I have a long history of poor sleep. When I was still working, a colleague and I used to joke that we should have called one another at 4:00 a.m. because we were both up at ridiculous o’clock every day.
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The Extension

The big telephone issue these days of course is whether or not to give up our landlines.   But the big deal when I was young was whether a girl could convince her folks to have an extension to the family telephone installed in her bedroom!

If they would,  l remember promising my parents,  I’d be completely happy and would never ask for anything again!

And – to the envy of friends who were then still extension-less  – I got it,  a beautiful pink princess telephone with an extra long cord so I could carry it all around my room as I chatted away.

I had a big crush on a boy named Warren at the time,  and one afternoon he called me and of course I ran upstairs to take the call in the privacy of my attic bedroom.  We had been talking for quite awhile when I heard my mother calling me from downstairs.   I told Warren to hold on and I went out to the top of the staircase to hear what she was saying.

She was calling me to dinner,  and so I hurried down to eat.

We were at the table a bit later when the doorbell rang and my father got up to answer it.  It was Warren who’d come over to say I’d left the phone off the hook and no one at his house could make a call!

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

Smart people can do or be many things.
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On my 70th birthday my brother welcomed me to my eighth decade! While he was accurate, that declaration gave me pause.

The summer after my senior year in high school I was in a local show, written, directed and produced by friends (including two who went on to conceive MyRetrospect decades later). There was some loose theme, but we sang Broadway show tunes. I sang a song from “Zorba” – Life is what you do, while you’re waiting to die. Life is how the time goes by! It was dramatic and quite suited me. We danced the Miserlou to prove that we were very much alive, we had our lives ahead of us.

I began taking serious care of my skin in my 30s, yet in late April, I had something removed from my cheek, which was biopsied (and was fine). Before I was 30, I used a reflector and sat in the sun, soaked with baby oil, trying to get color on my pale skin. My mother warned me I’d regret it. Sometimes she got it right.

I joined my fancy gym, Equinox in Chestnut Hill, 10 years ago. I take a class (Pilates, Barre, Barefoot Sculpt, which substitutes for my beloved Core Synergy taught by the irreplaceable Josie Gardiner which I now stream on my computer at home) three times a week and do my own workout on other days. Before turning 60, I was determined to get into, and stay in shape. Recently, a woman from one of those classes came into the locker room, out of breath. She was in a chatty mood, bemoaning how she felt and how old she was. We are both 70, but she had stopped coming to the gym for a while. She mused, “Don’t you wish you were still 30?” I thought for a moment, “I wish I had my 30 year old body with my 70 years of wisdom.” It is not a new or profound thought, but it rings true.

I won’t do the “organ recital”. I am not in ill-health (having just had my annual physical which confirmed this), but have had my share of things go wrong. The last time I saw my wonderful physical therapists (a husband and wife team) on Martha’s Vineyard (that time for tendonitis of the left elbow – another gym injury), I joked with Larry that they’ve worked on just about every part of my body. He didn’t believe me until I listed the body parts, starting with both shoulders (frozen shoulder), working my way down to the my big right toe. He shook his head in disbelief and laughed. He had to agree.

I try to put up a good fight, but Mother Nature always wins. I thought it would be fun to show my passport photos through the decades, as a marker for the aging process. I got my first one for my trip to visit my brother in Israel in 1972.

1972

1983

1993

2003

2013

2023

Passport photos aren’t known for being flattering. You can’t smile in such a way that you show teeth. And you have all the official stamps and bars across your face (the last one is before I sent it in for renewal; the current passport has two versions of the photo, one in black and white so it is less easy to counterfeit). You also see hairstyles through the decades here, weight fluctuations, etc. But the aging process is inexorable. I began wearing hearing aids two years ago. They sort of work, but my husband rarely looks at me when speaking and tends to mutter rather than enunciating, then gets aggravated when I can’t make out what he’s said. And noisy restaurants (aren’t they all these days?) are the worst. I just smile and nod my head a lot.

I know I don’t have the mental acuity that I once had. I search for words, I used to remember EVERYTHING, now things come to me later. It is very frustrating. My husband and I joke that we have one good brain between us (and indeed, since he is the math/tech whiz, and I am the emotional, artistic one, we compliment each other in our areas of expertise).

I’m seeing lots of articles from legitimate sources about how women after the age of 65 lose muscle tone and tendons become less flexible. GREAT! I’m doing all this work in the gym to try to counter that, but can I? I know I do not look like I did three years ago at the beginning of lockdown, though I exercised six days a week, taking classes from my favorite teachers over Zoom (with weights and bands, and even treadmill work). I feel like Sisyphus, trying to roll that rock up a hill forever, losing a little more ground each year. Yet, I persevere, losing a bit more flexibility with the passing of time. But hopefully gaining some wisdom.

70th birthday

Hillary, I get you. I was you. Sadly, as my mother often advised me, it’s nice to be smart but be quiet about it.
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This is so not the world I had hoped to leave for my grandkids. It’s definitely time for a new generation to take over.
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As the clock hands moved from the 20th to the 21st Century, Cupid -- disguised as the Y2K Bug -- played his own hand.
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Mothers are dead. Children are far away, one overseas who celebrates mothers in March, so may not know when Mother’s Day occurs here in the United States. Husband is on Martha’s Vineyard. I am alone with my thoughts. It doesn’t matter, but there is no one to fêtê me, no one with whom to celebrate.

In an effort to honor the work done by mothers, a holiday was established in the early 20th century, but Hallmark commercialized it. If one is always valued, do we need to be singled out on a specific day? We all wish to be valued.

Flowers from my kids during lockdown, 2020

#Retro Flash – 100 words