What’s with all these stories about insomnia? I feel as if every time I open up my laptop there’s another piece about someone having trouble sleeping.
I went looking for what’s keeping us up nights.
Maybe it’s the total chaos we wake up to? Snowstorms and firestorms and windstorms? Maybe we’re all getting older? Nahh, couldn’t be.
In any event, I sleep like a baby. So I decided to go public with the answers to insomnia. Herewith:
Weighted blanket. Just take my word for it. Or read one of those surveys about how they relieve anxieties and calm your aches and pains. (As long as you’re older than two; don’t weight down your two-year-old please.)
Forewarning: The rest of these solutions should be read in light of the fact that I lost my sleeping partner seven years ago; the following might require partner buy-in. Since I still have the California King-size bed, though, that leaves room to strew books and magazines all over the duvet and still allow for the following:
Food and drink. Cozy camomile tea is good for bedtime. But what if you feel hungry during one of those bathroom wake-up moments? (Taking bathroom breaks without really waking up is a learned skill. Work on it.) Still . . . I keep a glass of ginger beer on the bedside table just in case.
More food and drink. If a swig of ginger beer as you slide under the weighted blanket doesn’t do it, a few minutes of a good book and in-bed snack time generally work for me. To that end, along with the reading matter atop the duvet I keep a ziplok bag of peanut butter filled pretzels. Unfortunately I shared this information once with my dentist, Dr. Suezaki, who shook his head sadly from side to side and said, “No bueno.” Don’t discuss this with your dentist. No bueno will stick in your head and try to wake you up. We do what we have to do.
Dealing with the cares of the world. Even if you studiously avoid thinking about the news after three in the afternoon, the brain sometimes still kicks in. How to save democracy — a problem that can rarely be solved at three in the morning, can nevertheless be sublimated to worrying about problems closer at hand: a deadline looming on a job not even started, a leaky faucet you meant to fix, a letter un-written or email un-sent. Once you’ve reduced wakefulness to a personal level —
Turn on the light. Did I warn you about partner buy-in? I think so. Once the anxiety bots are awake in your brain you go on counter-offensive. To this end I keep a pen and notepad handy so without rummaging around I can make a list. The list will include, item-by-item, everything I will get done first thing in the morning. This does not mean it ever really gets done; but the anxiety bots don’t know that because they’ve all been moved from your brain to that notepad. Five minutes later —
Back to the blanket. Slide underneath, gently weighted back to sleep for the rest of your requisite eight hours. Possibly even sated with a few pretzels and a swig of ginger beer.
Editorial warning: This is a first world problem story.
The housekeeping people just left my apartment. Happy as I am to see them arrive, I am sixteen times happier to see them go.
It’s an every other week ritual. The hyper-efficient housekeepers trained and provided by my senior living building appear with their cart-load of sweepers, dusters, mops and vacuum cleaners and swarm my otherwise happy home. The exorbitant fees I pay to live in this place (where DO old people in the U.S. go if they don’t have a zillion dollars? — that’s another story) actually cover housekeeping once a week. But I find the experience so traumatizing I elect to have them only every other week. I am still waiting for the small rebate I feel due for all the $$ I save them.
Why the trauma? It’s because I have to zoom around before they arrive, making sure there’s nothing in the way of their Marie-Kondoing the place. Never mind that I do a lot of cleaning, arranging and tidying up every day; I have a lot of company. But whereas my visitors would overlook a small pile of stuff on the table or even the occasional toothbrush on the sink, our housekeepers may whoosh it away forever in the frenzy to maintain their standards of spit-and-polish. The housekeepers here are, I believe, recruited from the military.
Well, anyway. After they finish sweeping, mopping, dusting, wiping down, vacuuming and generally disturbing the peace, my work begins.
Bottles at the backs of counters, invariably left just a few degrees askew, must be rearranged in proper alignment. Pictures must be rescued from their descent into lopsidedness. Books and treasures must be restored to their rightful places. And — here is the real bi-weekly challenge — everything I shoved into cabinets or drawers just so it wouldn’t wind up in the recycling bin must be recovered from its hiding place. This last is not always successful. After I die it is likely someone will be heard to exclaim, “Why in the world did Mom put this basket of popcorn behind the stack of sweaters in her closet?”
Here is my question: What law of the universe ordains that the square bottle of hand lotion be positioned squarely against the back counter ledge?
For that matter, will the earth quit turning if pillows meant to be placed at angles on the sofa are left in improper poses? Will climate change be accelerated even faster if glass vases are left to refract the suns rays rather than being restored to positions of predestined alignment?
Marie Kondo I am not. I am just still in recovery from the loss of an otherwise spectacularly beloved husband who never saw a flat space he did not feel would be improved by a few piles of books, magazines and papers. I maintain a few perpetual piles of papers on at least two or three surfaces at all times in his memory. But of course, then I have to remember that I stuck them behind the laundry detergent when the cleaners came.
And the popcorn? Yeah, did that once. Bulky sweaters are rarely called for in San Francisco. I am not admitting in public print how long the popcorn remained undiscovered. (It was soggy. We don’t have mice in this building.)
There is probably a moral to this tale. All suggestions will be welcome.
* * *
This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye (franmorelandjohns.substack.com) where I also write weekly about things political. C’mon over any time; it’s free
Look better . . . fall less . . . what’s not to love about good posture?
I had the great good fortune, a few eons ago, to study modern dance in college with a woman named Eleanor Struppa. “Struppa,” as she was universally addressed, had herself danced with the famed Martha Graham. You could spot her in any crowd — she’d be the person standing, or more often moving, with such fluid grace and effortlessly perfect posture that she commanded a space of her own.
Struppa’s students did not slouch. This was because we might be walking droopy-shouldered along some hall or pathway when a hand from behind would quietly grab a small chunk of hair on the top of our head and, as it was tugged upward, a voice would sing out, “A string! A string! Imagine a string is pulling you upward . . .” End of slouch.
The string trick alone doesn’t do it; there’s a lot of chin-tucking, muscle-strengthening, spine-aligning and proper exercise involved. Good genes are a bonus.
Bone loss, physical afflictions and gravity have their way with the aging body, but concentrating on balance and posture can help us all stay upright. And here’s the pay-off: staying upright is the best way not to break bones.
In addition to a ridiculous obsession with posture, I am even more ridiculously obsessed with balance. I have a collection of balance exercises in my head that come into play in any given spare three minutes. You can sneak in a balance exercise anywhere, as long as you ignore the curious glances from everybody else in the wait lines. Extra points for executing rock-the-boats in a moving elevator — near the railing, please, just in case. Fellow residents in my senior living building are all by now used to this. More than a few join in (though seldom in the elevator.)
So far, it’s working. The last bone I broke was about 50 years ago, playing doubles tennis with my then-70-something-year-old father. That time, I made a graceful leap at the net and wound up with a broken foot. I was in a walking cast for the next six weeks. What I remember best about that time was repeatedly having to tell the story, only to hear the listener ask, “Well, how’s your father?” He was, of course, just fine. His posture was impeccable until his death, at 90.
My posture has now outlived his by a couple of years, thanks in large measure to the lilting voice in my head:
“A string! A string! Imagine a string is pulling you upward!”
This post also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye. C’mon over any time, it’s free
CONTEMPLATING LONGTERM PAYMENT PLANS CAN BE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH. BECAUSE WE NEED TO HAVE THESE LITTLE VICTORIES
This (above) is a selfie with my new iPhone 16e. I was going for an Edvard Munch ‘The Scream’ effect, which is how I feel about the thing.
I was actually very happy with my elderly iPhone 11, but oh, the horror of having a device that’s several models out of date. Plus, like all else in the Age of Technology it was created to reach obsolescence, one way or another, in short order. My 11’s battery died and went to heaven. No resurrection for iPhone batteries, just go buy a new phone.
I picked the 16e as opposed to the 16-with-no-letter mainly because it was $200 cheaper, even if it didn’t have a wide-angle camera (everybody needs a wide-angle camera?) or some Mag stuff — I am WAYYyy too old to get into Mag stuff.
As I prepared to pay, the nice, green-jacketed Apple person said, “Oh, you needn’t pay it all now! There’s no interest if you space out the payments.” No Apple employee is old enough to remember outright paying for stuff, though most are old enough to have heard a grandparent preach against credit card interest. Life before credit cards? — nobody remembers that.
But here is the revenge of the geezer class: Maybe I will expire before my payment plan does! Ever looking for a bargain, I scheduled the iPhone 16e payments for the maximum length of time and we have both now begun the race toward expiration. Where does Apple think it’ll find me if I exit the planet owing $200 on one of their devices?
It reminded me of the time, not long ago, when I picked up some new light bulbs. In not-so-small print they advertised themselves as Guaranteed to Last for Twenty Years.
“I’m going to have to put these things in my will?” I asked the check-out clerk. He just went on ringing me up.
But speaking of dead iPhone batteries, which I was a few paragraphs ago. Lately I’ve been joining the locals in friendly gatherings at the Tesla showroom, protesting against their unfriendly, chainsaw-wielding founder. Tesla is big on advertising its long-life batteries. I have some empathy for those batteries. “It’s important to understand,” writes one expert on the subject, “that very few EV batteries suddenly stop working.” (In other words, some of them do.”
To continue that report: “Instead, they degrade slowly over time, gradually storing less and less energy . . .” I know exactly how they feel. But unlike a Tesla battery, which will probably degrade the planet for a few eons despite everything they tell us about elaborate recycling, my ashes will at least be dessert for some marine creature in the Chesapeake Bay, so take that, Elon.
These are the sorts of reflections one has upon reaching a certain marker along life’s journey. Should I trade these comfy old sneakers for a new pair of Hokas designed to travel hundreds of miles? Is buying this large, economy size container of lemon pepper an overly optimistic strategy? These sorts of decisions eat up a lot of brain space.
Which brings me back to the iPhone. However much the Apple people get out of me, it’s a $600 thing. I use it as a communication device — and OK, picture-taking is fun and phones that don’t take pictures are so last century. Still, the transaction included a one-hour class just to discover how it can track your exertions related to sneaker use and your dietary relation to lemon pepper. I took the class, and since nobody else did I turned out to get a one-hour personal tutorial.
I learned all about the health app and the action button and the plant identifier and the text translation capability, but the instructor seemed a little baffled when I asked if there were an On/Off button. (No, there’s not.)
There are more bewildering things about my nifty little device than it is possible to learn within my anticipated lifetime.
But at least we’re both on the same pay-as-you-age plan.
Blood was beginning to drip across the marble tile. What can I say?
After a trip to Sicily with a short stop in Rome, I had made it without incident from my hotel to Rome Airport FCO Fiumicino well ahead of 7 AM for a 9:10 AM flight home. I found my way to the ITA Baggage Drop area to trade my one small bag for a boarding pass. That was when the drama began.
Reaching for my passport, and briefly forgetting about my cheap-tissue-paper skin — i.e., thinner than even the better quality tissue paper — I brushed the pocket of my backpack and came up with a half-inch gash across the top of my left hand.
If someone is trying to find a vein below my paper-thin skin when a blood test is required, good luck. Veins are nowhere to be found. But in the Baggage Drop area of Fiumicino Aeroporto, one small scrape and you’d think Vesuvius had just erupted in A-negative.
I had managed to grab some tissues from my pocket as the gusher began. But keeping it at bay required pressing one tissue, with my right hand, onto the back of my left. This left no available hand for doing stuff, and stuff needed to be done. I quickly attempted to wipe up the mess on the floor with the remaining tissues, deploying one foot before I ran out of appendages.
A horde of uniformed ITA people descended from nowhere. I had triggered the “Little Old Lady” alarm. I heard, for not the first of a zillion times in recent years, “Are you traveling alone?”
Ohforheavenssakes! At what age is it required that “Little Old Ladies” be accompanied by a “Keeper?” Admittedly, if I’d had a “Keeper” he or she would have produced the passport and avoided the whole drama. But still. The wound, which drew attention to my amply-wrinkled face, had triggered the “Little Old Lady Traveling Alone” alarm. The horde had taken over.
“No problem! No problem!” they were saying, guiding me onward and leaving the insufficiently wiped mess on the tile. Who cleans the floors at your houses? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I watched politely as someone picked up my tiny carry-on (the under-seat size) and backpack and guided me onward, away from the unsightly splatters.
I had a Band-Aid in my backpack. All I needed was that one Band-Aid and I’d be on my way. I desperately wanted to shout, had anyone been listening, Could someone please just help me get the #$%&+ Band-Aid so I can have two hands again!?! But I didn’t. I had been trying very hard to represent the Friendly American despite our current unfriendly administration.
One young helper agent disengaged himself from the horde to take over my small bags — and me in the bargain. I began to understand I had an invisible tattoo, “LOL-TA.”
“The chair is coming,” said the polite young man. “Wait here.”
I was apparently to be wheeled off, through Passport Control and the two-mile maze I had negotiated on the trip through FCO Fiumicino from which I was now returning. It had been an altogether pleasant walk — but of course, I’d managed not to injure myself on that leg of the journey.
While waiting, I engineered a raised left-hand maneuver long enough to reach into my backpack and retrieve a Band-Aid. Problem solved. I was anxious to be on my way, but once a wheelchair-designate, always a wheelchair-designate. I waited, obediently. However, I noted with some relief watching other wheelchairs come and go, that Rome Fiumicino features motorized chairs complete with a platform in the back for the driver.
My only previous airport wheelchair experience was once when I was re-routed through Seattle with 20 minutes to make a connection. I had played the “LOL” card and requested a chair. It was operated by a frail woman in a hijab who whisked me through a complicated series of passages and elevators to deliver me at the gate with several minutes to spare — and an overwhelming sense of guilt.
At least this trip would be guilt-free. Eventually, it began via a motorized chair with a pleasant-looking young woman who maneuvered me into the seat with my backpack in my lap and the other bag on the platform beside her. We were through Passport Control in a matter of minutes and headed to the A — E Gates.
“I take you to your gate,” said my driver as we sped along. “E-23.”
“Umm, if you don’t mind,” I said, “could we go to the ITA lounge?” This seemed a reasonable request. We were now navigating the swirling mobs of E Gates, and I knew, indeed, that the lounge was within range. As I had tried in vain to explain ever since the wound incident, I had done this entire business just fine, on foot, “LOL-TA,” when headed in the other direction.
The lounge had great appeal. I had access to it thanks to having declared myself years ago too old to fly overseas any way except Business Class. The lounge, I knew, had breakfast choices and hot coffee (I now also know to ask for “latte con café” to avoid the 80-octane Italian drink) and bathrooms, not necessarily in that order of importance. I still had over an hour before boarding, and E-23 was without any of those niceties.
“I think E-23,” said my friendly driver.
What to do? We were speeding towards E-23, and it seemed my destiny. At E-23 we came to a stop. I was gingerly assisted in getting off the fancy wheelchair and handed my tiny bag plus my backpack. “Arrivederci,” we said.
When my driver was safely out of sight, I picked up my bags and made my way through the cosmetics area of a mid-gate shopping center toward the lounge about an eighth of a mile distant. (As I mentioned, I’d done this before.) There I found breakfast, coffee, bathrooms, and easy chairs; what’s not to love about airport lounges? It was now 8 AM. Boarding was advertised as beginning at 8:10.
I was enjoying my latte con café in an easy chair when a smiling young man in an ITA Assistant uniform appeared at my side. He was piloting a motorized wheelchair.
“I will take you to your gate,” he said. Maybe a tracking device had been attached to my forehead, just below the “Little Old Lady-TravelingAlone” tag?
By now I had learned not to argue with management. Feeling a little sheepish, after having zipped from breakfast bar to coffee to bathroom to easy chair and to and fro for an hour or so in front of all these other able-bodied people, I handed over my bags and arranged myself primly upon the wheelchair.
This report comes to you from Seat 3A, ITA Flight AZ 640 Rome to San Francisco, where I continue to be treated with the exquisite care accorded a “LOL-TA.”
It is right there on the website: 100% of the people in the world are younger than I am; 0% are older. The French Institute for Demographic Studies told me this. I found it more than a little disconcerting. But could I argue with INED, a public research institute specializing in population studies, working in partnership with national and international academic and research communities?
One teeny reassurance was in the minuscule black tip of the still-alive-and-kicking graph of the world’s population. It looked like there had to be a few remaining others this old. That, plus the fact that I do have an actual friend or two still very much alive in their later 90s.
So I clicked myself over to percentages for the U.S. and lo! the numbers looked a little better: 1% of the people in the U.S. are older, even, than I am. Whew. Do we care if 99% are younger? Nahh, we one-percenters are happy to occupy that tip of the iceberg. At least we, and it, are still clinging to the precipice.
All this came about thanks to my fellow WordPress blogger Neil, who grouses more about being old at 77 than I think should be permissible.
“My status as an ancient has been made crystal clear to me,” Neil wrote, referring to INED’s revelation that 97% of the world’s population is younger than he is. He should grouse? He even admits to being “still nicely functional, still pretty much an ace at stumbling gracefully through life.”
Which brings us back to the whole demographic study business. At no point are the trends going to reverse. However more (or fewer) babies appear in any given 24-hour span, except for those who leave the planet for the hereafter, every one of the rest of us is another day older.
Perhaps the only answer is to ignore wherever we are on the percentage scale and focus on the 24 hours. Aim to do the right things, Neil suggests. Seek justice. Do a little good somewhere. Love your neighbor.
Smile when the sun goes down; it’ll come up tomorrow, whether you and i do . . . or not.
I’ve just finished an obituary of sorts for my friend Laurie, who died yesterday afternoon, slipping quietly into an ever-deeper sleep with those she loved best beside her. We should all, eventually, be so lucky.
The way you know you’re dead, in today’s senior living communities, is that your picture goes up on the hall table. Laurie and I laughed about that just last week, when I was saying I’d work hard at writing something elegant to go beside her photo. From somewhere in the ethersphere I am certain she’s getting the last laugh.
Elegance was easy to come by in this case. A decade ago Laurie had shepherded her physician husband through a descent into dementia, managing to keep him at home in their apartment until his own relatively gentle demise. They had raised two daughters and led a full, good life.
One daughter was extremely close to her mother, as was her wife, a particularly beloved daughter-in-law to Laurie.
So the first thing they did, en route to the Good Death, was to talk frankly and in detail about what exactly Laurie wanted. At 91 — precisely the age of this writer — Laurie enjoyed being with friends and family, walking her San Francisco neighborhood, reading and listening to music. She could still do most of these, but recent illnesses were imposing limitations.
We talked, occasionally, of how she felt her quality of life had diminished. Because of my volunteer work with Medical Aid in Dying, which is legal in our state (and 9 others plus DC,) we talked a good bit about that option — which she said she would choose over any painful & debilitating end.
A few weeks ago an intestinal issue sent Laurie to the hospital. Surgery would be required, the doctors said; and it would be a high-risk procedure.
No thanks, said Laurie, I think I’d rather go home to die in peace.
Which was exactly what she did. With a hospice bed positioned so she could look out at the distant mountains, a TV set she mostly kept turned off and flowers on the windowsills, she made herself comfortable. There was morphine for pain, but she had almost none.
There’s a name for this way to die: Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED.) The intestinal issue had spelled the end of her eating; stopping drink hastens the process. A popsicle-like swab was by her side to prevent any discomfort from thirst.
For a week, friends stopped by. We’d tell her how much she had meant to us; she’d return the sentiment — but nothing faux or flowery: “We really didn’t know each other that well,” she said to one visitor. “But I remember a funny thing you said not long ago . . .”
Sometimes, as the days wore on, she would fall asleep mid-sentence. Nobody cared.
Ten days after her return from the hospital Laurie’s sleep simply deepened and her heart and breathing stopped. Her two beloved daughters were holding her hands.
I was 13 the year my older sister left for her senior year of college, just before World War II came to an end. Unfortunately for my lungs she forgot about a carton of Lucky Strikes on the closet shelf. By the time I was halfway through those ten packs I was hooked.
In my defense — or by way of explanation — chain-smokers were more common than non-smokers in the 1940s, and in small-town America the sight of young kids smoking on school steps would have raised few eyebrows, if any. (The eyebrows of my parents would have been another matter altogether, but my sisters and I were sneaky enough to conceal these habits for years.)
The above is why my own eyebrows went up over this beginning line of a Quora story that just crossed my screen:
“If you’re a daily or heavy smoker it takes about 7 years for your lungs to clear themselves.” That sent me straight over to the website of my friends at the Cleveland Clinic where they said “if you can stop smoking for several years, your risk of cancer and other health conditions reduces or even returns to the same level as someone who doesn’t smoke.”
This is not to say everything will just be hunky-dory from then on. Read on for what the Cleveland Clinic says, or check with the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association . . . we know a lot more about nicotine today than in the days when cigarettes were glamorous and chic and omnipresent.
But I can’t help looking back on those days, and telling the story of my poor, once-innocent lungs.
Well into the 1960s, when I was balancing ashtrays while feeding my first two infants, smoking was generally accepted — okay, nobody said it was good for you, but you weren’t labeled a Bad Mom. Gradually, in the 1960s, smoking lost its cool. (Related factoid: for years, bad colds had simply forced me to switch from Marlboros to Kools.) By 1971, when ads were banned and smoke-free areas began to edge smokers out of the way, the reality of nicotine’s multiple harms to the body also began to break through and into the public consciousness.
In 1964, pregnant with my last child, I was so sick that for the first time in my addictive history I could not even manage a smoke. After she arrived I had a moment of clarity: I knew it would be impossible to quit, but since I had temporarily suspended the habit maybe I could manage not to restart. Sixty years later I am still managing not to restart.
You can do this math: I am now sailing into my 90s, still of sound mind and walking three or four miles on most days — so I’m living proof that a history of chain smoking doesn’t always shorten one’s lifespan. Here, though, are a few details within which the devil nicotine may lurk:
Macular degeneration? Maybe I wouldn’t be getting that periodic shot in the eye had I not accumulated 17 long-ago years of chain smoking.
This raspy voice finally curtailing the public speaking I’ve done in behalf of several causes for decades? Vocal therapists have helpfully offered exercises that take 20 minutes three times a day — when I can’t find five extra minutes to finish a blog post. I should never have dropped out of the church choir.
How about that breast cancer I had back at age 72? Virtually every day another link between smoking and cancer is established.
Or unexpected issues with altitude? Without my nicotine-infused history I might still be tackling historic enclosed spiral staircases or visiting Machu Picchu. As is, my daughter brings along a can of oxygen when she meets my plane in Bozeman, MT.
But the cruelest blow of all is when, puffed with pride over a history of sixty years cigarette-free, I wind up a routine exam with the ENT doc to the sound of his muttering voice from behind the X-ray screen:
