Fran Moreland Johns

Staring into the Great Beyond

January 20, 2021by Fran Johns1 Comment

Since this space is often devoted to end-of-life issues, today’s essay is offered as a new and unique perspective. And in case you need a laugh. It was written by my old and definitely unique friend Bob Dodge, a fellow supporter of End of Life Choices California. Asked for identifying bio he replied only that “the author had become delusional and cynical while standing in a local Bed, Bath & Beyond. He grants no interviews and wants to avoid being crushed by requests for TV appearances, magazine articles and the like – BUT – PBS or NPR requests will be considered. Meanwhile – – – ENJOY LIFE.”

I have never thought much about the name of the chain of stores named Bed, Bath & Beyond, thinking as most would, one can find items for furnishing different rooms of one’s home or apartment. Trash cans, wash cloths, hampers, rubber thingamabobs for shower, kitchen or bathroom and now electronic security gadgets for monitoring your goldfish, pets and the creatures, like raccoons and skunks outside near your car and front door. I really don’t mind going to these stores once in a while to browse through the isles searching for an unusual item to ponder on as to why people might want to buy such an item. But, I guess they do buy them else the store would have swept them off the shelves and replaced them with something else also so bizarre that nobody wants or really needs.

Today, Friday, I had a revolutionary experience at a Bed, Bath & Beyond in Redwood City that changed my perspective of this commercial outlet and I may return on my own free will! Let me set the scene: Mary was looking for some new items for our master bathroom, like a new rug with matching hand-towels and face-cloths and a new squeegee for the shower glass. Also on her list were new pillows, none of which interested me given I tend not to notice if the rug and towels match, the shower glass is streaked or that the pillow is sweat-stained since I prefer sleeping with my eyes closed and therefore don’t see what my head is resting on. Just knowing the pillowcase is clean is what matters most to me.

Anyway while Mary is off down one of the aisles, I am standing there, masked as usual these days, gazing at the RING displays of electronic security items, trying to figure out what all the displayed gadgets do. This display is near the check-out counters and as I am standing there a voice calls out asking, “Are you ready to check out, sir?” I look up to see a young, maybe twentyish, masked female staring at me. “No, I am not ready to check out, thank you very much,” I replied. And then it dawned on me… The BEYOND part!! NO! I am not ready to check out. Come on, I am only 83 years and 10 months old and doing pretty well thank you very much! I really didn’t think I looked so bad physically that I would attract attention! I had not realized that End-of-Life issues had advanced this far and into retail establishments no less! Imagine asking potential customers if they are ready to “check out” right there in front of other customers. I would think the process would be kept a little more private. I kind of had the same reaction when I went to buy condoms for the first time in a pharmacy. “I need to buy a package of prophylactics, please”. Pharmacist: WHAT? “Oh, CONDOMS! WHAT BRAND AND WHAT COLOR?” he seemed to shout to the few others in the store. But at B,B & BEYOND it seems to be out in the open and maybe that is good for the movement.

Another thought about choices at the end of one’s life. I think there should be a hotel chain with a name something like SWEET DREAMS or THE LAST GOODBYE or maybe CHECKING IN BUT NEVER OUT Hotel. Senior citizens could pack a simple overnight bag of a few items like a small toothpaste tube, hair brush, old and well used toothbrush and a favorite pair of jammies. Then they tell the hotel clerk, “Checking in to check out”, simple as that. And they check in with confidence knowing that when check out time comes the next day there will be no line to stand in. Fait accompli.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com

General interest

2021: The Year of Apprehension

January 9, 2021by Fran Johns6 Comments

*Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com – In remembrance of New Years Eves past*

The COVID-19 pandemic, the battered democracy, the turbulence of racial and economic struggles – this is definitely the Year of Apprehension. We’ll probably all survive. Even if a lot of people continue to suffer and die and need our attention.

Given the difficulty of looking ahead, I dug into the archives for a look back. New Year blogs – and a bunch of New Year stories that pre-date the era of the blog – turn out to offer many bright spots and a little reassurance.

New Year’s 2000 – That one was fun. Remember the Y2K problem? The Millennium Bug? Computers everywhere, unequipped to deal with this new digit coming after 1999, would be crashing and burning and taking us all down with them? My husband and I actually attended a somewhat subdued New Year’s Eve dinner party at which one of the other guests was an official of a global engineering company which will remain un-named. He spent the evening with an ostentatious black box at hand – during dinner he did get it off the table and into his lap – because of mysterious dangers that might need his immediate attention at the stroke of midnight. We followed that stroke across time zones. Our highest moments of hilarity were speculating about exactly what that black box was going to do to us all when he pushed his magic button; our engineer friend was not amused. The covid bug does make the Y2K bug seem quaint.

When New Year’s 2009 arrived I was heavy into brain exercise, having become a participant in a brain health study not long before. That piece reflected on the proliferation of brain health studies – New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the University of Texas’ Center for Vital Longevity to name two – specifically targeting the aging population. The resultant general recommendation was for everyone to plunge into word games and math games and we’d all be fine. Having still never found the time to get into games of any sort, I guess my brain just continues to muddle along.

In 2010, as the year turned, I was still preoccupied with brain stuff: esoteric questions (and some more fancy studies) about the passage of time. It was a sort of “Where in the heck did ten years go?” rumination. Considering the fact that the past year has seemed at least thirty years long, this perspective also makes past issues seem quaint.

For many of the in between years I included a favorite poem, just because poetry seems a good way to start a new year. So for these troubled times I offer the first and last few verses of Ian Frazier’s priceless holiday poem “Greetings, Friends!” in the December 28 issue – back in that old year – of The New Yorker.

Friends one and all! Let us unmute,

Excite the timbrel and the lute,

Make merry with our pots and pan

(The hour is seven, so we can),

Shout from the balcony or lawn

For joy at what will soon be gone,

And praises sing for what is here:

The end to this undreamt-of year!

Frazier goes on for 70+ poignant and hilarious lines, rhyming in friends and neighbors and people we know of or wish we knew; and finally winds up thus:

Let gladness rise, despite, despite;

“Love one another” routs the night,

And kindness is a folding chair

We carry with us everywhere.

In depth of winter, prospects brighten;

Mighty streams of light will lighten

The miles ahead, and goodness reign –

Once more, the angels’ grand refrain!

Thanks, Ian Frazier, and everyone who helped us though the old year with reminders that grace and humor still abound.

Happy New Year, and welcome, 2021!

This essay also appears on Medium.com

General interest

How to Stay Sane in 2021

December 28, 2020by Fran JohnsLeave a Comment

“Everything is not either all bad or all good,” observed my friend Oli. “There’s a little bit of good in things that are bad, and a little bit of bad in things that are good.”

This was after a discussion of how COVID-19 is affecting the entire country, in ways almost too numerous to face. Oli tends to get deeply involved in conversations of these sorts.

“For example, take pollution,” he said. “Since we’ve been staying home more, pollution has fallen dramatically.” Other observations were possibly less significant, but still to the point: “Noses aren’t as cold as they used to be, thanks to mask-wearing.”

Oli is seven years old.

This issue is way beyond “Out of the mouths of babes . . .” Surviving the weeks and months ahead – vaccine or no vaccine – is going to take a good bit of creative effort. As someone who has not seen her family for well over a year, who has had moments of panic and nights of insomnia over exposure to the virus – real or imagined – and who suffers from hug-deprivation to a major extent, I do not look forward to more months and months of masking, distancing and observing every precaution 24 hours a day. Because I live in a senior housing facility I will probably be an early recipient of the vaccine, but little will change other than perhaps feeling a little personally safer. Too much remains unknown, too many people will continue to sicken and die well into the (otherwise surely happier) new year, but these vestiges of the old year need to hang out with us until a new normal evolves in the new one.

So how to get through it with our sanity?

I think Oli is onto something. Finding ways to counter the sadness, the feelings of isolation and desolation, the sheer continuing disorientation of the months ahead might just be easier if it’s possible to discern a little good within the bad – while minimizing the bad that clouds the good.

This site, over the past few months, has featured brief glimpses into the struggles of aging, the pleasures of city walks, the art of communicating while masked, San Francisco city life and California wildfires, and one of the many great losses of 2020: Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Looking back, there’s one common thread: good was always found alongside the bad.

RBG’s legacy is wide and lasting. Amid the horrors of the wildfires there were extraordinary acts of kindness. Masks can’t keep strangers from interacting with eye-messages. Outdoor dining might just become a permanent fixture across the U.S. as it’s long been elsewhere: think Parisian sidewalks. Even among the sequestered elderly, friends and laughter make life livable. And most recently, with the remarkable convergence of Jupiter and Saturn just before the solstice, there was proof that no amount of stress on earth can eliminate the wonder of the universe.

Thanks for noticing, Oli.

Happy New Year to us all.

This essay also appears on Medium.com

General interest

What If the Stars Align?

December 22, 2020by Fran Johns2 Comments

It was like entering a giant cathedral, invited to a mystical once-in-a-lifetime event to which the entire world was also invited. Yet there was an intimacy unlike anything Notre Dame ever offered. On the way up – a familiar climb that bore an unfamiliar sense of impending awe – I encountered my first fellow pilgrim. She was in running clothes despite the chilly December dusk and I’d heard her swift sneakers approach. I was stopped mid-climb, though, as is somehow my regular custom on steep hills.

She stopped. “Are you OK?” I could hear her concern. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I ran a half-marathon in 2006 myself. But I was 73 at the time; now I’m catching my breath.”

“That’s impressive,” she said, now running in place. “Are you going up to the park?”

“Definitely. I think I’ll be in plenty of time.”

Jupiter slipping past Saturn, unconcerned

“See you there,” she said, taking off upward. “Merry Christmas!”

Pilgrims, I think, are bound together by both a common purpose and a sense of goodwill. Of the others who passed me on uphill blocks – I can still hold my own on the level ones – most said hello; one, “beautiful night, isn’t it?”

Reaching the park and beginning the last uphill climb along the path was when I entered the cathedral. Darkness was quickly falling on this longest night of the year. Fellow pilgrims were scattered along the path and across the meadow – carefully staying more than six feet from each other – and most were motionless. Like Rodin statues artfully spaced across the cathedral, they reinforced the feeling of awe.

It was utterly silent.

Jupiter and Saturn do this little dance for earthling admirers every twenty years. But it’s been eight centuries since they performed this particularly stunning pas de deux for us, a “great conjunction” created by Jupiter’s catching up to Saturn just as they are orbiting the sun. People who understand all this far better than yours truly say the last time our fellow planets did their Great Conjunction thing and it could be seen by earthlings, was in 1226.

Well, no wonder there was wonder. Some Christians think it was this event that led the wise men to Bethlehem. Fine with me, a Christian who struggles with much of the whole virgin birth/manger/shepherds/wise men thing, because mostly all I could see from the cathedral aisle way down below was one incredibly shining star. I guess I could have brought binoculars, but doubt they’d have made a lot of difference to my macular-degenerating eyes. Below me, though, under a park light, was a young man with a serious camera on a tripod. As I walked back down I said with some redundancy, “Can you see both of them?”

“Sure,” he answered. “Take a look.”

And there they were. Jupiter, orbiting its way around the sun exactly as planet earth is doing, and Saturn orbiting its own way around the sun, with even its rings also visible in this fine earthling device under the light. All three just going about the order of the universe without the slightest concern for the heartaches everywhere on the smallest planet of the them all. Amazing.

Peace on earth, goodwill to all.

General interest

Some Assembly Required

December 20, 2020by Fran Johns5 Comments

It is the phrase that strikes fear in the heart of every parent of young children on Christmas Eve. Similarly, it raises the blood pressure of anyone over 60 (and this writer is wayyy over 60) in anticipation. Some Assembly Required.

I have a very beautiful little 30” Baby Balsam Fir with LED Lights Christmas Tree now happily decorating my 7^th floor balcony. Should you be in San Francisco, I hope you’ll drive down Post Street and admire it. But in order to appreciate it fully you need its story – a story not unlike the countless stories of parents everywhere faced with toys to be put together at midnight on Christmas Eve.

My daughter Sandy, a parent herself and someone with both great familial love and an interior designer sensibility, cannot handle the idea of her mother not having a Christmas tree. No matter that I’m 2000 miles away on another coast. And we’re in a pandemic forheavenssakes, who am I going to be entertaining? It’s Christmas, and Mom should have a Christmas tree.

It only took one glimpse into the box containing my carefully wrapped 30” Baby Balsam Fir with LED Lights Christmas Tree to convince me this was going to require help. So I closed the box and went for a long walk. On return I invited three 7^th floor neighbors in my geezer house over for cocktails and (by the way) help assembling my Christmas tree. (All three are Jewish but compassionate.) Lois and Arthur declined cocktails or even a cup of comforting tea; Joel, knowing I don’t drink and not trusting my faux wine cellar, brought a fancy rum something he’d fixed at his place.

For about 20 minutes – a token amount of time, any parent of a 6-year-old will acknowledge – Lois and Joel and I deal with the initial Assembly and Care instructions. Remove tree stand, tree sections, and Welcome Kit from box(es), and identify the total number of sections of your tree. Joel has left his untouched drink across the room, but is probably beginning to be glad he brought it. Arthur, being already in his 90s (the rest of us aren’t quite there yet) has been exempted from active duty and assigned the position of assistant photographer.

Eventually we work our way to the battery part. (By this time Lois is uttering a few bad words, Joel is drinking and Arthur is saying he knows from nothing about iPhones.) We persevere. Push the locking hooks away from the battery box and gently (Joel and I had different interpretations of the word ‘gently’) lift the battery box away from the base. Please mind the electrical cord attached to the battery box and base.

“Do you have any batteries?” The second phrase any parent fears: Batteries Not Included. Joel went back to his apartment and produced several requisite AAA batteries for the something-or-other. For a while we proceeded nicely. Connect the male plug from the tree to the female sockets from the burlap base, secure the connection by fastening the lock nut. Well, we may be geezers but we’re still humanoids. The connection didn’t work (draw your own conclusions.) Maybe, suggested someone, your D batteries are a little out of date. Well, they did say “Best if used before November 1994,” but who am I to throw things away?

Enter the #1 advantage to living in a Senior Facility, especially The Carlisle, San Francisco. I called the Front Desk. “Lian,” I said in my sweetest helpless-resident voice, “is there any chance we might have, anywhere (by now it’s about 7 PM) two D batteries I could beg, borrow or steal?”

Well hallelujah. Not only did Lian find two D batteries, but the utterly brilliant (and way over-qualified; we’re likely to lose her soon) Activities Director Roquel happened to be still hanging around. We are saved, I realized, Roquel is here. There was unanimous applause when we burst into the room.

Here is the final truism of all Some Assembly Required/ Batteries Not Included reality: EVERYthing will be teeny tiny. The instructions, the assembledges (think male plugs and female sockets) the whole catastrophe. But then we find we know someone in a brand new generation, with delicate fingers that still work and a refusal to be daunted by anything digital or mechanical. (There are few daunting issues with computers that stump Lian or Roquel.)

Good friends to laugh with, young friends to fix things, there is hope for the world. Which is good, since the whole world now requires assembly.

Until then, I submit my tree.

And, as Tiny Tim so presciently put it:
God bless us, every one.

General interest

The Art of City Walking

December 15, 2020by Fran JohnsLeave a Comment

San Francisco from atop Alamo Square Park – a great place to conclude a City Walk

City walks rock.

Parks, mountain trails, beaches, all those other walks — wonderful. But city walks are in a class by themselves. It’s just a small matter of mastering the art. It helps (IMHO) to live in San Francisco, but I suspect anyone who loves his or her city might agree: walk with your eyes and mind open, listen for the life behind the sounds, look up and down and all around, and there you have: COVID-free (masks, distancing, no problem) exercise, unique entertainment, an educational and uplifting activity of however many hours you can spare. Totally free. Nighttime walks can be times of wonder, but given the weirdness of today’s pandemic realities, this addresses the joy of daytime city walking.

Cities everywhere have, tragically, people with no home, forced to confront the virus and the cold in whatever ways they can. Some, like the above San Franciscan reduced to tent life, stake out kingdoms of their own. Walking by people on the street — many struggling with addiction or mental health issues — is the saddest part of City Walking, sending you home (hopefully) with a renewed commitment to working harder to find solutions. But if you look, you find homeless citizens are really just fellow Americans with problems, bad luck, and often a good measure of ingenuity.

And then there are the trees. Even in the most urban of urban areas, trees survive. Sometimes on their own (look into corner parks or corner lots that have been abandoned.) You can find trees that are trying to save us from ourselves by storing carbon, preventing flooding & erosion, staving off climate change — or just standing there being beautiful.

The good people of SFTrees.com occasionally go around chalking the sidewalks with little Look! signs that point to trees like the one pictured at right and generously ID them for you.

Some of the most interesting sights of City Walks are down the alleyways. Granted you may find strange and unpleasant surprises, but you may often find the products of graffiti artists’ most elegant endeavors. Alleyways offer other surprises: hidden houses and back entries and flower boxes on third-floor fire escapes you’re delighted to have noticed, plus a few ground-level sights you’re happy to pass by as quickly as possible. It’s a city, after all.

Most City Walks — thanks often to the work of the Trust for Public Land, which has a goal of every urban dweller living within a 10-minute walk of a park — pass an urban park or two. Some are so small as to go unnoticed. But if you can work your city-walking paths by a park, possibly the happiest faces of the day will be found there. Where there are basketball nets you can watch the action but rarely get any interchange.

But kids on jungle gyms will smile for the camera at the slightest invitation. Search for urban parks in your city and you might be surprised to find tiny treasures. In San Francisco, also, almost anywhere you’re willing to climb upward will lead to another kind of park — glorious spaces with views and dogs and picnickers and more views. An unbeatable way to conclude a City Walk. Which brings us back to the vista from Alamo Square at the top of this essay.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com

General interest, Health, seniors

Talking With Eyes 101

December 2, 2020December 5, 2020by Fran Johns5 Comments

I am a hopelessly public social being. The annoying kind who says Hi there! and Good Morning! to every passerby on the sidewalk or the park trail. Who stops perfect strangers pushing strollers to comment on cute toddlers in puffy snowsuits. At random moments I’ve been known to walk up to frazzled moms in grocery stores whose small boys are demolishing the place and say, “One day he’ll be 26 and he’ll send you flowers for no reason at all, and you’ll know it was all worth it.”

So now, along with all the rest of you, I am silenced. Who can toss out a muffled Hi there! before the passerby has long passed? Masked strangers in their faces have to be pretty scary for toddlers in strollers. Increasingly isolated from friends and family by the coronavirus itself, we’re getting more isolated from our fellow masked humans by the day.

In the interest of brotherhood and sisterhood, I offer the following solutions:

The raised eyebrow hand salute. Starting about a yard or so from the passerby, raise both eyebrows simultaneously with the hand nearest the passerby, palm out. Works every time. Nobody even opens his or her mouth (risking the escape of those scary droplets) but you’ve acknowledged your fellow human, and your eyes have done the Hi there thing.

The eye-laugh. Trust me on this. The eye-laugh says Hi there, friend! If you actually (silently) laugh behind your mask, your eyes get friendly. Passing humans see a friendly passing human, which encourages us all to believe there is still humanity and friendliness in the world.

The open-eyed head tilt. If you don’t feel like laughing, you can try opening your eyes wide and tilting your head toward the passerby. This is the most abbreviated of Hi there!s. But interestingly enough, it often evokes an eye-laugh from a passing stranger.

Thanks to the ubiquity of Zoom gatherings, our colleagues and pods – friends & family & such as qualify for frequent contact – still recognize the bottom halves of our faces. The rest of humankind, though, are consigned to eye contact alone for now. When we’ll all be able to wander around unmasked again is an open question that only the very brave or very foolish are likely to try answering.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex summed it up nicely in an op ed published recently by the New York Times: “We are adjusting to a new normal where faces are concealed by masks, but it’s forcing us to look into one another’s eyes – sometimes filled with warmth, other times with tears. For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another.

General interest

The F-Words of Senior Housing

November 27, 2020by Fran JohnsLeave a Comment

Looking for a Senior Living spot for a parent or friend – maybe even for yourself? Here are a few tips to speed the process, in these upside down times when you can’t simply go visiting.

Where to start? There are almost as many varieties of Senior Living as there are seniors on park benches. Or there were, when people could go to parks. The site to which I’ve directed more geezer friends than I can count is A Place for Mom. (Why is it always mom? Well, sorry dads, but we seem to outlive you by a long shot.) This site, though, has a wealth of short-form information to help you home in on the sort of place you’re looking for.

After the basics – cost, location, availability etc – all you need to consider are the three F-words. The promotional stuff really doesn’t tell you about the F-words. In essential order of importance they are:

Food. Interest in food increases exponentially with age. At my own geezer house (call these places what you will, I call mine the geezer house) we have a four-star chef. Presumably the salary and benefits here are good, because the job has to be about as much fun as being a Trump appointee. Somebody wants ethnic, somebody wants more garlic, somebody else wants bland and tasteless. Too much spice! Not enough dessert variety! More light choices! You get the picture. So ask about the food. Ask whether there’s an onsite chef or an outside food service. If meals are contracted to a supplier, you or your geezer friend/relative may not love the food. Weekly entrées repeated throughout the month? Not wonderful. Get specific with your food questions.

Frivolity. Almost everywhere promises eternal happiness through crossword puzzles and arts-&-crafts. Almost everywhere advertises elegant-looking dancing couples. Don’t believe it. Ask for pictures of the onsite library. Ask about the fit with what you or your geezer enjoy: Symphony & opera – assuming we eventually get those chances? Find out if the facility has regular transportation to such events. Nature walks? Find out if there are arrangements for hikes or offsite exercise. Socialization? Find out what the real opportunities are, not what the pretty pictures in the brochures suggest. Preferences about all of these don’t magically change on moving from a regular neighborhood to a “senior community.”

Fire drills. Every city or county has safety regulations. Equal parts important and invasive. Once you move into a geezer house your safety is in its hands, and it’s not always pretty. Ask for details. Some places (mine included) have unannounced fire drills. As far as I know, no one has ever died of a heart attack by being blasted awake from a nap by the most god-awful shrieking noise you’ve ever heard, generally followed by instructions to remain calm. But I’ve come close enough that we now have an agreement that they alert me ahead of time so I can arrange not to be at home. Try to find out what invasive procedures are in place for staff to enter an apartment without prior permission. It may well be necessary (Is Mrs. Jones OK? She hasn’t been seen today . . ) but it’s one more major change to face, and geezers don’t do change any better than the next person.

Here’s to the day when we all emerge from virus hell, and explorations in real time render a focus on the Senior Housing F-words unnecessary.