Well Past 50: The Weblog of Boomerful.com

What’s the Best or Worst Holiday Gift You Ever Received?

Ah, the holidays! It’s that wonderful time of year when friends and family gather to delight in each other’s company. We all have our special memories of holiday gifts we have received over the years. Sometimes those memories are special because the gifts were a little … off-target. Some of them may have missed the bull’s-eye by a few miles! A friend of mine once received a huge bundle of cinnamon sticks tied up with a pink ribbon. Her comment: “I don’t cook and have no idea how people even use cinnamon sticks. What in the world was I supposed to do with all of them – build a little log cabin, maybe?”

Tell us about the best or worst holiday gift you ever received. You can change the name of the gift-giver to spare Aunt Martha or Cousin Lester any embarrassment!

Writing memoirs

For some writers, a memoir is kind of like giving yourself "a second chance at life." Although we can never go back in time to change the past, we can re-experience, interpret, and make peace with our past lives. When we write a personal narrative we find new meanings and, at the same time, we discover connections with our former selves. That's one of the things I love about writing.

Now, we are asking our readers to share their memoirs with us! Send us your story via email or do it online at Boomerful.com. We'll compile the submissions and make a special section on the site dedicated to nostalgia and personal memoirs. Looking forward to reading what you have to share!

I'm Wearing My Mother's Hands

When I was roughly 19 – or I might have been 29 –I don’t remember the details because the incident was not important to me, until now.  Anyway, my mother and I were washing dishes together when she stopped, examined her hands and said sadly, “I used to have beautiful hands.  Everyone would say, ‘what pretty hands you have’.  Look at them now. There’s no point in doing my nails – I don’t want anyone looking at my hands anymore.”

“Mm-hm,” I responded without looking at her hands.  My mother’s laments over the loss of her beautiful hands, her luxurious hair, and her adorable, trim figure had all become commonplace. Not that I doubted she had been a real knock out, but come on!  When you’re old, you’re old. Get over it.

Somewhere near my 45th birthday I was driving to work when I looked down at my hands on the steering wheel and nearly had to pull over to take in what I saw. I was wearing my mother’s hands.  There they were with age spots, bulging veins and crepey skin – exactly like the hands my mother had lamented. I had been overcome with guilt the first time my daughter spewed venomous diatribes at me and I realized that I, too, had once been a hateful daughter.  Now I was filled with the same guilt over my lack of compassion for my mother’s sadness as she lost the attributes she had once treasured. 

I had already dealt with baggy knees, and the chicken skin that replaced the smooth, taut skin on my neck. But this was far worse. My neck could be covered up with turtlenecks or tightened with surgery. My knees were rarely noticeable anymore – my mini-skirt days were definitely behind me, and I almost always wore pants. But my hands!  My once beautiful hands that I had adorned with rings to draw attention to them. I had rings for nearly every finger and I had loved the look - when I had beautiful hands.

Honestly, there’s nothing you can do about your hands. You can slather them with the most expensive lotions and the crepe-iness still exists. You can put skin whiteners on the brown spots, but they don’t really disappear. And those veins! If there was a surgical procedure to remove unsightly veins from the hands, I’m sure every woman over 50 would gladly give up having blood run to her fingertips.

And yet, when I think of my mother’s hands I don’t remember them as unsightly at all. I remember them stroking the hair out of my face to keep it from being soaked by my tears when my first boyfriend dumped me. I remember them lifting freshly baked cookies off the cookie sheet so I could eat one even though the melted chocolate chips were still hot enough to burn my tongue. I remember them turning the pages of books she read to me and then to my children. And I remember them smoothing my grandmother’s dress as she lay in her coffin, her aged hands crossed over her heart.  There is nothing ugly to remember about my mother’s hands. Every touch with those hands was filled with love – and beauty.

I can’t stop wishing that my rear-end would cease its rapid descent down the backs of my thighs, or that my waist would miraculously appear again. But when I look at my hands, with their striking similarities to my mother’s, I love the lines and spots and crooked fingers. And I hope that every time I touch my children, or bake something special for my family, or reach out to comfort a friend, that I truly am wearing my mother’s hands.

No Such Thing as Wasted Experiences

Recently we asked readers to share their wisdom with us – to tell us what they would tell their twenty year old self that would help them become even better at “well past 50”.

C.B. wrote: “I would tell my 20 year old self to grow up! I feel like telling 20 year olds that all the time. Childhood is over. Time to develop some responsibility. Sure I had fun in my 20's but I wish I would have not wasted so much time on stupid stuff like bad boyfriends and dope.”

C.B.’s comments about bad boyfriends and drugs could have come from many of us – they certainly could have come from me.  I had my share of both during my twenties.  But as useless as those years appear to us now, I think they may have given us the most important learning experiences of our lives. I had bad boyfriends – and they taught me what to watch out for in people, not just guys. They taught me how to refuse negative influences in my life and respect myself for who I am – not who I’m dating.  I had good boyfriends, too, and many of them are still close friends. They taught me that men are not all alike any more than women are all: technically challenged, nags-in-waiting or vixens who turn into sexual icebergs once they have landed their man. The bad boyfriends and the good boyfriends together taught me what I was looking for in a husband – a lesson that served me well these past 21 years.

I did drugs, too – not enough to turn my brain to mush like some people I knew – but enough to know that I like being clear-headed most of the time. And also enough to know that it’s not all bad to let go of your inhibitions and your beliefs about yourself in order to explore the parts of your mind that are usually hidden from view.

Certainly I have moments of regret over things I did in my twenties that seem now like negative, or at least wasted experiences. But there are also times when I long for the freedom that came from not knowing who I was yet, and feeling perfectly justified experimenting with boyfriends or drugs in order to find out. I’m really not sure I know who I am now, but I’m too old to get high and sit up all night talking about myself to one of the “good boyfriends” who was willing to listen.  And the days of doing anything “just because it felt good” are long gone.

I agree, C.B., it certainly is time to start developing some responsibility in your twenties. But it’s also probably the last time in your life that you will be able to be totally self-absorbed without feeling guilty. It’s the last time you’ll be able to “search for yourself” without worrying about how it’s affecting the kids, the job, your husband or the community. 

Don’t be too hard on yourself for wasting that time, C.B. After all…it made you who you are today – a well past 50 grown up who is working on being better and helping others do the same.

Monsters: Then & Now

I slipped quietly out of bed and tiptoed down the stairs of our townhouse apartment. I was supposed to be sleeping. But there were nights that followed days filled with stories of a cold war and nuclear fallout when I would crave the words I’d grown to depend on for my security.  I didn’t know who Nikita Kruschev was - only that he hated me, as he hated all Americans, and he planned to someday blow us all up with nuclear bombs. 

We practiced huddling under our desks at school to protect ourselves from the impact. It didn’t seem quite sufficient when total global destruction was the anticipated outcome, but our teachers seemed convinced, so to humor them, we huddled anyway. Some families we knew had built bomb shelters instead of homes to live in until the devastation was over. 

I remember visiting a family with three children, whose home was an underground three room basement dwelling. It may have been an unpleasant way to live, but they would be safe when the attack took place. My father talked about building a shelter, but found it too expensive or time consuming. I envied the family in the basement-house. In a shelter like that you could surely huddle under the dining room table and be completely safe.

Our day to day lives were typical of the ‘50s; happy, uneventful and relatively stress-free, except for the sense that any moment could bring the scream of air raid sirens and an explosion that would change the world forever.

My mother worked in a men’s clothing store downtown. On the floor above the clothing store was the local pop radio station that played the best music of the day: Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Patty Paige.  My mother had become friends with one of the disc jockeys and he would give her the long-playing 78 RPM records they had played on the air throughout that week. The day she brought the new records home each week was an exciting day for us.  Not only did we have the latest tunes before they were available in record stores, but there was a small measure of security that came as a bonus.

I turned the volume low and placed the needle gently on the record, three-quarters through the recording. I curled up, pulling my knees to my chest under my long, flannel nightgown, and wrapped my arms around them.  Resting my head against my knees I listened to the last few ballads on the record - ballads of falling stars, romantic places and love relationships with happy endings. As the music came to an end, I straightened up and leaned closer to the hi-fi to hear the words I had been waiting for. 

A deep, soothing voice, as comforting as the voice of God, ended the broadcast with a message of absolute assurance – “Sleep well tonight, your National Guard is awake.”  And then, the National Anthem played as I closed my eyes and pictured the multitudes of brave young men, watching the skies intently for signs of enemy intruders  - their only goal to keep me safe.

Today, our children face monsters much too close to home; the neighbor down the street who’s registered as a child molester, and the gang they see hanging around the convenience store as we drive by.  Their monsters are on the TV news every night and then recreated in the movies they watch.  Their monsters could be lurking in the public restroom or even sitting next to them in their sixth grade classroom.  And who is there to banish their fears and let them know that they are completely, unquestionably safe?

Yes, we had our own monsters when I was a child. But they were faceless monsters – monsters we didn’t really understand. They threatened us in ways that seemed unreal. We never saw them up close or thought for a moment that theirs would be an attack on us personally. And even in the dark of night, when our monsters became more vivid and real, we knew we could sleep well – our National Guard was awake.