Starting a new job, at 64

After five years as editor of the Woburn Advocate, this week I started a new job as editor of the Concord (Mass.) Journal.
     It’s a larger paper, with an engaged, exacting readership, and I am grateful for the challenge.
     I’m still getting my feet wet, but already I have fallen in love with some of the town’s female elders.
     There’s Dot, who’s 90-something and writes a weekly column for the paper, delivering it by hand every Thursday.
     And Phebe, who’s lived in places as far-flung as China, helped start a local feminist group in the 1970s and still motors around town on her trademark bicycle.
     And Marion, now in assisted living, who knows more about Concord’s historic cemeteries, and the famous authors buried there, than anyone alive.
     Those are just three of the people I’ve met so far.
     I think I’m going to like it here.

Miracle in a jar

     It was about an inch long, bullet-shaped and a leafy shade of green, roped with sparkling gold rings that my nieces would call “bling.”
     “A chrysalis,” Rick pronounced. The hard-shelled pupa of a moth.
     So, like two 7-year-olds undertaking a science project, we did something I have never done: We put it in a jar with a twig and few leaves, poked holes in the top and waited.
     We didn’t have to wait long. Less than a week later, Rick said he could start to see orange and white stripes appearing inside the translucent shell.  On Monday, there appeared before us a monarch butterfly, full grown and moving its wings uncertainly.
     We named it Harantis, after our street.
     Yesterday, before work, in a driving rain, we took the jar outside and gently deposited its contents on top of a tarp inside our open garage. I took one last picture and left.
     I was still at work in the late afternoon when Rick called.
     “Harantis is gone,” he said, and I swear I thought he was going to cry. “Off to Mexico.”
     And here is the magical part.
     Monarchs are the only butterfly that migrates both north and south, like birds do (though no individual one makes the entire trip, females depositing eggs for the next generation to continue the journey).
     By the end of October, Harantis will indeed be well on the way to Mexico, likely the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve.
     That little inch-long thing we found on a plastic lawn chair in our yard is an intercontinental flyer.
     Who says we don’t encounter miracles every day?

A new Spin on things

Never been to a farm-team game.
     Never thought I wanted to.
     But thanks to some free tickets from work, Rick and I found ourselves Friday night in the stadium of the LowellSpinners – the Red Sox farm team based in the one-time mill town that was once one of the largest producers of textiles in the world. That accounts for the team’s name – “spinners,” as in the turning spools of thread used in the mills.
     We had a ball, no pun intended.
     This year’s team isn’t ready for prime time (as if this season’s Red Sox are) but we fell in love with the ambiance of the place on that perfect summer night. The between-inning entertainment that ranged from two girls racing to see who could put on firemen’s hats, jackets and boots the fastest to the amazing border collie that could run halfway across the field to catch a Frisbee.  The basement Gator Pit, with its sumptuous grilled offerings. The mascot, an alligator (I don’t know why either). And, especially, the stadium itself, a low-slung, open structure over which the towering smokestacks of old Lowell still towered.
     As Rick said, Kerouac (a Lowell native) would have loved it – the laughing people, the beer, the good times.
     We loved it ourselves.
     BTW, Lowell won over the Connecticut Tigers 7-6.
     I think we might be back.

Boa noite, Amigos

     So here’s another “first” for my list – learning a new language at 64.
     I’m now half-way through a set of eight CDs (I listen during my commute morning and night) of Pimsleur’s “Learn Brazilian Portuguese.”
     Why? I’m reminded of the famous comment by a renowned philosopher (was it Bertrand Russell?) who was asked why he was studying Mandarin Chinese in his late 80s. “If I don’t learn it now,” he said, “when will I?”
     If I don’t learn Portuguese now, when will I?
     It’s an odd language, compared to others I’ve studied, fairly guttural, with a lot of  half-pronounced “ch” or “ji” sounds at the ends of words. Some phrases (“por favor” for “please”) are the same as in Spanish while others bear no resemblance to any language I’ve heard before.
     Why Portuguese? Because we have many friends who are Brazilian and I’ve watched them toil to learn our language so they can work and communicate with people like us. It seems only fair to return the favor and share in their culture as they do ours.
     And besides, learning something new is exhilarating – even if, in our 60s, we no longer have built-in opportunities to do so. At this age, we have to make our own.
      Boa sorte!

Applying for (gulp) Medicare

     I feel old and young at the same time.
     In a little over two months, I will turn 65 (Can it be? I demand a recount) and I’ve heard horror stories about how you must apply for Medicare right around your 65^th birthday or the premiums will be much higher if you apply later.
     Wrong. At least in my situation – which is, working and covered by my employer’s health insurance.
     I read AARP’s wonderful primer on Medicare (I recommend it to everyone) which attempts to lay out in simple terms the various choices one has in this Byzantine program. You probably know the basics – Part A is for hospitalizations; Part B, for doctors’ visits; Part C, for private Medicare plans; and Part D, for prescription drugs. Just reading through it made me understand how Ph.Ds have a tough time figuring out what program would work best for them. Two dear friends – both really smart women – spent months figuring out their options. I didn’t look forward to that process.
     But the guide also recommended that people covered by employer health insurance contact their human resources department to discuss options. Good suggestion. My HR consultant told me I should apply for Part A (hospitalizations) because it’s free and it might supplement any benefits I get through the company. The rest of the stuff I wouldn’t have to worry about until I retired – and I wouldn’t be penalized for it, she assured.
     But I’m a skeptical journalist. I called Social Security, which administers Medicare, and got the same answer. Once I retire, I have eight months to decide which if any of the other plans I want, without facing any penalties.
     So today, after much trepidation, I went on the Social Security Administration website and, for the first, time, clicked on that little button about applying for benefits. I’m now an official applicant for Part A.
     But – the good news – Rick and I have so much left on our mortgage that I’m going to have to work for years before retiring. And by then I’ll be too senile to care what my Medicare options are!
     May you all be so blessed.

Driven to murder

I’m not especially proud of myself today.
     I’ve become a killer – though many would consider it justifiable homicide.
     It’s the mice.
     For the 15 years Rick and I have been in this house, we’ve had company. We’d hear them in the walls at night, or find occasional droppings in the cabinet under the sink, but the mice have always seemed – what word to use? – benign, or symbiotic, like the unpleasant next-door neighbors you just have to put up with because you might want to borrow their hedge clippers some day.
     For years, we used little “mouse cubes” to trap them live and return them outdoors, where, no doubt, they promptly rerouted and came back in the very holes they had originally gnawed. We even took to naming them for a while, and recording their numbers in those little penciled notches where you make four strikes and run the fifth through the column. I’m embarrassed to say how many we recorded, but it surpassed two digits.
     Once, we found a mother mouse and three or four newborns in one of the mouse cubes and we felt so bad we kept them in a box in the bathtub for a while before we took them into the woods across the street, hoping they’d survive.
     Ah, but that was then.
     Now, it’s war. They’ve become so brazen they’ve broken into our precious camping gear to make nests out of our Campmor pillows. They’ve chewed the ends off paper towel rolls. I swear they’ve thumbed their noses at our cat. And – the final straw – they have climbed up on the kitchen counter to help themselves to a bowl of fresh fruit.
     Enough. This week, we had a exterminator come and set mouse bait throughout the house. Two or three weeks, he said, and they’ll be gone, though the “treatment” will continue for a year.
     As I said, I’m not proud of it. I’ve never done anything like this in my life. But it feels like it’s us or them.
     And until they start paying part of the mortgage – or show up with hedge clippers to lend – I’m voting for us.

Lost on the water (Umbagog, Part II)

    Here was a “virgin” experience I hadn’t quite planned on – getting lost in our kayaks as they took on water from a roiling lake.
     My friend Miriam and I had left our campsite about 9:30 a.m. for what we thought would be a short paddle up the Rapid River at the northeast end of Lake Umbagog, where we heard a bald eagle’s nest could be seen.
     We paddled as far as the rapids, got out and had a snack, then headed back down the river. We were almost to the lake when Miriam shouted my name and pointed toward a dead tree on shore. There, in all his majesty, a bald eagle perched on a naked limb, presiding over the surroundings like a monarch surveying his kingdom, the sun glinting off the white of his head as if it were a crown. We paddled back and forth several times to take him in, checked out the nest on a nearby tree, then made our way back to the lake.
     But it was a different lake than the one we had left a couple of hours earlier. Lake Umbagog is shallow – 12 to 14 feet at its deepest – and the slightest increase in wind velocity can produce quite a chop on the water. And, we were disoriented. We hadn’t brought our map of the lake (lesson one) and hadn’t paid close enough attention to landmarks on the way out (lesson two).
     I don’t know how to swim.
     We paddled hard and nervously, reminding each other of sites that looked familiar – a green-roofed cottage there, an odd-looking wharf there, as the waves grew in height and intensity. Finally we passed campsite 18, which we knew was the closest one to ours, and thought we were home free. But after a half-hour of hard paddling, we saw nothing that looked like our campsite, and the waves were turning into whitecaps pounding our boats against the shore.
     We beached them and got out. There was no entry into the deep brush on the land, so we slogged through the water, picking our way among rocks and water weeds, rounding point after point in the direction we thought our site might be. Finally, we saw it. We had overshot it by a good half-mile.
     Back we went, part overland and part sloshing through he water, until we got back to the boats and turned them around. Then, reminding ourselves that there was chardonnay at the other end, we paddled our hearts out in the choppy water for 15 or 20 minutes until we arrived at the pull-in near our site, exhausted, exhilarated and chastened.
     I was dead asleep at 7 p.m.
     The next morning, our last, I sat on a rock overlooking the water and thought about why I love the place – not only for the adventure it provides (planned or not), but for moments like the one I was experiencing, alone. A mist had settled over the water and as it began to burn off, it moved in smoky columns, the forms looking like wandering, nomadic wraiths. Occasionally, I could see dabs of green across the water – an impressionist’s version of trees. Waves lapped the rock I sat on. I felt I could have been in a dream.
     Two hours later, all packed, we sat on the same rock with our gear around us and waited for the transport to pick us up and take us back to base camp and our car. We just heard it puttering toward us when something above caught my eye.
     “Look, Miriam,” I breathed.
     A bald eagle, wings fully spread, soared over us and away.

Alcohol may have been a factor

(from Aug. 5, but posted Aug. 8 because of no Internet access)

     We were two women alone in the wilderness, camping at a remote site on vast Lake Umbagog on the New Hampshire-Maine border, having been dropped off with our gear and kayaks 10 miles up the lake.
     The park ranger who transported us said that just that week, he had chased a bear with his pontoon boat because it had been swimming toward a campsite and he wanted to discourage it from making unannounced visits to same.
     Ah. Bear country.
     But we had hatchets, a cow bell, a bear-proof container and a weighted rope which could be tossed over a tree limb to hoist up any food in which an ursine guest might be interested.
     We had also just watched part of the Olympics.
     We had also brought five bottles of wine for our two-night stay.
    My friend Miriam Gitterman agreed to do the tree-limb toss.

     The results may be seen on this video.

     Alcohol may have been a factor.

Author, author

     Is creativity contagious? Can you catch it from being around stimulating people?
     Those are the questions I walked away with after Rick and I went to a local authors night at our little library here in Chester, N.H. – a first for both of us.
     I had never heard of a library-sponsored authors night (do other places have them?) and didn’t know what to expect from the half-dozen or so homegrown writers who sat or stood at folding tables to chat and offer their works.
     First we ran into Tim Horvath, once a creative writing teacher at the late Chester College, whose writing “deftly interweaves the palpably real and the pyrotechnically funny,” in the words of one reviewer. What could we do? We bought his short story collection, “Understories.” But before even starting the book, we enjoyed just talking to him – his well-developed curiosity, the waterbug zigs and zags of his mind, his humor. Love to have him as a friend.
     And there was Robert Crawford, Chester’s own poet laureate, who is truly a latter-day Robert Frost (who writes in rhyme anymore?) and whose past includes a long stint working for the Pentagon (people are complex). He is a local treasure who should be a national one.
     And the impish Holly Robinson, whose memoir, “The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter,” is the first of the books we bought that I intend to read. How’s this for a hilarious book-cover endorsement (from Donna Anastasi, president of the American Gerbil Society): “Holly Robinson reveals a fascinating, untold chapter in the history of the Mongolian gerbil in the United States… all the while struggling to hide a terrible family secret – the barns in the backyard house nine thousand gerbils.” I’ll share it when I’m done.
     And a writer convinced of God’s hand in the workings of the American Revolution. And a novel interweaving the lives of characters in the historic city of Portsmouth (one of our favorite Friday night places)…
     After buying four books, we decided to stop before we bought again.
     But we left excited, inspired and expanded for the experience – ready to go right back to the computer and write some more ourselves.
     Is creativity contagious?
     Yes, yes, yes!