a little red hen

She Perseverates: Elderblogger and Knitter

I really, really wanted to do this.  Get this black survey badge onto the lefthand column. 

Oh, I spent a lot of time at it.  Had tried this sort of thing  with my award for blogging and the important red one.  Even with step-by-step instructions from Ronni Bennett, who developed the survey, I could not make it happen.  And I think important data will emerge from it.  The results, a window into who we are and how we relate to this technology, will appear at her site, Time Goes By.    

Creative, be creative, my nudging voice said.  My solutions as a late-bloomer in blogland, are two choices for viewers of a little red hen.  Readers of elderblogs as well as elderbloggers themselves are urged to click on this link ELDERBLOG SURVEY: May One deadline. If you put it off till closer to the deadline--though I'd appreciate if you did it now--scroll to the "Websites" section in the left hand column and click on the same words to get to the survey.   Please tell Ronni that I sent you.

Perseveration [continuation of something... usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point] I know well.  Following knitting patterns also offers me endless opportunities. 

Because the instructions for this adorable sweater were not, the chicken is off to the side rather than in the middle.  I began a creative solution by knitting small yellow eggs that I planned to sew under the hen's rump-- right where Roxie holds the bagel.

"Never mind," my son said, "We'll take it as is."  So, Marianne, at Busha Full of Grace (younger Elderblogger who I hope will do the survey) here's what I finished before the left hand break.  I'm onto another garment, slowed down by repetitve stress in right hand. 

And yet,  I perseverate--with blogging and knitting--to the distress of the hand therapist who is not a devotee of either one.    

A Little Red Hen to Obama and Clinton #1

Somebody had to do it...why not US? 

I was pleased with an email from Women'sEnews  that the my question of Clinton and Obama had been added to this list for their upcoming forum in Pennsylvania.  Rita Jensen, Editor-in-Chief of this online service, will be asking representatives of the Democratic candidates this list of questions their readers have submitted.

You will not be surprised that mine was about Aging.  Why, I asked, are older women not visible on either of the candidates' websites.  I point out that John Edwards' campaign site listed an 11-point, "Declaration of Independence for Older Americans" with specific concerns addressed-- affordable prescription drugs and Social Security among them.

Check out the entire list.  Is there another you'd like to ask?

Wednesday's dreadful ABC-TV "debate" with Obama and Clinton has had some encouraging fallout.  GoozNews.com alerted me to a letter by angry journalists (Merrill Goozner among them) on The Nation's website.  They let the network know what a travesty the program was.  You can send a letter to The Nation on your ideas about a "meaningful presidential debate."

All of us need to be shaping the questions and complaining to the media about what we are not hearing.  I believe it's called substantive issues.  In "Road Map to Defeat," Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times --

"The issues still favor the Democrats....Instead of capitalizing on the political advantages...the Democrats, with their increasingly small-minded approach are squandering them...It's not too late [but] The GOP's fondest wish is tht the Democrats keep doing what they're doing."

 

   

Elderblogs, A Bigger Footprint?

The other day Rosie the Riveter, this iconic World War II poster, turned into a very  engaging tee-shirt looked at me frm the window of the one and only neighborhood store that sells clothes, Liberty House.

How many of us as little girls puzzled over Rosie's image back in the 1940s?  Ronni Bennett could only have been a toddler then but something had started in late 19th century America--women taking snapshots with their own cameras, riding bicycles--to offer smart, creative women an alternative to domestic gooddesshood.  For Ronni, there was the rebellious, hard working, somewhat quirky for her time Aunt Edith.

Ronni showed us once again her place in that lineage  in an interview with New York City's leading public radio host, Brian Lehrer.  Except this was television.  Brian, public intellectual/social justice guru, also has a weekly show on CUNY-TV .  Yesterday ElderBlogging was a generous segment in his program on "Social Networking."  

Picture on left is not Ronni's response to intro, "Grandma's not nodding off, she's logging on."  Shame on Brian, so politically aware--just like my pet peeve, not your grandmother's knitting."

Undiverted from this opportunity to spread the gospel, Ronni smiled.  She spoke about words she favors to describe us, "the neutral word is 'old'...not 'elderly' which implies frail."  Most favored, of course is "elder."

The fearless leader of the notion, she clarified that elderblogs are personal, "not a one-way street." The value of blogs is a chance to show what aging really looks like," her tag line at Time Goes By,  We talk to one another about what engages us as elders.  She covered a lot of territory; listen for yourself HERE.   New York City lost when there was no job for her in the ageist marketplace here.

Portland, Maine, was the winner when Ronni moved there two years ago. We elders know how to land on our feet, thank you.  She ended the interview with a nod to the influence of boomers, those folks a little younger and often unsettled by aging, "They are going to change things a lot, " she said and noted there's a place on her site for "Honorary Elderbloggers, those not yet 50 years old."

Using that model, a new group forming at NYC NOW (National Organization for Women) decided to expand our boundaries with the name "Boomer and Senior Women's Network."  Like Ronni, I'm not fond of the "s-word" but that was in place before we began.  More important is what we're working on--ways to become better advocates for ourselves and other older women around health issues, particularly in how we relate to doctors.

We meet at 2:30 p.m., second and fourth Thursday of the month, in the NOW office in Manhattan.  Join us, add your ideas.  Contact me through the address on my About page for more information.  Once again, Rosie and Ronni remind us, We Can Do It!

 

Word & Image, a new class at Cooper Union

[The room is dark.  Black and white 1940s snapshot on a screen up front. I write.]

I loved him that summer.  Afterwards too but the time we met at camp when everything was secret... it's very hard to describe.  Years later I found this photo when it was too late to ask him why this one.  You cannot see my excitement in being close to him.  I'm surprised I could fall asleep when we were together.

He'd let the boat drift into the middle of the lake.  He didn't know what a bad swimmer I was.  And I'd lied when he asked if I'd be okay if we went out to the middle.

But it turned out that he had lied in a much deeper way to me.

This was the second of six photos shown in "Word and Image," a new continuing education class at Cooper Union. Susan Landry, writer and cofounder of  "Lifeboat: A Journal of Memoir" and Stacy Morrison, photographer and photo artist, who met in a another Cooper class, designed the six-week class for those who want to integrate photography and text.  Among the images we viewed and wrote about were famous, found, and personal photos.

This photo belongs to Susan's family.  Through my lens it became a scene from a play, an exchange years later between the boy and girl. What would you write?   

 

Whiteness: big bubble surrounds me

It happened Tuesday, February 19.  Four days later and no mention in major media that comes into my apartment in New York City.  Surfing, I happened upon this march in Texas at Bitch PhD, a feminist blog who got it via Pandagon, another feminist blog.

You see in the photo 2,000 students at historically black Prairie View A & M University as they march over 7 miles to exercise their voting rights.  Because?  The number of early registration sites near the campus--where there are 3,000 students registered to vote--had been reduced in the county around the school from six to one.

Their banner reads, “It’s 2008. We will vote.”*  No one makes it hard for me to vote.

A YouTube video of the march is HERE at the Burnt Orange Report, a blog focused on Texas politics.   Besides learning more about this significant voting rights event at Texas A & M, I read other sites new to me.  With all the excess of narrow coverage on the primary races it was at Black America Web that I learned of the discordant exchanges between Obama and TV commentator Tavis Smiley--and responses to that in the African American community.

*The Rev. James E. Orange, a project organizer in SCLC and aide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, brought young people like himself into the movement, died at 65 last week.  It is his legacy that these Texas students continue.

CORRECTION:  The school is Prairie View A&M University not Texas A&M--thanks to Virginia for noticing the error.

Blog Expert Minus Portfolio

For the longest time I've wanted to use this photo of myself as, well, "Our Lady of Curious Notions"?  It appeared, according to bloggers at Rhinebeck 2007, on Sunday morning, the last day of the event.  Disappeared at once. Captured on digital, by Kay Gardiner, it came to light in her blog post, "Oz."

And that is my intro to a radio interview heard as I lunched and knit today.  "Blogsifting" was the title (link will take you to a rewind) on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show.  Sarah Boxer of the New York Times has written a book,  "Ultimate Blogs, Masterworks from the Wild Web."  Selecting 27 blogs from the 80 million-plus out there, she sets herself up for much attention.  Clearly that's the objective.

Last month, just before her book appeared, Boxer wrote, "Two years ago, I was given a dreadful idea for a book: create an anthology of blogs" in an article in the New York Review of Books.  We definitely knew where she was coming from.  Ronni Bennett described it accurately as "snarky."  Boxer article was timed to appear as her book hit the stores.  Tonight she and two bloggers with her on the Lopate show appear at a local Barnes & Noble.

"It's not so hard to find good blogs," Boxer explained--and pointed to her own book as "the way."  She herself has never been a blogger.  Knows how to research and has read many.  If I were to be as bold to do a book on the subject, my direction would be toward categories of blogs--regional, mommy, visual, elderblogger, etc.  We learn what Boxer likes but nothing of the rich dimensions of the blog world.

Both bloggers on the program--and I guess her extra-special faves--were very likeable.  If I cared about the ins/outs of classical music, Alex Ross' blog, The Rest Is Noise would be on my list.  He is also music critic for The New Yorker magazine.  A thoughtful guy, he sees the breeziness of blogs linked to certain late 19th century writing.  Jennie Portnof, who blogs at Johnny I Hardly Knew You has been at it since 2000, is a poet, believes blogging emerged from and were influenced by the way interactions happened on the Muppets shows--an aside here, another there. 

On the "ethics of blogging" she replied, "Not to hurt anybody."  In contrast, Boxer disagreed, "...many bloggers are incredibly mean to people!"

LRH does love radio and felt connected to the larger world by the enchange of two thoughtful people helping Lopate--clearly not in the blog-loop--understand its value and attraction.

Here's an idea.  A weekly program coming from different parts of the country (this show was too NYC, white, college-educated)...2 or 3 bloggers talk with a non-blogging moderator.  Improve on this, if you wish.  I have to get the mail.

Super Tuesday: 21st Century Possibilities

Enormous changes in my lifetime.

What better reflection of that than this four-language sign near my polling place?

As others await to see who "won" between Clinton and Obama, I celebrate where this idealistic and flawed country has moved.   From celebrating white women's "progress" in the 1940s--which brought us to Hillary Clinton running for president.

And these courageous African-American women in Georgia, politicking before the 19th amendment was passed, are among the major players who have brought Barack Obama to try for the same prize.

This is the triumph of affirmative action.  It's what Ron and I grew up with in immigrant families.  These values were absorbed by our children whom we admire as they are passed on to grandchildren.

Dark voices will make every effort to get our attention in the coming year, to speak to our fears of difference and change.  They will try to divide us.  For those of us who worked toward the goal of true democracy, it's time to step aside and listen.

Elders can support the move forward by those younger.  Let's bring along the best from the 20th and join hands in the 21st century.  [click on images to enlarge] 

60 On Up, Lillian Rubin's Straight Talk on LATER Aging

The only picture in this book is on the cover.  See?  Down at the lower left is the author--Lillian Rubin herself.  An 80-plus sociologist and psychotherapist, her subtitle is "the truth about aging."  The "truth" is mostly geared to those who are white, middle-class, and educated   Not everyone.

That's fine with me.  Are you surprised?  It would be very presumptious for Rubin to be take on the entire population over 60.  We need more voices to tell us what it's like to be a black man--middle-level, never-married who retired at 64 from a government job, for example.  His life and mine are miles apart.

Perhaps her book will inspire others, to write about aging after 60 from varyious perspectives-- race/class/gender identity.  Some experiences will be similar.  All of us past experiencing these years move uncertainly in a swiftly changing world with few guidelines. 

While she includes problems currently discussed frequently in the media--aging children caring for their parents-- her own anger when her difficult, 85 year old mother on the opposite coast resisted the move to an assisted-living facility.   Rubin was in her late sixties.   She notes:

By the time the leading edge of the baby boomers reaches their seventies and eighties, they'll have 100-year-old parents to deal with...

Though the book is filled with the reality we know--the consequences of often roleless and longer life spans, the loss of social networks--I enjoyed reading it. It was as if a conversation was going on between us.

A sociologist and psychotherapist, Rubin speaks of "age grading" where people separate themselves by age.  My own efforts to point this out among peers is always met with resistance.  Many have commented on the discomfort felt by pre-retirement individuals toward colleagues who have left the work force.  In an ageist culture the next division is the old vis a vis the older.  Personally I feel it in my seventies from women in their sixties.  I sense its their fear about the future.  Very understandable with so much media emphasis on bad news about the elderly.

Rubin is an insightful writer whose articles on race, class, gun control (to name a few) continue to appear in Dissent magazine.  Missing for me in 60 on Up were ideas for how--or if--those over 60 might bring about change for themselves.  Personally she did it by starting to paint after 70.  Would she like my workshop idea, "Blogs and Zines for Geezers" as a way toward both agency and creativity?

Pleased her photo was on the cover--only wish it had been larger.  [Thanks to bloggers Ronni Bennett and Cowtown Pattie for the link to an hour-long interview with Lillian Rubin where she mentioned that her publisher would not put "80" in the title because "...people would not buy it."  More provocative issues like sex and unconditional love are addressed.  Some of her ideas on living a long life surprised me--a good thing!]

Chopped Liver? Not You and Me!

Of course you leave comments on blogs if you're a blogger.  Lately, I've been cranking to others about the absence of info on ISSUES from the Democratic candidates --especially the two leading the pack.  And the matching disinterest by media.

AGING, ever hear anything about us in the frenzy to scoop up attention from the under-30 demographic? Is it only John Edwards who speaks to us?  That's the word from The Crone Speaks who blogs from Tennessee, left a comment on LRH recent post with all the links to the specifics.

Thank you, Crone, for searching through the Edwards' site more thoroughly than I had.  "Security, Dignity, and Choice: A Declaration of Independence for Older Americans," is the heading for eleven points at the campaign site, http://www.johnedwards.com/issues/seniors/. 

Pay particular attention to Number 8 on the list:

The number of certified geriatricians fell by one-third between 1998 and 2004 and only 330 doctors nationally will complete geriatrics training this year [2007].  He will also call on experienced geriatric doctors to train the next generation of primary care doctors and nurses in geriatric care, including how to identify treatable conditions in older Americans – like depression, malnutrition, isolation and podiatric problems – that, if ignored, often lead to a downward health spiral (italics mine).

As I write, BarackObama has won the South Carolina primary.  Elderbloggers and their friends need to ask his campaign to add points from Edwards' list.  Like The Crone, I've been a supporter of Edwards' since he began the current campaign: he speaks specifically to ISSUES I care about.  I'm pleased he's staying in the race, hope his views influence the Democratic Party platform on aging and ending the Iraq occupation.

Aside from my personal discomfort with Hillary Clinton's ignoring us, I wonder that she has not considered the implications of our invisibility for the culture-at-large.  Curious that the two younger candidates have focused more on aging.  But then, I could go on at length on how sad I am about the Clintons and our fascination with their soap opera.

Visit the Changing Aging blog if you missed the excellent PBS story on Green House Communities Re-Invent Nursing Home Care.  Dr. Bill Thomas is the theorist behind this.  A review of his book with the wonderfully provocative title "What Are Old People Good For?" at another blog, Embodied Aging led me to another place, for this very important directive:

"We do not do ourselves or society as a whole any favor by allowing ourselves to be treated with a benign condescension by others. It’s shortsighted for a younger generation not to pay attention to the life experience of its older people. It’s worse when we allow ourselves to be characterized as irrelevant and don’t have the moxie to speak up. We diminish both ourselves and our world by our silence." from the blog, YaGrowsOldorYaDies.

Kudos once again to M.E. at Xtreme English, a loyal commenter here, for the cartoon of MAW (Most Assertive Woman) and Hen Pink, her deputy, which I was gifted with last year and delight in using today.  Inclusion does not indicate her endorsement of my ideas or notions.  Please join us both in asking the hard questions.

Who are Democratic Women in Iowa?

This morning in reporting from Women's E News.--

Ramona Oliver, communications director of Washington-based EMILY's List, says 80 percent of registered Democratic Iowa women didn't vote in the 2004 caucuses. So EMILY's List--which supports pro-choice Democratic women and endorsed Clinton the day she announced her campaign--is focused on turning out women. In an online poll, the organization gauged Clinton's support among Iowa women, and their likelihood to caucus on a 1-to-10 scale.

Puzzled?  I am.  So much media attention has been directed to the outcome of Iowa.  But article report reveals many non-participants among those I'd expect would have been actively involved.  Super Tuesday, primaries in states with largest populations, could tell us more.  Not hearing much about that day, February 5, here in New York City.

An old lady feminist, I hope that women who made early commitments to Clinton's candidacy, like NOW, the National Organization for Women,  will continue to direct their energy to the Democratic ticket even if she is not the "winner."  By the way, the link goes to a thoughtful essay on "gender politics" by NOW's president, Kim Gandy.

Women's E News is a place I'm looking for in-depth coverage of the coming election.  [Link to their website has been added in column to the left.]  Ronni Bennett's take on the issue at Time Goes By would have been important.  However, now that she has left the room, it's up to Kay's Thinking Pad in Ohio, Along the Way in California, Xtreme English in Washington, D.C., and many others from the TGB blogroll to connect us with other Elderblog voices.

"Actually," as my grandson Zach in Portland says, I'm looking forward to reading the comics with him again.

Here we are in one of my favorite black/white photos Ron took last summer.  Looking forward with much anticipation to Portland trip at the end of the month.