"The Young Elderly": No Way, No Way!

My "day job" is still editing journals -- that is, sets of articles written by researchers in various fields, from engineering to ocean law to classroom technology. I love it! It makes sense of my own academic background (chemistry degree from Michigan State, where I only went to one football game). And it keeps me learning every day.

Some recent work on articles about housing for "the elderly" took me to learning about urban China, where the ages that Americans label "past retirement age," that is, after age 65, are actually divided up into more groups. I did the work a few weeks ago, when I noted that my own age fits into the "young elderly" in China. That was something of a relief (being young), but also set me up for arguing: Although 50 years ago, I would have said the 70s are "old," now I know they are not. Definitely not "elderly"!!!

 

Except yes, I've lived for almost three-quarters of a century. I recall years that to my grandsons are part of American history. For me, "the war" is still the one in Vietnam. I do adapt quickly to people talking about either World War II or Iraq as their war, but ... mine was the one when a draft-board notice arrived around the time I'd been married for a year to another college student. And before that, the early part of that war when I saw several black students at my high school heading to the recruiting offices, while most white ones watched from the sidelines. (We all learn the force of racism in different ways, don't we?)

Now my poetry is based in an aging body and an overflowing mind, and often the poems begin with recognition of that, in some form. Today I found myself writing about how my feet are changing. If you know, you know. It's all good.

But it does seem to make autumn more symbolic than ever. I am planning for a good winter. So now is the time to prepare, prepare. And to hold these mountain colors in my spirit. 

 

School Days, School Days -- in Poetry School

Although I've lived in the Green Mountain State for almost half a century (!), I didn't grow up in Vermont. 

My father, an industrial engineer, carried my New England mother off as his bride, and the work for engineers back then took them to New Jersey (north Jersey, I add quickly). But each summer, Mom brought us all back to where we belonged -- the mountains of Vermont, the farms of New Hampshire (one still in the family), the rocky coast of northern Maine. As soon as I could "get back here," I did, with a four-month-old baby and a husband who was determined to write serious sociology and willing to learn to split wood. I grew vegetables, made and canned applesauce, earned a living from home with my chemistry degree, and found that the Vermont house we'd moved into had been built for and by one of my mother's relatives back in the 1840s.

In the past 20 years there hasn't been much, other than brothers and their grown children's weddings, to draw me back to New Jersey, a far more industrial place than the interrupted farmland I'd known as a kid. Today, I learned that my "middle school" had a name change in 2015 to honor the town's astronaut, Buzz Aldrin. What a surprise!

Buzz Aldrin Middle School. Wow!

Still, it's September, so I'm back in school again: poetry school.

I spent much of my Labor Day weekend online in a three-day set of workshops led by strong poets with something worth saying. And I'm eager for the six-week class I'll attend that starts next week, with one of the best teachers I've learned from. (Proof: My poems reached publication FAR more often after each of her courses. I'm growing stronger and maybe even smarter in how and why and when I write them.)

Maybe you'd like to see a bit of how a poetry class operates? One session last weekend, taught by Alvy Carragher, focused on adding detail to poems. She showed us how -- but also pushed us to discover more through what these classes call a "prompt," a short assignment for writing something. I won't tell you her prompt because that could be unfair to all the work she put into it. But here are five things I paid attention to and scribbled as a result: 

• The blue ordinariness of a sunny sky.
• Up and down goes the zip on the sweatshirt as the day changes.
• Garlic baked into the bread! Such wealth!!
• Aliens adjusted my friend into enlightenment.
• Apples to process, pushing at my priorities.
• What can I recall about when my sons were teenagers? -- thirty years is a long time. 

I bet you can already see how each of those could lead into a poem. So can I. I have pages-and-pages-and-pages of notes from my classes.

Now I've got to get serious about the homework.