I Come to Praise Technology

Recently, my hometown installed a new method of payment in the parking garages. When you leave, you flash your cell phone with the QR app, linked to your credit card, at the kiosk. This replaces a perfectly good system where you inserted your credit card into the machine to pay.

I’ve had trouble with QR codes since they were introduced during the pandemic to replace menus in restaurants. Many times I’ve had to ask my dining companions to share the menus on their phone or beg the waitstaff for a paper copy, which is often out of date. In any case it doesn’t make for a leisurely perusal of the menu.

As hard as I try, I feel like I’m always several steps behind the latest technology, floundering at the cash register or parking garage, giving every indication that I have early dementia—or worse, that I’m an old lady. Yet I have to admit that technology has helped me and fellow seniors cope with the afflictions of getting older. It’s made life easier in so many ways. I think of my partially blind friend who can ask Siri to put on her favorite music or dial someone on the phone.

The technology I’m most grateful for is Google Maps. Because of my poor sense of direction, I’d be lost, quite literally, without it. Otherwise, I would have to write down detailed directions or else strain to read the small print on old maps that don’t include new subdivision. (And just try to find new maps.) Once in the Chicago area, driving my elderly parents to my niece’s house, my cell phone stopped working, and I had to stop at numerous stores along the way to find my way on all the crazy numbered highways (“Just go to 52, get on 23, then get off on 71”). We arrived about an hour late.

As we become more isolated as we age (friends die, children move away), a social media platform like Facebook can reconnect us with high school friends, former co-workers and the sister-in-law you lost touch with after she and your brother divorced. You can feel like you’re part of a larger community. I think of the elder orphans group on Facebook where people who don’t have children share stories of loneliness but also advice for how to meet people. It doesn’t take the place of personal connection, but it can be more meaningful than sitting home alone talking to your cat.

Similarly, for those unable (because of physical problems) or unwilling (because of snowy roads) to leave the house, Zoom (and other video conference programs) lets people meet and converse with others. It’s not the same as sitting in a room together, but online we can discuss the current political situation or hear lectures about arthritis.

I don’t know how I lived without Spotify. Not only can I easily find my favorite music, the music service pretty quickly figures out what I like and puts together playlists that also introduce me to similar musical artists. I can find my old favorites from the 1970s without thumbing through my scratched and worn record albums or the chewed-up cassette tapes. I can follow my curiosity about current popular musicians without having to buy their albums. 

With the internet, I no longer have to rely on my (faulty) memory to make favorite meals: do I use lentils or pinto beans for that soup recipe? I admit it’s a pleasure looking through my old cookbooks stained with flour or cherry juice, and with penciled notes for changes I made in the recipe, but the internet is faster.

I no longer have to depend on my memory or my doctor’s (especially when I have six specialists) for my medical history. Many documents and tests—when I had my last mammogram or colonoscopy—are stored online. And it’s all connected in some unseen network, so when I see my primary care provider, she has the x-rays, lab results and notes from another doctor. Of course, I also miss the days when one doctor had all our files, and a friendly receptionist was always available to answer questions. But those days are long past.

With the internet, I don’t have to thumb through an old phone book to find the name of a restaurant or find a plumber, and I can see how each is rated. If I want to find the best time of the day to take a walk, I can get the weather forecast hour by hour. When I’m planning a vacation I can find lists of lodgings—and reviews— on websites and make a reservation rather than comb through an old guidebook that recommends only three or four places—often no longer in business.

There’s no doubt that aging makes driving more difficult, whether due to less flexibility or focus. But with rear-view cameras we don’t have to turn our less-flexible necks to see if someone is behind us in a parking lot.

Now I’m looking forward to reliable self-driving cars. Hopefully by the time I have to give up driving, these cars will compensate for my poor sense of direction and concentration. Siri, take me home.

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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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