Focus Group on Aging

In preparation for writing my second book, which will be on aging, I’m hoping to get feedback from people 50+ about their experiences of growing older. What are they thinking and feeling as they move through mid-life into their 60s, 70s, and beyond?

To that end, I’m offering a free program at the Center for Life & Learning at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, on Wednesday, January 30, 2019 from 1:00 - 3:00 pm.

Here’s the official description from the Center’s website:

In addition to writing, Carol LaChapelle has conducted writing and journal writing workshops for the past thirty years. Her newest offering, The Purpose of Aging: Aging with Purpose, encourages people to continue creating their lives as they age.

Inspired by the positive response to the workshop, Carol is focusing her second book on the topic of aging with purpose. She envisions it as both resource and guide to this most challenging and rewarding life transition.

In preparation for writing the book, Carol is offering this free program at the Center for Life and Learning. It is an invitation to people fifty and beyond to share their experiences, thoughts, and feelings about aging. The conversation will explore what elements of mind, body, spirit, and story might help us move beyond midlife with more intention and purpose.

Carol LaChapelle is a Chicago-based writer, teacher, and the author of Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Stories. Her essays have appeared in America magazine, The Writing Group Book, and on www.nextavenue.org. She blogs about this “new” old age at forboomersandbeyonders.blogspot.com.

If you—or anyone you know—might want to attend, please click on the link, then select Free Lectures from the list. Once there, you can register.

http://www.fourthchurch.org/cll/programs.html

Also, if you know of other venues that might want to offer this program, please do contact me at madmoon55@hotmail.com or 773.981.2282.

Finally, I wish all my readers a meaningful and stress-free holiday, and all the best for 2019.

Style Stories

I’ve never been accused of being stylish. And, if for some reason I got close, it didn’t last long.

I credit my rather utilitarian approach to dressing up—or down, as the case may be—to many things, including being a fat kid; wearing uniforms in high school; and growing up female and Catholic in the ‘50s. Translation: no drawing attention to one’s looks, one’s body, else you become an occasion of sin for a young man.

Despite all that, once I graduated and started to make my way in the world, I made reasonably successful attempts to look attractive, especially after losing a ton of weight in my early 20s. These included wearing skirts, nylons, and high heels, and using make-up, if sparingly.

Then came the ‘60s, when hippie wear ruled and the women’s movement urged us to minimize body and maximize brain. Sounded good to me. I could read and write way better than I could coordinate an outfit or tie a scarf.

Besides, except for books, I hated to shop. And the more choices available—the racks and racks of shoes and dresses and accessories—the dizzier I got.

As I’ve aged, it’s gotten worse (or better?). I clothes shop only when I absolutely must, and whatever I buy and end up wearing (not always the same thing) must be washable, durable and affordable.

And if also fashionable, well, great.

All of which is context for why I so much enjoyed a recent essay on aging and fashion in the Washington Post, “Why I gave up on ‘flattering’ clothing,” by Alison Gary, the editor of the style blog Wardrobe Oxygen. 

Now her style story is not the same as mine, but I think many of my readers will appreciate her journey. Here are some excerpts:

When I turned 40, I started to slowly question my choices, easing up on some of those hard-and-fast rules. I worked so hard and for so long to fit my shape into the ideal of my Barbies in their Scotch tape-cinched Kleenex dresses. I was exhausted.

Some rules I broke out of necessity. After I gave birth to my daughter, I developed plantar fasciitis and couldn’t wear heels. I tried. Lord, I tried. It went away, and I went back to heels — and then developed a fallen arch. I have now embraced my collection of Birkenstocks, brogues, flats and funky sneakers.

[W]e are square pegs and a lot of fashion is round holes. We try to shove ourselves into those round holes with compression garments, uncomfortable shoes, and over-shopping thinking there’s that perfect something that will make us suddenly chic. Style comes from within you, not within your closet. You are fabulous just the way you are. You deserve clothing that doesn’t require so much effort and so little payback.

And finally:

The older I get, the better a relationship I have with my body. I no longer want to punish it for not fitting an ideal, but pamper it for how well it’s supported me all these years. 

To read the entire piece:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/30/why-i-gave-up-flattering-clothing/?utm_term=.3e05ac6bc94b

With Gratitude to Poet Elizabeth Onusko

The World’s Oldest Person

BY ELIZABETH ONUSKO

has died. She attributed her longevity

to divorce and raw eggs,

which she ate daily.

A previous record holder

had no idea why she’d lived so long.

Another credited the Lord; still another

cited getting enough sleep. (They’re primarily

women.) Moisturizer, home cooking,

kindness. Hard work. Expensive lingerie.

A former world’s oldest man claimed

the secret was joy. Minding your own business.

Bowling, fishing, great-great-grandkids.

Many lived for decades alone.

One got her hair done on Tuesdays.

One took a job as a housekeeper at ninety.

Every night she set her table

before eating a plate of pasta.

She was buried with a photograph of her son,

who’d died in infancy. Some had the title

for hours, others for months

or years. They gave interviews, greeted fans.

One declared there was nothing left

to accomplish. Another lamented that

it had gone so fast. Their birth records

were hard to come by, if they even existed.

One wasn’t sure what day she was born,

but her marriage license confirmed the year.

They fought for women’s suffrage,

endured Jim Crow, lost count

of wars. Most passed quickly

and peacefully. The person who lived

to the greatest confirmed age thus far

was a chain-smoker

who quit when she could no longer see

well enough to light a cigarette.

She wanted to go to the moon.

She ate two pounds of chocolate each week.

(Published in The Sun, August 2018)

 

Writing Our Lives, Creating Our Lives

There’s more than one way to write our lives, different formats for exploring where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re headed. Or would like to be.

Novelists, dramatists, and poets might use bits of their own lives when writing fiction, plays and poems. Those writing memoir and personal essays are writing their actual lives, looking for meaning and significance therein, hoping what they discover will resonate with their readers’ lives.

In each instance, there is an intended audience in mind—usually the general reader. People writing family stories to pass along to future generations are also writing for an audience, albeit a more restricted one: people in their family, whether still living or yet to be born.

Then there are the vast number of people who keep personal journals, who write about their lives only for themselves. They have no plans or desire to publish, no need to edit as they write. They may be writing to record and reflect on their personal stories; as a way to manage stress or difficult transitions; and to make sense to themselves of what they are thinking and feeling.

And, yes, they are creating something in the process, though it isn’t a poem, a play or a short story. What journal writers are creating (and revising) are their lives.

Yet both kinds of writing—public and private—share a lot of the same elements. I was reminded of this when reading playwright Mike Birbiglia’s piece about his new solo play, “The New One,” in a recent edition of the Sunday New York Times.

Here’s how he begins:

I recently wrote my fourth solo play, a comedy about how no one should ever have children, and how, after my wife and I had a child, I learned that I was right! Anyway, “The New One” is going to Broadway and the biggest question I’m asked since I announced the run is “How did that happen?”

I’m not sure. But if I take a step back and try to answer the question, I’d say, “There was no single step.” It was a series of steps over years…..So what are those steps? For me, it began with my first solo play, “Sleepwalk With Me,” 15 years ago.

As I read through each step, it seemed that two of them especially could apply to private writing.

Here’s Birbiglia’s #1 Step:

1. WRITE IN A JOURNAL. Document your life. The good stuff. The bad stuff. But mostly the bad stuff. What’s wrong with you is more interesting than what’s right. I’ve always felt like we go to solo theater to be told secrets. When I was developing “The New One” I was writing in my journal all of these secret feelings I had about being a new dad. Feeling like everything I did was a mistake. One day I wrote, “My wife and daughter love each other so much … and I’m there too.” In the margin I wrote, “This could be something!”

Writing as a way to think about or think through our experience is why we ever put pen to paper. Or as memoirist Patricia Hampl once wrote: we don’t write what we know, we write to find out what we know.

I’d revise this slightly to read that in journal writing we do start by writing what we know. But we don’t stay there. The goal is to keep writing and, in the process, discover or uncover thoughts, feelings, fears and desires that maybe aren’t consciously apparent.

So Birbiglia was writing all his secret feelings, and then had an “ah-ha.” As a playwright, he knew he could use that discovery in his work. For a journal writer, that very same discovery—that very real feeling—could be of great value in his or her personal and/or professional life.

And here’s the 4^th:

4. PRACTICE. Over the course of two years I’ve performed “The New One” in 60 cities in three countries and I’m still making changes. The show will run for 12 weeks at the Cort Theater and I will have my binder backstage after every performance, making notes on what could work better. The script is a living, breathing item that changes constantly and the audience has everything to do with that. By the way, an “audience” can be any number of people. It can be a living room of friends, an open mic at a coffee house, or the speech at a bar mitzvah. These are not joke examples. These are memories. Now what do you do with the feedback?

And not only is a script a “living, breathing item that changes constantly,” but so are we, influenced in large part by our “audience” of family, friends, co-workers, and others who intentionally or not give us feedback, some of which we find valuable.

Even the negative stuff. Besides, we’re not afraid to write the negative; we know that writing about it will lead us to some positive way of dealing with it. That’s what journal writing can do: give us agency over our own lives.

To read more from Mike Birbiglia:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/theater/mike-birbiglia-broadway-the-new-one.html

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