Shari Graydon - I Feel Great About My Hands: And Other Unexpected Joys of Aging

I FEEL GREAT ABOUT MY HANDS

Edited by
Shari Graydon

I Feel Great
about My Hands

And Other UNEXPECTED Joys of Aging

Introduction and this collection copyright 2011 by Shari Graydon

Individual essays and poems copyright 2011 by Beth Atcheson, Constance Backhouse, Frances Bula, Carol Bruneau, Sharon Carstairs, Lyn Cockburn, Meri Collier, Ann Cowan, Lorna Crozier, Susannah Cohen Dalfen, Sheila Deane, Susan Delacourt, Dawn Rae Downton, Sheree Fitch, Hlne Anne Fortin, Marlaina Gayle, Shari Graydon, Lyndsay Green, Susan Harada, Gail Kerbel, Bonnie Sherr Klein, Harriett Lemer, Susan Lightstone, Diana Majury, Maxine Matilpi, Elizabeth May, Susan McMaster, Susan Mertens, Lynn Miles, Renate Mohr, Susan Musgrave, Val Napoleon, Judy Rebick, Heather-jane Robertson, Laura Robin, Alison Smith, Linda Spalding, Ann St James, Mary Walsh, Liz Whynot and Lillian Zimmerman

11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-786-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-55365-844-3 (ebook)

Excerpts from Little Gidding Part I and III in Four Quartets, copyright 1942 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Illustrations on pages 7274 by Meri Collier.

Photograph on page 88 of Johanne, wrapped in the loving arms of her mom,
by Hlne Anne Fortin.

Poems by Susan McMaster (pages 212217) and photo of Betty I.E. Page (page 210) from Crossing Arcs: Alzheimers, My Mother, and Me (Black Moss, 2010). Photo by Marty Gervais. Reprinted with permission. Quotes from Betty Page.

Editing by Iva Cheung
Cover design by Jessica Sullivan
Cover photograph by Hlne Anne Fortin
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

In memory of SALLY CHRISTINE SOROKA,
who would have enthusiastically embraced
all of the worst indignities of aging just to spend
a few more years with the people she loved.

Contents

M y mother once remarked that she had a blast in her forties, so as I approached the milestone a little over ten years ago, I invited half a dozen slightly older friends over for dinner, insisting that, in lieu of offering anti-wrinkle cream, extra reading glasses or snarky condolence cards, they show up prepared to share with me some of the more salutary things about growing older.

Youd have thought Id insisted they all devote their next day off to reliving the rigours of drug-free childbirth. As a face-half-unwrinkled kind of a woman, I was stunned. Even fuelled by copious quantities of wine and homemade chocolate cake, they were depressingly ill-prepared for the assignment. It was all over after a few lame references to freedom from bleeding and the joys of birth controlfree sex (once every six months, whether they needed it or not). We laughed a lot despite the lamentations, but I remember thinking that I should have flown my mother in for the occasion; despite her near-blindness and bad back, shed have done better. (Author Pearl S. Buck suggested as much, arguing, one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.)

A decade later, in July 2009, a newspaper columnist I normally read with interest devoted her twenty-four column-inches to cataloguing the litany of wrinkle-prone, gravity-challenged parts of a womans body and the derogatory nicknames applied to each. Worse, her callous editor chose to accompany the assault with deeply unfortunate illustrationsthe kind of crude line drawings you might see graffitied on the side of an abandoned meat-packing plant.

I considered writing a letter to the editor but was unable to contain the vigour of my response within the papers dictated 250-word limit. And so I conceived of this book instead, inviting dozens of women my age or older to pen a few bons mots that celebrated the benefits of maturity. Envisioning a positive, multi-voiced complement to Nora Ephrons I Feel Bad about My Neck, I welcomed well-supported essays and creatively crafted riffs, in poetry or prose, focusing on any aspects of their journey of aging that interested my invitees. Whatever they experienced as being, gasp, even better than it used to be was fair game, and healthy doses of humour were encouraged.

The responses were as fascinatingly diverse as the women themselves. Not surprisingly, given the response to my fortieth birthday dinner, a handful declared themselves incapable of seeing the bright side of the downward slide. Family illness or the recent death of a friend often played a role. One highly placed public servant who has spent much of her career trying to rectify wrongs against the disadvantaged called me to confess that, as much as shed like to contribute, shed made it a practice to avoid ever publicly celebrating her good fortune. And at the other end of the empathy spectrum, a former politiciancolourful, outspoken and apparently riled by the proposalflipped me acondescending email suggesting I get a life.