend on the lake. “Knowing it will never be the same.” He had memorized so many of the poems she had written just for him. She taught English, and wrote for others, but the poems were just for him, and he knew them all by heart. One good thing about being an actor. Just a year ago she had come back stage to meet him, and they were together ever after. Noon. Grateful for the distraction, he continued reciting her poetry, reliving their time together...

Bike Path

Bike path
Life path
Through the woods
with the yellow line.
You slow to lead me
Then you’re gone.
Down the road
Round the corner
Up the mountain
Out of sight.
To bike with you
To run with you.
I never dreamed
and now I do.
What better gift
Can ever be
Than you have shared
your path with me.
• Emily Stone, 1999

He blinked back tears. He felt she was with him, and she understood what was in his head. Always. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” she’d say when he was filled with worries. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” And he knew it was. He knew she would be saying that now, gazing into his pale blue eyes and gently touching his lips. He marvelled that someone could be so serene and yet never waste a minute. She was always planning a trip, always thinking of some great adventure they could share together. She hated being stuck in the city on a long weekend. She wouldn’t have wanted to be in town now, and would have persuaded him to skip the race.

Urban tumbleweed

Scrub grass lapping unevenly
at the old metal legs
of a scratched park bench
placed optimistically
under a sparse, struggling tree.
A small circle of nature
in a mall of asphalt
ending abruptly
as a torn plastic grocery bag
blows saucily by.
Urban tumbleweed.
A blunt reminder
of where we are
and where we want to be.
• Emily Stone, 1999
•
She’d been sick so long, they both knew from the beginning their relationship had no future. They knew they could do nothing about it; and knew the pain of goodbye was the price they would have to pay for being truly, wildly in love.
He had imagined over and over how it would be to part from her - like visualizing a race - hoping that by creating her leaving in his mind he could somehow alleviate the leaden lump in his chest. Home for the last time, she had asked to put on his socks, closing her eyes as he rubbed her feet.

He was wearing the same socks now, the way she had wanted him to. They were keeping him going - through the blur of mile markers, drink stations, sweat and pain.

The mantra of poetry was a link with Emily, propelling him on.

It was the second time around. The home stretch. Then why was it so hard.

He plugged along.

Eyes downward as he came around the corner, he saw a piece of orange peel on the asphalt.

She always loved oranges.

He willed his throbbing legs to keep moving as the orange imagery flooded his mind. He was 12 years old, back in the bedroom of his parents’ house, light-hearted and light-headed, knowing what he wanted to do. He had seen jugglers at the circus every year, and he yearned to be like them. Maybe that’s what made him become an actor.

He had stayed in his room all day, practicing juggling three Mineolas. He was the smallest in his class back then. Though he’d been over six feet tall for so many years now, he was still that little boy inside. “I picture you tall and strong your whole life,” she said in disbelief when he told her, rubbing her fingers up and down his long arms for emphasis. His mind went back to the juggling as his legs strained on.

There had been so much to learn. He had wanted to quit. Who needs to juggle.

Who need to love. The oranges fell to the floor. Over and over. He was feeling a little better now. Everything seemed a little brighter, sounds a little louder. . .

He concentrated on finishing the race, juggling the oranges. The little boy had skipped supper to continue juggling the oranges... Daniel thought of the food at the finish line. He wondered if there would be oranges. One kilometer to go...Don’t move forward as you juggle...Don’t stumble as you run...His arms felt lighter as he imagined the three oranges tossing through the air, but he could barely breath. Focus. Focus... She’d always loved his juggling. She’d laugh and clap and say it was one more thing that made her love him.
He felt dizzy.


As you leave

I ache with envy
future dreams
Your strength
When I have none.
And see the world
Through your bright eyes.
Too late.
You show the joy
That all should taste.
Embrace the world.
Don’t cry. Just live.
I’ll know. I’ll feel.
I’ll be the same
And care as much.
I won’t be gone.
• Emily Stone, 1999

He gasped over the finish, ignoring the numbers on the large black time clock. He stumbled to the grass. He’d done it. He’d done it. For her. He had thought he couldn’t live without her, and now he knew he wouldn’t have to.