Author: cheriebell69@hotmail.com

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80’s the magic number

My dad just turned 80 years old.  He was a Depression baby born in the winter of 1936.  I felt this milestone birthday needed major celebration.  So I prepared a party for him.  I thought about everything I knew about my dad: poor country boy from rural Oklahoma, classic car enthusiast, auto mechanic, junk yard roamer, electrician, plumber, home builder, repairman, jack of all trades, country music lover, down-home guitarist.  In short, he is the salt of the earth.

 

When I arrived for Christmas, I presented him with huge party balloons of the ‘good time rock ‘n’ roll’ theme: round helium balloons in solid colors of burnt red, black, and teal with one larger balloon shaped like a classic car detailed with flames.  The story goes a long time ago, when my father was a young man, he drove a car detailed to read “The Wild One.”  Presenting the balloon bouquet to him, I said with a smile, “Happy birthday!” and then decided to spill the beans about his surprise birthday party.  His quick response was a commanding “No!”  Mom and I smiled calmly and remarked about how there would be more cake and fun and prizes for us.  His relatives had been invited, so Dad decided to go with the planned occasion that would take place in his home the following afternoon.

 

For fun I created games called “Who Knows Dad?” and “Who Knows 1936?”  Anyone who correctly answered a question got a small gift from a grab bag.  I came up with about fifty questions for both games, most partiers choosing to answer questions about Dad’s life.  The night before, I asked him if he wanted me to read over the questions about him.  [I figured he might think I would include something embarrassing from his past.  No way!]  As I read the first question, “Dad was born on what day of the week,” he looked confused.  He said he had no idea.  I told him an internet search of the year showed he was born on a Sunday.  I went on with the next question: “What was Dad’s nickname on the baseball field?”  He looked even more confused.  He told me he did not know his father’s nickname when he played baseball.  I explained the game was about him, my Dad, not his father.  For a moment he seemed to think he would be put on the spot at the party to answer questions about his life.  I assured him the questions were for the party-goers, not him the Birthday Boy.  Yet I knew given his age, the whole thing might confuse him, maybe stress and upset him, as he initially seemed to me.

 

A few years ago “60 Minutes” aired a segment on the nation’s growing elderly and skyrocketing costs for hospitalization and medical care, most of which may be unnecessary.  A noted geriatric physician wanted to bring home one hard fact: The human body is built to last 80 years.  It doesn’t matter how well we take care of it, 80 is like nature’s expiration date for human life.  If anyone lives longer than that, it is a blessing or luck and maybe genetics.  I paid attention to everything the doctor advised, especially when it came to loved ones who turn 80, when the geriatric physician strongly advised family to have a serious talk.  So now The Talk between parent and child is not about sex but about death and dying and final wishes, specifically Do Not Resuscitate directives in case of end-of-life scenarios.  Since the initial airing of this vital report, I have managed to come across it while watching TV again and again and again.  Still I haven’t had The Talk with my parents.  In fact, when I first told them about seeing this report, they were offended.  They honestly believed the doctor was advising society to do away with anyone over 80 years old instead of help them or heal them but just let them die.

My parents, however, are wise and pragmatic.  They’ve already purchased their cemetery plots, paid for their funerals, and even showed me a picture of their lovely double headstone in pink marble shaped like a heart.  Surely they have made their DNR wishes known to their doctors?

 

As for me, I went ahead and typed up all my final desires and arrangements, knowing life can expire way before reaching age 80.  Once as a topic of discussion during a visit, I told my parents about my end-of-life preparations, hoping to open the door to full disclosure about their wishes … before something happens.  All right, when the time surely comes.  But neither of us was direct.  So the issue remains awkward.

 

Aging and the brain is major research today with already helpful findings, such as dementia is averted and the brain more youthful when the elderly are taken back in time to a favorite era of their younger years.  For my parents that would be the 1950s: of Elvis and hot rods, rockabilly, jukeboxes and burgers and malt shops.  In their mind, the time is full of vitality and color, not faded black-and-white pictures.  The clothes, the music, the fun and fads, home furniture, TV shows and cars can bring back very happy memories—and this can help revitalize the brain.

 

My dad looked at the napkins I chose for his party.  They where white with a specific teal color, the exact blue-green shade of the teal balloon and the teal plates, bowls and dinnerware I purposefully chose for his birthday party.  He was showing the color to a relative while recalling he once had a car that exact color.  I remember it well: a ’55 Chevrolet with whitewall tires.  He’d fix her up every now and then and take us for a ride while we were growing up in the ’70s.  He’d floor the engine on the highway, gleefully passing up modern cars with no pizzazz or distinctive body design.

 

By the end of his birthday party—an event he declared to be his first and last—Dad seemed to have pepped up quite a bit.  The stroll down memory lane, his lane, with numerous and fondly recalled anecdotes from the life he lived his way proved therapeutic.  That’s the reason for an 80th birthday party: to celebrate a life well lived now.

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So long Charles Manson, so very long

Charles Manson’s not feeling well these days.  Sniff, sniff.  The infamous lifer guilty of mass murder was moved from his prison cell to an undisclosed hospital.  At long, long last, maybe society will finally be rid of this notorious sociopath.

 

For almost fifty years, Charles Manson has remained so well known he’s like an uncle in prison.  Because of him, much has been debated on the nature-versus-nurture theory in child development: Would Charlie have turned out the same if he had come from a loving home, or is he indeed proof of a born sociopath?  With several books and autobiographies, TV movies and news magazine specials, interviews, articles, websites and perpetual interest, Charles Manson’s life and crimes are like a tattoo on our society—perhaps never to be removed.  Even his heroes the Beatles commented on him back in the day.  (John was more sympathetic; George was not.)

 

Did you know that Manson and the attorney who prosecuted him were born the same year, in 1934?  Prosecutor and defendant—clean-cut suit with college, unkempt hippie with prison smarts—were the same age during the trial.  Vincent Bugliosi was always available to comment on Manson through the decades until his own death a few years ago.  Sharon Tate’s mother, a physical presence at every parole hearing, also passed away.  Alas, Manson and his aging girls live on behind bars.  Originally after their collective trial, they had received the death penalty in California.  But that punishment was later deemed cruel and unusual in our society.  That was during the liberal ’70s when even the likes of heinous murderers, though never forgiven, were going to be treated in the manner of a loving society.  Life without parole was considered fair and just.

 

A lot more vicious crimes have occurred since 1969, back when some hippies on a hot August night went on a senseless rampage of carnage not once but twice, leaving blood-smeared taunts and warnings at the police and society.  More discreet mass murderers roamed free in the decades to follow—each news account a revelation that scared us, mostly women, out of our wits.  Nowadays no one sleeps with the windows open and doors unlocked, and those who can afford it place a premium on home safety by adding dogs and alarm systems.  Manson and his creepy crawlies had a lot to do with ushering in these commonsense changes in the American home.

 

Another decade or so after the Manson trial, the death penalty was restored as being perfectly sound in the case of certain kinds of murders.  These crimes had to meet criteria such as involving a child or police officer and taking place during another offense such as burglary or rape and being particularly gruesome.   In the past decade, Texas boasted the number one killer of capital offenders.  And more of the condemned were black than white.  Once upon a time, lethal injection was deemed a viable solution that lets the punishment fit the crime without offending society’s growing inclination against other forms of execution.  As the years rolled on, however, we became increasingly aware of many men in prison who were proven innocent through DNA.  So now, like the ’70s, society is questioning the death penalty, and many states already have banned it—because it stands to reason some who died in the death chamber were innocent.

 

I am against the death penalty and support life in prison.  A lifelong prison sentence is exactly how some murderers should pay for taking one or more human lives.  We have to pay more money to provide lifers with housing, food, health and education.  But doing so reflects a society’s clear conscience.  I am a product of the ’70s after all, having grown up knowing about Manson and the murders and his commuted sentence from death to life in prison.  So I shed no tears about Charlie or any mass murderer spending the rest of his life in prison—even if living to be 100.  We have all the time in the world.

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Heart Attack still number one

Like most people, I assumed Carrie Fisher would survive a heart attack.  Given that she was only 60, the constant news watch was evidence to me of a slow news day.  I think the self-deprecating Carrie would have agreed.  Then the next morning, she was gone.  Women and heart attacks are no laughing matter and are dead serious.

 

Women of a certain age, post menopausal, are not only equally susceptible to heart attacks as men but are more likely than men to die from them.  Why do we place this in the back of our minds instead of at the forefront, like men do?  Like we all do when it comes to men and their health?

 

Women’s heart attack symptoms are often different from men, not always the classic left arm numbness and crushing chest pain.  Women’s heart attacks are much more subdued.  Their complaints are more like emotions, vague and hard to describe in physical or medical terms.  A woman’s heart attack can feel like simple indigestion without a thought of anything more serious.  Prior to my mother’s heart attack, she had been feeling ‘anxious’ and ‘off’ and a little ‘queasy.’  Those symptoms could be about anything, even matters of the psyche.

 

Carrie Fisher had a fabulous life, really living several lifetimes.  Hers was marked by fame at birth, unanticipated movie mega-stardom in “Star Wars,” spiraling drug addiction mostly to pain pills and cocaine, partying with celebrities like John Belushi, rehab, and writing semi-autobiographical books—one made into a major Hollywood movie with the great Meryl Streep and legendary Shirley MacLaine acting out the presumed mother-daughter relationship of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Hollywood sweetheart Debbie Reynolds.  Around this time, the real mother-daughter duo did not speak to each other for ten years.  That’s got to wear on the heart, aging it prematurely.  It’s hard to cling to hate and animosity toward the same person, year after year.  Forgiveness and communication allow love to flow, heart to heart.

 

At the heart of Carrie’s chemical makeup, however, was not addiction as much as bipolar disorder.  She talked candidly about possessing an over-fueled mind, one that is constantly ‘on,’ never off even when she was exhausted.  Lack of rest, mental and physical, can age the heart, too.

 

Once mental illness was diagnosed and properly treated, including occasional shock therapy with pills instead of bolts of electricity, her mania calmed and at some point she and her mother made amends—even to the point of residing as next-door neighbors.  Their story is quite poignant, demonstrated by Debbie Reynolds’ sudden death practically at the news of her daughter’s departure from the planet.

 

For the rest of us women of a certain age, Carrie Fisher’s sudden death is a warning to take care of our heart by exercise and diet including medical checkups and cholesterol and blood pressure meds if prescribed.  In retrospect Carrie lived each day as if it were her last, leaving us one final postcard from the edge.

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Bedmates and Politics

Like a nation divided, so is my marriage.   I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat married to an equally dedicated conservative Republican.  But somehow for 15 years, we’ve managed to keep the peace that seems to have eluded our fellow Americans especially at this point in time.  My background is in liberal and perhaps dreamy-eyed causes and insecure professions: newspaper reporter and music teacher, the latter having suffered two job cuts as a choir director in the public schools.  Admittedly, a decade in the public schools has opened my eyes to many a Republican’s perception and stereotypes of minorities and the poor: crime, gangs, drugs, run-down neighborhoods, broken homes, perpetual chaos and drama, overworked parents, tough kids feeling unloved and unwanted, and an overbearing collective sense of despair and more urgently a disbelief in education making any difference.

My husband, also a college graduate, works in an upscale community as a cubicle cog within the tech industry.  A recent cancer battle meant he would have to take on an additional part-time job.   He would describe me as altruistic, the last of the bleeding-heart liberals.  I would refer to him as the consummate Angry White Man.  Yet together we have seen our income not only shrink as taxes increase but our growing medical needs and household bills escalate while salaries remain stagnant.

We know we work hard.  He has taken few vacations.  I completed a master’s degree, hoping that might open doors for a salary increase.  Still we float along together on the ocean of life, holding tightly through storms and managing to laugh along when an unexpected wave slaps us silly.

We’re both 54 and have lived through many presidential elections (my husband voting in all local elections, too).  So during the summer when the political dust cleared and we knew the choice was between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, without saying a word we agreed to disagree.  He put up with my ferocious laughter during “Real Time” while I held my tongue as he listened to right-wing radio and FOX News meme about crooked Hillary.  Time and again, he allowed me to call Trump a lying sack of *()& to his TV face while I accepted my husband (and just about everyone I knew on Facebook) referring to Hillary as, well, the worst kind of woman.

Working where he does, he assumed everyone nationwide shared his views.  I the same.  But we were both equally alarmed and surprised at the election results.  I was seething the next morning, clearly foreseeing the worst recession ever and bracing for another music teacher job loss.  Yet he refrained from an ‘I told you so’ smirk.  He really could not believe his guy won.  Like the rest of the country and world, we were reeling in shock and maybe uncertainty.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day he offered to take us out to eat, a sign between us that we, like the country, will go on.  Over dinner he remarked with a pleasant surprise about my lack of anger or even tears.  I wasn’t crazy for Hillary to begin with.  She’s no Obama.  But I did not believe Trump should or would win the election especially the way he did.  With a sigh of resignation, I told my husband I’ve lived through Republican administrations before.  After all, the America I know elected Reagan twice, Bush I, and then Bush II twice.  Nothing is shocking. Nothing lasts forever.  I think half the country had forgotten that.  It’s our deal.

So what advice could my mixed political marriage offer to help bring together fellow Americans, seemingly divided more emotionally than politically? First I’d say we win some and we lose some; deal with it.  I and millions of people will be watching the new president like a hawk.  A review of American presidents, 99% rich white men, will reveal Trump is nothing unusual and nothing our nation hasn’t dealt with before.

Finally I would say politics is not as important as marriage.  In a country with a high divorce rate, maybe we forget this.  Plus, our democracy allows us to throw away presidents every four years, and that’s how it should be.  The people are in charge, not the president who represents always only about half of us.  Marriage, if at all possible, should not be thrown away after four or eight years, especially over political views or affiliations.

Our divided nation is going to have to find ways to get along, to not let emotions overrule knowledge and truth, to not take American politics so devastatingly serious.  We’re still living in the land of the free and home of the brave.  (A marriage like mine proves it!)  And by the way, humor goes a very long way in bringing people together, including married couples, because laughter is a product of love.