Fear of Falling

In the past few months, almost weekly I’ve been hearing about people in their 60s and 70s who had to be rescued after falling while hiking on local trails. My first reaction was disbelief. How could someone just fall off a trail? Were they near a steep slope and not paying attention?

But then it happened to me. I was hiking on a rocky trail when my feet went out from under me while I was going downhill. One minute I was standing and the next I was on the ground. In the past, when I had started to slip while hiking on similarly steep slopes, I was able to regain my balance before falling. What happened that made this different?

I’m not sure, but something like that makes you lose trust in yourself. Last year I went hiking with a friend who, I could see, had lost confidence in her body. We were hiking on a trail I thought was relatively easy, but the rocky trail was a challenge for her. I had never seen the rocks as an obstacle, but since my fall, I’ve become more wary, especially when the rocks are wet. We take our mobility for granted until we lose it.

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When I Get Old

I’m talking to a friend, a former neighbor, and the mother of one of my childhood friends. Dorothy is 97 years old, an age that most people consider old, yet she starts out most sentences “When I get old . . .” She’s not being coy. She doesn’t feel old and has no serious health issues except when she crochets too long and her hands hurt. She has just returned from a summer in Wisconsin at the family lodge, where she lived alone, although with the help of friends around the lake.

We’re sitting in her living room, the same place I used to play with her daughter some 60 years ago. Dorothy loves knick-knacks, and her small house is filled with them, like the mechanical flower that shimmies when the sun hits it. Her house, like Dorothy, radiates warmth and cheer. Almost every piece of furniture is covered with the colorful afghan blankets she has crocheted over the years.

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Bite My Coin

I know there are fellow baby boomers who embraced each new technological marvel as it came along: the first primitive computers, the first BlackBerry phones, the first digital cameras. But I’ve resisted technology every step of the way.

When the newspaper I worked for in the 1980s started replacing our manual typewriters with computers, the management decided the best way to get its employees comfortable with this new technology was to teach us in the comfort of our own homes. I felt pretty confident after listening to the tech guy go through the whole system with me, but after he left I couldn’t figure out how to start the computer on my own. I was so frustrated that my impulse was to throw the computer through the front window.

I eventually got comfortable with computers—I had no choice—and even started to appreciate that they made writing and editing easier; instead of using white-out and pasting (with glue) strips of paper over mistakes, I could do that with a few keystrokes.

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