Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow?

My hair is in its Third Third. Not just the color, and not just the texture.

It started with sparse bangs on the right side of my head. At first, I thought it was just unruliness, another hair rebellion. My hairdresser thought it was because I slept on my right side, but now it’s yet another sign of Third Third-itis: my head is downsizing my hair.

After my daughter was born, I had little baby hairs sprouting all over my head. They were the signs of recovery from pregnancy hair loss, and I was like a little, furry tennis ball of new hair. Yeah, well, that’s not happening now.

My bangs are getting wispier. (Why mostly on the right side??) I have no idea what’s happening in the back or top of my head. My doctor says it’s only visible to people taller than I. Which I guess is a growing number as I shrink, too.

So first I noticed the bangs problem – which could have been debatable –  but the hair in the shower drain catcher is unequivocal. Instead of cleaning it up with a tissue, I have to use a paper towel. It’s a wad of red.

And then there’s the hairbrush.

My hairdresser suggested Costco’s 5 Percent Extra Strength Hair Regrowth for Men. For men! So I had to think about this: how far was I willing to go to defy age and Nature?

Yes, I dye my hair. But that didn’t begin as a means to cover gray or age; it began as a theatrical requirement for a particular role. It morphed into an identity signature long before age had anything to do with it. So I’ll keep the color. In fact, I’ve noticed that white roots make hair loss appear worse, so now I have to be even more prompt about coloring my hair. [And if anyone is going to Costa Rica, please let me know and I’ll place an order for my hair dye with you.]

But I’m stopping short of putting Extra Strength chemicals on my head. I’ve decided: I’m prepared to lose my hair. I wonder what I’ll end up looking like?

Sometimes, when my hair is looking particularly bizarre, I’ve said I look like Bozo the Clown. But I just checked images of Bozo, and he was bald on top! He had no bangs! And he was actually pretty scary looking.

On the good and very lucky side, I am not losing my hair because I’m undergoing cancer treatments. I am truly grateful.

And then I remembered the Velveteen Rabbit:

By the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

My hair has been loved off! I’m becoming Real!

We all fall down...

I fell down and hit my head.

Now I bet you’re thinking: Age-Related. You’re not thinking klutzy-related or athletic enterprise or slapstick or ha,ha,ha or so-what-else-is-new. You’re thinking uh, oh, fragility, weakness, elderly.

Argh!

So when the little toddler on ice skates got confused and bumped around and came backwards at me, I knew I was in trouble. I’m not a hockey player; I can’t turn on a dime. First skate of the season, I’m a Tin Man on skates. So I went down backwards and my head slammed into the ice.

Going down on ice takes your breath away. Slamming your head takes that up many, many notches. I’m pretty sure I panicked inside, and when I realized my jaw didn’t seem to fit in my head any more, I was … distressed.

Suddenly, people were all around me: “Do you need an EMT? Do you want us to call 911? Do you want to go to the hospital?” Tim and Sophie walked me off the skating oval, and I sat on an upside-down bucket. Sophie was worried, “You didn’t cry in Florida.”

“When was I in Florida?” (Was I crying now?)

“Typhoon Lagoon.” Oh, that’s right, I’d cracked my head before going down a water slide while we were on the National Waterpark Tour. I don’t remember that hurting. I just remember the blood everywhere. When I got to the bottom, 10-year-old Sophie exclaimed, “Mommy, all your hair dye came out all at once.”

So Friday, Sophie insisted she had to take my hat off and see if my head was bleeding. It wasn’t. She was relieved. I said, “Y’know what’s really killing me? That everyone here at this whole big Winter Solstice event is probably saying, ‘Did you hear about the old lady that fell?’”

I was on a plane a year or so ago and got up to stand in line for the restroom. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor and the flight attendants were telling me to stay there. Then they announced for any health professional onboard to come to the rear of the plane. It was all very confusing since no one else was required to get on the floor, just me.

Since then, I have learned that if you get up too fast from an airplane seat, you can faint. I guess I took down the flight attendant’s coffee pot with me. But it was the look on their faces that said not anyone can faint; only old, frail, infirm, elderly people faint. And then it’s so tragic.

When you’re 20 years old and you faint – I have low blood pressure, I’ve fainted my whole life – you get up, laugh, and people make jokes. They tell you how funny it was.

Now they look at me with Concern. I’m on the downhill slide to bedridden.

Am I being too sensitive? Do you know what I’m describing? Do we look … pitiable … if we stumble and fall?

Now, I must admit, the thing that sticks with me most about the whole event was a very kind woman named Mary (whom I’d met over at the hot chocolate station earlier). Mary stood next to me and said, “Relax into your body and let it tell you what it needs” or something like that which was incredibly calming and true, and I did it. I’d guess Mary was in her Third Third, too.

Very quickly, the daughter-with-an-iPhone looked into my eyes to make sure my pupils were the same size. When we got home, she looked at me again. She was worried because there were dark circles under my eyes, and that’s A Sign. “Or are those dark circles always there? It’s not blood pooling, is it?”

This is why we have children.

Then she said, “I just don’t want you to be a Natasha Richardson story! She hit her head, came home, hung out with her family, and died later. Do you have a headache?”

“What do you mean ‘hung out’!?! Like she was fine and then she died?”

“Only because she had a headache later.”

“But if I take Tylenol, will that mask the killer headache I might have?!?”

“Don’t worry. We’re watching to see if you deteriorate.”

This is why we have children.

Okay, it’s days later. It still hurts to brush my hair over the spot, and my jaw can’t tackle a bagel, but I haven’t deteriorated.

Hooray, I have not deteriorated!

Bra Ladies

When I was a teenager, my mother used to take me to Dora Myers Corsetry to buy bras, and I HATED IT. Old ladies with glasses strung on beaded chains would poke and prod at me, and – did I mention I HATED IT? Why couldn’t we just go to Macy’s like all the other girls?

But now I’m in my Third Third … and I travel 4,000 miles to buy my bras at Mary Corsetieres on Long Island. I line up with all the other women who are outside on a cold New York day waiting for Mary to open up at 11 a.m. Yes, I’ve come the furthest, but there are women there from Manhattan, from Massachusetts, from Connecticut. We enter and sign in, and we are prepared to wait several hours. Unless you’re not and you’re new, and then you are horrified by the “terrible customer service,” but we Mary regulars know better.

Because once you’ve been fitted at Mary’s, you can’t go anywhere else.

The fitters at Mary’s – my sisters and I call them the “Bra Ladies” – can just look at you and say things like, “Now you’re a 36 F … in your left breast. So we’ll have to go up for that but adjust it for the right breast.” And this is what distinguishes them, this is why we return like salmon to our spawning grounds: they alter the bras right there, on their sewing machines!

They add a dart here, a line of stitching there. If those straps are uncomfortable, put in different ones. If you’re between sizes, let them take it in and make it a size just for you. The bottom line: you leave with a bra – or three or four because when will you be back? – that fits you and only you perfectly.

Now that I’m in my Third Third, I know the value of that.

I’m sending my Aunt Evelyn there because she needs to have front closure bras. I asked the fitter about that, and she said they can make ANY bra into a front closure for her. Women came with the dresses for their daughters’ weddings so they could get the bra first and have the dress fitted after, only with the right bra.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of my Bra Lady because I was too scrambled remembering the names of my bras, Anita and Freya and Dominique. But as she ran up and downstairs searching out bras for me to try, I eavesdropped on the conversations in the other fitting rooms.

Have we made it all the way into our Third Thirds to be so utterly embarrassed by, ashamed of, and angry at our bodies? Every woman didn’t like her flab or her fat, her breasts or her butt. They didn’t like the sag or the slump, the blob or the bumps, the skin or the hair. Hearing that cacophony of disgust and self-loathing was enough to shut my mouth tight (although I’ve been known to say the same things).

One of my other New York adventures was an exhibit at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology on “The Body: Fashion and Physique.” The exhibit focused on the lack of diversity in and the deception of fashion advertising. A video showed a live shoot with a live model … and then the photo manipulation afterwards – lengthening her thighs, narrowing her waist, lifting her breasts – that would be impossible for a real human’s anatomy to match.

Mary should show that video to all her customers. Through it all, the Bra Ladies were consoling but tough New York psychologists: “You’re 60; you want to not be 60?” “They’re called thighs. They hold you up.” “This is the size you are; you want to be happy in a bra or miserable in one?” And then they would provide a bra that held and supported and made someone look and feel great. And women left restored.

Who wouldn’t travel 4,000 miles for that? I even went home with a swimsuit.

But just in case, Mary’s has my whole bra history – with size, style, and altering notes – on file. If I’m desperate, I can order by mail.

Driver Ed: Third Third Style

Driver Ed in our First Third: harrowing films of terrible car accidents, screeching brakes, bodies burnt to crisps.

Driver Ed in our Third Third: harrowing statistics like, “Seniors aged 65 and over are more than twice as likely as younger drivers to be killed when involved in a crash;” that we need 20 times more light to see at night at age 40 than at age 20; that deaths in crashes start increasing around ages 60-64.

I decided to click on all those AARP emails about saving 30% for a limited time only – with a promo code! – on the Smart Driver™ online course so I’d get an insurance discount. It looked easy enough: there were six units, and it would take about four hours. I could do it on my own schedule.

The man and the woman instructors said this was all about change: we and our bodies are changing, our cars are changing, and road conditions are changing. It became clear that I wasn’t the only one in my Third Third: my 2001 Subaru was in its Third Third. It doesn’t have half the gizmos new cars have. Gizmos may make driving safer, but gizmos apparently also add to the confusion.

Right off, the novelty impressed me. The instructors switched from video to PowerPoint-looking things, to little interactive games. I had to click on the little clouds to see how many deaths per 1,000 crashes occur at each age.

Right away, we hit my personal fear factor: vision. Older drivers have trouble with glare, with switching from looking out the windshield to looking at the dashboard, to seeing contrast. I already know dusk is the roughest time for me driving. In a car, I’ve learned it’s hard to switch from the road to the cheat sheet with my directions written on it.

I’ve written about my “Agony at the Eye Doctor,” but this course put eye doctor agony in my car. They described a vision test I’d never even had: contrast sensitivity. I’d better tell my eye doctor about that. I have a new thing to worry about.

But vision wasn’t enough: we had to move on to the big fear factor: brain health. As we age, we experience changes in “memory, processing speed, attention, and brain regulation skills – overall executive function” – Oh, no! She named the nightmares! If driving is a complex balancing act, “the idea that our mind isn’t working as well as it used to can be frightening.” You think?

Okay, a bit of First Third explanation: As a teenager, the week before my road test for a driver’s license, I was out practicing with my mother. At the top of a hill, an inattentive driver was on the wrong side of the road and rammed into me head-on. In a big old Buick, the engine sat in the front seat with us, and my face went into the steering wheel.

I decided I wasn’t going to drive. Ever. Cars were tons of weaponry on the road, and “other guys” were everywhere.

This continued for a couple years until my parents were tired of chauffeuring me everywhere. So I learned to drive. Unwillingly. Hence, a happy career in public transit and a love affair with buses and street cars.

Living in Anchorage, having a child, having to be places – driving is what I do now. It’s what my mother did, too, which worried her kids a lot. The course talks about that, about how to have The Conversation with a person who shouldn’t be driving.

Mostly, the course upped my attention, always a good thing. Meanwhile, I got to click on icons, click on highway signs, and click on talk bubbles. I got to move the car into the right garage. I wouldn’t call it a video game, but I did win dollars off on my car insurance.

Curmudgeon or Sweetie-Pie? That is the question.

As we age, we face choices. Actually, we face choices every single day, every single moment. But the big one I’m focusing on right now is whether I’m going to age as a curmudgeon or as a sweetie-pie.

I’m not sure whether sweetie-pie is the right antonym for curmudgeon, but it’s all I have. Even thesaurus.com doesn’t provide one, but there are lots of synonyms for curmudgeon: grouch, crank, sourpuss, grump, crab.

I’ve always thought I was tipping towards the curmudgeon side, mostly because I have Rules. Rules, as in:

• Do not litter.


• Your dog is supposed to be on a leash if he is not calmly at your side.


• Do not contaminate the plastics recycling bins by throwing in unrecyclable, miscellaneous trash.


• Cell phones should be off during public performances.

I have been known to enforce these Rules in public. Yes, we all discovered the heart of gold in A Man Called Ove, but I’m not sure the recipients of my Rule Awareness Lessons would speak to my heart of gold.

I fear it’s even worse than that. Recently, we had two couples over for dinner. As they were removing their shoes at the front door, some kind of issue arose. When Danny came up the stairs, he was griping about the rules in his house. “We even have a rule about synchronizing the light switches.”

What does that mean to synchronize the light switches? “It means that when one at the top of the stairs is up, you can’t turn off the light at the bottom of the stairs because then the light switch at the top is in the wrong position.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s right. They have to match. Light on means switch up.”

The husbands looked at me. “When the light is off, the light is off. What difference does it make what position the switch is in?”

Oh, yes, this is one of those little glitches in the universe. I am married to a man who doesn’t care what position the switches are in. I run around to the back of the garage to make sure the switch there matches the switch in the front of the garage. Apparently, I am not alone. Women like me are married to men like them. The men call these things “rules.” Personally, I don’t make Tim synchronize the switches … but I do readjust them when I’m in the garage.

I was at a party. A person nearing retirement asked a retired person about the transition.

“I love it,” the retiree said. “I enjoy every day.”

“Well,” I offered, “there are a lot of ups and downs in the transition.”

“Not me,” said the first. “I love every day.”

I draw a lot of conclusions from this, many of them revolving around Barbara-as-grouch and my inevitable fate as a curmudgeon. If I were particularly generous, I might try some self-description of Barbara-as-careful-observer-of-reality, but “I love every day” will never pop out of my mouth.

Lately, however, I have been encountering individuals who take my perception of sweetie-pie to new heights. In my new job with OLÉ (Opportunities for Lifelong Education), I receive phone calls from mostly older individuals wanting to enroll, to register for classes, to sign up friends, etc. I return their calls.

“Thank you, thank you for returning my call. I really appreciate your calling me back.”

And that’s only the beginning. I am thanked for providing information, I am thanked for remembering their names, I am thanked for talking them through the computer process. I am encountering more overt kindness and gratitude than I would have imagined was possible in routine human interaction. Yes, this says even more about Barbara-the-grouch, but my eyes have been opened! I have encountered appreciation to such an overwhelming degree, it’s changing my personality.

Sweetie-pie-ness begets more sweetie-pie-ness. The glow of sweetness just reflects and magnifies. I find myself going the extra mile just because it’s so appreciated. I’m a newbie at this: I still have Rules. I’m still not good at initiating sweetie-pie-ness but only remember it when I encounter it. I have to remind myself that being a sweetie-pie is not the same as being a vacuous optimist. It means appreciating the human effort around us.

Is there such a thing as a sweet curmudgeon?

Getting Comfortable

Do you sleep on the ground?

Did you used to sleep on the ground? Like, in a tent?

I remember when camping in a tent meant the old, closed-cell foam camping pad. You could feel every rock in your back. When we discovered self-inflating Therm-a-Rests, life changed – we had cushion! A whole inch of cushion! I still remember our first camping trip with baby Sophie; she turned the tent into a bouncy house. We found her in the morning by the door of the tent, having bounced there after Tim and I fell asleep.

Funny, that old Therm-a-Rest just doesn’t bounce anymore. Or rather, I don’t bounce. I thump and rattle and groan.

One friend said it’s not even just the sleeping on the ground that gets her; it’s the getting up.

When I backpack, I sit on the ground. Many years ago, my mother-in-law gave me a fold-up-able chair that basically held my butt on the ground. It felt so extravagant. When we all had little kids, I took it on our first car camping trip with friends. I was a little embarrassed to bring it out around the campfire.

But then, everyone else unloaded real chairs from their cars! At first, it was just chairs. Then the chairs got arms. Then the arms got cup holders. Now the chairs have cushions.

It happened with stoves, too. Camping used to mean fiddling with stoves, relentlessly fiddling with little stoves that held a single pot and that always seemed to clog. The first time someone pulled out a two-burner Coleman stove, I almost flipped. Now we own one. We even put it in a kayak.

Now our friends camp with cots and air mattresses, even RVs. Last weekend, I spotted a car going into their tent site with a giant air mattress on the roof. The guy was riding the back bumper, holding the air mattress on the roof with his hands. She was driving really slowly, but how did they get there?!? I figured they must have gone to the electricity at the RV site to blow up the mattress and were now delivering it to their tent.

My friend Rob once had his well-used camping gear described as “prehistoric.” When I buy mine, it’s usually with the assumption that it will last a lifetime. (I buy a lot of things that way.) It’s my stubborn fight against planned obsolescence – not to mention the emotional attachment to my gear – but this curmudgeon side is now getting in the way of … progress. Yeah, I used to walk to school in the snow, too, but I’m pretty sure dinosaurs were uncomfortable before they went extinct.

When I hiked the Chilkoot Trail last summer, my friend Mary loaned me her blow-up NeoAir Therm-a-Rest. Wow! It was a sleeping transformation! It was thick and cushy and still lightweight; oh, the miracles of technology! But last weekend, Tim and I still pulled out our old, one-inch-thick Therm-a-Rests … and groaned and tossed and turned.

No more! If the world is building better mousetraps, I’m getting with the program. I love camping. I love sleeping in a tent, all contained and cozy. I love breathing air that hasn’t been inside walls. I’m ready to update!

Stodginess lurks in secret places, and it’s so liberating to cast it off.

Musical Memory

If you’re in your Third Third, Carole King’s Tapestry album was the soundtrack to your emotional life. Released in 1971, each song tracked with the phases of our lives. Maybe you’d met someone new and weren’t sure where the relationship was going, and then Carole King sang “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” so you learned the words and sang along.

Stop right now! Sing it! You know the words:

Tonight you’re mine, completely
You give your love so sweetly

Tonight the light of love is in your eyes

But will you love me tomorrow?

Confirmed in new love and positive no one else had ever felt like that before? Did you feel the earth move? Was that when you felt like “A Natural Woman”?

Yes, you know that one! Belt it out. Even just the chorus counts.

But then you had to head home for the summer from college and the love of your life was “So Far Away.” Heartbreak and the end of a relationship because “It’s Too Late”? And then, as we all consoled each other, it was “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Do you know the words? Do you picture where you were, how your heart was throbbing or breaking? Join the club.

I’ve just seen Carole King in a live concert in Hyde Park, London. Or rather, I saw it at the movies, but I was there. 65,000 other people (plus the ones in the theater) and me. As the cameras panned the audience, their lips were moving. They knew all the words, too (and many of them weren’t even born yet in 1971).

No, I take that back: I wasn’t there. I was back in 1971 with a first boyfriend, in 1972, in ’73, in ’74 with long-distance separations, break-ups (several), good friends (several), and new loves (a few). Listening to that concert touched all those old, sensitive places. All those places where Feelings were just so big and new and raw, and then later on, when the Feelings were familiar and recognizable and still big.

And on the stage was Carole King. She was beautiful and energetic and … radiant! Behind her, the very young Carole King was projected on a screen, and that Carole was so very, very young, with smooth, smooth skin. The camera pulled in for close-ups of Carole on stage, and she had wrinkles and a sagging chin and deep lines. Her hair was unruly, her stomach and sides came with flab and bulges, and her upper arms had a life of their own. She was so BEAUTIFUL! She said, “This is what 74 looks like.”

It was an epiphany moment for me: she was beautiful! I abandoned the painting I made; I can’t do justice to her. She shone and glowed and radiated brightness. I was so enthralled, I turned to my friend Robin and said, “Look at her. All you see is her life force. She has lines and aging, but all you see is her life force.”

And Robin said, “Don’t you know that’s what people see of you, too?”

Is that true? Yes, it’s what I see in everyone else. But here we are, looking at ourselves up real close in the mirror, noticing every new hair or spot or line; and no one else sees that! What a miracle!

I thought then that our life force is what makes us beautiful, and I felt … hopeful. Suddenly I could see a life past bad knees, sagging eyelids, flabby upper arms. I could see that I just had to hold on to my life force. Oh, that’s right; she told us that, too: “You’re beautiful as you feel.”

Carole’s daughter, Louise, came out and they sang “Where You Lead” together. Carole just beamed at her. I thought, No one gets to have an adult daughter and still look 25. She looks like a mother, and she loves being that mother, that singer, that 74-year-old.

I’d love to hear the song she writes about that.

Limping into our Third Third

Last week, as I arrived at my book club, I limped out of the car. Coming from her car was Chris, limping. Robin met us at the door, limping. If Riki were with us, she’d be limping, too.

None of this had been planned in advance. We weren’t reading a book with a limping character. No Hunchback of Notre Dame, no Treasure Island. No game of charades, no funny ha-ha mimicry.

Our bodies are just crapping out on us.

I even cringe writing that because I harbor the desperate hope that my currently bad knee is just a temporary aberration and has nothing to do with long-term degeneration.

But, of course, it does.

One day, I was biking and running and walking, and the next day, I was in terrible pain. No fall, no twist, nothing catastrophic. It just happened. It was going to go away in a couple days. That’s why I hobbled, iced, and Aleved my way across the Badlands and South Dakota. That’s why I foolishly thought the 422 stairs of the Presidential Trail at Mount Rushmore wouldn’t be a problem. That’s why they’re probably still talking about that crazy hopping redhead.

So, of course, I was at the orthopedist the day I returned. (Yes, the same orthopedist. I trust him. He gave me my knee back before.) That’s why I was in an MRI machine the next day and physical therapy the following week.

Sample thoughts while limping and freaking out: What if I don’t have my knee back?!? How can I run? How can I go up and down stairs? What do I do when my mental health requires movement? How will I not get fat????

And on the Fourth of July, I went to two parties where people enthusiastically discussed ailments. Or, as Our Third Third readers have put it, “organ recitals.” Then the New York Times did an article on knee interventions, which everyone shared. And shared. My doctor said that as we get older, we can injure ourselves sliding a shoe box with our foot. We are all degenerating.

My physical therapist has pointed out that my right knee doesn’t line up with my right foot when I walk. I have pointed out to her that I can’t even balance on one foot, period. Basically, I have to re-do my whole skeleton. My friend Irene has to re-learn how to sit. We should have done this when we were three years old, but if we can fix it now, we’ll have mobility.

The looming Third Third question is: what do we have to give up? I used to play soccer and tennis, but I had no trouble giving them up. They weren’t worth the injuries. The doctor and the physical therapist feel the same way about running. They call it pounding, and they wince when they say it.

I’m not a devoted runner. I don’t train with intervals; I don’t go fast. I don’t like races. Very often, I try to find excuses not to run (rain, wind, laziness, other things). But running is outside, tires me out, maintains my weight, keeps me healthy, and wards off depression. It’s cheap, easy, and accessible anywhere. I just haven’t found anything else that works on all those levels.

So a bum knee starts a cavalcade of reactions in me beyond the initial five-months-of-crutches freak-out. Beyond the “Oh, no, we have stairs now!” It starts all sorts of “beginning of the end” scenarios in my mind, visions of restrictions and incapacities. Of no outlet for all the parts of me that need an outlet. Of limitation.

This is my first encounter with Aging-with-a-capital-A. (Well, not really: there is that issue of my face sagging….) But this could mark the transition from getting-older-means-you-get-to-do-more to getting-older-means-you-get-to-do-less. That’s going to take some mental readjustment. If this is a first step, no wonder I’m limping.

I know I’ve been lucky. There’s a woman in physical therapy who’s trying to walk at all. When my mother’s memory went, she had to give up the reading that she loved, and that would be HARD. Maybe you’ve already had to cross this bridge; what was it, and how’d you do?

Where have all the uncles gone?

Oh, no. They just keep aging. The parents, the aunts, the uncles – that generation ahead of us. Yes, we’re in our Third Thirds, but they’re in their Ninth Ninths or Eighth Eighths. And now Uncle Howie has just died.

Let me tell you about Uncle Howie, who came attached with Aunt Selma. They were the city part of the family when we moved out to the country, but then they upped and moved to Florida. There was an old joke that the Brown boys never traveled further than a block in Brooklyn to find a wife, so Aunt Selma was part of the family before she was actually family.

Uncle Howie was the youngest, talkative brother so he was the window into my dad, too. I still remember his telling me the story of my father and the German field telephones he brought back from World War II. Dad was in the Signal Corps, and the telephones include the printed alphabet: A is for Anton, F is for Friedrich, G is for Gustav, all the way to Z is for Zeppelin. There are two of them, and my dad strung them across the street to my mother’s window when he was courting her. My father?!? Courted my mother? Private phone calls? “Well,” Uncle Howie said, “until ConEd made him take the wires down from their poles and lines.”

Years later, my brother and sisters strung the wires between our bedrooms to “secretly” talk. (Except that they caused static on the TV and my father would yell, “Go to sleep!”) Many years later, I wanted the telephones so we could string them between our house and Sophie’s playhouse in the backyard. They were too heavy for my mother to dig out of the garage, and she didn’t know if they still worked. Uncle Howie to the rescue again: the phones came to us complete with miles and miles of brand new wire.

Eventually, Uncle Howie and Aunt Selma came to visit us in Alaska, and Sophie and I were visiting with them at their room in the Capt. Cook Hotel. Sophie, barely a preschooler, was taking a very long time in the bathroom, so I got up to check. Turned out, she was enthralled with the tiny bottles of shampoo, conditioner and lotion and had stuck her head in the sink to try them out.

Now this is why I love the two of them: ever after, whenever Uncle Howie and Aunt Selma traveled, Sophie would get a giant box of little shampoos, conditioners, and lotions from all the hotels they’d visited. That’s Uncle Howie and Aunt Selma.

This wasn’t the first appearance of little bottles in Uncle Howie’s life. When I was little, he was a Fuller Brush salesman. (If you remember Fuller Brush, you’re in your Third Third!) He gave us little bottles of cologne. Later, when I threw a suitcase on top of the thermos of milk in the family Volkswagen and the resulting sour milk smell lasted forever, we used to hold those tiny bottles of cologne up to our nose so we could stand to be in the car.

 We visited them and stayed with them in Florida during the National Waterpark Tour. Although my poor cousin nearly got a concussion after I dragged her to Rapids Water Park, what I still picture is Sophie sitting on the kitchen counter as Uncle Howie taught her how to make matzoh brei his way. Then, because she had an incredible knack for finding money on the ground, they gave her a metal detector. She hunted for money the rest of the trip. It’s still in the closet here. (It has nostalgia resistance to de-cluttering.)


I don’t know how to tell people who are far away that I love them. I’m far away, I don’t really call. We lose touch. I’m not there to help. But they hover in my heart and the pictures in my memory are vivid and warm. All I can do is write and try to say, “You figured in my life and the life of my family. You opened windows, showed love. You mattered to me.”

And as I searched the kitchen cabinets for the recipe for Uncle Howie’s matzoh brei, and I couldn’t find it, I thought, “Oh, no! Is it gone?” How much will be gone with this generation, and then who are we going to ask? What stories will we miss?

Facing our Third Third

Every now and then, one of my adventures could more accurately be called a misadventure. Vanity was the root cause, but de-cluttering and age-defiance made this one a perfect Third Third storm.

A little background: A couple years ago, I participated in an online research study by graduate students at my alma mater. I can’t remember what it was meant to investigate, but I had to submit a photo, and they would “age” it and return it to me. The first photo was rejected; I was smiling too much. Maybe if you’re happy you can’t be “aged”?

The second photo came back and totally freaked me out. I looked OLD, really OLD. I looked grayish – and not just my hair – and there were lines all over my face. Ever since then, I’ve watched the mirror vigilantly, assessing whether I’m turning into the photo.

About a month ago, during the great yarn bombing/knitting vandalism episode, I was interviewed for a news video. Despite being very happy in the video, all I could see was that my face was turning into that grayish, lined face in that old-looking photograph. It haunted me.

When they had me back for a second interview, I actually put on eye makeup. I talked to friends about trying to look better … groomed. But it’s hard because I have finicky skin that doesn’t like most things, and because … well, make-up just doesn’t seem to show up on my list of to-do’s.

Around about this time, I was de-cluttering and came across some very, very old gift bags from Estée Lauder, the kind you get as a prize when you buy cosmetics. As I poked through the bags, I found a never-opened tube of some sort of gentle, luxurious face cleanser.

Tell me, what would you do? Your face has developed lines and you suddenly rediscover a “gentle, luxurious face cleanser”? The only cleanser my face knows is water. Maybe it was time to add some luxury, to make an effort. It felt soft. Luxurious.

Until the red bumps appeared. Bumps that didn’t go away. Bumps that eventually got crusty. On my face.

I pulled out all my ideas of a cure: alcohol, lotions, soaps. A face that knew only water, moisturizers, and sunscreen was now a test site for anything I could drag out of the bathroom cabinets. (Smart people are saying, “What on earth were you thinking?!?”) Hey, I stopped before I tried mouthwash on the bumps.

The dermatologist sighed when he looked at my face. Near as I can understand, I’ve disrupted the flora and fauna of my face, and it is going to be very hard to get it back to normal. Like months and months of hard. I have to put tiny amounts of steroid on it, see if it works, stop, re-start, see if it works.

I’m spending a lot of time looking in the mirror.

I don’t recommend it.

What I’ve learned:

• Third Third lines may be preferable to First Third-looking bumps.


• Sometimes clutter shouldn’t be repurposed, recycled, or transformed into treasure. Sometimes clutter just belongs in the garbage.

No Longer 30

Yet again, my friend Marj has given me the meat of a new blog post. This is what Marj sent me:

“I am so glad you are writing about the third third of our lives. It has changed the way I always thought. For years I had thought the thing to do is to pick an age, like 38, and then for the rest of your life make sure NOTHING changes. Stay the same weight, keep your hair the same color, keep wearing mascara when you leave the house, keep your same clothes style, keep doing the same activities – just DO NOT start looking and acting older. If you get health problems, fix them! Fast! DO NOT let any infirmities settle in!

“But as I have gotten older, it became increasingly hard to hold at 38. I was starting to feel like a failure. If only I had tried harder. When did I start to lose it? What can I do about it now?

“Then I started reading what you write about the third third. And I realized life really does have thirds. The third third just can’t be the same as the first. And that crazy second third! Who needed all that? I was aware of the concept of there being a season for everything. But I thought that did not apply to me personally. But now I have accepted that there are irrevocable thirds. And I’m in my third one. I’m no longer 38. Haven’t been for decades. And now I realize, I have not failed. I have simply progressed through life. As one does. If one is fortunate.”

It’s funny that one of the things I remember Marj telling me – years and years ago – was that my daughter thought of herself as a “work in progress.” That seemed so positive, such a healthy way of looking at the world. And yet here was Marj, thinking that we make healthy progress to a point … and then it’s downhill.

How many of us have thought – or still think – that way? What age did you pick?

I used to think I was 33. I don’t know why I picked 33. I was single, in charge of my life, a Big Boss in my organization, open to adventure, free of commitments. Long after, whenever I met people, I thought they saw me as a 33-year-old. If they were in their 30s, we were the same age (in my mind). We were all peers. I was 33 for a long time.

I stopped being 33 for two reasons. One was the crushing realization as I looked in the mirror one day that I looked old. Older than 33. The other was more positive: I was coaching, advising, and instructing 30-year-olds … and I had a lot more life experience than they did.

And I guess that’s the two sides of this whole progression through our Third Thirds: we win some and we lose some. I will never fool anyone into thinking I’m 33. Even cashiers in grocery stores offer me the senior discount unsolicited.

But I have life experience. I’ve been there, done that, and know how to make a phone call and get a reluctant company to remedy my problem. I know how to make a quilt, run a half-marathon, create a website – all things I learned after I was 33. I got to experience marriage and parenting … after I was 33.

After age 60, I got to experience Machu Picchu, re-discovery of art in my life, even the Chilkoot Trail. Less-than-60 Barbara hadn’t gotten to them yet, but less-than-60 Barbara had time constraints, obligations, resource limitations.

I’ve always known I never wanted to be 16 ever again. It’s interesting to realize that I no longer want to be 33 either.

Is enough enough?

Way back when, I told boyfriend #1 I didn’t know if I loved him enough. He said, “So do you wait till five minutes before you die to know this was what you were going to get so it had better have been enough?” He was that kind of guy, and I’m sure he’d be flabbergasted to know this is what I remember.

By now, all of us have seen that commercial where the spokesperson asks people, “Have you saved enough for retirement?” and they all look at him quizzically and ask, “How do I know what’s enough?”

How do we know what’s enough?

While I’ve been thinking about enough, I keep coming across this word: “tireless.” As in, “She worked tirelessly for human rights” or “She was tireless in her passion for making art.”

So if I were making a scale, this is what it would look like:

In my mind, it’s a scale measuring laziness, commitment, and passion. I’ve written a lot here about feeling like I waste time, that I’m not very productive in my Third Third. But recently, I realized that constant self-criticism had given way to a Third Third rhythm: I liked the rhythm of my days, of my creative activity, of my social/adventurous/New Thing pursuits. I liked the balance I’d struck between being useful and being still. I stopped feeling lazy and occasionally just felt … still.

And then my book club read Founding Brothers about the creation of our country and a friend reminded me of what Ben Franklin had said after the Constitutional Convention.  A woman asked what kind of government we were going to have, and Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Can we keep it?

Do you read the newspapers?!?

So I feel tremendous responsibility to not let our country down, to keep a republic. I write many letters to my Congressional delegation, I teach English to new immigrants, I go to vigils and marches and make sure I’m standing with the now-marginalized-more-than-ever-before. I donate to rights-preserving organizations.

But I’m not doing this tirelessly. I’m still kind of lazy about it. I’ll spend a whole day caught up in a new novel or my nights finishing Orphan Black season 4. I’m beginning to think that tireless is not an operative adjective for my Third Third.

I’ve been tireless in my life. I’ve fought for political access, for affordable housing, for public transit, for women’s equality. I’ve burned my candle at both ends. I’ve felt part of something bigger. I’ve liked living “notched up,” fueling the energy that flowed and flowed. But now, I only operate at lukewarm.

Is this aging? Am I tired?

But we don’t have that luxury now. If we slack off, we can’t keep our republic! (My sense of urgency would insert LOTS of exclamation points there!) We have to do more than enough. We have to be vigilant and positive and proactive and resourceful.

So I’m back to beating myself up. I’m no longer still; I’m just lazy.

But this weekend, at the Human Rights Day vigil, I spotted a man carrying a sign:

I’ll think more about tired and tireless, lazy and still, enough and not; but for now, I just have to make sure I do. And keep doing. And do a little more.

Mammograms, gravity, and The Breast

I am really, really lucky to have my boobs. Not because they require very expensive bras, not because they make it difficult to buy clothes that don’t separate tops from bottoms, and certainly not because they must add ten pounds to my body weight.

I am really, really lucky because I still have them. I have made it to my Third Third with boobs intact.

So I never miss a mammogram. Except that I have switched to biennial ones after the Great Mammogram Controversy over annual or biennial, false positives vs early findings, anxiety vs reassurance. If the experts can’t agree, I took the minimalist option.

Today was the day.

Little-boobed women tell me of the pain of stretching themselves over the table, grabbing skin from their sides to put more skin in the game. Not my problem. I just fling my cantaloupes onto the table and wait for the squish.

When I was growing up on Long Island, my mother took her big-boobed daughters to Dora Meyers Corsetry to buy our bras. I HATED Dora Meyers: all those fitting ladies touching us to make sure the bras fit. What self-respecting First Thirder would go to a “corsetry” anyway? Thank heavens Dora Meyers went out of business.

But my mother found a replacement, and nearly every trip I make to New York includes a stop at the “Bra Ladies.” Mary Corsetieres is a phenomenon: women make appointments and wait on line. Bras are personally altered at the bank of sewing machines, and Mary keeps a file on exactly what alterations are made to my bras. My sisters and I wouldn’t buy a bra anywhere else. Mary saved me from having to wear two sports bras at the same time. Funny how a couple of Thirds changes your viewpoint.

Nevertheless, at the end of a day, the bra comes off with a sigh of relief. And often, the end of a day comes earlier than the end of the day, if you know what I mean. If I’m not going back out, the bra is history. I used to feel that way about pantyhose, but they’re ancient history.

Bra-less big boobs may be comfortable lounging around, but the effects of gravity only worsen with age. There I was, going through security for a recent red-eye flight. If I’m going to be miserable on a red-eye flight, I’m at least not going to be miserable in a bra. So I stash the bra in my backpack and go through security in a bulky sweatshirt. This time, however, I had scored “TSA pre-check,” so I could just wear my jacket.

“Empty your pockets, please, Miss,” said the TSA agent.

“There’s nothing in them,” I replied.

“No, you missed something,” he said. “I can see there’s something in your pockets.”

I poked around. “They’re empty.” I looked down. Uh, oh.

“Those are my boobs.”

(sob) Third Third boobs no longer leave the house without a bra.

Our names are in their Third Thirds, too

There I was at the teachers meeting for the Alaska Literacy Program. All of us are volunteers, most of us are women, and three of us are named Barbara.

Tell me, do you know any young Barbaras? I thought not.

Back when we were having babies, there was a resurgence of what I call grandparent names. Suddenly, there were baby Maxes and baby Emmas, Emilys, and Sophies. But Barbara has never made its comeback.

In fact, the median age of all Barbaras alive in 2014 was 64. Ruths and Frances were 68; Carols, Freds, and Bobs, 63. Which is a whole lot more modern than Gertrude, whose median age is 80. In fact, if you’re named Gertrude, 89.4% of you are dead. Right up there with Mabel, Myrtle, and Blanche. Or Elmer, Clarence, and Chester.

This all comes from matching social security birth names with actuarial tables, and it’s kind of fun if you’re noticing that there are three Barbaras in your Literacy Program teacher cohort. It’s part of “How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name,” and you can check it out here.

Yesterday the cashier at the supermarket reminded me that it was 55+ discount day. I have to assume that’s because he saw my name come up with my rewards card sign-in. Right?

An Orphan in My Third Third

Did you feel it? The shift in the universe? Like the gravitational waves, “ripples in the fabric of spacetime from a cataclysmic event”? Or maybe it was just my universe.

My mother died.

We’d had a happy time, sitting in the sun, looking at old home movies. She was all settled, ready to be released back home. All good. I flew back to Alaska. Two days later, she was nonverbal, back in the hospital. Suddenly, things were “grave,” according to the doctors. She died before our planes landed and cars arrived.

My mother died peacefully with Cousin Larry, Jessica, and Kathy at her side, with her best friend Gloria on the other side. They say it was easy and peaceful. I thank everyone she wasn’t alone, but I worry whether she was frightened. Whether we all are.

My mother had a big chair in her and my father’s bedroom. When I came back from school dances, no matter what time, I would sit in that chair and tell her about the night. Did I have a good time? Did any boys ask me to dance? Anything special? She let me go on and on. She asked questions, she never fell asleep on me.

Now I need a big chair, and I need to tell her how her death is rocking me.

I didn’t expect this. I somehow thought I was “ready” for this news. I even thought it was the best way for things to go, that my mother needed to be spared a life of endless readmissions to the hospital. That she didn’t want to live in a world that had become so confusing to her.

And now I find myself bursting into sobs when just nothing at all triggers it. My mother died two days before Yom Kippur. I sat in her synagogue with all the contemplation that Yom Kippur fosters, looking around at “her” space, and I think my whole self just broke.

The thing is, my mother and I had a “prickly” relationship. I don’t understand some of the reasons, but it was prickly enough my mother could never broach the subject. Yet I was her only child to have a child. I KNOW in the core of my being how powerful mother love is – I know of nothing else so gripping – so I know my mother felt it for me. My mother felt it for her four kids. And now there’s a shift in the universe because that force is gone.

A long time ago, I was featured at some event and asked the organizers for an extra copy of the program to send to my mother. One woman said she used to do the same thing, and she noticed each time she couldn’t after her mother died. As my siblings and I went through my mother’s things, I ended up with piles and piles of all the photos, programs, news clippings, stories, and letters I’d sent her over the years. Even from far away, my mother was … my witness. The keeper of my story. Or something like that.

Now my life is … unobserved. I don’t know how to describe this.

My father died when I was 26 and he was 56. But to me, he was “old” and I was young. Not so young as to feel robbed, but not so old that his mortality leaked into me. I was 26, I still had a mother, and death was something that happened to old people. But now I’m in my Third Third, and the loss of my mother puts our generation “up next.” You find yourself doing subtraction, estimating how many years you have left. Mortality is beyond hinting; now it plants its shadow solidly in your path.

I’d said my Third Third was my mother’s Ninth Ninth, and that was worrying, stressful, challenging. Sometimes it was a problem bigger than me, a whole-society problem. Now my Third Third is motherless, and it’s still bigger than me: a sadness so very, very big.

My siblings and I talked about an afterlife. None of us believe in one. I believe in spirit, in soul, in things not observable; I just believe they die, too. But I do believe in memory, in the aftereffects of good deeds at work in the universe. My mother left a lifetime of good deeds behind. Let me share her obituary with you here.

Tonight as I was cooking dinner, my thoughts just glanced in my mother’s direction as they often did. And then I remembered that she’d died, and the universe shook again. I’ve lived 3,000-4,000 miles from her since I was 17, and yet she was always a presence. Now she’s an absence. And no matter how much I think of her or cry over her or wish about her, it does no good. The hole is big and real and permanent and sad.

Who is my mother?

A visit with my mother and my philosophical side runs rampant with questions. Now back home, I sit here and wonder about our “self-ness.” What makes me Barbara, and would I be Barbara if all the memories that I’ve collected over my life were gone? Is there some core of Barbara that has nothing to do with what I’ve experienced, seen, done, etc.?

So who is my mother now that she’s virtually memory-less?

When I’d asked before the trip whether I was still My Mother’s Daughter, one reader, The Noodler, commented that “she will know that you are someone important to her.” And yes, she did! When I walked in the room, her face lit up. She knew my sister and I were there to see her, not someone else in the dining room. So yes, I am still my mother’s daughter, but who is my mother?

Right now, she has a lump the size of a tennis ball on her forehead and black and blue marks lining her temple, cheek, neck, and under her eyes. Our guess is that she fell in the bathroom and her head hit the support bars on the toilet. We’d need an NCIS crime scene analyst to know what happened because my mother asks, “I fell? When did I fall?” So she is in rehab before returning to the dementia wing and her room.

On prior trips, I was intent on “rescuing” Mom from rehab so she could get back to her normal life. Now I know there is no rescue. While that relieves a lot of pressure, it also leaves these philosophical questions. At one point, my sister and I wheeled her onto the patio into the warm sun.

Still like my mother: She loves warm sun. She offers money so we can buy something nice. She doesn’t like raisins. She would be upset that she hadn’t been to the hairdresser.

Not like my mother:
My mother was a voracious reader and major movie-goer. She helped found a whole film center. She wrote poetry. Now she can’t read because by the time she gets to the end of a sentence, she can’t remember the beginning. She dozes off in movies. My mother was chatty with the energy of an Energizer Bunny. Now she sits and doesn’t really engage with her company. She sits. (But this is rehab after an injury and she’s not really just a sitter in her normal life, but still…)

When I look at myself, I think my self-ness is tied up in curiosity. I have questions about everything and find just about everything worth exploring and asking about. Who would I be if I just sat?

I took one reader’s advice and had a conversation with my mother, telling her the things I’d want her to know just in case I didn’t see her again. She appreciated it, I guess. It’s hard to tell because her responses are muted.

My mother never made an ethical will or legacy letter, but she communicated her values, loves, and hopes regularly. All her life. We know what her Mom-self thought and wanted.

But this later version Mom: Is she happy? Does she think about happiness? Is just sitting like interminable waiting or is it like being peaceful? Is this what she would want for her 90s?

I’m not sure she could answer these questions. In a quiet moment, I tried asking what she was thinking, but she looked confused and told me she wasn’t thinking at all. Should I have tried again? Should I have been more specific? But look at those happiness questions: they are insensitive if not harrowing questions. My memory-less mother is sitting in a chair and I’m going to ask her if life turned out the way she wanted?

Insensitive? Harrowing? Is that more about my fears or her happiness?