Tag Archives: Dick Van Dyke

The Road to Diamond, Day 355: Nonagenarian Beacon

4
Posted by on in collaborating, Community, Family, Personal goals, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving

November 17, 2025- All three ladies are using walkers, but all three are sharp upstairs and let no one forget it. This was made clear by the way none of them repeated the stories they told at the beginning of Coffee Klatsch, this morning, and for that matter, none has repeated stories they told two weeks, or two months, ago. One put it simply: “Who wants to hear the same old crap? Life goes on, and so do I.” That statement is like a beacon, in the night that, for many, is the process of aging.

The three ladies in question are 94,92 and 91, respectively. I can remember when someone close to me told my mother that her “old, decrepit son” (me) was there to visit. Mom’s reply: “Are you saying old is decrepit?” Her leg went out in a kick, as she always did when someone had irked her. Dignity and self-regard die hard in a person who has all, or most, of faculties into the “higher elevations”. Mom’s idol was Dick Van Dyke and she told me to look to him as a model for how to move gracefully towards century-hood. Indeed, he has a new book out, called “100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life”. This is a man who has not stopped moving-and that, he says, is his secret.

So, I went back and exercised at Planet Fitness and showed up at the Monday night Soup Kitchen, where I may stand and serve food for thirty minutes-but then go around and clean all the tables, so it is not a “passive volunteer” activity. With grandchild being my prime motive for moving to Texas, just before Christmas, I don’t think there will be any room for passivity there, either.

The Road in Winter,Part II

9
Posted by on in Inspiration, Spiritual, Striving

February 3, 2016, Prescott-  A deep freeze has visited us, these past two days.  I took my students in Chino Valley outside, yesterday. Today, it was a bit colder, and my special needs student stayed inside.  It’ll be more like Arizona, tomorrow, and for the next several days.  In fact, we’re expecting 65 on Sunday.

This brings me to the notion that some have, about one’s sixties being the start of the Winter of life.  I had a wintry start to my sixtieth year, and it did end with the passing of my beloved.  Since then, though, and not without her influence, I feel my own Winter is a ways off.  For one thing, I am far from ready to stop working.  For another,  my energy level has not gone down, and no one who really knows me is saying, “Slow down!”

I love helping children find their direction in life, and acquire the skills needed to do that.  I treasure being in nature, and trails abound, both here in Arizona, and increasingly, just about anywhere else.

So, what of the road in winter?  My own expectations, as previously stated, are that it will filled with wonder and constant learning.  I have been warned, by the constantly-hectoring elder generation, to “just wait” until I reach my 80’s and 90’s.  Then, I am told, “You’ll see how the cow chews the cabbage.”  Maybe so,and if it rolls that way, I’ll deal with it.  On the other hand, there are Dick Van Dyke, and Betty White, to show us that the cow not only chews the cabbage, but digests it well and comes back for more.

I wish, for everyone who has embraced their sunset, to have as many days of solid energy as possible, and not to lose sight of a dream.  I’d rather take after one of the two above-mentioned entertainers, or Kirk Douglas, seemingly back from death’s door, at least twice, or the late Bob Hope, who joyfully celebrated his centenary, before heading to a new stage.

Dylan Thomas was onto something.

Four Days’ Reflections

6
Posted by on in "sibling-ish", Family, Inner Struggles, Inspiration, Social, Travel

December 29, 2015, Phoenix- The period just passed, from Christmas  until Transit Day (yesterday), saw either sporadic WiFi connection, or time when being on the Internet would have been just plain rude.  As it was, my non-technological mother saw any time spent on the computer as an imposition, even when I was sharing what I found with the group.

Few are in a place of honour, when among those who knew them when.  I was delighted to have felt welcome, when I visited with a couple of friends from my late teen/young adult years, and the three of us were actually having intelligent, respectful conversation- free of the oneupmanship that seemed so prevalent back then.  Now, we are all mid-sexagenarians and have a grander view.

Mom was not feeling all that great, but kept a game face the whole time I was in Saugus.  I know better, though, and I also know that her current aches and pains will subside.  Andrew Wyeth remarked, on his own father’s passing, “It took a freight train to kill N.C. Wyeth!”.  It’ll take a lot more than that to bring down my mother.

The siblings will always be my treasured core group.  I spent time as the bete-noire, in my twenties, and it was largely deserved.  Now, each of us has our niche and when we get together, we have genuine nuggets to share.  This was my sister’s year to break out- to see the Mountain Northwest: Montana and Wyoming.  Her list of travel goals is also growing, and I hope she gets to a few more, in the years immediately ahead.

One of my seatmates, on the plane back, recommended a book entitled “The Third Target”, by Joel C. Rosenberg.  She was looking at the piece as if it were non-fiction, much the way some of us interpreted Tom Clancy novels, in the ’90’s.  Indeed, many fictional works are vehicles for disseminating information that would otherwise be “classified”.

I got a lot read of “The Witches:  Salem, 1692”, that is a nonfictional study of the events, and backdrop, of the Salem Witch Trials.  Kids were unruly back then, also, and, wonder of wonders, because they were roundly ignored by parents who were pre-occupied with the day-to-day grind of an oppressive life.  That teenaged girls and young women would react to being treated as chattel, by staging near-psychotic flash mob attacks on the reputations of their elders, somehow comes as no surprise.  Children have been my life, for nearly forty years.  The more neglected they have seemed, in their larger lives, the more I have sought to understand them and be of value.

Now, I am back in what has come to be Home Base.  My coming to Arizona, initially, was rather random and happenstance.  As with any such move by a rootless youth, it morphed into a place of growth.  I am still growing, and my octogenarian mother is till lucid enough to tell me that I’ve seen nothing yet.  The “Greatest Generation” will never concede to their Baby Boomer children, or anyone else, the place of the pioneer.

I look forward to the rest of this decade, and to my seventies, eighties and whatever else the Good Lord deigns to offer.  As the great Dick Van Dyke writes: “Keep Moving”. (I’m reading that book now, also).