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 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 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  :)