New Years reflections: not quite arrived and aging in place

Though the calendar has turned and we're finally out of 2020, I'm not quite into a new year -- yet. And I won't get there until after the voting ends in the Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5; I'm still phoning for Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. 

Perhaps I'll feel the arrival of a new year when Congress votes to accept the results of the election on January 6. Or perhaps the feeling will wait until Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20. I've lived four long years in a hyper-vigilant state, struggling for the survival of the better possibilities of this deeply flawed country -- that doesn't just disappear with the flip of the calendar.

I'll write plenty here during this new year about what I learned in that struggle -- and the struggles going forward -- but not yet.

Today I want write a little about what I learned in 2020 of my own experience of aging, of growing into getting older.

Going into the year, I knew what I thought was ahead. In the first half of the year, Erudite Partner would teach and I'd run, and continue Walking San Francisco, and writing this blog. In the second half of the year, we'd work in some way, somewhere, on a campaign to elect whatever Democrat emerged to contest Trump and the GOPers.

And then came the pandemic -- and we were locked down at home in a constrained world. This wasn't much of a hardship. Though I missed seeing people in person, I could still walk about, and read, and write. We could afford Costco deliveries and cooked more regularly. Pandemic isolation was comfortable for us.

But little nicks and aches interrupted my running. By July I was largely immobilized with a bad back which morphed into medicine-induced digestive problems. And we understood, incompletely but not inaccurately, that the coronavirus was a respiratory threat I had to take seriously. Over the last decade I've had several bouts of pneumonia and I just don't recover rapidly or cleanly. So I chose to reduce risk of infection drastically. I didn't even go out to participate in the racial reckoning protests triggered, this time around, by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

And I certainly couldn't join an on-the-ground political campaign during a pandemic. For me, working a political campaign is the equivalent of going to war; I have always required absolute and unstinting focus from myself when on campaign. I couldn't deliver that in my condition or in the situation the disease had created.

Erudite Partner is a little younger and healthier, so she could go, and in August she departed for 3 months in Nevada. I had to content myself with working on the hotel workers union (UniteHERE) phone bank. This got off to a slow start but built up into a significant effort in Florida, Nevada and Philadelphia -- and continues now in support of canvassers in Georgia.

But stuck at home, I became aware that the pandemic and my own aches were slamming me with a reality that I, like most of us, prefer to push aside. As we age, how we physically and psychically participate in the world around us changes. My mentor in aging Ronni Bennett taught me to experience these changes with curiosity and humor. In her honor, I hope to write here occasionally about what I learn from my aging.

Here are some snippets from this plague year:

• I can't use ladders to change light bulbs anymore unless I've got someone around to hand me needed tools, etc. Found that out the hard way; nothing broke in the tumble except the lamp cover.
• Best have a wall or bed nearby to lean on when pulling on pants. I no longer can do this comfortably standing on one foot.
• I don't know whether this change comes from aging, or the pandemic, or both: mundane tasks that just need to get done like an oil change for the car or calling in the roofer to clean gutters seem more challenging.
• Interests changed. Don't know whether this is a consequence of the pandemic or increasing maturity, but I find I am no longer interested in football, professional or college. Football is a less violent alternative to war. Maybe I don't need that jolt anymore?
• I no longer can intelligently write in the evening; I'm too tired. So it's a good thing I don't now have, and expect never to have, a day job. When would I blog? I can listen to books during evenings, and that's a delight. I hope the San Francisco Public Library reopens soon, as I like to borrow a hard copy of any book I write about here to check quotes. There's quite a blog backlog of booktalk coming once they open.
• You can't go home again (thanks Thomas Wolfe) but old passions recur -- and it's possible to take them up again. I spent much of my early adulthood working to ensure that people in need of food had some. In the pandemic, I find that just about the only useful service I can perform outside the home is contact-free deliveries of food to homebound households one day a week for the Mission Food Hub. 
  

We'll see what the New Year brings ... May yours be happy and peaceful.