Category Archives: Confessional

“Old” Age is Not a Number. It’s a Measurement

31 Friday May 2013

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"Mirror mirror on the wall? Am I old?"

“Mirror mirror on the wall? Am I old?” By Julie Seyler.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Age is a fascinating racket. At 30, I wailed I was old. That seems like such a quaint thought today. There are those who say age is merely a number, and has to nothing to do with anything. I disagree. Age is a measurement; a tool we use to mark the passing of time when we are shocked that we graduated high school 40 years ago. So I play the age-boggling game.

For example, I have a friend that I have known since I was 12, when we both had Miss (this was an era before Ms., when one was either a Miss or Mrs.) Isaacs for 8th grade history. My friend just became a grandmother for the second time. This makes no sense to me because it was yesterday when I was taking pictures of her pregnant with the daughter that just gave birth for the second time around. My girlfriend, through my eyes, looks exactly like she did when we were on the cusp of becoming teenagers. Her daughter, who for me stands as a symbol for the child-bearing generation, also looks like a teenager, but not a grown-up teenager in the way I thought we were. Rather, I see her as a teenager playing house. But she’s not – she is an adult woman raising two children with all the responsibilities that goes with that. My girlfriend is now cast in the role of Nana. And that’s one mind-boggling aspect of the aging process.

Another mind-boggling aspect of the aging game is what does “old” look like? I see a woman who looks older than me. Why do I think that? When I look again, and try to pinpoint her age, I realize, “Whoa, she may be younger than me. Or maybe only 60, tops. And that’s only two years older than me.” That means to a stranger I, too, may look that old. Ergo, “old” is a mere perception conjured from the point you are at any given time. I still remember my French teacher in 9th grade. She was so old. She was 24. But then, I flip it, and figure I bet I still look pretty “young” to my 85-year-old buddy, Alan.

Some, like Lois (aka,Lola), fabulously defy the fact that they may be getting old. For me, a documenter, analyzer, and dissector of every stage in life, I just want to make sure I embrace “now,” because one day I may really be “old.”

At the Cape of Good Hope. May 29, 2011.

Julie, at the Cape of Good Hope. May 29, 2011.

Cicadas on My Trees, My House, My Cup. And Me

30 Thursday May 2013

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BY LOIS DESOCIO

The cicadas are landing on me. First one was on the head. Second one was on the shoulder. What makes a cicada landing so freaky, aside from their baby bat-like size is, you don’t know it’s coming. There’s no buzzing. There’s no warning. There’s not even a bite, or a sting, to let you know that it digs you like a tree limb. And it does not shake off easily, despite my shrill, piercing shriek, the girly up-and-down jumping, the arms flailing like rubber. And once shaken or flicked off – I suggest a stop, drop and roll, because their unwieldy and languorous flying can take them from your head or your shoulder – smack! – right into your face.

The few people with whom I’ve shared my cicada touchdowns, and resulting freak-outs, have all responded, across the board with,”Really? I haven’t seen that many.”

Really?

As Bob and the news media has informed us – we are in the midst of the cicada sojourn. The first one in 17 years. They don’t stay for long, but billions of them, for the next month or two, will be drilling up from the ground beneath us, where they’ve been getting in gear since 1996. They then hatch, climb, crawl, and the courting male fills the woods with its clangorous, rackety mating hum. I can now hear it when I’m inside.

But were it not for the errant flying and subsequent mountings (on me), I could embrace the cool-factor of the cicada, and the science class offered right outside my back door:

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Underneath the lampost light:
lampost

Hanging on the corner:

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In my dryer vent:
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This one got inside:
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But perhaps what is most freaky of all, is this cup that I found yesterday morning while cleaning out the outer reaches of my china hutch. I don’t know where it came from, or to whom it belonged, but it was the first time I’d reached back there in 15 (that’s almost 17) years:
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These Are a Few of My Favorite Things …

28 Tuesday May 2013

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Allenhurst AM

Allenhurst in the a.m. All photos by Julie Seyler.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Is it accurate to state that we on the right side of 50 can automatically conjure up that scene from “The Sound of Music” when the seven Von Trapp children are jumping off their beds while Julie Andrews, aka Maria, is trilling “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens?”

I am not saying the vision conjures up the same feelings – there are those who embrace that movie, and those who disdain it. But what I am saying is that it is a cultural set-point of the mid-60s. Because of that scene, and that song (and nobody but nobody does a better interpretation of “My Favorite Things” than John Coltrane), I love to think about, and make lists of my favorite things – many of which have changed; others of which have stayed the same.

So something like sitting on the beach before the crowds arrive, watching the sea slurp in and out, and the gulls swoop up and down, is a no-brainer favorite thing since way before I started coasting past the half-century mark. However, a super-chilled gin martini with a single olive on a Saturday evening is a new favorite thing – the gin factor making it “new.”

Frosted.

Frosted.

But the best-of-all favorite thing evolved soon after I became a pasta addict in 1986 following a trip to Italy. The favorite part is not simply eating spaghetti, it’s eating spaghetti at 6 a.m. on a rainy Sunday morning with a glass of fermented grape juice.

Spaghetti for breakfast.

Spaghetti for breakfast.

My Weekend “Hangover” Keeps Me in Bed on Mondays

20 Monday May 2013

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nestbox margo

Early morning chirping in the nestbox, aside – I want to sleep in. Photo by Margo D. Beller.

BY MARGO D. BELLER

Another Monday morning and I’m hungover. Again.

Not from alcohol. From trying to outrun Father Time while cavorting with Mother Nature.

For over three decades, I would rise for breakfast, and rush for a train to take me to an office. About two-thirds of the way through those three decades, my husband and I moved to the suburbs, so that one train became two trains, and the longer commute meant I often had to rise before dawn.

That ended about two years ago.

I am lucky to have a job at my age. It was much harder for an unemployed someone, age 50 and older, to find a job during the recession. And it’s not much easier now, when things are allegedly improving. But I made friends along the way, and one of them found me my current job, for which I work from home.

When I had become a serious birder, I had wished I had more time out in the field – time that was spent working or commuting. But a funny thing happened now that I am home, with a commute measured in minutes rather than hours. I find I still don’t have enough time.

I used to get by on six to seven hours of sleep. Now, like a newborn baby, I crave eight to nine. It is a struggle some days, particularly Mondays, to rise from bed. I hear this year’s house wren busily singing his territorial song at the nestbox every dawn. Part of me wants to rise and see what else is out there. Usually, I go back to sleep.

Except on the weekends. After five days spent mainly in my house, I must get out. I must fit seven days of life into two: see my friends, work in my garden, walk in the woods, drive to another part of the state (with or without MH), and look for birds.

I rise early and walk and drive for miles. I climb. I pull weeds in the garden, and lift heavy pots. The hours fly by. I forget about things like age, and how I’m going to pay the bills.

Then, usually around 8 p.m. on Sunday, I pass out in my chair, spent. Somehow I get to bed. Suddenly, it’s Monday morning. Fifty-plus-year-old knees and back hurt. I’m exhausted, and I’m depressed – hungover yet again.

I don’t know if I am unusual. I see women older than I am walking every day on my street, no matter the weather. Most days I do take a pre-work walk and run short errands during my lunch break.

It’s just Mondays, when I am depressed, that I find that even though I work from home, I still don’t have the time to do what I want. Because this job is a contract position – the new reality for some of us in journalism – I get no paid holidays or personal days. No work, no pay. And so I must use the weekends to the fullest.

Welcome to the “golden years.”

Grappling With the Letting-Go of Anger

08 Wednesday May 2013

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Angry orchid. Photo by Julie Seyler

Seething orchid. Photo by Julie Seyler

BY MARGO D. BELLER

The other week, I was awakened in the middle of the night from a dream about a raging argument I was having with my uncle, who died in February. The argument was about his mother, who had died 30 years ago this coming August. It was so disturbing – I could not go back to sleep.

The man spent his life complaining of the hardships his widowed mother created for him and his family. Much of the time I was growing up, my uncle’s family was on the West Coast, and my grandmother had been my mother’s problem for decades.

I got along with this grandmother, so when my mother died, I gladly took over her care. Yet my uncle continued to complain about his mother, including paying for her grave, when he and his wife moved back east.

I consider myself a rational person. I thought I had worked through my anger at various family members over the years. But with my uncle’s passing, it seems I didn’t resolve anything.

Anger is a terrible thing. I’ve had a hard time controlling it since I was a child. It has gotten me into trouble many times over the years. When something doesn’t make sense to me, I question. When something seems downright stupid to me, I question and disparage. This would make me popular with peers, but not with figures of authority, including parents and supervisors. (Questioning is great for being a journalist, but makes one a lousy employee.)

So over the years, I’ve learned to channel my anger by taking myself to the woods where I can concentrate on other things – the lovely day, making sure I am still on the trail, not tripping over tree roots and rocks.

But mainly I concentrate on the birds I might find overhead and underfoot. When I am out in the field, the only thing that angers me is myself for not finding the bird I hear singing to identify it.

Now I wonder if I am have only avoided the issue.

As I get older, I admit to being glad I have no children to resent me for unintentional or intentional actions. However, I also don’t have children to take care of me as I age – as my parents, grandmother and uncle did. What happens when my husband and I can no longer take care of ourselves and our house?

Aging and the money scare the hell out of me. Makes me angry, too. I doubt I’ll have the kind of retirement my parents had, and my husband’s parents continue to enjoy in their 80s. They take their trips, they go to concerts with their friends, and family checks on them.

Is this why I woke from screaming at my dead uncle about his dead mother in the middle of the night, my fear and anger at something over which I have no control? Probably. I will have to keep working at it.

My History of Rock ‘N’ Roll

02 Thursday May 2013

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Stairs to Music Heaven.

Stairs to Music Heaven. By Julie Seyler.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

On a previous post I mentioned that I thought that rock music was one of our generation’s greatest gifts to society. Now, the first thing I want to make clear is that Baby Boomers did not create rock music. The Baby Boom era did not begin until 1946. Bill Haley was born in 1925. Chuck Berry was born in 1926. Elvis Presley was born in 1935. So the first generation of rock musicians were not Baby Boomers. Technically, even the Beatles were not Baby Boomers. George Harrison, the youngest Beatle, was born in 1943. No, we Baby Boomers were not the creators of rock music – we were the generation that brought it from an obscure offshoot of country and jazz and made it mainstream. We supported it with our dollars, and adopted it as the music of our generation.

There is actually a lot of musical real estate under the rock umbrella. It ranges from blues rock like The Rolling Stones to country rock like the Allman Brothers to folk rock like Crosby Stills & Nash to hard rock like Led Zeppelin. Most Baby Boomers embraced one or more of these flavors of rock music. And those that didn’t probably embraced pop rock bands like Gary Lewis and the Playboys or the marvelous Motown stable of artists like The Supremes and The Temptations.

It’s no accident that the seminal Baby Boomer event was a music festival. That’s how important the music was. Rock music reached its zenith in cultural influence at Woodstock. While I wasn’t fortunate enough to attend, I own a copy of the wonderful documentary that was directed by Michael Wadleigh and recommend it to everyone. It’s one of those films you can run in the background and just revel in the music without getting wet. As marijuana slowly becomes legal across the country, the film may make a big comeback.

The thing that strikes me about watching the Woodstock film is just how broad a spectrum of music it featured. Richie Havens opened the concert, followed later in the night by Ravi Shankar, Melanie and Arlo Guthrie. The next day Santana, The Who and Jefferson Airplane rocked the crowd along with John Sebastian, Sly & the Family Stone and the Grateful Dead. Jimi Hendrix closed the weekend event. This was the music of a generation, and the generation showed up in force to hear it as the ‘60s came to a climax.

By the early ‘70s we were entering the heyday of the singer-songwriter. Bob Dylan had dominated this field in the 1960s, but as the new decade got under way, James Taylor, Jackson Brown and Carole King were climbing the charts.

Notwithstanding the popularity of folk rock groups like Seals & Croft and America at this time, as I arrived on campus for my freshman year, it was Layla that was blaring out of dorm rooms everywhere. Eric Clapton’s epic rock anthem was released in November 1970 on an album that Eric made with Duane Allman, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon under the fanciful name Derek and the Dominos. The album is such a classic it was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000.

Throughout the ‘70s, groups like Yes, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd kept the rock flag flying. Radio stations like WNEW-FM in New York, WBCN in Boston and WMMR in Philadelphia played entire album sides without commercials. And it was good. It was very good.

And now here we are in the 21st century, and not only is our music still alive, it’s more accessible than ever. As I write this, I’m listening to Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple. But I’m not listening to the radio, or a record, or even a CD. I’m listening to the online music service Spotify. We now can get ‘60s and ‘70s music on demand via the Internet from services like Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, and many more. And when I feel a need to hear “Stairway To Heaven,” I can just say to my Iphone “play it again, Siri” and Jimmy Page’s guitar solo begins. What with MP3 players and smartphones, we are never more than a few seconds away from “our” music. And “our” music is still the best that the world has ever heard.

Same Awe at Magazine Centerfold, Just Different Limbs

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

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Bob tree

Quite the spread.

BY BOB SMITH

National Geographic magazine is famous for its often remarkable high-quality photos. I recently picked up an old issue that was lying around the house, and found a story on giant redwood trees. It featured a pullout photo that folds out, and keeps on folding out, until it’s at least 18 inches long.

And there, filling the entire surface of the page, was a phallic leviathan: a single full-length photo of the second largest giant sequoia tree on earth. At 247 feet high and 27 feet in diameter, it’s one of the most massive living things on the planet. It has two billion leaves. That number alone is mind-numbing – if you counted out one number every single second for twenty-four hours every day, you would be counting for the next 60 years before you reached 2 billion.

This tree is estimated to be 3,200 years old, which means when it was a sapling, humans were just discovering how to use iron to make cutting tools and weapons. Rome, much less the Roman Empire, wouldn’t emerge for another 500 years. But there was the President (its nickname from 90 years ago), quietly sprouting and growing taller and stronger in a snowy forest that, millennia later, would be called Northern California.

It’s so huge you can barely discern the intrepid scientists, and their climbing gear suspended among the upper branches. Wearing bright red and yellow parkas, they resemble apples and peaches nestled in the foliage.

As I stood there in my dining room admiring the centerfold, I felt a sense of displaced déjà vu. When I was a teenager (and beyond), centerfolds in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse featured oversized photos of oversexed women with their limbs splayed in provocative poses. Now I’m more impressed by a giant tree. How life has changed.

There’s a Method to My Mascara: Plump Up the Volume

26 Friday Apr 2013

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There are NEVER too many mascaras

There are NEVER too many mascaras.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Does anyone remember reading Cosmopolitan (Cosmo) magazine in the 1970s? Helen Gurley Brown’s creative inspiration for the single woman – the risqué diversion from Glamour and the now defunct Mademoiselle? Cosmo always ran a quiz. Maybe all the teen mags did. Maybe they still do. In any event, the purpose of the quiz was to give you, the reader, an insight into your personality. Pop psychology in 10 questions as to whether you were an innate extrovert, who embraced the idea of a party with 100 strangers, or a natural introvert, who could think of nothing more fun than a dinner for two by candlelight. Somehow, the choices given were always made to be mutually exclusive. You were this way, or that way, but never a combo of both. I loved taking those quizzes, and counting how many times I answered (a) or (b) or (c), and getting my nutshell diagnoses in a 100 word paragraph. Better yet, was picking the (a) or (b) or (c) based on my prediction of what the magazine had determined was my primary personality trait.

I don’t remember any of the quizzes today, but one question from one quiz has stuck in my mind over the past 40 years. And rather than it being a reflection of how I have changed, it is a reflection of how I have stayed exactly the same – at least with respect to this particular thing.

The question asked what make-up would I take with me to a desert island. I could choose between mascara, lipstick, or foundation. Hands down, I chose mascara, and today I would still choose mascara (albeit I love my red lipstick also).  Without mascara on, I always feel just a little bit naked, except at the beach – I draw the line at wearing makeup on the beach.

I am very methodical about how I apply mascara. I always have 6 to 8 wands of black mascara with a different type, size and style of brush. I keep a set at home; a set at the gym. And a travel set, because I hate the idea of leaving home without my mascara. People look at my line up and say, “Huh? Why do you have so many mascaras?”

Well, there is a technical method to my madness. The old ones help build the eyelash so it doesn’t clump. The medium old ones help lengthen the eyelash, and the newest mascara gives it shine. (As soon as I discard an old mascara, I buy a new one.)

I have shown my mascara application process to all my guy friends, and they are so appreciative. In fact, I think money can be made on this process.  I intend to ask one of my colleagues if my mascara system can be protected as a business method patent.

7 mascaras and one red lipstick

7 mascaras and one red lipstick.

The Cicadas are Coming (Again). The Cicadas are Coming (Again). And I’m Not Jiggy With It.

25 Thursday Apr 2013

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The cicadas are coming. drawing/photocollage by Julie Seyler.

The cicadas are coming. Drawing/photocollage by Julie Seyler.

BY BOB SMITH

It’s an entomological Paul Revere moment: the cicadas are coming. Every 17 years these giant, ugly bugs burrow out of their holes in the ground and crawl up every tree in sight en route to the upper branches to mate. On the way,
they make a cacophonous clacking racket as they molt, leaving empty husks of themselves clinging to crevices in the bark. Once the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit or so, here they come.

The first time cicadas appeared in my lifetime I was seven years old, in second grade at Merritt Memorial School. I was in love with my teacher and a little girl named Charlotte with curly brown hair. I remember reading aloud in class and feeling frustrated when my friend Pete struggled with simple words.

When they emerged again in 1979 I was 24. I was working full-time as a garbage man because it paid roughly twice what I’d earned as a textbook editor, the only job for which I was qualified by my undergraduate degree in English. I had been married for less than a year and was just beginning to realize that it was a disastrous mistake.

I was 41 when the cicadas came again in 1996. I was divorced and fourteen years into my second (much happier) marriage. With three kids between 6 and 11, and an intense career as an attorney, I was too busy to notice the emergence of lumbering red-eyed bugs.

This year’s appearance of the cicadas finds me approaching 60. The kids are fully grown and pursuing their own lives. (Although my youngest son, for now, is doing so under our roof.) The prospect of retirement is a cold reality as opposed to a theoretical, far-off possibility. And for some reason this year’s appearance of the cicadas fills me with foreboding.

Their raucous chorus of mating calls, alien eyes and zombie demeanor, and eerie exoskeleton shadows clinging to tree trunks are bad enough. But what makes me uneasy, what really knaws at me now, is their periodicity.

I’m looking at the timeline: when they come again, I’ll be 75. What quantum changes will have happened in my life by then? What will I have gained and lost in those years while the cicadas lay deep in their burrows, sucking at the tree roots and slowly maturing, marking time until their time comes to dig out again?

And the next time they emerge – as insurance salespeople are so fond of saying, “God willing” – I’ll be 92. Will I be able to see and hear them at all? Will I care? In the words of T.S. Eliot, do I dare to eat a peach?

My chances of living to see a third cicada emergence beyond the one expected this spring are nil. Chances are I will have been deposited into my own hole in the ground long before they crawl out of theirs.

In ancient China cicadas were viewed as symbols of rebirth. Many cultures today see this periodic influx as a gastronomic opportunity. After all, these are billions of slow-moving vegetarians that don’t fly away and can’t bite humans. They’re bundles of readily available nourishment on the hoof (or the wing or weird sticky leg, whatever). Yes, for many people, cicadas are what’s for dinner. Periodically.

I’m not a cicada, so I can’t crawl into a hole and count on coming back in 17 years to climb a tree and get jiggy. But I am a bipedal, meat-eating, surface-dwelling top predator, so why not revel in my role? These fugly bugs may have a high gag factor but they’re incredibly low in cholesterol, and they’re packed with protein and nutrients.

I’ve already found a couple of good recipes. If you can’t join them, eat them.

Maybe I’ll live longer.

Boomers Rocked AM Radio in the ’60s

23 Tuesday Apr 2013

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Transistor Head. Collaged drawing by Julie Seyler

Transistor Head. Collaged drawing by Julie Seyler.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

The Baby Boomer generation has some terrible PR. Most people see us as the selfish “Me Generation” – idealists who sold out. This is in stark contrast to our parents, whom I am convinced are called the “Greatest Generation” just to annoy us. Damn you, Tom Brokaw!

But whenever I get into a discussion about how little Baby Boomers have contributed to society, I always point to two things that our generation provided the world – rock music and personal computers. Interestingly, the brand name “Apple” covers both of those.

Now I don’t think that our music is better than the music of our parents or children. (Well, OK I do think it’s better than most of the music my children listened to when they were teenagers.) But obviously “better” is a function of taste, and our music appeals to our tastes just as big band music appealed to our parents, and rap appealed to our children.

Back in the ‘60s, most New York-area Baby Boomers got their music from AM radio. Our parents were listening to Dean Martin on the hi-fi, while we listened to our music on lo-fi (or no-fi) transistor radios. WABC was the perennial top dog in this market with talented people like Dan Ingram and Ron Lundy behind the microphone.

I was reminded of this recently because back on July 3, 1981, I ran my reel-to-reel tape recorder while Dan Ingram celebrated his 20th anniversary on WABC. I put the tape away and forgot about it. A few weeks ago this musical time capsule resurfaced at my house. I carefully threaded the take-up reel and hit the Play button. I was instantly transported back to my youth. The music was there, and that iconic voice, who referred to his audience as “Kemosabe,” and in beach weather told you when to “roll your bod,” presided over “the Ingram mess.”

For much of our youth in New York, WABC was our music. And then on May 10, 1982 the music died, as WABC changed to an all-news station. I think that for many Baby Boomers, that day marked the end of our youth. Our music was gone from the mainstream.

Well, of course it wasn’t gone altogether. It had just migrated to FM. But it wasn’t the same after WABC. I never listened to Top 40 radio again. And certainly the music post-1982 was less “our music” than the music that had dominated the airwaves for the 20 years before that. So Baby Boomer music became oldies, and some of the former WABC disk jockeys migrated to the oldies station -WCBS-FM.

But now I know that whenever I want to be transported back to the heyday of AM radio I have that WABC time capsule on my tape deck. And there is a website called http://www.musicradio77.com/ that is full of recordings and information about this New York radio institution from our youth.

Clearly WABC was not the only radio station in New York that played rock music. It was simply the most popular. It provided that community of common experience that is so hard to find today in our fragmented media world. It was the chief outlet for Baby Boomer music in the New York area, and I will put the music that Baby Boomers produced up against the best of any other generation.