Okay. I don’t feel well this morning. I can’t tell whether it’s a cold or just pesky sinus problems. I was going to simply say that I was sick and that would be the post, but a couple of things happened this morning that I want to share.
Don had a gig last night and this morning he told me that he sang the song he wrote about my parents years ago. He sang some of the lyrics to me and I started crying. He wrote it after my mom was about to have hip replacement surgery and we learned that the night before the surgery, my dad had stayed awake all night long in order to hold her because she was so scared. His lyrics are so beautiful. He told me he sobbed when he was writing it. We miss my parents.
Then, I was on Facebook and I saw a post from my cousin, Gordy (named after my dad.)
Just a simple post: “I was a helicopter pilot.”
Gordy is older than me and he suffers from the same thing his mother did – Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in Florida but he has a cottage on an island in northern Michigan. He spends every summer there, except for this one. His Parkinson’s has progressed to a point where his doctor was worried about him being able to safely get around in that rather remote location. That simple declaration was so moving. I found myself crying again.
Don’t we all know what that feels like? To be older after a lifetime of working and perhaps retired and/or unable to do what used to come so easily? A loss of identity. A loss of something in which you excelled. Gordy was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and a rescue pilot after he came home. I remember him giving me some wings in the form of a small pin. He was handsome and dashing and we worried about him over there in Vietnam. Thankfully, he came home safely. But now he has to face a body that betrays him, that he can’t control, all the while remembering what he used to be able to do.
The comments were lovely, everyone assuring him he was a great helicopter pilot, that he was still a pilot.
When I was young, I used to look at older people with an assumption about them based on nothing except that they were old. It wasn’t unkind or anything like that, rather, a sort of ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ kind of thing. I had no idea what their lives had been like before that moment in time; what their profession had been, who they really were. And because I was young, I was never really curious about that.
Now that I’m older, I have the same feeling that Gordy has. When I walk into a room full of young actors, directors, staff members and I’m the oldest person in the room, I know they are seeing gray hair and wrinkles, just like I saw gray hair and wrinkles and nothing beyond that. In my current situation, I am able to coach the actors and get to know them and that helps. I become defined. But everyone has an interior voice that cries out “You should have seen me when I did this or that!”
Anyway, I am rambling a bit here. I’ll just leave it at that. It’s sort of a weepy morning and that’s okay.
By the way, I received an Islamaphobic comment this morning, obviously in reference to my happiness about the election results. I deleted it, of course, and will block that person. It’s someone who has never commented before, so it might well be a troll. Still, I’m always shocked by that level of ignorance. Begone!
Stay safe.
Happy Saturday.
