Life Experiences Add Up

Getting Back to Your Roots

“It’s time to get back to our roots.” I have heard this numerous times but never quite understood the true significance of it until I had the chance to do this very thing. When the opportunity arose for me to live this philosophy, even briefly, I cannot say that my initial reaction was one of excitement but rather one of compelling obligation. This will be good for me and I will get something out of this – that sort of thing. And so, I went back to my roots.

Shortly after losing both parents, my siblings and I felt we should do something together, just the seven of us, as a way to reconnect with one another. Since we still had not visited our parents grave-sites as they were laid to rest in a different part of the country, we felt this to be a relevant enough reason to not only reconnect and honor our parents, but experience the “getting back to our roots” concept. We could all meet for a 3-day weekend, visit our parents headstones at the family plot and as an added bonus, since the cemetery happened to be in the same area, visit our childhood home, the only home that all seven of us lived in together at the same time. We would visit both of our grandparents homes, and reconnect with a few long-lost relatives This trip would be steeped in memories for all of us and a part of our psyche that only we shared. Again, my initial reaction was not one of glee, but one of ‘this will be good for me.”

We gave our trip a title and began planning the “Fee Family Most Excellent Adventure”. The excitement began to simmer as the plans progressed. Commandeered by eldest big brother, and full Colonel (a helpful criteria), we were all given different and various assignments; a few had to reach out to long-lost relatives to plan lunch, some to contact the new residents of our grandparents former home to arrange a tour, a few to map out the driving routes and so on. Being together is key, so we rented a “BAV” – a big ass van to transport the seven of us. We also all stayed at the same hotel – 5 girls in two rooms and the boys in another. The big ground rule we had was no spouses. This was a time to experience and be who we once were before life eventually defined us a mother, wife, father and husband. On this trip, we were once again children. Flights were arranged, we had a rendezvous meeting point at the airport, and the “most excellent adventure” began. While in the van, the girls drove the boys crazy with our incessant chatter – the boys up front commandeered the vehicle as we shouted out –
” remember this…remember that?”

The trip began with a visit to the cemetery. It might be my generation, but it seems to me that more and more people are opting to be cremated and scatter loved one’s ashes rather than having a traditional headstone in a family plot. I subscribe to this theory of scattering ashes, but I must say that seeing my parents names etched in stone and laying aside their family members was very moving for me and actually filled me with joy, an emotion I was surprised to feel. Having this dedicated place to honor my parents respects their memory and provides a place to remember and reflect. The seven of us had our own memorial, standing in a circle and holding hands, and each taking turns speaking, reading a memento, or just being silent for a moment or two.

And so it went. We visited our childhood home and did the usual – took photos outside of where we went to school, drove past old friends homes and another very special thing – we found the old swimming hole. We had to hike back by the river in mud and leaves, but we found what remained of the diving board, the shuffleboard set and the swing-set.
I found myself thinking – did I really live here? It seems like an eternity ago – and made me realize how fast life goes – what were my memories and my life at one point are now just mud, leaves and old rusty metal pipes. When we visited the church we grew up in, the icing on the cake was bumping into someone we had known 40 years ago – imagine that! We were given a tour of our Grandmother’s home by the new owner, and to get there, we drove the route we always took to get to Grandma’s house. As we were driving on the twisting and turning roads, I found myself staring out the window just like when I was a kid, looking at all the familiar landmarks along the way. The memories came flooding in, and to paraphrase a line from the movie “Field of Dreams”…the memories will be so thick you will have to brush them from your face… Upon walking around my former Grandmother’s home, everything there was just as it was. The back yard ivy and cellar door are still there and look the same.

and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.

There really only was one sobering moment, at least for me, and that was the visit to my “Lake Grandma’s” house. She was my father’s mother and we visited her often. It was there that I have the most vivid childhood memories. We would walk up the road to get water from the pump, eat meals outside in the rock wall garden, take the row-boat out on the lake and go fishing, and swim all day long. Her house had two separate smaller houses – one was a log cabin which my father and his brothers lived in, and the other was my Aunt Ellen’s house. The three houses had been torn down and replaced with a rather large edifice. There was not one thing that looked the same, so we walked over to the neighbors and I took a photo looking down at the lake where the log cabin stood – now and then.

After the trip ended, I was not only happy we made the pilgrimage, I was glowing about it. This trip was not about tracing our family lineage back to the stone age, but rather delving into childhood memories that have made us what we are today. This seemed to be a significant part of the healing process and provided a sense of unity for all of us. It was such an enriching travel experience that has since added a new dimension to life for me. The trek to our “roots” was so interwoven with emotion, that it became a journey in both senses of the word – physical and personal. It was one of the most re-affirming experiences of my life.

National Poetry Month

In honor of National Poetry Month, I would like to dedicate this blog post to my Father, Robert Fee, whom I credit for my love of poetry. Poetry spoke to his soul and it continues to speak to mine. I can recollect certain poems instantaneously when a time presents itself. My love of poetry, cultivated by the times I grew up in, filled a hunger inside of me that was not satisfied with movies, cable TV or social media like we have today. Poetry comes to us bringing life, and focuses on giving us a better understanding of it. Poetry is ancient and vital language, and can be inspirational on the highest level. Once embedded in your memory, it becomes an experience that is intense, much more so than ordinary language.

My family had a brown tattered anthology type book containing short stories and poems. It was this book which my father read from that became my poetic foundation. I also was taught poetry in school – it was not viewed as offensive or controversial curriculum as it can be now. I believe education about poetry is essential towards a better understanding of it and once I learned the structure of poetry, it made grasping it all the more easier. Advanced Poetry, which I took in college, opened up a new structural world of poetry for me – I learned about “Poetic Feet” and was absolutely mesmerized – I mean, who knew? The poetic foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most traditions of poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited by the sound pattern the foot represents. Check out this quick guide to Prosody for a crash course.

Poems can be fitting to use in most circumstances; weddings, funerals, birthdays, and anniversary’s. The poetic prose can turn sorrows and pain into something beautiful, and can help to celebrate life’s milestones very eloquently. My father read poetry often, and I can conjure up the image of him reading poems with a marked intensity, and I could see his feelings behind the words he read aloud. Although initially I would roll my eyes at the readings, the prose slowly became a part of my psyche. Ozymandias, a fourteen-line sonnet metered in iambic pentameter by Percy Bysshe Shelley, is a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time and one I think of often when I find myself getting too “self important”. “Trees“, a lyric poem by American poet Joyce Kilmer consisting of twelve lines of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse, depicts a feminine personification of a tree pressing its mouth to the Earth’s breast, looking at God, and raising its arms to pray. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, written with four stressed syllables per line, varying on an iambic tetrameter base, makes me to be mindful to live the Carpe Diem “Seize the Day” attitude.

…I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Of course, I cannot forget the childhood poems which were read to me over and over again, and poems I often read to myself while lying in bed. Wynken, Blynken and Nod, a fantasy bed-time story of three children sailing in a wooden shoe and fishing in the stars by American Poet Eugene Field, symbolizes a sleepy child’s blinking eyes and nodding head. Who can forget “Little Orphant Annie“ a poem written by James Whitcomb Riley with the famous lines that always made me squeal…

An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

The Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson never got old for me. “Bed in Summer” and “A Good Play” lulled me to sleep and when I recollect those verses in each poem, I can still smell the Nebraska night air and recall having to go to sleep before it was dark. As the American Poet Amy Lowell most eloquently wrote… “Poetry and History are the textbooks to the heart of man, and poetry is at once the most intimate and enduring.”

Perhaps the most important poem to me and one so influential to my family that my sister read it at our father’s funeral, is the four six-line stanzas of a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme where each line is metered in iambic tetrameter – William Wordworth’s Daffodils. This beautifully written poem is great to think of when I get bogged down in worrisome details of my life and keeps me grounded in the inherent unity between man and nature – a sort of “the sun will come up tomorrow” feeling. Spring is always just around the corner, and the daffodils will bloom yet again. I have a copy of this poem on my desktop at work along with a picture of daffodils as a reminder to stay centered. Poetry to me is experiencing life at its fullest.

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

50’s So Far

It seems like lately I have been reading quite a few blogs about age and “age decades” – what were my forties like, how it feels to be twenty, the X Generation. I never felt compelled to discuss my age because it never really mattered to me – I was too busy living it. Being in my fifties is a completely different story however. I do not recall focusing more on my age and my age group until now.

For most of my life, I have been busy accomplishing and doing. My teenage years I spent dreaming about college and living my own life away from my parents, participating in high school activities, experimenting with many different types of teenage “rights of passage” and dreaming about the person I would become. My twenties were exciting – I became a “legal” drinker, went to college, got married and had my three children. My thirties and forties were busy raising the kids, buying, remodeling and creating a home, carpooling, discovering the joys of gardening, canning, cooking, traveling and finally going back to work after a 6 year absence…. lots going on.

As I enter my 50’s, I find myself an empty nester with increased disposable income, flexibility in daily life, an enjoyable career with leftover time to indulge myself and make decisions just for me. Sounds wonderful? I am not there yet. It just seems a bit unstructured and almost as if things have come to a screeching halt. I feel this is truly the generation when I am really creating myself yet unlike my teenage years, I do not have the luxury of time to ponder on what I want to do with the rest of my life, nor do I feel I have unlimited possibilities as I once had. Why is this so? Where is the sense I had in my twenties and early years that the possibilities were endless? I guess it is because there are some definite “age” criteria that I throw into the mix now which defines my generation with a bit of limiting structure. What exactly is that criteria?

What does 50 look like?

We are looking older. Granted, you can say that in every generation, but it becomes much more poignant in our 50’s. Each year from here on out really shows in subtle changes on our face. Going from 25 to 30 or even 40 to 45 is not that dramatic, but going from 50 to 55 certainly is. For me, noticing the subtleties in my changing body and profile make me more aware that I am getting old, that life is really fleeting, and that I had better get a move on with things because I do not have the luxury of being 20 and having MY WHOLE LIFE ahead of me – there is a bit of a sense of urgency for me.

We talk about our health more. Acquaintances die and it is not so shocking when you hear the news – it is more of an “OK, this is beginning to happen”. This makes you definitely realize how important health is to where it becomes a point of discussion. I got together for my annual reunion with my siblings recently and within the first hour we covered the usual topics – have you had a colonoscopy, what is your cholesterol level, do you have any menopause issues, how are your hot flashes, are you keeping up with yearly checkups, have you had a bone density test to determine if you have osteoporosis or not? I guess what really got me was when I received my AARP card in the mail – available for those who are 50 and older. That was a cold dose of reality right there. (although some of the discounts offered through their organization are quite substantial.)

Our parents are old and require assistance. I lost both of my parents a few years ago and it seems like friends in my age group are all going through this – our parents need to be moved to assisted living, need help at home, cannot take care of themselves, have Alzheimer’s and various other serious health issues or need ongoing health care support. This can be an eye-opening experience and another hard dose of reality that time is marching onward.

We have a hard time seeing. I laugh when I get re-acquainted with long-lost friends on Facebook and I see them wearing reading glasses in their photos – classic. It just happens. This is a completely normal part of aging that happens to everyone and is known as presbyopia. As we age, our lens becomes stiffer, making it more difficult for our muscles to change its shape. As a result, our eye can no longer have a full range of focus (accommodation). Therefore, we rely on glasses (or contacts) to do the focusing for us. The need for reading glasses is a dead giveaway for being in your 50’s.

We are bombarded with a plethora of health related commercials targeted for our age demographic. – Commercials for prescriptions; Viagra, Abilify, Lexapro, Lipotor, Crestor, Ambien, Celexa; commercials for Our Time dating sites, long term health insurance, plastic surgery, – boring but necessary. Almost all of the top 10 prescribed drugs are for the 50’s generation and up – Lipitor and Crestor, cholesterol-lowering drugs, 94.1 million prescriptions; blood pressure drugs, 87.4 million prescriptions; angina/blood pressure drugs, 57.2 million prescriptions; not to mention sleeping pills, blood thinners, and medications for diabetes and depression.

We do not have good role models and the stereotype for 50 is not that great. When I say “not good role models”, I am talking about celebrities and the people we see in the media every day who are getting noticeable plastic surgery that just makes them, well, look weird. I am not a big fan of movies geared towards our age and older – I feel we are portrayed as sexless people, basically heading towards that point in our life where we become insignificant and are really treated like children. I am not a fan of the movies that show older adults trying to resurrect youth – Last Vegas to name one. I find it rather embarrassing.

OK – not to be a wet blanket with all this “stuff” but I do feel the above list weighs on my decision-making opportunities nowadays. I feel bombarded with it. Let us start stressing and pushing the positive emotions and emotional perks that this decade is bringing. Try to never say NO and embrace new things – it’s okay! Wisdom, experience, vision, realism, practicality, and the “nothing is taken for granted” attitude prevail over anything else. I just wish they would prevail in the general public’s eyes – imagine what a wonderful world! Just sayin…..