Category: My Story

Traveling While Aging

When I was young, I took a trip with my sister where we took advantage of the Eurail pass, never knowing where we would end up, not quite sure what country we were in. Perhaps our innocence saved us, but as I’ve gotten older and discovered the inconvenient things that can happen, I’ve tried to make more definitive plans ahead of time.

In my 50s, a friend and I selected the towns we wanted to visit in England and rented a car, but we still had to drive on the wrong side of the road and search every day for lodging. I remember banging on the doors of B&Bs to see if they had any available rooms and whether a bathroom was ensuite or if we had to share with other guests.

When I turned 70, I decided I needed to plan every detail and not rely on chance. On a trip to the U.K., I reserved seats on the train, and a room in the hotel and car rental in the town where we would catch the ferry.  So what could go wrong? The train broke down, and we had to find an alternative way to get to the ferry town but didn’t make it in time. In an unfamiliar town, we dragged our suitcases in the rain, looking for a hotel room. I won’t tell you what else went wrong on this trip, but suffice it to say that it taxed my physical and cognitive skills. It felt like I was being taught a lesson: there’s no guarantee that everything will go as planned. In fact, the more you plan, it almost seems destined to fail.

When I was younger, I could handle these challenges, but as my memory has gotten worse and my legs weaker, travel has gotten harder. So for my most recent trip, one to Europe, I jumped on the idea of a river cruise, where they would make all the arrangements, provide three meals and one excursion a day, and I wouldn’t have to look for a place to stay every night.

I imagined a slowly, leisurely pace and time to just watch the world go by. But that’s not how it worked out. To make the 8:30 a.m. excursions to different towns, my friend and I had to get up at 6:30 for breakfast at 7:30. This was made more difficult by three-course dinners at 7 that didn’t end until 8:30. For people in their 70s, this felt like burning the candles at both ends.

The excursions through medieval towns were led by young local guides who either had a schedule to make or wanted to get the tour over with. The pace was fast, the information fascinating but unrelenting. By the time the tours were done, there was little time to sit in the café and enjoy a croissant or to shop for postcards or souvenirs before we had to jump back on the bus or ship and head for the next town.

But even when we were left to our own devices, there were still challenges. My sense of direction has never been great, but it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. In Amsterdam, Google Maps wasn’t much help when we got lost, telling us to go west when we had no idea which direction we were facing.  Asking locals wasn’t much help: “turn right on Leidsegracht and left on Keizersgracht” was hard to understand, let alone remember by the time we got to Keizergracht.  When we finally found our hotel, after wandering the streets and getting soaked, we were exhausted.  

And then there’s the airports to navigate. Airports have gotten faster—or I’ve gotten slower. If you can’t keep up, you get run over. In the Dublin airport, I did something I never thought I’d do: enlist an airport cart to take me to a distant concourse because I was limping from a sore leg and wasn’t sure I could make the gate on time.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I’m not ready to give up traveling and I’m not ready to join a huge cruise ship. I no longer have the courage to drive on the narrow and bewildering streets of medieval villages. That means I need to become more familiar with the abilities of cell phones, like how to utilize Uber in a strange city or how to call a taxi when it’s raining or I’m tired. The young couple (late 30s) who accompanied us one day in Strasbourg helped us find two bookstores with a few clicks of their cell phones. If not for them, we’d still be there, staring at our screens.

I was determined to take this trip to Europe because I worried that I was running out of time to see new places. Many friends in their 80s tell me they have no interest in traveling anymore. Maybe it’s time to relax on a on a beach with a good book. Or take a long road trip through the U.S. where I get up when I want, eat when I want, and spend as long as I want admiring the bears in Yellowstone or the redwoods in California.

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You Can’t Go Home Again

In this world of too much change and chaos, I’m constantly looking for something stable, something from my past that I could return to and be comforted, like my childhood neighborhood. But everything is gone now, because, at my age, I have little connection to the home I grew up in. My parents are long gone, and only one neighbor (the mother of my childhood best friend, age 99!) still lives on the old street.

Of course, the neighborhood has changed in the 60 years since I grew up there. It’s become wealthier with bigger houses and fewer children. Although the small shopping center a block from my childhood home still exists, nothing is left except for the grocery store where I briefly worked.  Everything else is gone: Huebinger’s Drug Store where my girlfriends and I would buy comic books; the Gift Box, where we would agonize over which stuffed animal to buy with our babysitting money; and nearby the library that was my refuge.

There’s another refuge from my past that I want to go back to: a lake in Wisconsin where I spent the happiest days of my childhood with my family: swimming, boating and reading under the birch and pine trees. Although the family cottage still exists, the lake has changed: bigger homes, less wilderness and louder boats. What was once a clear lake is now filled with weeds, and all the development has chased away the chipmunks and frogs.

Even my beloved places in the Colorado mountains are disappearing. Wildfires have destroyed some of my favorite trails, and old mining towns that had stayed much the same for 100 years are now filled with condos and new mansions. 

There was a time when things didn’t change as quickly. Both sets of grandparents lived in the same neighborhoods in Chicago for their whole lives—one in the Czech neighborhood on the west side and the other on the north and German side. My grandfathers worked the same jobs for their whole lives, while my grandmothers shopped at the same grocery and department stores. Each couple (and their families) attended the same neighborhood church, where they were married, their children baptized and their funerals held. Because they lived in the same place their whole lives, they knew all their neighbors, who also rarely moved. And so a community was formed—at that time (the 1930s-50s) composed mostly of people from their own ethnic backgrounds. Of course, this resulted in an ethnic insularity that often kept out people of different backgrounds and races.

Even though I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for more than 30 years, everyone around me keeps moving, so there are only two houses in a three-block neighborhood where I know the residents. It’s a disorienting feeling, and I think contributes to our sense of anxiety in this world. Along Colorado’s booming Front Range, new subdivisions are taking over once empty fields. Nothing stays the same, especially the landscape.

Even something as small as losing my favorite restaurants can disrupt my personal landscape. Especially during the pandemic many restaurants closed permanently. Though that may seem trivial or unimportant, especially compared to more serious issues like failing health, it’s a loss in our day-to-day lives. You lose a place that you’ve been going to for 25 years—a place that felt comfortable, where you celebrated birthdays or anniversaries, where the chicken pot pie always made you feel better. When other long-time stores and restaurants close, the losses start piling up and one day you realize that all your favorite places are gone. At the new places, the music is too loud, the menu has food you’ve never heard of, the chairs are metal, and everyone there is 30 years younger than you.

It adds to the sense of dislocation, of a world that is out of control. It’s especially hard for seniors because we adapt to change more slowly. All I want is the booth at my once-favorite hamburger joint, but Tom’s Tavern has since been replaced by an upscale restaurant that serves “wood roasted octopus, with curried carrot purée, candied bacon, roasted turnips, asparagus, black garlic aioli.” Since Tom’s closed I’ve become mostly a vegetarian, but if the tavern were magically resurrected, I’d beat a path to their door to enjoy their hamburgers and fries, while sitting in a booth and watching the shuffleboard players. Just for a while, it would feel like home.

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Let’s talk about our ailments—please

Increasingly, when I get together with friends, the first thing we talk about is our ailing bodies, comparing notes: what did you do for your spinal problems?  How fast did you recover from your knee replacement? Anyone have cures for arthritis?

I recently had an MRI that showed I had “significant degeneration” in one of my spinal disks. Before I got to see the spinal doctor, I imagined all kind of bad outcomes. I had a lot of questions for the doctor, but the physician’s assistant I saw could tell me nothing about my long-term prognosis. Instead he listed all the options for relieving the pain, most of which involved using their clinic for increasingly expensive treatments, even though the pain is negligible for now. Luckily, I have friends and acquaintances who have had similar back issues, so I got more suggestions and reassurance from them: the massage therapy that worked, the steroids that temporarily eased the pain, and the surgery that mostly fixed the problem.

Almost every female friend has some form of bone-density loss. When I tried to decide if I should get on a popular drug that has some serious side effects, I found one person doing well on Fosamax, the recommended treatment for osteoporosis, while others had allergic reactions and have now tried something else. For now, I’m staying away from the drug.

Almost everyone I know has knee or hip replacements or both. They trade war stories about their operations and how long it took to heal, walk and drive again; and the best pain management. Some even share walkers, so they don’t have to buy or rent one.  

I get much more useful information from friends than from doctors who often tote the party line: take this medication and you’ll be fine; or this operation will fix the problem. What I hear from friends is that it’s more complicated, and outcomes can vary.

Over conversations, I also find out about new or alternative treatments. One friend told me tai chi kept her body balanced; another said stretching can overcome the downward effects of aging. For my arthritis pain, I got two good suggestions: decrease sugar consumption and take glucosamine. Based on another friend’s recommendation, I found an alternative healer who counsels that stress makes our ailments worse, so his therapy is to relax my body.

Not every new therapy works, but I’ve gotten more options than my doctors have given me and gained a bigger picture of my body. From this more holistic perspective, I can see how all the parts of my body—from my fingers to my brain—work together and affect each other.

Beyond the medical advice, I’ve often got good recommendations for doctors, massage therapists and acupuncturists.

Some people (younger people?) would say that all that time yapping about our medical conditions is self-indulgent and boring—an indication of our aging brains as much as our aging bodies. Aren’t there better things to talk about—politics, the state of our country, climate change or even the newest restaurant in town or our favorite TV show? And there’s a thin line between complaining too much and acquiring the information we need.

But the more we share stories about our tendonitis or bursitis, the more we help each other.  At our age, we’re all struggling to maintain our health. We know that none of us are going to regain our flexible, strong and pain-free bodies again. But we can boost each other, like combatants in a battle, to survive as best we can. We’ve all got war stories. Don’t keep them to yourself.

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