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“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.”\u00a0<\/i>~Goethe<\/p>\n“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.”\u00a0<\/i>~Goethe<\/p>\n
This is the second in a series of letters between me and my friend, author\u00a0Margaret Roach<\/strong><\/a>, on the challenges (and joys!) of aging. I’m Old (just 55) and she’s Older (facing 60 this year). And since we’re surely not the only ones buying wrinkle creams, we decided to share our exchange with you, too. \u00a0Be sure to read Margaret’s letter to me here<\/strong>.<\/a> \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n D<\/span>ear Older,<\/p>\n Oh Margaret! You would have to bring up our cars.<\/p>\n Well, I\u2019m not going to lie about age here.\u00a0 Yes, my Acura is ten years old.\u00a0 And she\u2019s about to roll over 170,000 miles \u2013 that\u2019s a lot of trips taken, a great deal of life lived, many bridges crossed.<\/p>\n Buying this car was the first thing Steve and I did in 2003 when we left the suburbs of Boston and moved back to my country roots.\u00a0 If we were going to make our home in a place where the last snow might not melt til mid-April, I wanted a car that would carry me through our Northern winters without too much anxiety on my part.\u00a0 \u201cGood in snow\u201d<\/em> was my top priority when we went out shopping for new wheels.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth remembering that gas cost $1.54 a gallon when we arrived in New Hampshire to embark on this new life.\u00a0 \u201cGood mileage\u201d was on my list, but it was somewhere below good visibility, comfort, and safety.<\/p>\n Jack was eleven and Henry was just starting high school when I began driving the kids around rural New Hampshire in my brand new silver MDX. (Family trips we took in our Toyota Sienna minivan \u2013 plenty of room for two parents, two boys, one dog and gear for all, and already showing the wear and tear of four years of hard daily use.) The Acura was the nice car.\u00a0 My<\/i> car.\u00a0 And, I\u2019ll admit: it was and is the only car I\u2019ve ever loved.<\/p>\n A<\/span> little back story:\u00a0 I\u2019m not a natural behind the wheel.\u00a0 I shudder to recall my first solo forays on our rural roads after I got my driver\u2019s license in 1974.\u00a0 The car: my parents\u2019 1970 red Plymouth Fury sedan, graciously bequeathed to me.\u00a0 The most notable feature of that car was its size.\u00a0 Huge<\/i>. I have vague, unsettling memories even now of drifting around curves in the road, wondering if I was going a little too fast, fighting to hold the car on the pavement, straining to sit tall enough in the broad, slippery seat to see out the windshield.\u00a0 To drive that car was to experience the rather surreal sensation of hurtling down the road at the wheel of a small houseboat, guiding it along its way with a white knuckle grip.<\/p>\n The first time I was given permission to take the Plymouth on a trip beyond my well-worn daily routes of school, work, and friends\u2019 houses, it was to drive to Lowell, where my three best friends and and I would park, hop on a train to the Boston Garden and attend a Neil Young concert.<\/p>\n I\u2019d never driven in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or maneuvered down a crowded city street, or negotiated my way through narrow passages between parked cars.\u00a0 By the time I finally docked the mammoth Fury at the train station, I\u2019d clipped off not one but both of my side mirrors, in two separate heart-stopping incidents.<\/p>\n Trying to explain the pair of accidents to my parents the next morning, the best I could offer was:\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m just never really sure where the car ends and the air begins.\u201d<\/p>\n S<\/span>kip ahead thirty years.\u00a0 Time and experience and a dedicated yoga practice have given me a better sense of where I am in space.\u00a0 After years of panic attacks at the wheel, avoiding city driving at all costs, and doing everything I can to get out of driving at night, I am actually a pretty confident driver.\u00a0 I have to be.\u00a0 I\u2019m the main chauffeur for two boys with wildly disparate interests.<\/p>\n In sharp contrast to our geographically concentrated urban life, everything in the country is spread out and far apart.\u00a0 Our new schedule requires weekly trips to Boston for piano lessons and treks all over the Southern part of the state for Little League baseball games.\u00a0\u00a0 The house we\u2019re building is on one side of a mountain, the schools our sons attend on the other \u2013 and there are multiple daily crossings, in all kinds of weather.\u00a0 We travel to AAU basketball games and All-State Concerts and field trips and jobs at summer camps in Maine.\u00a0 Once a month I return to our old home town for my book group meeting.\u00a0 A dear friend and former neighbor gets sick; I make up an excuse every week to make the three-hour round trip to see her. Jack enrolls in boarding school three hours away, and for three years I make drive after drive, learning the road to the Berkshires by heart.<\/p>\n The miles add up. And my car, my trusty Acura, never lets me down. The car feels like an extension of me.\u00a0 I know exactly where it ends and where space begins.\u00a0 We are in synch, well-matched fellow travelers.<\/p>\n M<\/span>eanwhile, first one son then the other comes of age and passes the driving test.\u00a0 I take a deep breath and hand over my keys.\u00a0 I sit in the passenger seat one winter morning as my son Henry drives us off the road and straight into a tree, having glanced down for a moment to look for a CD case.\u00a0 (Three months in my mom\u2019s borrowed Subaru while my car\u2019s in the shop only makes me appreciate my sturdy, graceful MDX all the more. It is fixed at last, good as new, ready for the exploits of the next brother.)<\/p>\n I spend many nights staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sound of the garage door opening and closing again, signaling the safe return of an adolescent son. My nose is good:\u00a0 no matter how carefully the car\u2019s been checked by its teenaged occupants or how long the windows have been rolled down to air out telltale scents, I can always piece together a morning-after story.\u00a0 I sniff the air, pick up bits of trash from the floor, check the GPS history.\u00a0 I\u2019m a mother.\u00a0 There are no secrets.<\/p>\n These days–to my relief– there are no stories, either.\u00a0 No one asks for my keys anymore. Henry, living in New York, makes his way in the world by subway.\u00a0 Jack, in school in Atlanta, is thrilled with his own first car, a used Volkswagen Jetta that he wisely kept off the road during this winter\u2019s crazy southern storms. Steve celebrated a brief break in our tuition-paying-cycle last year by treating himself to his own \u201cdream car,\u201d a Chevy Volt that runs 44 miles on a charge, gets 40 miles to the gallon when it switches to gas and boasts a great sound system, plush seats, and sleek styling.<\/p>\n Everyone has moved on, it seems, but me.<\/p>\n I did go out last fall and test drive a few new models: a Ford Escape, a Honda CR-V, a Mazda CX-5.\u00a0 All those gadgets!\u00a0 The fancy dashboards, Bluetooth and audio streaming, and back-up cameras were intimidating.\u00a0 Sure a USB port would be nice — books on tape for the road! — but at the end of the day, all I really wanted to do was climb back into my familiar seat, slip in an Alison Krause CD, and point the reliable old gal toward home.<\/p>\n Instead of a new car, I treated my silver friend to a day in the shop and had all her dings and dents pulled out \u2013 the automotive equivalent of Botox, I suppose.\u00a0 She returned to me looking years younger, perky and clean, although of course the odometer reveals the unavoidable truth: try as we might to hold on the illusion of youth, such struggles are in vain.<\/p>\n So yes, we\u2019re in the same boat here, Margaret. To give up our cars is also to acknowledge so much else that\u2019s over.\u00a0 It\u2019s to let go of who we each were ten years ago. (Would we have had time to be such close friends back then?\u00a0 My guess is not.)\u00a0 And it\u2019s to step into futures that feel so much less certain than our rigorously productive, wide-ranging pasts.<\/p>\n The day I trade in my car is the day I\u2019ll also sever an ineffable strand connecting the younger, busier, faster-moving me of ten years ago to the older, less entangled empty nester I am today.\u00a0 Good-bye to the last vestiges of soccer mom, hello to. . .whom??<\/p>\n The answer to that question is still a work in progress.\u00a0 But here\u2019s my thought.\u00a0 We\u2019re both in good shape and life is long.\u00a0 Our cars may be worn out, but we aren\u2019t.\u00a0 I see adventures on the horizon.\u00a0 Road trips, perhaps.\u00a0 Voyages of discovery, with jazzy soundtracks courtesy of our new four-speaker sound systems.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to get a move on.\u00a0 West Springfield you say?\u00a0 Just as soon as I get plowed out from this latest snowstorm. . .<\/p>\n Love,<\/p>\n Old<\/p>\n P.S. To our readers: Are you attached to your old cars, too? \u00a0Got any recommendations for us when we go out for those test drives? \u00a0Margaret is over here<\/a>, with her aging Saab story; this is my response. And if you missed our first letters, they are here<\/a>. Of course, we’d love to hear from you, too!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.”\u00a0~Goethe This is the second in a series of letters between me and my friend, author\u00a0Margaret Roach, on the challenges (and joys!) of aging. I’m Old (just 55) and she’s Older (facing 60 this year). And since we’re surely not the only ones buying wrinkle creams, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,3,22,29,35,8,10,14],"tags":[62,145,157,182,263,279,311],"class_list":{"0":"post-3473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-acceptance","8":"category-aging-2","9":"category-change","10":"category-friendship","11":"category-letting-go","12":"category-parenting","13":"category-parenting-teens","14":"category-soul-work","15":"tag-aging","16":"tag-dear-older","17":"tag-driving","18":"tag-friendship-2","19":"tag-letting-go-2","20":"tag-margaret-roach","21":"tag-older","22":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}