Oh Susie this resonated with me and I am a solid Gen Xer. The longing for a time where we were more connected to the immediate world and less connected to hustle and image and brand is so strong in me and you embodied that feeling of longing so well. I have this theory that part of our overwhelm and collective grief that cannot be calmed is due to this over connection without community. When we lived without the internet, and in smaller communities of family, neighborhood, town, we could collectively hold each other’s grief, and bring the casserole, attend the wake. But we were not physiologically, emotionally or mentally built to handle the challenges, horror and grief of an entire planet. Especially now that we have so many hurdles to real in person connection. So thank you for your act of resistance. I’ll join you. 🙏❤️
Welcome aboard, Jocelyn. I really appreciate what you've written about how "we were not physiologically, emotionally or mentally built to handle the challenges, horror and grief of an entire planet." It makes complete sense to me that the demands made on us (or that we make on ourselves) to carry so much suffering interfere with our capacity to make human scale in-person communities.
Thank you, Susie! ;) I'm glad that makes sense to you. There's just so much grief and so much isolation and not enough energy/time/support for tight-knit, local community connection.
Susie, as always evocatively written with a strong sense of personhood for the aging. Partly, I thought of legacy writing as I read your piece (not only because it prompts our memories … the scent of a library filled with love and respect for books and knowledge)…It is the purpose of legacy writing for the writer to be known, to be seen, to be remembered, to bless the future with our experience in a world very different from youths'…our wisdom doesn’t die with us, but provides breadth to their world views, and perhaps even produces delight.
Rachael...I have thought of you often when writing these essays over the last year and a half. Without being completely conscious of it, I have definitely been influenced by your work.
I have a friend with a daughter in Portugal. The daughter wants her parents to move there, but the friend (73) hasn't retired and doesn't seem to want to, quite. I read a long article about a woman who moved there because her daughter wanted her to and she LOVES it. Apparently Portugal is one of the places where the aged are honored and respected. On another note, Max and I are doing something really fun with a bunch of middle school kids this spring. One of the schools here has some unusual programs including a class the includes any takers from our independent living community and any kids who want to sign up to hang out with us and do fun, sometimes wacky projects. It has truly given me a lift. I got to lead a session of "poetry" writing - more like Mad Libs, as it turned out - and it was hilarious.
Portugal is an enchanted place. I've always thought it had a lot to do with the fact that their time of empire was long past. Hanging out with the school kids sounds like a joy. I predict that some of them will remember your interest and your gift for language for many years.
I'd love to go to Portugal. Given what happened in Miami on our return from Costa Rica, we are not eager to set foot in another major airport, but we'll see. Maybe we'll give in. Re what I did with the kids: Aw. I hope so, though it was only a momentary experience.
Lordy, lordy, I just treated my CR group to a rant about a restaurant I recently went to where there was absolutely no interaction with a human. You sat down at the table, took a picture of a QR code, ordered on your phone, paid on your phone. Occasionally a hand appeared with drink or food but never a word. and at completely random uncoordinated times. And of course the place was designed to maximize the noise level. I actually started to cry at one point. Perhaps a form of resistance.
I experienced that horror for the first time in an airport restaurant where it was awful but somehow appropriate. But eliminating waitstaff altogether and everywhere? Where's the pleasure in that?
Thank you Susie. Appreciate your piece very much. This 80+ born in London under bombs, remembering horse and cart days delivering milk, or coal, on through decades of societal, gender role, material and cultural changes marvels at the wonders of now. Actively writing a memoir, I hope to capture a sense of the importance of memory as a historical snapshot of the times lived by one woman. For me change is exciting. I have to learn new skills, keep my conversation relevant to youngsters, work out time zone differences for when I Zoom with a cohort of writer friends thousands of leagues from Australia in an opposite direction and hemisphere. It is thrilling, my morning might be their afternoon yesterday‼️
This is a marvelous and inspiring response. Time was when memoir didn't have the cachet it deserved in the literary marketplace. But now, I think we all realize that mining the past through the lens of one's own experience is at the core of what makes us human. As long as we keep storytelling, we may just make it.
We will. Eternally optimistic, I trust intrinsic human virtues and values. We will get to a place of peace and equanimity but it may be a painful journey and take a while
YES. Through writing my stories I process a great deal of emotion taken up in living them. For me the telling brings me to a place of compassion for self and others. Understanding the human condition as a phenomenon which each of us experiences in our unique ways.
Thank you for this thoughtful and wonderful riff which felt oddly comforting. I find myself glad that I am 81 and not tied to the "new-fangled" way of communicating, as my mother-in-law spoke of cell phones some 300 years ago!
I wish we could sit down over a cup of tea and talk in person!! My 16 year old granddaughter who visited recently asked me this: "Ami, when you were young and didn't have cell phones, what did you do when you were with other people you didn't really know and you felt awkward?" Ah, we tried talking... I'm glad she can recognize the question!
Great news! We'll be back for our annual visit to the Berkshires September 20-29 and will be staying in GB. Tea is in order! Wonderful story about your granddaughter. My favorite story concerns my grandson who was 2 or 3 at the time (now turning 15). The family was on vacation in a motel and everyone really wanted to go in the pool but he wouldn't put down his book. He was reading the Gideon bible upside down.
Susie, I get it, and you've once again expressed IT beautifully. I'd like to add that in my observation of a few young people - my 20-something step grandkids who grew up in New Hampshire, and my own 17 year old grand twins here in Rochester - they don't seem in the least dehumanized by all the virtual living options. I think they experience them differently than we do, though I can't describe how. They are all very involved in the real world, too, not just hanging out in virtual reality. So there's that....
Thank you, Marjorie. I hope I didn't sound like an old scold. I'm certainly not saying that all young people are hopelessly infatuated with the screen. I just wanted to comment that seventysomethings have something to offer that needs to be given space to be heard.
The Spanish poet and professor Carlos Bousono, author of Teoria de la expresion poetica, used a term I've never forgotten: Nostalgia por lo nunca ha pasado: nostalgia for that which never happened. That's true yearning for you.
That seems to happen when the past is sentimentalized. I'm on the alert to avoid that. I am not a Luddite chaining myself to my loom. Just want to have the opportunity to pass along what I know.
" We are the people who caressed the spines of library books and inhaled their scent. " Walking through the door of the Wellsboro public library at 10 or the New York Society Library at 60, the scent promised possibilities...even today at 80+ when I walk into the local NYC branch on 1st Avenue. The staff there tells me that since the pandemic more young people have been coming to buy books of poetry and philosophy in their downstairs book cellar. The cycle or circle of life, yes?
Oh Susie this resonated with me and I am a solid Gen Xer. The longing for a time where we were more connected to the immediate world and less connected to hustle and image and brand is so strong in me and you embodied that feeling of longing so well. I have this theory that part of our overwhelm and collective grief that cannot be calmed is due to this over connection without community. When we lived without the internet, and in smaller communities of family, neighborhood, town, we could collectively hold each other’s grief, and bring the casserole, attend the wake. But we were not physiologically, emotionally or mentally built to handle the challenges, horror and grief of an entire planet. Especially now that we have so many hurdles to real in person connection. So thank you for your act of resistance. I’ll join you. 🙏❤️
Welcome aboard, Jocelyn. I really appreciate what you've written about how "we were not physiologically, emotionally or mentally built to handle the challenges, horror and grief of an entire planet." It makes complete sense to me that the demands made on us (or that we make on ourselves) to carry so much suffering interfere with our capacity to make human scale in-person communities.
Thank you, Susie! ;) I'm glad that makes sense to you. There's just so much grief and so much isolation and not enough energy/time/support for tight-knit, local community connection.
Susie, you are so good at articulating boomer malaise that it tends to leave me silent. You say it all so well.
I want to hear what you have to say, Judith. There's more where that came from and it would be wonderful to share it with one another.
Another creatively precise and satisfying last sentence (in the opinion of this dinosaur enthusiast, literally and figuratively)!
Maybe you could be a brontosaurus. They seem kind of friendly.
And big! I fancy the parasaurolophus: the ones with trombones on their heads, that run in herds :)
Have not had the pleasure.
Susie, as always evocatively written with a strong sense of personhood for the aging. Partly, I thought of legacy writing as I read your piece (not only because it prompts our memories … the scent of a library filled with love and respect for books and knowledge)…It is the purpose of legacy writing for the writer to be known, to be seen, to be remembered, to bless the future with our experience in a world very different from youths'…our wisdom doesn’t die with us, but provides breadth to their world views, and perhaps even produces delight.
Rachael...I have thought of you often when writing these essays over the last year and a half. Without being completely conscious of it, I have definitely been influenced by your work.
Yes! the invisible Council of Elders
Do we get special hats?
I have a friend with a daughter in Portugal. The daughter wants her parents to move there, but the friend (73) hasn't retired and doesn't seem to want to, quite. I read a long article about a woman who moved there because her daughter wanted her to and she LOVES it. Apparently Portugal is one of the places where the aged are honored and respected. On another note, Max and I are doing something really fun with a bunch of middle school kids this spring. One of the schools here has some unusual programs including a class the includes any takers from our independent living community and any kids who want to sign up to hang out with us and do fun, sometimes wacky projects. It has truly given me a lift. I got to lead a session of "poetry" writing - more like Mad Libs, as it turned out - and it was hilarious.
Portugal is an enchanted place. I've always thought it had a lot to do with the fact that their time of empire was long past. Hanging out with the school kids sounds like a joy. I predict that some of them will remember your interest and your gift for language for many years.
I'd love to go to Portugal. Given what happened in Miami on our return from Costa Rica, we are not eager to set foot in another major airport, but we'll see. Maybe we'll give in. Re what I did with the kids: Aw. I hope so, though it was only a momentary experience.
No, not particular to us, but I suspect we take the lead. Our culture reveres youth, whereas some revere the elderly.
I wonder what it would be like to live like that. The honor, the respect. Aging would take on an entirely different quality.
Lordy, lordy, I just treated my CR group to a rant about a restaurant I recently went to where there was absolutely no interaction with a human. You sat down at the table, took a picture of a QR code, ordered on your phone, paid on your phone. Occasionally a hand appeared with drink or food but never a word. and at completely random uncoordinated times. And of course the place was designed to maximize the noise level. I actually started to cry at one point. Perhaps a form of resistance.
I experienced that horror for the first time in an airport restaurant where it was awful but somehow appropriate. But eliminating waitstaff altogether and everywhere? Where's the pleasure in that?
Thank you Susie. Appreciate your piece very much. This 80+ born in London under bombs, remembering horse and cart days delivering milk, or coal, on through decades of societal, gender role, material and cultural changes marvels at the wonders of now. Actively writing a memoir, I hope to capture a sense of the importance of memory as a historical snapshot of the times lived by one woman. For me change is exciting. I have to learn new skills, keep my conversation relevant to youngsters, work out time zone differences for when I Zoom with a cohort of writer friends thousands of leagues from Australia in an opposite direction and hemisphere. It is thrilling, my morning might be their afternoon yesterday‼️
This is a marvelous and inspiring response. Time was when memoir didn't have the cachet it deserved in the literary marketplace. But now, I think we all realize that mining the past through the lens of one's own experience is at the core of what makes us human. As long as we keep storytelling, we may just make it.
We will. Eternally optimistic, I trust intrinsic human virtues and values. We will get to a place of peace and equanimity but it may be a painful journey and take a while
The storytelling will help us get through it, don't you think?
YES. Through writing my stories I process a great deal of emotion taken up in living them. For me the telling brings me to a place of compassion for self and others. Understanding the human condition as a phenomenon which each of us experiences in our unique ways.
Thanks for sharing your experience here!
I wonder whether every generation in the U.S. has felt that a certain amount of meaningful living was being lost to “progress”.
Do you think that's particular to Americans?
Thank you for this thoughtful and wonderful riff which felt oddly comforting. I find myself glad that I am 81 and not tied to the "new-fangled" way of communicating, as my mother-in-law spoke of cell phones some 300 years ago!
I find it comforting to think there's something we have to offer instead of always feeling like I don't know what I'm doing.
I wish we could sit down over a cup of tea and talk in person!! My 16 year old granddaughter who visited recently asked me this: "Ami, when you were young and didn't have cell phones, what did you do when you were with other people you didn't really know and you felt awkward?" Ah, we tried talking... I'm glad she can recognize the question!
Great news! We'll be back for our annual visit to the Berkshires September 20-29 and will be staying in GB. Tea is in order! Wonderful story about your granddaughter. My favorite story concerns my grandson who was 2 or 3 at the time (now turning 15). The family was on vacation in a motel and everyone really wanted to go in the pool but he wouldn't put down his book. He was reading the Gideon bible upside down.
Susie, I get it, and you've once again expressed IT beautifully. I'd like to add that in my observation of a few young people - my 20-something step grandkids who grew up in New Hampshire, and my own 17 year old grand twins here in Rochester - they don't seem in the least dehumanized by all the virtual living options. I think they experience them differently than we do, though I can't describe how. They are all very involved in the real world, too, not just hanging out in virtual reality. So there's that....
Thank you, Marjorie. I hope I didn't sound like an old scold. I'm certainly not saying that all young people are hopelessly infatuated with the screen. I just wanted to comment that seventysomethings have something to offer that needs to be given space to be heard.
We do indeed, and thank you for saying so!!
The Spanish poet and professor Carlos Bousono, author of Teoria de la expresion poetica, used a term I've never forgotten: Nostalgia por lo nunca ha pasado: nostalgia for that which never happened. That's true yearning for you.
That seems to happen when the past is sentimentalized. I'm on the alert to avoid that. I am not a Luddite chaining myself to my loom. Just want to have the opportunity to pass along what I know.
" We are the people who caressed the spines of library books and inhaled their scent. " Walking through the door of the Wellsboro public library at 10 or the New York Society Library at 60, the scent promised possibilities...even today at 80+ when I walk into the local NYC branch on 1st Avenue. The staff there tells me that since the pandemic more young people have been coming to buy books of poetry and philosophy in their downstairs book cellar. The cycle or circle of life, yes?
How exciting to hear about these post-pandemic book sales made by young people! Thanks for sharing this news!
This is very encouraging, Mary. The preservation of the culture of the book is dear to my heart.