Cheerleading

I have always craved attention. An amateur psychologist might say that I felt ignored because I was the third child in our family. I needed a lot of attention and would go anywhere to find it. For example, even today I update Facebook every morning and obsess over how many “likes” that I get on my posts. Back in high school, I read the morning announcements and was an actor in the theater. When I was a counselor at Camp Tall Trees, I loved to tell the campfire story and lead the kids in song. But the most blatant example of me looking for the attention of my peers was when I became a cheerleader in high school and college.

The year was 1978 and my sister had decided to run for homecoming queen at Eastern Kentucky University. She won first runner up that year but what I remember was that she got to ride in a convertible down the main street of Richmond, the heart of E.K.U. One part of that parade was a group of cheerleaders who were screaming their lungs out while riding on top of a fire engine. The girls were so pretty and the guys looked like they were having so much fun that I remember thinking to myself, “I want to become a cheerleader, too!”

My first stint as a cheerleader came in 1979 at Trinity High School only we didn’t call ourselves cheerleaders; we were the Yell Team because it sounded a lot more masculine. We were at an all boy school and looking manly was important to us. What was great about being on the Yell Team was that we got to be on the field during the football games at Cardinal Stadium. Karen Spears was my partner and my job was to stand behind her and clap a lot. The guys on the squad didn’t know any gymnastics, and we didn’t do any stunts, but it was still fun to cheer in front of thousands of people. I remember a lot of campers from Tall Trees came to the rail to get my attention during the football games and the girl that I was dating at the time thought that it was cool to have a boyfriend who was a cheerleader.

In 1980 I attended Xavier University and thought that the best way for me to become socially active was to become a cheerleader. When I tried out for the squad, no one was more surprised than I was that I had made the team. The best part of being a cheerleader at Xavier was the road trips. We travelled to DePaul in Chicago and stayed in their dorm rooms over break. Our game was in the evening so we spent a day in downtown Chicago. I remember looking out of the bus at staring at all of the high-rise buildings, one after another, and I whispered to myself, “Gosh!” with my mouth agape. Loraine said, while laughing at me, “you have never been in a big city before, have you, Jeff?” I must have looked like a rube, gawking out of the window with my eyes open as wide as saucers. While we were in the downtown area, we did a cheerleader pyramid in front of the old water tower building. It was all in good fun as we were so excited to be in the big city to cheer on the Musketeer basketball team.

The other big road trip that we took was when the Xavier Musketeers took on the Evansville Aces. The Aces were a powerhouse in the 1970s but they were also known for a tragedy. Three years before I travelled with my team to southern Indiana, the University of Evansville Aces basketball team suffered a calamity when the plane that was carrying the basketball team crashed and all 29 people on board died. A memorial, built in the shape of a weeping basketball, had just been built in the middle of the campus. It was a somber reminder of what the university had just been through, but the tragedy had made their basketball program even stronger.

Emotions ran high as the Aces played to sold out crowds. The Musketeers were their first home game of the season and I had never seen anything like the preshow that the Purple Aces put on. They turned off all the lights in the arena and then shone a spotlight on Mr. Ace, the team mascot, who drove a mini-car around the court. When the floor was cleared, the announcer introduced each player and the spotlight shone on the him when the player’s name was called. The crowd yelled “Aces! Aces!” after the introductions were made and I thought that the arena walls would come tumbling down because the whole place seemed to shake with noise and excitement. Streamers and glitter fell from the ceiling at the end of the program. It was quite a show.

The Evansville cheerleaders put up the Xavier cheerleaders in their dorm rooms for the weekend. One of the girls threw a party for us at her parent’s house after the Saturday night game. The family had made a lot of money off coal and their father had the resources to build in an indoor pool and a billiards room with a television and VCR. This was in 1980 and, back then, very few people had a VCR in their house. I remember being so impressed that I could watch “Alien” or any other movie, whenever I wanted, when previously I would have to go to a theater to watch a full-length film without commercial interruption.

I was the youngest one on the squad and was intimidated by the cheerleaders, most of whom were two years older than I was. Usually two years doesn’t mean that much but there is a wide gulf between a freshman in college and a junior in college. They were adults and I was just a kid. In addition, Xavier attracted the best and the brightest and these ambitious people were going to be something someday. Playing against type, these cheerleaders didn’t party on the road trips but instead studied their textbooks on the team bus.

Tom Burkhardt was our captain. He was a short man, built like a refrigerator, and was attending Xavier on a ROTC scholarship. He openly declared his love for Lorraine, a beautiful cheerleader and pre-med student who was way out of his league. She was wicked smart, had long blond hair, and Tom’s crush was so deep that he often referred to Lorraine as “a goddess.” Tom’s buddy on the squad was Steve Kaitenowski and the two couldn’t be more different. Where Tom was hyper active, constantly spitting out his opinions on politics or sports, Steve was laid back and would calmly say, “Okay, Tom” when his buddy got too fired up. The two guys traded barbs with each other but as different as they were, I could tell that they really liked each other.

Jennifer was a little Italian ball of fire, with long black hair and an athletic physique, and she was madly in love with Chris Groefer, the rakishly handsome pre-med student. Maloo was a tiny little girl from the Philippines who was our flyer. She partnered with Tom, who was as strong as an ox, and those two turned out to be the best on our squad because Tom could toss Maloo high in the air to do many great tricks. On one long road trip, Maloo fell asleep on my shoulder when she was done studying in the bus. It wasn’t about romance, it was one friend being comfortable enough around another friend to let her guard down. She felt safe and I felt like I belonged.

My partner on the squad was Andrea Tryba. She was a popular freshman but was too tall and too heavy to be a cheerleader but she brimmed with confidence, and that made up for a lot. The problem was that I could barely pick her up at the beginning of the season and, when Andrea gained the ‘Freshman Fifteen’ pounds, I couldn’t pick her up at all. I was already strong but began to lift weights in earnest to build the muscles need to lift Andrea off the ground. On our last road trip, the whole squad went out to a bar and I was so frustrated at my inability to do any tricks with Andrea that I called her a heifer. She was a city girl who had never left Chicago, so Andrea didn’t know what a heifer was, but she glared at me with rage in her eyes when Tom told her that a heifer was a female cow. To this day, I feel badly about hurting her feelings. Andrea barely spoke to me for the rest of the year and didn’t try out at all for our sophomore year.

One of my regrets is that I only cheered for Xavier for a year. I was frustrated, tired of the politicking and gossip, and just wanted to play rugby. If I had the chance to do it all over again then I would have stayed at Xavier and cheered for all four years. Instead, after two academically and socially frustrating years, I transferred to Bellarmine University, and thought that I could meet a lot of people quickly by becoming a cheerleader again.

It just wasn’t the same. Where we didn’t take ourselves too seriously at Trinity, and at Xavier we were professionals; Bellarmine was somewhere in between those two opposite poles. Since I was a transfer student, it was clear that I would have to find my own way to fit in because the others had already established their friendships. Most of the guys were in ADG together and the girls were in the Little Sisters program associated with that fraternity. Also, there wasn’t a lot of leadership on our squad. Marilyn was our sponsor but wasn’t a coach. We had a team captain but he was more of the problem than the solution. The whole situation stank of amateurism and I longed to go back to Xavier where the squad took cheerleading seriously and we had a good coach. After a single season on the Bellarmine squad, I stopped cheerleading all together, finding it much more gratifying to work at a part time job and earn some money.



Trinity Yell Team: Steve Tompkins, Matt Higgins, Mike Higgins, David Hobbs, Brigid Sheridan, Jill Joseph. Karen Spears was my partner and our sponsor was Mr. Spitzer

Xavier Cheerleaders: Steve Kaitenowski, Steve Johnson, Tom Burkhardt, Tim Beno, Julie, Lorraine, Jennifer, Edie, Maloo. Andrea Tryba was my partner and our coach was Chad

Bellarmine Cheerleaders: Mike Epperson and Suzanne, Jack Horn and Susan, Rick Olgine and Lisa Young, Doug Strothman and Doris Swenson, Paul Garner and Brigid Sheridan, David and Mary. Helen was my partner and our sponsor was Marilyn.

Book 3 Chapter 10 The Day My Father Died

The Day My Father Died

My father died early one morning in the spring of 2006. Once I received the word of his passing, I called into work to tell my boss that I would be out for a few days. After driving over to my parents’ house, I sat with my mother and sister in the kitchen as we waited for the ambulance to take away the body. Every once in a while, I peered in the living room to look at my father who lay on the couch. The thought occurred to me that it isn’t like the movies where the deceased’s face looks peaceful, almost like the dead person had fallen asleep. No, it was nothing like that at all. My father’s crystal blue eyes were crossed because there was no conscious muscles there to keep them in place. They rolled around when ambulance driver picked him up to put him into the body bag.


The three of us waited in the doorway and watched as the technician certified that Dad was dead and then two men loaded the body onto the gurney and wheeled him out the front door. Mom cried quietly. She said, to no one in particular, “my father would not be proud of me right now. He would have told me to keep a stiff upper lip.”

Dad’s health had been declining for years so his death wasn’t unexpected. When I was a freshman in college, my father had his first major stroke. He recovered nicely and suffered no visible damage but his doctors told him that it was time to slow down. It was probable that he had several small strokes before and after the major one but they didn’t register with Dad or his doctors. Ten years later, Dad retired from the company that he helped to build up for three decades. He never talked about it but, after he died, I went through my father’s personal papers and I found a sheet with his unique handwriting on it. There were two labored paragraphs where Dad tried to write about being conflicted about retirement, but the words wouldn’t come. He wasn't used to expressing himself in emotional terms and shoved the paper in the back of a drawer for me to find twenty years later.

After his career ended and his health slowly deteriorating, my father began to lose interest in almost everything. Even the simple act of going out to eat became a chore for him. An example of this is when he went to his favorite restaurant and the waiter asked Dad if he wanted any change from the fifty-dollar bill that he used to pay the check. This question irritated my father, who didn’t like that the waiter assumed that he earned a fifteen-dollar tip, and he tersely asked to be given all of his change. The waiter became testy and, with an attitude that no owner would have agreed with, he asked my father not to sit in his section any more. In his younger days, my father would have given the waiter a tongue-lashing for his impudence, but now he meekly accepted the rebuke. He never went back to his favorite restaurant, and eventually stopped going out to eat altogether. In fact, he rarely left the house and asked my mother to go to a drive through restaurant to bring home sausage and biscuits.

When he first retired, my parents took many vacations to Europe together, but that was just to give my father something to do. He enjoyed planning the trips more than actually going on them. It became an undertaking that was too much for him because of the hardships of travelling, having to find a place to shelter the dogs, and the disruption of his routine. As time went by, and his health declined, Dad didn’t want to do anything at all, so my parents stopped taking trips. Since they no longer went on vacations or out to eat, Dad’s only distractions were reading the paper and watching television. When asked how things were going my father always answered "Peace and quiet."

Because he rarely left the house, my father stopped taking caring about the way that he looked. While he still had a career, he wouldn’t leave until his hair was in place, his suit was cleaned and pressed, and his shoes were shined. After a few years into retirement, he rarely wore anything but a t-shirt and shorts around the house and he stopped caring about how his hair looked. The highlight of his day, and what occupied his mind, was taking “a big poop.”

When he was about fifteen years into retirement, Dad’s gait was so unstable that he began using a walker. He had to lean over it to keep his balance and, when he looked up from that cramped position, the emotion that registered on his face was one of fear. In order to see where he was going while using the walker, my father had to crane his neck upward. It was an awkward posture and he was afraid of losing his balance and falling down. Once he was seated and comfortable, he looked like his old self; but the simple act of moving from room to room became a trial.

At the end of life, having switched from the walker to a wheelchair, Dad resigned himself to his fate. He had given up. After he lost his health, he also lost his social life and, since he could no longer enjoy his hobbies, my father spent most of his time sleeping on the couch; the same couch on which he would die. It wasn’t just that he wouldn’t leave the house, he never left the den. A hospice nurse visited him to give him a sponge bath since he couldn’t manage to take a shower by himself. If he needed to relieve himself then he had a bottle to urinate in and a toilet chair set up in the middle of the family room, which was available for him to take "a big poop" in if he needed to.

After he died, it took a couple of hours for the ambulance to arrive to take away Dad’s body. I remember thinking that I regretted that I never had the chance to sit down and have a heart to heart discussion with my father before he died. I would have liked to ask him if he was ever happy and if he took any joy in raising a family or building a career. Later, as I looked through an old album, I saw a picture of my father sitting next to his first-born son, who must have been just five or six years old at the time. At that moment, he was happy, taking pride in his eldest boy and was clearly full of hope for the young family that he had created. The old pictures give me a clue as to what was truly in my father’s heart and I like what I see in the albums.

Book 3 Chapter 4 Section 2 Tom and Gail's Salad Days

Book 3 Chapter 4 Section 2: Tom and Gail’s Salad Days

Thomas Frazier III was such a pretentious name for a man who showed so little promise as a young man.  His father, whose nickname was Junior, was a truck driver who tried to own his own business but could not make a go of it.  Junior tried to get into the regulated freight business but when the trucking company didn’t take off; he sold it and bought an irregular route carrier of truckload commodities, which ran from Minneapolis to Iowa.  When Junior’s son was in his teens, Junior needed him to drive his trucks.  At a very young age, Thomas Frazier III was well travelled, having driven his father’s trucks all over the West, from Minnesota to Montana to Oklahoma.

Thomas and Junior did not get along.  The father was content with being a good old boy trucker owner and operator while the son was filled with piss and vinegar.  The younger Thomas couldn’t wait to begin his life; to strike out on his own.  In fact, Junior’s oldest son did not invite familiarity but instead insisted that everyone call him Thomas.  This pretension drew a lot of sniggers from the other truckers, but never to Thomas’ face because, even at a very young age, he was lean, scrappy, and always spoiling for a fight.  The older men often said to Thomas, “Don’t get above your raising” because they thought that Thomas was too full of himself.  The young man never listened to anyone else’s advice, especially his father’s, and was proud of becoming strong and independent.

  From his earliest days, Thomas suffered from eczema and, since he was the oldest, he often asked his younger siblings to apply the medicine onto his back.  Sometimes he itched so badly that he couldn’t sleep and he ended up reading the night away before attending school the next day.  He had read so much that he had read every historical novel at his local library and had his name on the list to check out the new book arrivals.  When the itching became so bad and Thomas missed more than one night of sleep, he was prescribed phenobarbital, a very strong narcotic.  Occasionally, his family woke up and found that Thomas was nowhere around.  The narcotic had make him so groggy that he couldn't figure out how to get into his own bedroom so he slept in any corner of the house where he could find peace.

            While he was in high school, Thomas worked at the local bowling alley.  He worked the late-night shifts because the manager had left and he could run the place without being harassed by his boss.  Although he was only fifteen when he started to work at the bowling alley, Thomas knew that he could avoid the child labor laws, which strictly prohibited youths from working at night, and the young man would often act as the closing manager.  When the local police decided to enforce the child labor laws, Thomas had to develop strategies for avoiding the cops.  Often, he hid up in the machinery at the terminus of the bowling lanes, squirrelling himself in a secret corner spot until the cops left.  One time he didn’t have any notice that the police were coming and to avoid a confrontation Thomas pretended that he was part of the family who was bowling in middle lane.

            After his junior year in high school, Thomas joined a traveling carnival for a summer job.  The truck driver in the carnival became too sick to work and asked Junior if he knew of anyone who could take over his route for a couple of weeks.  Junior volunteered his son.  Thomas had to hitchhike to Dallas in order to meet the semi and assume the driving duties but what he didn’t count on was that the load he was carrying was a Ferris Wheel.  This carnival ride is heavy, shifts easily, and is difficult for a novice to handle.  Still, Thomas had a lot of confidence in himself because he was a teenager and still too young to have been truly tested.  He had not been on the job for even a week when he found himself driving down a steep road that led to a small town in Montana.  Thomas lost his brakes because he had not down shifted enough and he sped straight through the town with his horn blaring.  This same situation had happened many times before to other drivers, so the townspeople knew what was happening and cleared the streets before anyone could get hurt.  When the truck finally came to a complete stop, and the police showed up, no one seemed to know who was driving the vehicle because Thomas had fled the scene.  Since he didn’t have a commercial driver’s license, Thomas knew that he would be arrested and fined if he were found with the truck, so he snuck away and hitchhiked back to Minnesota.

After the carnival fiasco, Thomas entered into his senior year in high school and almost immediately got into a grudge match with Principal Kleinert.  After flaunting the rules whenever he could, Thomas was caught smoking on the school grounds and Kleinert expelled him.  Junior went to the assistant principal’s office to voice his disbelief that the principal could remove his son from the school on this one offense but Kleinert told him that Thomas had a history of being a rebel but was too clever to get caught.  The principal would not take away the expulsion so Junior had no choice but to transfer his son to the next closest high school, which was over ten miles away from his house, in the hope that he could get the boy to finish out his senior year.  Unfortunately, the goal of graduating from high school just wasn’t that important to Thomas.  He became a truant and, even when he did make it to school, he cut class so that he could sneak out for a cigarette.  By the beginning of the second semester of his senior year, Thomas decided that high school wasn’t for him and he dropped out to join the Air Force.  Junior had to sign the papers to admit him because Thomas was still only seventeen. 

After boot camp, Thomas went back to his old rebellious ways and became a pain in the ass to his superiors by flaunting the rules and defying authority.  For example, he didn’t see the need to stop at the security check point and reentered the base by speeding his rental car past the officer on duty.  The officer quickly gathered a couple of MPs to track down Thomas and they found him within an hour.  He was eating dinner at the mess when the MPs grabbed him, cuffed him, and took him to the police station.  “Come on guys,” said Thomas, trying to bargain his way out of being arrested and charged with violating the security regulations.  “This isn’t that big of a deal.”  The security officers realized that Thomas was just a raw kid who wasn’t worth their time, and not some kind of terrorist, so they let him go after roughing him up a little bit.

Thomas seemed to rub everyone the wrong way.  Once, while on leave, he had left a bar at closing time and decided to take a back way to base.  A group of young toughs saw him walking in an alley all alone and accosted him.  Instead of meekly handing over his money, Thomas tried to fight off the robbers but it was four to one so he never had a chance.  The robbery cost him more than his wallet because one of the robbers hit Thomas so hard with a bat that he lost several teeth.  For the rest of his life Thomas had to wear a bridge in his mouth but was too embarrassed to talk about it.  Only after he died did his family find out that Thomas had implants.

The guys in his unit didn’t like Thomas very much either.  He was a smart ass, and a know it all, and to teach him a lesson the young man’s sergeant ordered Thomas to fix the radio antennae on a hill above the base.  The antennae was attached to a fifty-foot tower and the sergeant told Andrew to check on the connections to make sure that all transmissions were going through.  In fact, there was nothing wrong with the radio or the transmissions, the sergeant just wanted to see if Thomas had the guts to climb fifty feet up in the air with nothing between him and eternity but a flimsy tower.  It was in that moment, holding on for his dear life while scaffolding up the tower, that Thomas decided that maybe the Air Force wasn’t for him.  He wouldn’t quit the service but instead would earn his GED before he was discharged and then he planned to go to college once he became a civilian again.

It didn’t work out that way.  Eczema, the skin disease that had plagued Thomas since he was a young boy in Minnesota, continued to trouble him while he was in Asia.  The local farmers fertilized the soil with manure and once the stuff dried up it blew away with the wind.  The dust settled onto Thomas’ skin, making his eczema much worse than before, and the condition became so bad that the young man was sent to a hospital in Japan to recover.  Even with treatment, the affliction would not go away, and Thomas’ face blew up to twice its normal size, and his back and legs became bloated.  The doctor who was assigned to Thomas decided that time, and fresh air, were the only cure for his affliction.  He prescribed a prolonged stay at a base outside of Burlington, Vermont in the hope that a month’s long convalescence would help.

            The problem was that in addition to bad skin, Thomas had inherited an excess of energy and could not sit still for long periods of time.  As soon as the bloating had subsided, Thomas decided that he needed to get off the small base and socialize.  The local women had organized a U.S.O. club and organized parties where the young service men and local girls could meet.  Thomas made it a habit of his to show up for these parties on the first Friday of every month.  His uniform was pressed, his hair was slicked back, and his body was lean from the months of convalescence.  In short, he cut a very attractive figure.  This brash young man had been rolled up, tight in a coil, and was waiting to be sprung.

In the corner of the church basement where the U.S.O. parties were held, Thomas noticed a beautiful young lady with her nose in a book.  He craved attention and thought that if he sat next to this girl then maybe she would give some to him.  She was reticent.  Gail hadn’t earned much in the way of social skills in her youth or at her short stint at Green Mountain College where she had been content to sit in her dorm room and nap her days way.  Now she had to deal with this brash young man who had sat down next to her, uninvited, and it appeared that he would not leave until she danced with her.  Gail had seen Thomas strut across the dance floor, towards her, and thought that if she could get past his obvious skin problem then he was good looking.  The pox marks and acne may never go away but she was willing to look past them.

She danced with him.  Over and over they shared the dance floor together and promised each other that they would do it again the following Friday.  It went on like this for months until the Air Force decided that Thomas was well enough to be medically discharged.  After a brief engagement, Thomas and Gail were quickly married in Vermont and then he whisked his new bride away to Minnesota so that they could begin their new lives together.    

It was at this point in his life that the self-confidence that Thomas possessed came in useful, for these were the hard years that would test his metal.  After earning his GED, Thomas enrolled in college and earned extra money by driving a tanker for Archer Daniels Midland on the weekends.  He left school after his last class on Fridays, picked up his fully loaded tanker, and drove to New England and back and still had enough time to sleep for a couple of hours before his Monday morning classes.  Gail spent most of her time in the G.I. married housing unit on campus.  Because housing was in short supply, the newlyweds were forced to live in a temporary housing structure; an old Quonset hut.  It was a prefabricated structure of corrugated steel formed in the shape of a half cylinder.  They only were given the front half of the hut, another couple lived in the back of the hut, and there was no insulation.  Gail liked to tell the story of how the condensation on the window of their hut froze during the cold Minneapolis winter and there were icicles everywhere.  Still, even though they were crowded and cold, the young couple was free and independent, and they could not have been happier.

            These were the salad days of Thomas and Gail.  He was busy going to class, studying, driving a truck, and otherwise growing into his name.  She worked at Dayton’s Department Store to help with expenses.  Thomas decided that they needed a car so he took a second part time job unloading boxes from trucks at night to earn some extra money.  Eventually he saved up enough to buy an old model maroon Dodge with a Desoto race engine.  Thomas loved to tinker with the engine whenever he had the time but, no matter what he did, the engine rocked the car back and forth even while it was idling.  Still, that car was hot, and Thomas would let his bride drive it whenever she could come up with some gas money.  Gail drove the Dodge like a banshee through the streets of St Paul.  Like riding her horse on the trails when she was just a girl, Gail felt a new sense of freedom whenever she was behind the wheel.  On the rare day when they both had time off, Thomas and Gail loved to go to the lake so that she could swim and sun herself while he worked on the Dodge.

After Thomas graduated from college, he found a good job working at a family owned barge line in Minneapolis.  The owner and manager of the small company, Minneapolis Harbor Service, which was run by Frank Eiple, who wanted to hire Thomas before he even graduated from college.  Thomas insisted that he be allowed to finish his course work, but was willing to put off going to law school, and started to work for Frank the day after he graduated.  For the rest of his life, Thomas regretted not going to law school after earning his undergraduate degree.  However, since Frank and Mable Eiple were an older couple, they took Thomas and Gail under their wing and treated the young couple as if they were their own children.  For example, When Thomas and Gail started a family of their own, Mable volunteered to babysit.  In her spare time, Mable knitted sweaters for the babies.  Thomas moved his wife out of the Quonset hut and took an apartment next to the Eiples so that the two families could spend even more time together.  For the first time in their lives, Thomas and Gail were truly happy and settled down to a marriage that would last for over fifty years.

Elderhood: Forewarned is Forearmed

                          Elderhood: Forewarned is Forearmed
       About twenty years ago I was called to visit my aunt, who had cancer and wasn’t expected to survive, and she said, “It is alright if I die.  I have had a long and fulfilling life.”  She ended up beating that cancer and, when she turned 80 last summer she said, “What was I thinking?  At 60 I was still young, and I didn’t realize that I had many fulfilling years ahead of me.  Being a grandparent became the best part of my life!”  It is comforting to think that my aunt considered 60 to be young since I am only two years away from reaching that age.
       According to a book that I have just finished reading, there are three age-based subgroupings: childhood, adulthood, elderhood.  The final category, elderhood, is the final thirty years of our lives.  As I approach elderhood I have learned that the key to successful aging is to approach it with the same shameless ambition accorded to childhood and adulthood.  My personal philosophy is to shoot for being an exceptional senior.  That means that I want to continue to do the triathlons, only at shorter distances, and I will keep working.  I want to be as low maintenance as I can be until I can’t live without assistance.  If I can give my life meaning and purpose, all the while keeping my perspective and self-respect, then I will consider myself to be an exceptional senior.
       Elderhood is the climax of a lifetime spent building a bank account and raising children; now is the time for resolution.  If adulthood is filled with the stress that accompanies work and family life, elderhood sees a rise in contentment, wisdom, and agency.  Since Tracey and I have been blessed with good health and financial resources, the options for us are unlimited.  Our lives can evolve into a new form.  We could quit our jobs and move to the Fontainebleau in Miami.  If we became bored with our lives of leisure, then we could volunteer.  If retirement didn’t agree with us, then Tracey and I could unretire.  About 40 percent of Americans begin an encore career because retirement brings on a lack of purpose, a lack of social engagement, and a lack of needed income.  What scares me the most is that I will feel a loss of self-worth so I doubt that I will ever fully retire.
   Elderhood can be broken up into two distinct age groups; the young-old who are in their 60s and 70s, and the old-old who are in their 80s and 90s.  Tracey and I are about ready to enter the young-old stage.  The good thing about being in our 60s and 70s is that we have not taken up permanent residency in old age.  We are the young-old but feel like we are in our 40s.  Of course, there are physical challenges that go along with being older: hair loss, weight gain, wrinkles, graying, and general weakness.  Degradations also include hearing loss and vision loss.  As we get older, we are more concerned with mobility and remaining independent, while the vanities of physical appearance and social recognition become less important.  That is probably for the best since the young-old have become invisible to our youth-obsessed society.
One of the good things about being at the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation is that is that there is silver tsunami of 40 million people aged 65 or older.  These folks who have started elderhood right before Tracey and I and they can help to shine the light on successful aging. 
   The final stage of life, the old-old, begins somewhere in our 80s, and will eventually take the steep downward plunge towards death.  Our main goal is to remain independent, but that goal becomes harder and harder to achieve as we face more and more challenges.  The physical challenges that we will face in our 80s are a compressed torso, humped back, losing teeth, constipation, high blood pressure, heartburn, and obesity.  The loathsome expanse of the years begins to catch up with us as we have trouble with the simplest acts, like standing up, because we suffer from a loss of balance and weakness.  Depression can set in because by the time that we are old-old, we will have to give up on a lifetime of gainful employment.  Driving a car can become problematic and there will be grieving at this loss of freedom.  Growing old isn’t a battle, it is a massacre.    
   The old-old face many mental challenges including managing finances, handling medications, and such mundane chores as shopping, cooking, and cleaning.  They worry about who will take care of them when they are no longer able to take care of themselves.  The secret to aging well is to have good genes, good luck, enough money, and one good kid.  Usually a daughter.  Ultimately, however, the hard fact is that 60% of Americans die in an acute care hospital, 20% die in a nursing home, and the last 20% die at home.  To make matters worse, more than one third of all people over the age of 85 have dementia.  No one will get away unscathed and the old-old suffer from a sense of fatalism and a general loss of interest.  The last thing that I want to do is to become a burden to my family; a problem to be solved.
   My final wish will be to have a good death, meaning that I can die at home surrounded by family and friends.  The worst way for me to die would be alone, in a nursing home, miserable because I am in pain, and undignified because I would be wearing a full diaper, and tubes would protrude from my mouth.  And yet I know that even if I take all the precautions for a good death, and that I have made my wishes clear in a living will, there is no guarantee that my family will follow through with all of the arrangements that I have made.

Dementia: Carolina and George: Book 3 Chapter 10

Dementia: Carolina and George: Book 3 Chapter 10 Section 2
After Andrew died, George tried to bring his mother to his house for the Sunday night family dinners, but the experiment didn’t last very long.  The incessant demands by Carolina put the extended family on pins and needles.  It wasn’t anything dramatic that bothered the family, it was the little things that irritated them.  For example, Carolina picked her nose when her granddaughter, Lucy, took a group picture.  The old woman asked a lot of questions to anyone who happened to pass by but then, before the family member even got a chance to respond, Carolina had already lost interest in the subject and turned to someone else to ask another question.  She scans the pictures on the mantel and notices Lucy’s senior picture and says, “Look at the size of those titties,” as George’s oldest daughter shrinks in embarrassment.  Carolina disappears into the bathroom for long periods of time to go through the drawers and cabinets, and to check for cleanliness.  She fed the family dog, who was old and under a strict diet, food scraps under the table, on the sly, and when caught she swore by all of the saints in the calendar that she hadn’t done it.  The final thing that irritated George’s children was when Carolina stuck her fingers into her mouth to clean out any remnants of food and then insisted on stroking the cheeks of George’s children with her wet fingers.  All these acts were off putting to George’s wife and children so the traditional Sunday night dinners with the family were cancelled.
George decided to pick his mother up from the nursing home and take her out to dinner once a week.  At first, when his mother’s dementia wasn’t much of an issue, he brought his family to the restaurant with him.  Carolina’s forgetfulness kept getting worse and became so bad that she became lost while doing very simple things, like returning from the bathroom.  The first time that she got lost the old woman only made it back to the restaurant table after wandering around in confusion for several minutes.  Her eyes were full of terror and she was angry at George’s family for abandoning her.  The burden of taking Carolina out to dinner became to big of an obstacle to overcome and George’s wife and, even though the old woman was the matriarch of the family, the children no longer joined him for his Sunday night meals.
On the car ride over from the nursing home to the restaurant, Carolina rarely said a word.  She stared out the window as her eyes became vacant and unclouded by thought.  Carrying on a basic conversation was beyond her and her only contribution to any discourse was to say, “Yes,” or to repeat what George had just said.  If she did initiate a conversation then all she could do was to comment on what she saw around her, like the weather or the traffic, because she had no memory to draw upon.
When they arrived at the restaurant Carolina searched the parking lot for trash and if there are wrappers or cigarette butts on the ground, she exclaimed "this is terrible" and then she picked up all the trash in the immediate vicinity.  Once inside the restaurant, Carolina hugs the waitress, a total stranger, because the old woman knows that she is helpless and will lean on anyone who may give her support.  The waitress escorts mother and son to their table to take their drink orders and Carolina tries to impress her by saying things like “I like to ride horses,” or “My father fought in the war.”  Even through the fog of dementia Carolina remained proud of her heritage and wanted to let the waitress know that she used to be something.
When the menus were placed before George and Carolina, the son tried to help his mother figure out what to order, even though she ordered the exact same thing every Sunday.  Still, Carolina liked to study the menu; she sounded out the words of the dinner items, and then asked questions about the food.  Her confusion became so bad that she could not decide what to order so George ignored her questions and ordered the soup and sandwich.  If the waitress doesn’t take the menu away from her then Carolina would continue to study it, sounding out the words, and asking questions.  On the other hand, if the menu is taken away before Carolina is done reading it then the old woman gets mad and gives the death stare to the one who deprived her of the menu.
Now comes the hard part.  George and Carolina must wait for the food to arrive and the old woman gets bored easily and wants people to pay attention to her.  For example, she puts on a show when she sneezes; doing it as loudly as possible, without bothering to cover her mouth, spewing spit all over the place.  She clings onto the ends of her jacket for fear that the sleeves will touch the floor and get dirty, and Carolina cannot stand to get anything dirty.  Everything must always be tidy.  She grabs the pepper and waved it around and asked if anyone wanted it and then looked disappointed when no one did want it.  There is absolutely no reason for her to pick up the pepper but it is on the table in front of her and so she must do something with it.  She spied the other people in the restaurant and, if the patrons were overweight, Carolina felt the need to point at them and say loudly, “They are fat!”  George tried to quiet her because he doesn’t want any trouble but within a few minutes she again points and said loudly “They are fat!”  If the temperature is too cold for her then she insisted that George go to the car and get his jacket for her to wear even if it is in the middle of August.  She zipped the jacket all the way up to the neckline and then asks for a scarf.
After what always seemed like an interminable wait, the food arrives.  Predictably, Carolina had already forgotten what she has ordered, and it is always a complete surprise to her when the meal is placed before her.  She refused to eat the meal because she is sure that she didn't order it.  George reminded her that she did order it, that she orders the exact same thing every Sunday, and then he tries to coax her into eating a little bit at a time.  She won’t be rushed.  If George tries to get her to eat faster then his mother opens her mouth to show him, and anyone else within the immediate area, that there is already food in there and she couldn’t possible eat more.  Or she will play with food and stop eating after a bite or two claiming that, “My belly is full.”  Part of her ritual is to take some of the food that she had already chewed and spit it out onto her plate.  By the end of the meal she has several lumps of used food on her plate.  The lumps disappear, one at a time, because Carolina has put it into her mouth when no one was watching.
Her dinner is over, but she will not allow George to eat in peace.  Whatever is in front of her disturbs her so she must move everything away from her immediate area.  To make room for herself Carolina pushes used napkins, dirty dishes and silverware or anything else away from her and in front of George.  Her son’s personal space quickly becomes crowded with whatever Carolina can push to his part of the table and she gets very angry if George tries to push her things back into her space.  “Look at that!  It is disgusting!” she says.  Then, to distance herself from the mess that she has made, Christa asks “Whose plate is this?”  When told that the plate is hers, and so the mess on it is hers, she refuses to believe it.  “This is not my plate.  I didn’t have any dinner!”  There is no use arguing to her about the mess that she has made because almost as soon as she has eaten something then she forgets that she had eaten it.
“I have to pee pee,” Carolina suddenly announces.  George has only begun to eat his meal and tries to put her off.  “It hurts!  I have to go now!”  Carolina cannot be alone, not even for a moment, so George abandoned his meal to go with her.  He stands outside of the bathroom and waits while his mother idly cleans the sink or picks up trash off the ground, unaware that time has passed, and without the knowledge of where she is.  All she knows is the bathroom must be tidied and she will not be hurried. After five minutes or so, George must ask a waitress or a kindly patron to go into the bathroom and lead his mother out.  When she emerges, she sticks her head out of the bathroom door and peeks around the corner, not knowing that her son was waiting for her.  “What have you been doing in there,” George tersely asks his mother.  “I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the bathroom,” Carolina plaintively replies.  “There is only one door,” said George, “I don’t see how you got confused over which door to use to get out of the bathroom when there is only one door.”
The two sat down at their table again and George tried to finish his meal, which has grown cold by this point, when Carolina orders her after dinner coffee.  A remarkable amount of dinner time is built around Carolina’s coffee.  She won’t drink anything else and makes a major production out of preparing her coffee once it has arrived.  First, she says that she wants some sweetness in her coffee, but there are many types of sugar and she can never figure out which sugar is the plain white one and needs helping picking out the packets from the container.  Next is the creamer.  If the waitress gives her more than one package of creamer then Carolina must open them all up and, of course, she spills the creamer everywhere.  After a few seconds she had forgotten that she was the one who spilled the creamer and starts was complaining about the mess that she made.  After a few dinners out George learned to hide the extra containers of creamer and the packets of sugar so that they will be at the ready for his mother’s second cup of coffee.
The second act of the coffee show is when Carolina must stir her coffee, only she cannot figure out how to do that because she doesn't know to use a spoon.  Instead, she asks for a straw to stir her coffee only she cannot remember the word for straw, so she calls it a sucker.  Before she even tastes it, Carolina is sure that the coffee is too hot, so she blows on her cup so hard that her cheeks swell out like a trumpet player.  Now the coffee is well prepared.  The old woman takes a sip and then she must tell George how good it is.  After taking two sips she wants a refill because her coffee has cooled down.  If the refill doesn’t come immediately then Carolina loudly complains, “This coffee is lukewarm!”  She is indignant and insists on telling people who happen to pass by that her coffee is cold and she calls the waitress over to pour her a new cup.  “Yoo-hoo,” she yells at the waitress while frantically waving her hand in the air.  The waitresses inevitably bow to the demands of the old woman while risking bad tips from the other patrons since they must ignore their other tables.  Once again, Carolina insists that her cup be filled all the way to the brim but then she immediately spilled it all over the table.
Carolina insisted that her coffee tasted like water and needed sugar to make it palatable.  When George pointed out that she had already put three packets of sugar into the mug, his mother insisted that there was no sugar in her coffee.  The two fought back and forth until George took the coffee away from Carolina.  Unsatisfied with this turn of events, and wanting to even the score with her son, Carolina said that she needed sugar in her chicken soup.  George was tired of fighting and let his mother put three packets into her soup.  The two made ugly faces at each other and raised their voices in anger.  It was not an attractive sight for either one of them.  To score one last point against her son,  Carolina pounded the coffee cup with her spoon as loudly as possible, if for no other reason than to get some attention.
By the end of the meal George was clearly frustrated with his mother.  She could tell that he was frustrated and said, "Did I do something wrong?" This question comes only after she has ruined the meal.  There is no remorse on her part, she is ready to move on to the next thing.  It wouldn’t matter if George tried to correct her because Carolina’s fallback remark was always "I don't know.  I am a dummy."  This one statement excused her from her incessant demands.  Instead of trying to correct his mother, George puts on his coat and says, “It is time to go.”  Only now does Carolina realize that they are going back to the nursing home.  “I don’t want to go back to the nursing home.  I would rather cut my throat than go back there.”  George replied, “Well don’t try to use that knife.  You couldn’t cut hot butter with that knife.”  The manipulation isn’t over yet.  Carolina tries to guilt her son into letting her stay with him.  “I love you,” she says, reciting the words that George would have given anything to hear when he was young.  “Can’t I go home with you?”  This effort of maneuvering George into doing something that would be clearly bad for mother and son was so transparent that he did not bother to respond.
After a couple of repeat performances of Caroline’s obnoxious behavior, George decided not to take his mother out to dinner anymore.

Why I am doing Ironman Louisville 2020

           Why I am doing IMLOU 2020    

            My back and neck still hurt from the accident that I was in for Ironman 2019 but, with a lot of stretching, I think that I can overcome my injuries.  My right hand suffers from a malady that a specialist termed “Thor’s Hand.”  The tendons in my hand have tightened up to the point where I cannot open my hand all of the way and it is permanently cupped.  My toenails are bent and misshapen.  My shoulder never recovered from the bike wreck that I was in ten years ago.  The “Achilles Tendon” in both of my legs have tightened up and require a lot of stretching and, like other men of a certain age; I have continual troubles with my knees, hip, and ankles.  In spite of all of these aches and pains, I have decided to do the Ironman again in 2020.  If I am going to give the race another throw then I need a good reason as to why I should spend the time and energy to try it again.  This blog entry is an attempt to give those reasons.

            “I regret that you could not have suffered longer,” said the race director of an ultra-marathon when one of the runners quit earlier than expected.  This line has some resonance for me in that I quit the IMLOU 2019 race early because I felt like that I didn’t have a chance to finish it.  There was a sense of resignation after my bike wreck on the first loop of the race; it was the final nail in the coffin.  After searching my feelings, and really digging deep as to why I wasn’t even angry at the triathlete who cut me off and made me take a horrible spill, the only answer that I could come up with is that I felt like I never had a chance at a medal.  To paraphrase another line from that same race director, “triathletes don’t quit the race because they can’t go on.  They quit the race when they realize that they cannot finish.”  The first reason as to why I am participating in IMLOU is that I have some unfinished business.    

            A student of mine, who I taught twenty years ago, ran into me at the grocery store.  She looked me up and down before saying, “You haven’t changed a bit.  Do you take supplements or something?”  Susan wasn’t trying to be nice; she really wanted to know my secret for staying young.  When I am asked that question, my pat answer is, “I work out twice a day, every day, because I am training for an Ironman.”  When I weighed myself yesterday, I found that I weigh about ten pounds less than when I was in high school, and I wasn’t overweight in high school.  The second reason why I do the Ironman is that the training keeps me young and in incredible shape.

            The third reason why I do the Ironman is that it fills a huge hole in my life.  The children have left the house and are establishing their careers.  Tracey, my wife for over thirty years, leaves the house for work before 6:00 am and usually doesn’t get home until 6:00 pm, so I don’t see her much throughout the week.    My career has become unfulfilling and I view my time at the office as a time to rest between training sessions.  I get up at 3:30 and run eight miles, or bike nineteen miles, before work.  After work, I either swim a mile and a half or lift weights.  If I had a more demanding job then I would have to give up my two-a-day training days.  Unless I change jobs, I have a lot of time on my hands and may as well use that time to train.

            My final reason for participating in my twelfth Ironman Louisville is I am not feeling burned out at all.  My training days, especially doing the long bike rides on the Ironman route, contain some of my happiest hours.  I feel calm and at peace while on the bike.  Besides, if I didn’t spend my time training then I would probably sit in front of the television to drink beer and eat chips.  Father Time is not my friend and if I was to stop training now, at the age of 58, then I would not be able to start it up again.  I must try to finish the race while I am still young enough to do it because there will soon be a time when I cannot hope to participate in such a grueling race.  

            I hope that this blog entry has inspired you to find new and personal reasons for participating in triathlon.           

St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, and the B.V.I

Norwegian “Epic” Vacation

            Our first port of call was Barbados and our guide for the bus trip was Janelle, who was born and raised on the island and who was very proud of her heritage.  She made it a priority to point out the beautiful spots on Barbados, which is only 23 miles long and 14 miles wide, but Janelle couldn’t look past the fact that her island has a high cost of living and high taxes and bad roads.  Our tour included a full circumference of the island where we saw an array of unfinished houses and poverty.  On the other side of the coin, we saw St. James Church, whose origins date back to the 1600s, and Rhiana’s house on Shady Lane.  Rhiana is a native and she has donated a lot of money to the local hospital so that it could purchase medical equipment.  At the end of our tour, Janelle gave Tracey and me a big hug, something that no other tour guide has ever done, and she was such a positive person that I hugged her back because I was grateful to have a guide who had such a boisterous personality.
            On New Year’s Day, we walked around Castries, St. Lucia, because we didn’t want to take another bus trip.  Everything was closed for the holiday but there was a church service on the small island so Tracey and I went to listen to the preacher for a while.  We left the service early and made our way over to the only restaurant that was open and it was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Since we are both lifelong Kentuckians, we got a kick out of clinking our KFC glasses together in St. Lucia, an incongruous spectacle because they were paper cups and we were in the middle of the Caribbean.
            The next island on our itinerary was St. Kitts and we spent most of our time in that port milling around in Independence Square, waiting for the Carnival Parade to begin.  Since we were in the Caribbean, where time is an abstract and flexible idea, the start time for the parade kept being postponed, so we walked around the square and saw the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals.  A British couple that we ran into said that they also skipped the bus tour, preferring to “amble about.  But since we have become older our path to amble has become greatly constricted.”  We enjoyed talking to the Brits while we waited for the parade to begin but when it started to rain, we decided to cut bait and make our way back to the ship.
            Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the Caribbean in 2017, cast a dark cloud over everything in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.  For example, the sugar factory closed because much of the building was damaged and management couldn’t find enough of the parts of the machinery to make the works run again.  We visited the botanical gardens and the lady at the front desk said, in broken English, “I lost my roof.  Everyone lost roof.  Some rebuilt.  Most did not.”  She looked so sad as she looked around the bay and pointed out all of the abandoned houses.  Tortola saw 90% destruction of all of the standing buildings by the hurricanes.  Even the botanical gardens didn’t get away unscathed; a Banyan tree had been uprooted.  These trees are very expensive and the woman said, “I can’t bear to get rid of it,” but she couldn’t afford to hire a crane to put it back in place.  The Banyan tree lay derelict and, much like the abandoned houses, will remain in place until decay turns it into an unrecognizable relic.
            Our final port of call was St. Thomas and we began our day at “Coral World Ocean Park” where Tracey got to hold a star fish, a sea urchin, and a sea cucumber at the “touching pool.”  In the aviary, a lorikeet named Pi stood on Tracey’s arm and drank nectar from a small cup that she held in her hand.  Our driver for the day was Cat, who got his nickname because his eyes were copper in color, similar to a cat’s eye.  He drove us to “Coral World” and waited for us outside of the park.  Since Tracey and I share a dream of her working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in St. Croix and us buying a condo in St. Thomas.  She could commute to work via the local ferry and my only job would be to drive her to the port at the beginning of the day and take her back home at the end of the day.  Cat drove us to a couple of condominium complexes while he told us his life story.  He has lived in St. Thomas for all of his seventy years and, when he was in college, he had a scholarship to play baseball.  Cat’s only ambition was to vacation in Puerto Rico, but he “has to find a honey” to go with him.  Just as with Janelle, Cat had a delicious Caribbean accent and all of his anecdotes were punctuated with an uproarious laugh.  He was a character.  It is always the people that you meet while on vacation, and not the places that you go, who always make the trip interesting and memorable.