NO ROCKING CHAIRS YET

As Peggy Conti Crawford slid out from under the comforter on her side of the California king-size bed, she decided to ignore the arthritic aches and stiffness that seemed to randomly occur in different parts of her body.

I’ll feel much better as soon as I get moving, she knew, as she hurriedly got ready, minus any possible distractions from her husband, Mack, who was already out playing tennis. After hooking her cell phone onto the waistband of cropped pants, slathering on plenty of SPF, and popping on a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, she backed her Toyota out of the driveway of their one-level Southern California home and turned west toward the beach.

For almost half a year now, she’d been meeting her closest friends, Barb Demeter and Cassie Harrison, on the first and third Saturday of every month during low tide. We’re the walk and talkers, she couldn’t help but smile to herself. Our conversations about the situations in our everyday lives have more substance than much of the chatter and prattle put together on TV. Topics just naturally come up; and then we bat them back and forth, encouraging, and supporting each other. Best of all, we’re able to pull back and laugh at ourselves.

Peggy, who had stopped counting birthdays at fifty-nine, was a reference librarian and also an avid blogger. She liked to think of herself as catching the ordinary moments of life and then posting them in the form of personal reflections for her readers to enjoy.

Despite her upbeat nature and keen sense of humor, waves of nostalgia hit her hard whenever she thought about her kindhearted Italian father, who had died one year ago at the age of ninety-four, and about her mother, who no longer recognized her. Although the petite blonde looked much younger than her calendar years, a gift of inheritance from her Danish mother, she grappled with the same challenges, changes, and concerns as other women in her seasonal range. Her long marriage to Mack, a retired accountant, had always been a solid one; but lately she was feeling restless.

Cassie Harrison, a fifty-six-year-old baby boomer and English teacher extraordinaire to high school seniors, was still reeling from the shock of being dumped a few years ago by an unfaithful husband, who preferred to live with a younger wife during the third chapter of his life. After the divorce, she’d settled into a cozy townhouse with a tropical-themed garden, vowed to stay single, and routinely spent a chunk of her summer vacations back in Baltimore visiting her parents and son, who was a med student there. On the way home, she would always stop in Pittsburgh to see her married daughter and two toddler granddaughters.

Native Californian Barb, recently retired from a long successful career as a nurse practitioner, was feeling the squeeze between her aging parents’ needs and her adult children’s view of her as an instant babysitter. How could she at long last accommodate her own aspirations—that had needed to stay on the back burner for so many years—as well as all these new demands? Being a mother-in-law, not exactly an admired position in our present culture, was no piece of cake either. Her husband Drew’s hilarious quips, in rapid-fire response to her vocal frustrations, usually helped, sometimes irritated.

I wonder what we’ll talk about today, Peggy pondered while pulling into a parking space. It was mid-April, and she loved the increasingly longer sunlit days. As she strode briskly toward her waiting friends, who were already animatedly chatting along the water’s edge, she hadn’t the slightest hint about the surprises and life-changing decisions that lay before them in the months to come.

AGING WITH ATTITUDE

After Barb and Cassie greeted Peggy enthusiastically, and the three friends shared a couple of minutes of small talk, Barb launched directly into the topic on her mind.

“I see another great big birthday looming portentously on the horizon,” she wailed.

“Any birthday you reach is a great one,” Cassie offered, sagely.

“Don’t even look at the horizon,” Peggy advised, as they started to walk briskly in a southward direction from their starting point in front of the Tamarack parking lot on Carlsbad State Beach.

“I get into a room with women who qualify for senior rates, I look around, and I say to myself, I don’t belong here. Some terrible mistake has been made. It’s not possible that I’ve reached this stage in my life. I’m too young to be this old!” Barb continued.

“So where do I fit in? In which niche would I feel comfortable? The young-old? The in-betweeners?

“I feel as if I’m caught in a time warp, living somewhere after midlife and before rocking chairs.”

“After fifty, we’re all in an unclassified group. We’re the new unlabeled,” Cassie laughed. “Look, Barb, what you need is a little attitude adjustment. Every age has its own unique advantages, but you’ve got to do a search for them. Every moment is interesting in a way that will never come again—whatever age you happen to be is the best age.”

“Easy for you to say,” smirked Barb. “You’re the youngest of us.”

“Oh, come on, Barb,” Cassie responded, “you know age is inconsequential, doesn’t matter, after fifty. When we were very young, just a year or two made such a big difference. No longer. After a certain point of maturity, everyone has enough cumulative experience to be able to commiserate with one another.”

Peggy breathed in the salty sea air and watched as a rolling wave suddenly surged. This early in the morning, prebreakfast, the air was still cool and crisp, and the ocean’s deep navy blue depth lines sharply contrasted with cerulean tones. A seagull veered sharply over the swell of the surf to snatch a morsel floating with the breeze.