So This is How to Look at the World...

Lately, there's been a lot of public outrage about perceptions.
We humans like to categorize ourselves into groups. Our shapes, colors, and apparel speak volumes to observers, who make assumptions about us based on preconceived perceptions we express in the current lingo as ‘prejudice’.
In my youth, these perceptions drove me crazy and made me as angry as those currently marching our streets. As a short, olive-skinned, curly dark haired, slightly plump female who prefers clogs to heels, I've always resented having to constantly prove my intellectual and social status both in business and in society. I know in view of what others suffer because of what they look like, my suffering was slight, but nevertheless, I suffered. 
Somehow, I thought once you reached midlife people stopped judging your outsides. That the wrinkles on ones’ skin overrode any preconceived perception of category based on looks. 
In any case, I had not felt that suffering in years, so, for lack of a better word, I thought in aging we acquired the wisdom to see beyond our skin. I thought midlife made people more careful about trusting their perceptions and more willing to have their assumptions shattered. 
I was wrong.
As a perk to being on the board of a public media company that will remain nameless, I was invited to a star-studded meet-and-greet last week. Arriving late, I took my glass of Merlot to an empty seat at a table with a middle-aged couple. After the stars' presentation, there was that quiet moment when strangers know they must either make acquaintance or awkwardness will ensue.
"Hello," I said.
"Hi," said the blue-eyed grey-haired suit-and-tie wearing male of the couple. "Are you with the restaurant they took us to for lunch?"
Stunned, I immediately scanned my outfit for any misguided signs that shouted "waitress":  wool slacks, velvet shell, textured office jacket, Chanel purse, demure gold necklace, big gold earrings, diamond wedding band – nothing that would have alluded to “service help”.
OK, I was wearing booties (it was snowing after all)... Maybe it was the booties? 
No, wait, I suddenly remembered my youth...
"Did they take you to an Italian restaurant?" I asked.
"Yes - great place - you know - so much food!"
That's when the angry young me had a small eruption:
"Oh. Well, I'm not with the restaurant, I'm a board member of (the organization) that took you to that lunch. But I am Italian -- We all look alike."
The blue-eyed man seemed visibly taken aback, unwilling to let go of his assumptions, but he knew how to do a social quickstep and immediately introduced his blue-eyed wife. 
We chatted aimlessly about northern versus southern Italian food (I'm the latter, which they claim to prefer). About the event, and how great public media is (because it's such an equalizer). About their retirement to a warm climate after his wife's back ailments led her to take pain killers (she hates how they make her feel, according to him). And, finally about his ridiculous post-retirement writing and consulting ventures (he handed me two cards, one for each venture - one is an inconsistent blog...).
In return, I purposefully told them nothing about me -- in my unthinking mind this was a way to punish their impudence. 
The truly sad thing about this small encounter was that they were innocuous people. They were not bad people, and, in sincere humbleness, far less superior to me. 
But that single comment betrayed their preconceived superiority based on what my body looked like.
And that made me angry.
That comment reminded me that we retain our presumptuous perceptions well into the "wisdom" of our later years, and that they continue to sting, even when we think we are finally immune. 
Even worse, I recognized in myself a sick willingness to categorize the blue-eyed-couple into something they perhaps are not -- merely because of my own preconceived perceptions of their shape, and color, and attire...
In an utterly benign way, this week I felt a gentile slap of prejudice, and my reaction was blinding, unjustified, hate.
At this point, I suppose I should say something uplifting, like therefore this proves that we should all abandon all our prejudices -- religious, race, gender, nationalism, you name it, just get rid of it all! But then we all know how insincere that sounded and how badly that went for poor Nick in "Gatsby".
What I am now willing to say is that I can no longer write off the anger on our streets, (as I did to my youngest daughter), as mere youthful outrage.

The current marches against the folly and tragedy of preconceived perceptions may just be misspent energy, (a desperate search for a simple answer to a complicated situation), but they sadly point to a visceral unalterable truth.

So This is How to Pick Yourself Up Off the Floor...

I'm luckier than most...when I lag behind, there's usually a friend around to kick my ass.
In this case it was a family member who claims he's missed my blog. Well, he didn't exactly say he missed (or even liked) this blog, he just complained I could not keep a commitment.
So, partially in response to Chris, mainly in response to life, I'm picking myself up off the floor and resuming the human march, and this blog.
Falling on the floor is what we do when things don't go our way. In my case it happened in response to the funnel cloud swirling around my father since his dementia got the better of him, and then he died.
Just the act of typing the words "he died" pushed me again into that whirling tunnel, spinning my thoughts towards the emptiness we are witness to when a loved one is no longer there. I chose the image of the funnel cloud with reason - death is a force of nature, that, though understood, is impossible to comprehend or manage. The closer you are to that cloud, the more you are sucked into its vortex, the less you comprehend, the harder you fall.
It's natural to focus on death once a parent dies, or you yourself have lived past that mid-century mark. Given all the thought I've expended on death lately, I confess to not understanding its consequence.
A few years ago, when my husband's dear uncle suddenly died, I read Buddhist tracts because I could not (still can't) wrap my mind around the idea that a person ceases "being". Buddhists (or at least the one I read) explained that it's like a radio in the room: the signal is always there, it just gets turned "on" and "off" occasionally. Okay...I'm Christian, but the idea that the "signal" is still around seemed so much more comforting than the idea that the person left us completely to go somewhere much nicer than where we are.
So it was natural then that when my father died, I saw him everywhere - even in the personality of stranger's dogs who, I reasoned, were nudging me to pet them because somehow my father's being was in them, and he wanted me to know he loved me. I've been told it's common.
When I was around seven, I finally mastered the art of skipping and was showing it off to my father ("Look at me! Look at me!) when I tripped and fell breaking my arm.
Fifty years later, I can still feel his strong carpenter's arms picking me up off that floor, and that wave of comfort that I forever associated with my father -- that I was going to be okay, that he would take care of me, that there was nothing that could hurt me as long as he was around.
I think that's what a good parent is supposed to elicit, and he did.
Recently I took my widowed mother to Boston for a treat. We were walking arm in arm down Back Bay's charmingly wobbly sidewalks to a favorite restaurant when, in a rare moment of blitheness for both of us as we are too similar in spirit, I tripped and fell.
No broken arm this time, just a bloodied lip.
I picked myself up.
Life goes on.

So This is How Not to Spend Time

     Quite a few of us at a "certain age" begin to talk quite a bit about "finally having time" to pursue our dreams. I'm beginning to think this concept of midlife living is overrated.
     If we haven't pursued our dreams in the last 50+ years, is it reasonable to assume we will do so in the next 20+ (heavens...30+!)?
     I think not.
     What I do think we pursue in midlife are not our 'dreams', but rather our natural inclinations and peculiar interests -- no matter how odd they are.
     Perhaps after five decades of life we feel emboldened not to have to have a 'dream'.
     I came to that conclusion having spent 5 hours in the Apple Store https://www.apple.com/retail/fashionvalley/ in San Diego. How (and why) I found myself in San Diego is of no interest, what is of interest is that I calculated the average age of customers around me in the Apple Store to be about 55, with me being among the youngest. And there were A LOT of these mid-lifers, crowding around the Workshop  tables, giggling with the blue-T-shirted Apple 'masters', hooked up to earphones staring at screens.
     What were they doing? Pursuing their interests.
     The 70-year-old man on the bar stool next to mine was learning to edit his videos of trout fishing.  The other 70-year-old man on the other side of me worked on his music files - a prodigious pile which he had carted in on a dolly. The 80-year-old woman doctor I took my Apple-One-To-One class with was updating her filing skills for what looked like a substantial collection of emails on bird watching. She, by the way, strongly counseled me to get an ICloud email address because "...when you say 'my email is ICloud-dot-com' to people they look at you up and down with respect!'"
     Perhaps 'dreams' are what you have when you are young and think you have to prove something to the world.
     Your natural inclinations and interests - on the other hand - are meant to impress no one but you.
     And that's why, perhaps, those are the things we choose to follow in the end.

So This is How to Lose 'Weight'

I've been thinking a lot about fat lately.
I trust this is something most of us 50-somethings think about a lot. It's no great secret that one of the burdens of aging is weight - the accumulation of mass.
But what is irritatingly captivating my interest now is not body mass, it's the accumulation of 'stuff' (or, as my husband puts it, 'crap'). Thirty-plus years of adulthood makes you 'fat' - bloated with the weight of physical stuff and emotional responsibilities that make you less nimble and certainly less independent.
This added weight is evident when, as we did, you decide to make a midlife career and housing change. Nothing makes you appreciate the problem of accumulated mass more than lugging boxes of your mother-in-law's bone china, (the ones you haven't used in 10 years because they're too precious), out of the suburban house's formal dining room, across three states, up three flights of stairs, to your new city apartment sans formal dining room, (where they will be put on the highest, most impossible to reach kitchen shelf, never to be used, because they are too precious),
but, having to leave your 22-year-old daughter and her two older sisters behind in the move.
So here's the deal:  you will accumulate much mass as you age: a very large house, your in-laws' bequests, expensive antique chairs, heavy tarnishing silverware ... things you thought in your youth you just had to have to be happy or that legitimized you as an adult with property. Whatever -- you will curse each and every box of it you move.
Material possessions are the real 'crap' of middle-age accumulated weight. But, here's the irony:  though painful, this crap can be surprisingly easy to dislodge and take with you.
Not so the accumulated emotional ties, the real weight of life.
The more important and truly precious your hard-worked-for 'acquisition', (your family, your friends, your community), the more impossible it is to take it with you.
I think most of us don't make changes in midlife because we know this is true. So what are you supposed to do?
For some of us born with wanderlust, moving seems a natural progression of life. Standing still is not an option. Personally, I blame our genes-- really! I think (and science bears me out) we are imprinted with certain traits passed on by our forefathers. My husband and I come from immigrant parents so home for us is a concept, not a place.
I'm not saying that everyone should or could feel like we do, and I'm certainly not saying it's easy or even admirable. It's just that at midlife, you kinda know yourself, and I know I travel lightly.
I have a dear friend, let's call her Adel (because that's her name), who is a few years older than me and though she grew up and lives in another country, shares much of my nature. When I first met Adel she was approaching midlife and had already moved twice, not just across three states, but across continents and oceans, alternately leaving behind two of her four sons. At dinner in our well appointed NJ home Adel admired (as I'd secretly hoped she would) our furnishings and rich tableware. We struck it off from the start and I remember still her offhand comment that she "once" too cared about decorating, but that it didn't seem all that important anymore.
So, embrace your midlife 'fat', the one that is important to keep. Let go of the 'crap'.

So This is How to Feel Like a College Student Again

There's nothing that says "youth in the city" more than buying cheap bookcases and spending hours you could otherwise have spent earning money to purchase more expensive bookcases that you wouldn't have had to spend time on putting together yourself!
So, why not?  Bring it on!
After three decades of marriage, buying and getting rid of furniture for the three suburban houses we lived in, surely putting together a bookcase in a Boston apartment would not be an issue for this empty-nester?
I have delicious memories of buying our first bookshelves as a couple. In those days (ah, the '80s...) there was no such thing as IKEA, but there were sweet Scandinavian furniture stores where you could get all the laquer and teak furniture to fill Madison Square Garden.
As newlyweds we bought eight bookcases and teak shelves in various configurations to fill a whole wall of our starter house (still have most of these pieces in the suburban house's basement filled with kids' mementos, photo albums and slides we will never convert to digital images though we keep saying we should).
But we're not newlyweds any more and have some more disposable cash, so we went one step higher than IKEA or the local mom-and-pop Scandinavian furniture stores in the mall: we chose Crate and Barrel's Sloane shelving system -- but no one told us it had to be put together...
(Actually, I did know that - but I also knew that if I told my husband he would never have agreed to buying them.
I'm not apologizing: the only way a 31 year marriage survives is through subterfuge and strategy.
I plan to make it to our 75th anniversary.)
Thankfully Crate and Barrel delivers to the second floor and we bought the furniture during free delivery sales period, so when the enormous 6 boxes (one weighing 60 pounds) arrived at the Boston apartment we just pointed to the spare bedroom/office (actually, our youngest daughter did that since I was stuck on the other side of Commonwealth Avenue with the car, unable to cross the street because of some unnamed walk-a-thon that frankly we could do without in the middle of a city - haven't we had enough of these things anyway?).
The boxes sat there for 3 days until the morning our daughter -- who had just graduated Columbia and shamed into helping us move since she didn't have a job yet -- was due to return to the "real" city of Manhattan in pursuit of a job. That's when panic struck me - if she left who would help me put them together?
There was no way to get hubby to help me (he never agreed to this in the first place, he thought what I showed him the in showroom was what we bought).  The landlord is nice, but I'm still getting used to this living-in-an-apartment adventure and I've watched too many episodes of "Friends" to trust neighbors. So, youngest-daughter was once again shamed into helping out. Her train for NYC left at 3:30pm, it was only 9am, surely, in the immortal words of "Rosie the Riveter": "We Can Do It!"
Panic struck again around 3:00pm when youngest-daughter and I had already built (incorrectly backwards) and taken apart and re-built only 2 of the 3 shelves.
Six hours, two ordered-in sandwich wraps, a pot of coffee, and still no beautiful shelving unit.
As she bolted out of the apartment to Back Bay station to catch the 3:30 train, youngest daughter sneered...I had failed her!
I think all mothers want to empower daughters with self-reliance, but all I had done was prove that indeed neither of us could cut it as engineers - her father's dream for her (she turned out to be a writer), or contractors (ironically my father's occupation - though I don't think he ever had dreams of me growing up to become one).
Defeat hit us both hard. (Well, it hit me hard - I think she was just annoyed.)
I bitterly assumed the sole responsibility of finishing that last shelf (a desk unit nonetheless!) all by myself.
About 30 minutes later, youngest-daughter called to say she had missed the train, was re-ticketed on the next one in 2 hours and was walking back to the apartment.
Happy happy, joy joy - I got her back for another 2 hours - notwithstanding her 22-year-old you-don't-know-nuthin' attitude, I love this kid and wanted to prove to her that -- Yes, women can do anything!
So when she walked back up the stairs and into the spare bedroom/office sipping her Dunkin Donuts Iced Coffee (because "Mom, you can't just make iced coffee at home!") youngest-daughter was witness to a miracle:  I had completed the unit and (at least in my mind) transferred all that good feminism to the next generation.
She brightened, took out her phone, told me "turn around and smile" and, wallah:  moment immortalized, lesson learned...

So This is How NOT to Buy a Bed if Your Apartment is a Walk-up

Step one in realizing our midlife adventure as empty nesters was to leave the burbs and move to the city.

This wasn't too hard.  Boston, we were told, moves en-masse every June. Like lemmings and other clueless creatures, Boston's denizen of students habitually vacate and relocate after the end of spring semesters creating an ebb and flow of apartments up for lease.

Not too surprisingly, if one is willing to pay enough, one can find the perfect brownstone apartment in Boston's adorable Back Bay neighborhood across the street from Tom Brady from which to begin this adventure.

The trouble starts when one wants to fill the apartment.

As we painfully learned, a walk-up brownstone in Boston's Back Bay presents a host of "challenges". 

For starters, there's the staircases. Beautiful as they are, they were not crafted for moving furniture.

And so, that's were our adventure stalled -- literally -- on the second landing of a 36" wide staircase. Much like G.O.T.'s valley of the Vale, the staircase was apparently built to halt all intruders, including our awesome Crate and Barrel storage bed.

After struggling for a half hour, the nice Crate and Barrel deliverymen gave us one choice:  return the bed and get our money back.

Which is what we did, opting instead for a C&B bed that comes apart.

But, until the new bed is delivered, here we are..sleeping on a mattress on the floor -- like teenagers.

Lessons Learned:

(1) apartments are not houses -- don't assume all furniture will fit up stairs and through apartment doors (the Crate and Barrel saleswoman who is helping us find a new bed told us one of her clients had to have his table hoisted through a window...);

(2) furniture either comes delivered as one single piece, or many pieces that are put together after transporting - again, the nice Crate and Barrel saleswoman explained that few beds don't come apart -- we were just lucky enough to have chosen one of the few that don't;

(3) buy expensive items from established retailers - they will always treat the customer right!

(4) measure your staircases, doorways and landings when buying furniture for apartments - even if you're over 50 and think you've done this before, you can eyeball it  :)

So This is How NOT to Start a Change in Midlife

After 30 years of a happy stable marriage - 15 of which were spent in the same 5,000 suburban house - having finished shuttling 3 kids through colleges, my husband and I decided we needed "an adventure."  Call it 'midlife', call it 'what-the-hell-are-we-doing-in-this-big-house' syndrome, call it whatever you like: we (I) wanted change.  So we got it. 
No: we didn't split up. I love my husband too much and am pretty damn sure he loves me back (according to him I still look like the 'vision' he say walking down that church aisle almost 31 years ago, but I credit that to his stubborn refusal to wear glasses...). 
What we did was leave suburbia for the city. 
We didn't do it the easy way either. We could have just moved 20 miles across the Hudson to NYC, but why make it easy?  Apparently the midlife brain needs challenging, so we opted to put our non-working brain cells into use by making them figure out new, demented, traffic patterns and frustratingly oblique parking rules designed to accrue the largest numbers of tickets. 
Yes, you guessed it:  we moved to Boston!
Doing so, we realized a curious thing - we're actually going backward. We are a dying breed; consummate baby-boomers who believed in the American Dream.  As two low-middle-class kids who fell in love in college, we saved all our pennies so we could marry and immediately afford a mortgage for our very own house in the burbs.  I confess - the American Dream worked.  We live well and are fundamentally healthy and happy.
But we had never wavered from this path, and heard the howl we had only read about in Kerouac biographies beckoning to us.  
We never rented, never lived in an apartment - let alone a city - and, frankly, had no idea what we were getting into.
So, this is what this blog is all about -- learning from our mistakes (and our successes), seeing what works, and what doesn't, and feeling it out alongside you.
It's a brand new world for us and we're embracing it, including this newfangled thing we ironically call social media. 
So, welcome. 
Keep reading, as we've learned, you'll never know what can happen next. 
Good Academic Study on Midlife