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Yes, I know, I know. There are all-too-modern ways to keep your friends' addresses, phone numbers, and emails, but this old guy still uses an address book. Unfortunately, the pages of the one I'd kept for endless years finally grew so worn, so tattered, that I bought a new one and, name by name, copied my contacts, my friends, my family from one to the other.
That, however, proved anything but a straightforward process for two reasons: first, there were some people whose names I no longer remembered. When I stared at them on that page, nothing nothing! came to mind. Yes, they had once been contacts, if not friends, and now they were gone, forgotten, just as if they had dropped off some brain cliff. And believe me, that was a daunting feeling. How could I have forgotten them? Sigh.
And then there were those other names, the ones I hadn't forgotten, not at all, but they no longer existed on this planet. They are dead and, take my word for it, that was daunting, too. As I copied that book, page by page, skipping their names, I was, in my own fashion, consigning each of them to the ashes of my personal history, as those who know me will, in their own fashion, do to me someday. It's hard to take in.
And here's what's made it harder yet. I recopied that book more than a year ago and already there are a couple of people I cared for in the "new" one who no longer exist. Names that have gone where all of ours go sooner or later into the trash bin of history and even of memory. But of course, there are better and far worse ways to get there, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reminds us today. And sadly, this country's version of my address book can be grim indeed. Tom
Stumbling Towards Old Age
And Looking for Someone to Lean On
For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages.
Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a local commercial printing press where our run of 2,000 copies would be printed.
This was, of course, before ordinary people had even heard of email. Our entire editorial process was mediated through the U.S. Postal Service, with letters flying constantly between our two cities. On the upside, through 12 years and 48 issues, we only had to hold four in-person meetings.
All of which is to say that I'm old. That fact and recent events in the lives of several friends have brought to mind the first article I ever published in LesCon: "Who's Going to Run the Old Dykes' Home?" It's a question that's no less pertinent today, and not just for lesbians. My worldview was more parochial back then; I naively believed that someone the state or their families would look out for heterosexual elders, but that we lesbians were on our own. It turns out that we the people of this country are all on our own.
Playing Aging Roulette
These days, my partner and I seem to be doing a lot of elder care. Actually, I've long been a source of tech support for the octogenarian set, beginning with my own father. ("OK, you're sure you saved the file? Can you remember what name you gave it?") With our aging friends, we also help out with transport to doctors' offices, communications issues (with landlines, cell phones, and the Internet), and occasionally just relieving the loneliness of it all.
In recent months, elderly friends of ours have faced losing their housing, their spouses, their mobility, or their cognitive abilities. I find it terrifying and ache because there's so little I can do to help them.
I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm daily reminded that getting older can indeed be frustrating and frightening. It pains me to know that my bones are weakening, that I don't hear as well as I used to, that my skin's drier and wrinkling, that my once familiar face in the mirror is growing ever stranger. I'm lucky that like my father who used to say, "After 70, it's all maintenance" I've managed to maintain a fair amount of brown hair on my head. I especially hate the way words that used to leap down my tongue in merry cadence now frequently lurk sullenly in the backwaters of my brain.
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