Len Edgerly » Aging

Odds and Ends Toward the End of a Year

Len — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:03:41 +0000

The Road to Harvard Square

Cory Doctorow and Stephen King have hijacked my Kindle with great fiction reads.

My pre-ordered copy of King’s Under the Dome arrived, as promised, on Christmas Eve. It’s scary how well he tells a story. I suspect that I will soon be drawn into a dead run toward the end of the story, even as the initial beckonings are small and odd. A dome gets dropped over the sock-shaped Maine town of Chester Mills. This ridiculous premise already seems plausible, because of gruesome bits like an unlucky woodchuck chopped in half on Dome Day. Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know how the story ends, don’t click on this Wikipedia item.

Doctorow’s Makers, downloaded for free from his site in .mobi edition, has taken longer to draw me into the story, even though story itself is a central artifice of the novel. It’s set in a troubling future, and you’ll never think of Disneyworld the same again.

I like Chrome, the new browser from Google now available for Macintosh. It’s slightly different from Firefox and Safari, but I can’t tell you how or testify to any of its advantages, except that you type search terms or URL addresses in the same place, called the “Omnibox.” I like the pretty icon, which looks like a camera lens. It’s peeking at me from the dock on my MacBook Air, saying, “click on me.”

I’ve had it with the nook. The gee-whiz phase lasted about two weeks, peaking one night at the Barnes & Noble store in Chestnut Hill when I got a free oatmeal cookie by showing the puzzled barrista a coupon that had appeared on my nook once it found the B&N store network. The same coupon appeared when I entered the palatial B&N store across from the Burlington Mall, so I got another cookie. You could make your way across the country with your nook, apparently, grazing on free cookies at every store. Except that the Burlington barrista did not check the coupon number, which was the same at each store. If she had entered it in the cash register, perhaps there would have been a message: “Seize this impostor! He has already obtained his free cookie at the Chestnut Hill store. He is a suspected Kindle provocateur.”

It was also cool to download two library books to the nook from the Denver Public Library, but there’s no way I’m going to finish them before they expire, and I doubt I’ll be able to renew them.

So after straying from my Kindle, I’m back home with fuller appreciation of its amazing tool set for reading. For example, there is no way on the nook to search for a character’s name and see all the references to it, including the first, when the character enters the story. With the Kindle, I can do this with ease, and then use the magic “Back” button to jump back into the story, with a clear sense of who this person is. The nook’s dictionary is a joke. It’s painfully slow and awkward to maneuver the cursor to a word, and the definitions are truncated and lame.

I still don’t hope the nook fails. Driving up to the Burlington B&N book palace, I had a strong sense of how many people work there, and how sad it will be if places like that cease to exist, never mind classy independent bookstores like the Tattered Cover in Denver and the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. They guy at the nook kiosk in Burlington really knew his stuff. How odd, though, to have an eBook sales desk in the midst of all those paper volumes. Do the other sales people hate the nook guy? Do they look on him as their only hope to survive the coming revolution? It’s a great story unfolding, and I’m glad I invested in a nook so I can follow it firsthand. But for the pure joy of reading, I’m back to dancing with the eBook that brought me.

I realized the other day that I am in my sixties. I’ve been 59 years old since August, and that comforting “fifty” in my age had disguised the fact that I am well into my 60th year, the first year of a new decade. The realization hit me not with sadness and dread, but with the hope of impending wisdom, if I play my cards right.

Ross Douthat in a recent New York Times op-ed piece has totally nailed what makes Obama tick, in my humble opinion. As a hard-core moderate, I am thrilled to read an insight like this:

“Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.”

I have to say that this is the Obama I thought I was working for since early in the primaries. At this point in his presidency, it takes a lot of hope and faith to expect him to leave a legacy of peace and prosperity in these impossible times. But when it comes to Barack Obama, I have become used to long odds paying off handsomely. My wife and I first saw him in person during the 2004 election campaign, shortly after his keynote speech to the Democratic Convention on July 27, 2004. With a huge lead in his own Illinois U.S. Senate race, Obama had come to Denver to support Ken Salazar’s much tougher Senate bid. He looked tall, thin and slight as he entered the small gymnasium. But as soon as he began to speak, I could imagine him as president. It’s with a similar awareness of long odds that I now can imagine him as a truly successful president. Time will tell.

It’s not always easy to find a fact on the Internet. I spent two hours trying to learn the date of Obama’s 2004 appearance in Denver. The only trace I found was a blog entry stating that Colorado State Treasurer Cary Kennedy has a photo on her wall of Obama at a 2004 rally with Salazar and some congressional candidates.” I’ve emailed her in hopes there is a date on the back of the photo.

“It’s Complicated” with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin was much more satisfying a movie than I had expected. My wife and her sister and I saw it last night in Harvard Square. We also enjoyed a very different movie, “The Young Victoria” the night before at the Kendall Square Theatre. On the way out, I rang Cha Cha up on my iPhone to ask what relation the current queen is to Victoria, and by the time we’d reached the car I had a text message informing me that Queen Victoria was Queen Elizabeth II’s great-great-grandmother.

My sister totally surprised me with a Christmas gadget gift that I had not even known enough to lust for. It’s a tiny Veho Micro DV camcorder that I strapped to my head for some of the big family dinner here on Christmas day. I can’t wait to try it while rowing on the Charles next spring. You can also clip it to a shirt pocket. The resulting videos are headache-inducing because the view jumps around so much. But it’s definitely a cool addition to my tech arsenal.

It’s been fantastic to spend most of the past six months here in Cambridge. Next week we return to Denver till the spring. No matter where the suitcase lands, it’s nice to hang out “here.”

What the Land Knows

Len — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:18:14 +0000

We return to Denver this morning after three days visiting Casper, Wyoming, where my wife and I met 27 years ago and lived till moving to the city in 2000. I’ve never really enjoyed the outdoors, to tell you the truth, so city life suits me fine. But being back here in Wyoming and reconnecting with old friends seem to have updated my operating system. I’ll see if I can explain what’s new in this version.

The issue of physical health kept butting into my consciousness yesterday as I did the rounds. One old friend’s body has been ravaged by stroke, lung condition, and a fall down a flight of stairs. I had not seen him for nearly 10 years before lunch yesterday at the Casper Petroleum Club, one of my old haunts. He was on oxygen, and his left arm was bruised and taped. He’s in his early 80s, just as full of piss and fire as in the old days, when he was a state senator, and my job was often to lobby for things he opposed and to kill things he held dear. It was an odd setting in which to form a friendship, but that’s what happened. I enjoyed my dealings with Tom more than my encounters with so-called allies, because he was fierce, principled, and irreverent. He was always a one-man lightning bolt with thunder, and he still is. I saw it in his eyes yesterday as he clawed at his sandwich and laughed at our reliving of the old battles.

Another friend, about the same age as Tom, just returned from a trip to Israel and is planning trips this year to Denali Park in Alaska and the Galapagos Islands. He plays two rounds of golf each week and goes to the nursing home each noon to feed his wife, who has advanced Alzheimer’s. I don’t remember Jack working out or eating tofu, but for some reason he’s reached his early 80s relatively intact. He’s cranky as ever, in a playful way that always makes me smile.

As if I were being led around Casper by a cosmic tour guide, my visit with a friend who at 57 is a year younger than I am included a moment in his office when he nearly leaped out of his chair, he was so excited to recommend a book he’s reading. It’s Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond (click here for Kindle edition) by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D. The thesis is that you can, by exercise and sensible diet, dramatically improve your chances of good health in your eighties by getting ready in your 50s. My friend said the diet boils down to “don’t eat crap.” That and 45 minutes a day, six days a week, of aerobics and core strength exercises are, the book, claims, the Rx for an old age barely worth surviving for.

Last night I was a warmly welcomed visitor to the men’s group that I helped organize in 1990, inspired by Robert Bly and the then sure-to-change-the-world Men’s Movement. Well, not so much. But this particular group of men has been meeting uninterruptedly for nearly 19 years. My old drum was still there in the upstairs meeting room, along with the talking stick I decorated with feathers and leather. There were seven us there last night, and a couple of things had changed: not as much hugging, and no junk food. Had they read the book? Back in the day, each of us would bring a bag of something crunchy and harmful, and there were lots of back-slapping hugs that always felt a little awkward, but okay. Since I’ve been gone, the awkwardness seems to have prevailed, and the hugless greetings last night seemed more natural.

The drumming was fantastic. It went on for a good 15 minutes, a din of rhythmic energy and thrumming mind. “I guess you can’t do that in your condo,” one of the guys said afterward. At Men’s Group, whoever holds the stick talks, and the rest of us listen. It’s a brilliant mode of conversation. As the stick made its circle a few times before being passed in silence for a full rotation, I kept hearing about the body, and the land.

One guy is gearing up for yet another commitment to work out regularly. But on his first day of jogging, he pulled a muscle. This provoked an instant roar of knowing laughter. Another guy’s work with concrete countertops provides him days of physical effort that leave him happily spent. Another is enjoying an orgy of healthy outdoor activities during his summer break from a job at a high school – biking, hiking, and hockey. He glowed with physical well-being. I heard stories of elk hunting, rodeos, and trespassing on a local landowner’s ranch spread outside of town. The latter came with a question about whether to ask the owner’s permission. “I recommend against it,” one of us said. “If he says no, you’ll probably need to avoid his place, and if he says yes, it won’t be as much fun to go there.”

At one point, after I’d asserted my preference for life indoors and online, William did not mock or contradict me when the stick arrived in his grasp, but his passionate recounting of the joys of being oudoors in sun, blizzard, rain, and all other conditions almost convinced me I’m missing something.

I do plan to read this book, and I do plan to get serious about whatever might help me arrive in my 80s as healthy as Jack, or as my father, for that matter, who at 82 strides a mile to his office each day in Cambridge, Mass., frequently whistling a happy tune. I don’t have to love exercise to embrace its obvious benefits. The land here in Wyoming does know something. It is relentless, and the people who come and stay here are originals. Even those who live here for a decade or two and then return to the city, leave changed. It was good to be reminded of that during this visit to Casper.