Being old is a lot like being young

I spent the day trying to solve problems that are interesting only because they are such a nuisance if they aren’t solved.  Things like the heating system and satellite connection for the TV.  I spent a fair amount of time talking to charming young men who seemed glad to give me instructions for what to do next.  It occurs to me that I might be what some might consider a high-maintenance customer because mostly I want to understand what’s going on.

On the other hand, maybe I don’t.  I mean, I really don’t have a burning desire to understand the mechanisms of the apparent air block that’s the problem with our heating system, and am not enthusiastically trying out all the little steps our helpful plumber is giving me by mobile phone from where he is currently working. Though I do appreciate his help.

In the midst of this home maintenance activity, I thought about how much being 67 resembles being 17.  I experience amazingly intense highs about being alive, and so much seems so intensely stimulating and interesting.  Whether it’s politics or the kids next door or figuring out a software glitch on the computer. 

And just as when I was 17, I worry.  As a teenager, I worried about the future, about possible nuclear annihilation, about whether someone would invite me to a big social event, about money, about what career I should pursue, about clothes and being fat and being liked.  Now I worry about the future, about the environment, about money, about being prepared for the limitations that come inevitably to those who live long enough, about fixing things, about the possibility of getting sick or blind or crippled, or – worst of all – suffering from dementia. 

My hope is that at 67 I’m taking advantage of having done something similar before.  I hope I’m kinder, less judgemental than I was in my all-knowledgeable youth.

One of those days

It has been one of those days.  The furnace repairman came and got the furnace going.  It seemed like nothing more than an air block.  Now I’ve just discovered that the entire system has shut down again.

The new DVD recorder was working beautifully with the satellite box and tv this morning, and this afternoon I set it to record the latest BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.  When I went to play it back, I discovered  the scart connection between the satellite box and the recorder has stopped working.  Probably means a new satellite box.

My computer froze and refused to save about a hour’s worth of  - oh never mind.  It’s just things that are breaking.  My neighbour told me this afternoon she’s scheduled for one of those “this might be cancer” kind of follow up tests next week. 

Peter and I are doing fine.  I feel quite lucky – if a bit harrassed.

Sister Mary Edith, MM

Sister Mary Edith was the Maryknoll sister whose courses in philosophy and history opened up a world to me that was the most exciting thing I’d ever known.  She was very frail, thin, almost translucent.  I think she might have been ill or in constant pain, but no one ever talked about it.  I don’t know very much about her background because in those days when we entered the convent, the idea was that we left our old selves behind.  So we took new names and rarely talked about our previous lives in the world before Maryknoll.  I heard once she had her graduate degree from Oxford University in England, which is quite credible.

During our second year as novices, we had classes several afternoons a week when Sister Edith taught us philosophy and history.  Encompassing everything I remember about them is the amazement I felt when I realized that women could be just as smart, just as incisive, as analytical and far-sighted as men. 

What an old fashioned thought this seems even to me as I write it at the end of my academic career.  But although from first grade at the age of six to high school graduation at eighteen, I was always the first in my class, I never thought of myself as smart.  I was just an older sister, which was why I always knew more.  And besides I was a girl.  My father was the one who could think;  my mother was supportive and loving, but didn’t even try to analyze things the way my dad could.  In a traditional Catholic family, it was made clear to me that I was expected to be differential though cheerful and not obsequiously subservient, which would have been considered in poor taste.   It was suggested that I might be a nurse but not a doctor, a teacher but not a leader.  Girls could be nuns but not priests.  In fact, a priest once told me that I could not possibly have an IQ of 150 because if I did “I would be as smart as my father.”  I accepted that possibility as patently impossible.

Although I entered an order where I thought I could be independent, I did not go in with the attitudes of feminism we take for granted today.  I had no idea I had anything but quite acceptable intellectual abilities.   But here was Sister Edith, a nun who was smart the way I thought only men could be smart.  And what’s more, I understood what she was saying.  I grasped almost immediately the difference between Aristotle’s essence and existence.  I understood when she said a lesson of Greek mythology is that behavior has irrevocable consequences, that wanting to do the right thing wasn’t enough.  If it was the wrong thing, the result would be wrong too.  That is probably when the core first formed of a contrariness which is with me still.  In the face of the great tragedies played out on our global stage every day, I know that just because something is desperately wrong, it doesn’t mean any good hearted person knows how to make it right.

After I’d been in Maryknoll for six years, I was assigned to take courses at Mary Rogers College to train to be an elementary school teacher.  Mary Rogers was a Maryknoll college, staffed principally by Maryknollers themselves.  I thought it was a secondary place providing a sub-standard education until I went to New York University where I was shocked to find so little to challenge me.  Some of the best and most committed teachers I would ever have in my life had been at Maryknoll.

In psychology, logic, and anthropology, the teachers were brilliant women who knew their subject as well as their students and I learned a great deal from them.  But for me, Sister Mary Edith was unique. 

Many years after leaving Maryknoll, I asked about Sister Mary Edith in the hopes that I might tell her how her classes had so profoundly shaped my life.  But I was too late;  she had died.  And as I write this now, I wish I knew more about this beautiful woman who gave me so much, and I am sure, never suspected the magntitude of her gift.

Compensation for my senior moment

My Plan A for today was to write about the academic Maryknoll nun who influenced me so profoundly.  In fact, there is probably no other woman, even my mother, who so clearly gave me a vision of what I could be.  And what, in the end, I became.  Unfortunately, however, Plan A was replaced by Plan B today, so Sister Mary Edith is now Plan A for tomorrow. 

I did, however, finally get the DVD recorder wired up to the TV and satellite receiver and even tested the various modes we want to use.  The unit also does a lot of other things – hooking up to a PC or camcorder or additional speakers for amplified sound – that we don’t want to do, so I was hugely relieved to be able to skip those pages in the instructions manual.

I did walk around for about an hour frantically trying to remember the word “crepe” to describe the thin pancakes Peter made for a cannelloni dish this evening.  Figuring out the DVD recorder system helps to calm a rising panic when I experience these senior moments.

Brainy exercise

Since prime time television in our house lasts for about two hours between 8 and 10 pm, we’ve found that most of the programmes we want to watch seem to be on when we are sleeping or doing something else.   So we bought a DVD player/recorder.  It was delivered yesterday.

I’m usually pretty good at following directions – even those written in Hong Kong or Beijing – so I sat down with the cables and the manuals for our TV, our satellite receiver, and the new recorder.  Aaagh!

They don’t match – outlets one manual says should be there on another component don’t seem to bear a resemblance to what we actually have.  I have tried versions from each of the manuals so far without success and am now resorting to actually trying to figure out what sends signals to where, instead of slavishly following the diverse instructions.

But I’m reaching the conclusion that this stuff about continuing to exercise ones brain as we get older is over-hyped.  It is just as boring as the old-fashioned kind of exercise, and I fear I lack a consuming desire to really understand how these electronic cables work. 

Still, I estimate there are 120 different ways the cables can be connected.  If I try one a day, I should have the problem cracked no later than the end of March. 

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Look at the bright side – things will get worse

As a natural bio-chemical optimist, one of the survival mechanisms I have used successfully over the years when faced with unpalatable news is to look at how much worse it could have been.  Because however bad something is, I find that it could always have been worse.  My sister died of cancer in her mid-40s?  well, at least she died quickly and not hooked up to a bunch of machines in the hospital delaying the inevitable.  My mother died at 48 leaving behind ten children under the age of 19?  at least she had time to prepare and left a legacy that has supported each of us throughout our lives.  I might owe a huge unexpected tax bill?  well, at least I can still take that amount out of savings.  Etc.

All the evidence suggests, however, that Peter is not a born optimist.  He might even be a natural bio-chemical pessimist.  In any case, his reluctant attempts to apply my Things-Could-Be-Worse strategy lack a certain effectiveness.  Yesterday he said he didn’t like being 73.  But that at least it wasn’t as bad as being 74. 

Not quite the approach I would suggest.

Sister Anne Cecilia

Earlier I wrote about the four men whom I have loved most.  This Thanksgiving, though, I have been remembering two Maryknoll sisters who have left me with an enduring legacy.  They were very different – one was an academic, the other was in charge of the bakery at the Motherhouse. 

My first introduction to Sister Anne Cecilia was as a postulant when I was assigned to work in the bakery for three hours each morning.  The bakery made all the bread, cakes, pies, cookies, rolls, and other bakery goods required for the daily needs and festive celebrations of 350 nuns.  Sister Anne Cecilia ran the bakery with a professional brilliance that we never questioned.  But that is not what really made her special.

She was born on a farm in upstate New York to an Eastern European immigrant family, and brought with her to Maryknoll a common sense, good cheer and capacity for hard work that made her a treasure and that over the years we often came to take for granted.   I liked working with her, partly because my mother had already taught me how to bake and I liked working with someone who did not waste time in vain rituals that would have gotten in the way of literally getting the bread on the tables.  She did insist that we use our finger to swipe round the inside of every shell as we broke eggs into a bowl for our cake batter or sweet dough, but this did not seem a finicky conceit to me, and I know more than one ex-Maryknoller who still does it to make sure nothing goes to waste.

I was assigned to the bakery again as a second-year novice and several times as a young professed nun was put in charge when Sister Anne Cecilia took an annual two-week vacation.  The job was not quite as easy as she had made it look.  I remember once spending an entire afternoon when the bakery was usually closed getting 40 loaves into the oven that were needed for the next morning because somehow the yeast had inexplicably failed to rise in the first batch of dough.  I also left Sister Anne Cecilia with a very large bowl of salt, butter and eggs.  It should have been frosting, but a young postulant had used salt instead of sugar.  We added the salty mixture for months to anything that could absorb it, but in the end, most of it had to be thrown away.  I think it violated Sister Anne Cecilia’s deepest principles, but she bore it stoically.  I don’t think she herself ever presided over a disaster of such magnitude.

My full appreciation of what was special about Sister Anne Cecilia, though, took many years to develop.  Because it took many years for me to become mature enough to  glimpse how extraordinary her ordinary virtues were.  She was content to be nothing more than a baker, spending most of her working life in a room no bigger than the kitchen in my house today.  She never bragged about herself, never suggested she deserved a higher status than we accorded her, did not lose her temper, did not gripe or resent or sulk or blame others if something went wrong.  She was always interested in hearing about what someone else was doing, and her eyes would easily fill when someone told her about the orphans, the battered and starved bodies, the weeping mothers, the anguished men in the worn-torn or desperately poor areas where many Maryknollers worked.  You might think this is standard fare for nuns dedicated to lives of service, but it is often a goal to be hoped for more than it is achieved.

I have not taken the opportunity to say thank you to many of the people who have made my life so much richer.  Most often, they have died or disappeared from my orbit before I understood how much they had given me.  I did, though, make a rare trip back to Maryknoll several years ago, and visited for several hours with this feisty, down-to-earth, humble, and practical woman.  I did say thank you, and she promised to keep me in her prayers.  When she died several months later, hundreds of people from all over the world mourned her dying.  And a lot of women went into their kitchens and baked a “Sister Anne Cecilia” recipe in honour of what she had given them.  An ex-Maryknoll friend sent me a grey apron worn almost threadbare by Sister Anne Cecilia because she knew I had come to love her. 

As a young nun, I thought of Sister Anne Cecilia as only a baker.  Today I think of her as someone who lived her life needing only to meet the most basic needs of those who themselves lived only to serve others.  She didn’t need to be noticed, but she left behind a lot of goodness.

English Thanksgivings

Like much else American, Halloween, with the pumpkins and beggars, has made it across the Atlantic from America in the last ten years.  Halloween probably arrived in America with the Irish, so in a way it is merely returning home with the added gloss acquired in the New World.

Thanksgiving, given its Puritan roots, will unfortunately have a harder time making the return crossing to these English shores.  Thanksgiving in its modern version is by far my favourite holiday of the year, and I enthusiastically wish our English friends a happy Thanksgiving, making sure they know they are included in my list of gifts for which I am grateful.  But somehow our neighbour’s suggestion that I hang the American flag out my window to celebrate rather misses the point. 

Well, perhaps not.  He was also the one who reminded me that the first American Puritans left England having tried to impose a regime of puritanical (it’s where the word came from) rigidity in England, becoming one of the parties to the religious wars waged in Britain during much of the 17th century.  It was a time in which the religion of the land was determined by the ruler, so disagreement with the government and disagreement with God were tantamount to the same thing.

In those days disagreement was exceptionally dangerous to ones health.  It still is, I suppose, though we in “advanced” countries try to be more subtle about it than staging the public be-headings of those we deem to be ungodly.

How big is 25 million?

I was introduced to the Spanish Guardia on the day we moved into our house in an elegant little fishing village on the Mediterranean coast in 1986.  It was a hot February morning and the young men were moving everything we’d packed up from our lives in New York – furniture, clothes, pots, pans, computers, and thousands of books from our personal academic library – from the truck into the house, when the police vehicle wended its way up the hill.

Two Guardia officers got out.  The movers all disappeared into the back of the moving van, and quite suddenly, did speak a word of Spanish.  One officer came to the door, removed his hat and greeeted me – Buenas dias, Senora.  Peter speaks French, so it was left to me and my rusty Spanish learned in high school to stumble on.  What emerged was that the officers wanted to come into our house and open the boxes that were piling up there. 

I was well aware that in the U.S. or England, the police do not have the right to roll up and insist on coming into your house to search without a warrant.  They don’t have that right in Spain either, but when you are a foreigner and a police force with a ruthless reputation forged under the rule of the dictator Franco arrives, one is not inclined to choose a moment like this to make a point of law.  I invited them in.

The senior officer ripped open two of the boxes.  By chance, both of them were filled with books.  “Ah, libros!” he spat.  Then tipped his hat, and with many Gracias, Senora, departed.  We learned later that they were looking for a load of contraband machinery.  I might have resented their high-handedness but I’ve never wished in restrospect that I’d stood up to them.  I knew they had too much power, and even if we had done nothing wrong, they could cause us an immense amount of trouble for a very long time.  

I remembered this incident today when news broke that four weeks ago the HMRC (the treasury and tax-collection department in Britain) sent in unsecured mail two computer discs containing the names, social security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and bank details of 25 million UK citizens.  (If you wonder if 25 million is a large number, it might put it in perspective to know that it represents more than 4 out of every 10 people living in this country.)  The discs have been lost, and despite a furious search, have not been found.

The government has no choice but to admit this is a huge failure to protect its citizens from serious potential harm, especially identity theft.  But what is coming out is a story of systemic failure.  This is by no means the first security failure, and stories of incompetence on a huge scale are terrifying. 

This incompetence is why I was willing, at fairly substantial personal cost, to pay a UK accountant to stand between me and the HMRC should they ever decide to examine my tax liability. 

I fear arrogant incompetence far more than I fear the rule of law.

Queen’s diamond wedding anniversary

Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh* celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary today in one of those regal ceremonies in Westminster Cathedral, attended by a select number of 2000 guests. 

There really was nothing wrong with the ceremony.  Prince William, the future king, son of Diana and Charles, and the Queen’s grandson read the well-known biblical quote that God is Love, and all those who love belong to God.  And the Archbishop of Canterbury (the counterpart in the Anglican Church to the Pope in Roman Catholicism), praised them for their strength of character and for being a public model of a successful marriage.

At which point I felt a cold chill of revulsion.  I could not bear to appear in a public ceremony and have someone else tell me about my marriage and praise us for the strength of our mutual love. 

Who has the right to stand outside a marriage and pronounce on its success or failure?  who has the right to stand outside such an intimate relationship and judge the strength of its love? 

Maybe some people find it confirming and they are glad for the public affirmation.  I strongly suspect that the Queen did not.  I know that I would flee in furious disgust.  The Queen and her husband bore it with great dignity.  I wouldn’t want to be a Queen.

*For those interested in such things, the wife of a king is a queen, but the husband of a queen is not automatically a king.