My History and Connection to Downingtown, Pennsylvania

My first homes weren't in Downingtown, but I consider the borough my home town nonetheless. It is where I spend most of my youth and where much of what I would be as a person was formed.  I hold a great fondness for the place.

My family history goes far back to the town and the surrounding environs of Chester County and the memories of living along the Brandywine flow through my veins as much as blood does.

That history goes back further even than the 1870 photograph of Downingtown's then main street. My family is married into the very name. My Grand

Uncles Herford and Ellsworth Downing (Uncle Ellsworth is pictured on the right.) were direct descendants of Thomas Downing, for whom the town was named.

The two Downing brothers, the 4-Great Grandsons of Thomas, married my Grandmothers two older sisters, Helen and Clara. My Grandmother named Easter was the youngest child of William Frederick and Anna Dunlap Wilson. My Grand Aunt Helen and My Grandmother Esther were named for my Great-Great Grandmother, Esther Helen Bicking Wilson.

Esther Helen Bicking's father was Frederick Bicking and he was the Manager

of his father's paper mill in Downingtown.  The last remains of that mill, long after its usefulness and prior to it disappearing from this world is pictured on the left.

Esther Helen Bicking married William Frederick Wilson, who was a farmer and auctioneer. His son and namesake, known as Fred owned a large dairy farm that stretched along Route 100 from around where Ship Road crosses up to Lionville. He called his farm, "Marchwood".  Today his old lands are covered by housing developments and a shopping center.

The lead rider on the right is my Great Grandfather, William Frederick Wilson, Jr., engaging in what was a popular Chester County activity, riding to the hounds on a fox hunt.

As a boy my grandfather took me along on several such hunts through the farmland of Chester County. We usually ended up in a bar somewhere.

One of William, Jr.'s sisters was Emma Bicking Wilson. She married Benjamin Franklin Meredith. This fact freaks my kids out, "Our family tree doesn't branch," they yell. Yep, my mother and dad are cousins. I have a Great Great Grandmother who is also an Aunt and a Great Great Grandfather that is also an Uncle.

The Meredith's go back in Chester County a ways. David Meredith came here in 1683 with a group of Welsh Quakers. They settled in Chester County with a land grant from William Penn on what was called the Welsh Tract. This is why we have places with names like Llanerch, Bryn Mawr, Gladwyne, Bala Cynwyd, Berwyn and Uwchlan. Davis Meredith married a Philadelphia girl named Sarah Rush, who was the Great Great Aunt of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

David and Sarah settled about twenty-eight miles from Philadelphia, which Sarah described as "Six miles beyond neighbors, except Indians…" Another man who came over with the Welsh at that time was Richard Thomas, he was the namesake of Dick Thomas, who had the Brick Oven restaurant I loved as a boy. The families settled around a Lemi-Lenape village called Katamoonchick, meaning "hazelnut grove". The Lenapes had dogs and this afforded some protection. If strangers came into the area the dogs would bark a warning. Katamoonchick is better known today as Exton. (On the left is an early West Whiteland settler's cabin built in 1707.)

The Thomas Family became leaders in the community and established an estate off of what would

become Route 30. They named their estate, Whitford. The Meredith's eventually established farmland along what is now Route 100/202 and they called their homestead, Whiteland. (On the right is the home build by my 5-Great Grandfather Daniel Meredith in 1815 as it looks today. It sits off of Route 100 on Echo Hollow Road.)

So having established some long buried roots in this area, lets move up to more recent times and my coming to Downingtown. But first lets deal with my own arrival on the scene.

As I said at the beginning, my original home wasn't in D-town.  I was born at the Chester County Hospital in West Chester in the middle of 1941.

My parents at that time lived in Modena, sometimes known as Paperville and originally named Modeville.  This suburb of Coatesville was my father's hometown and a good bit of it was owned by his Grandfather, for whom he had been named, William Wilson Meredith. My father's family lived on Meredith Row (now called Meredith Court) in

one of the row houses owned by his Grandfather. Although his mother and brothers occupied some of these houses at the time, my parents were living in an apartment in this building by the railroad
tracks (pictured left) , also owned by my Great Grandfather.

All these structures still exist pretty much as they were those seventy-plus years ago, as does the family General Store (owned by my Great Grandfather, of course), which sits on the corner of Meredith Row/Court. (Pictured right.)  On the left are my father's family in 1930, when my dad was 12. From left to right are my Grandmother Florence Townsley Meredith with her arm around my father. The blond boy was the youngest of the three boys, Uncle Francis. Next is my Grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Meredith III and finally, Uncle Ben (yes, Benjamin Franklin IV) My Grandfather was the manager of the family store and that is the delivery truck behind the family.

I did not live in Modena long, only a few weeks, and then we moved to Whitford, to the George Thomas III Estate and in with my maternal Grandparents. This is where my mother lived her childhood. The area was known as Whitford Station.

This is me standing in front of the house as it looks today (photo taken 2004).














Whitford Station as it looked in 1908.

My mother in front of the Whitford Home in 1930. She is the girl in the middle. The others are Bill, Bob and Irene Yarnell.

Although this was to be my second home, I didn't live there long either. I do not know the reason, but in December of 1941, when I was six months old, the whole kit and caboodle of us, Grandparents, Parents and I, moved to 424 Washington Avenue in Downingtown, right across the street from the East Ward School.

The house looked pretty much as it does in this photo then, except it had different siding and a wooden rail around the front porch. There was a green glider where that bicycle sits.

The United States had entered World War II at the time we moved here and my father went off to serve aboard the Destroyer Escort USS Jaccard in the South Pacific Theater, taking part in the retaking of Bataan and the Philippines in 1944.

This is my dad with me in 1944 during a leave. The house across the street was where the Buckley's lived. It sat right at the corner of the East Ward playground and I don't think that house is there anymore on Washington Avenue.

My father came home from the Navy in January of 1946, three months before his term was up due to the illness and death of his mother. (His father had died in 1937, when my dad was in his late teens.

On the right I am sitting on the front steps of 424 Washington in 1944.

We remained at 424 Washington for the most of the next two years, but my dad got a job as a trucker at Hines Trucking in Glen Loch. With the job came a house down in a swamp across the highway from the trucking company. Hines owned the property and let us live there rent free because dad was a returning veteran. This meant I moved again. In December, halfway through First grade at east Ward, my parents and I moved.

Glen Loch had once been a large estate and where we now located was at a far corner of it. The main house, called Loch Aerie (pictured right) sat along the Lincoln Highway more toward Frazer. It still is there today,

Our house was not so grand. It sat surrounded by a swamp on two sides, a cow pasture on another and a hill covered with corn behind.

Someone had started to cover the brick with whitewash and never finished, but the scaffolding still stood along one wall.

We lived there in isolation from the world, with no children my age anywhere around. I went to West Whiteland Elementary on the bus and then came home to make up games with my two dogs, Peppy and Topper.

But another December rolled around and my father changed trucking companies, going to drive for Atkinson in Philadelphia. This meant we lost the house and me moved back to 424 Washington Avenue in Downingtown. I was halfway through Third Grade.

I continued in Third Grade at East Ward with Miss Ezrah as my teacher. I am the dark haired boy standing directly in front of her in this class picture, 1950. On the far right of that same row, half hidden by Stuart Meisel, is Ronald Tipton.  Those two would become my best friends and remain so even today, although Stuart is in Florida and Ronald lives in Sussex County Delaware and I live in New Castle County.

Downingtown was small in those days and relatively quiet. (Pictured left, the center of Downingtown in the 1940s. On the right you can see the towers of the Swan Hotel and the side of the Downingtown national bank.) I walked downtown a lot or to the Roosevelt Theater (right) for Saturday matinees or to the library.

We lived with my Grandparents for a couple more years and then my parents were able to rent the

house at 417 Washington Avenue, on the opposite side about the center of the block. We lived directly across from Iva Darlington.

It was a double house. We lived in the side nearest the camera in this photo (right). The lot next door was owned by a farm equipment dealer. It was full of tractors and combines and such equipment. On Sundays when the place was closed I would go play on these vehicles. That is how that dealership looks today, except the farm equipment is gone and the lot is filled with pickup trucks.

I lived at 417 until the spring of 1956. (On right, the 400 Block of Washington Avenue from Chestnut Street.) The Landlord told my parents they would have to move because he wanted the house for his daughter, who was getting married. My parents bought a house near Pottstown, just above the Village of Bucktown and moved there by the end of April. I moved back to 424 Washington and lived with my Grandparents until the school year ended and I finished Ninth grade at Downingtown Jr. High School, then I moved out of town for good, although it will always remain my hometown in mind and heart.

Real Essence of Cool

When I was a lad I wanted to be cool. Don't we all long to be cool when young? Of course to be cool means avoiding those things which are uncool.

One of the things that were decidedly uncool at that time were rubbers. Now I know in the popular vocabulary "rubbers" has another meaning and I am not talking about those kind. I am talking about the ones you slipped over your feet and nowhere else. Actually you pulled them over your shoes, sort of sox for the outside.

All the ones I saw then were black and shiny. They were made of a rubbery material, the same stuff boots were often constructed from. They were waterproof, which was the whole purpose. When it rained I would hear my mother yell, "Put your rubbers on so you don't catch a cold!"

That was the last thing I intended to do. No way I wanted to be caught, even caught dead, wearing rubbers. I would try to slip out of the house without them, but sometimes my mom was hovering about me and I had no choice but stretch those ugly black shells over my shoes. Once outside I would look for a place to ditch them where I could retrieve them after school.

It was just as bad come the winter snows, only then it was galoshes, by golly gosh! These were

exponentially more uncool than even rubbers. They were black too and they fastened up the front by snapping closed these metal tabs. If you are unfamiliar with these grotesques, they were what the Old Man wore shoveling snow in "Home Alone", only he didn't snap his up. He let them flop about.

I tried my level best to avoid clamping those on my feet as well. They just weren't cool.

No, it was much more cool to sit in class all morning with wet feet and cold soggy sox, risking a chill and ruined shoes.

Another thing to be avoided as all costs, when I was a boy, was the book bog. They existed. My misguided parents even gave me such an object for my birthday one year. Better to gift such an atrousity in June in time for the next school year than at Christmas halfway through. It was a very fine

book bag, as such things went. It was some sort of faux leather, a little too light perhaps, with three inner-departments and a flap that had a little twist knob through a slot to hold it closed. It had a pouch on front for pencils and other small tools of the young pupil trade, like compasses and triangles and erasers.

At least it wasn't embroidered with lassos spelling out Roy Rogers.

It was my intent that it should never see the light of day. It would have been humiliating enough in elementary school, I couldn't imagine the slings and arrows I would have suffered lugging that piece of luggage to Junior High.

No, it wasn't cool. Being cool was carrying your books, hooked by you hand and supported by your

lower forearm and pressed against your hip. This wasn't too bad coming home from grade school, especially since I lived right across the street from East Ward. It was somewhat different carrying the load from Downingtown Junior High to which I walked a mile to and from. Not only was there the hike, but the books had grown thicker and heavier and the teachers, showing little mercy to coolness, gave more homework.

This was not easy. Some books tended to be slippery and tried sliding away from the stack as you walked. Sometimes an edge cut into the flesh of your forearm, which grew more and more uncomfortable as you journeyed along. Occasionally you might try switching the load from your right arm to your left, but when balancing several tomes and a notebook it was easy to lose your grip. There is little of coolness it picking up your fallen schoolbooks and even less if you are chasing papers down the street that have fallen from between their pages. And what if that expensive History book should land in a mud puddle and your parents have to pay to replace it. Yike!

The young females of our species would cradle their books in their arms pressed against their chests. This was a more effective and more controlling way to handle a load of educational volumes. Although this is a perfectly acceptable way for a running back to secure the football, there was no way a "cool" dude was going to carry his books like a girl.

Nope, better to struggle home and then stand, after dropping the stuff on the table, with a sore wrist, numb fingers and a tinkling arm.

Now today when I see school children they are wearing back packs. It apparently is not uncool to do so, because every single one seem to indulge in this practice. Even outside of school you see them ambling along with backpacks on to carry their video games to friends houses or whatever.

I wonder why we didn't think of that when I was a boy? I was in the Boy Scouts and all we Boy

Scouts possessed backpack, or knapsacks as we called them then. Why didn't we strap them on to bear our books about? Think of the advantage, our hands would even be free to throw the random snowball or pull a girl's hair. Still, now that I remember, being a Boy Scout wasn't considered all that cool back in my childhood years either. Maybe it was the short pants and tasseled knee socks, but definitely not cool.

Of course, these examples are only a couple of the many no-no's if you wished to look cool. However, it didn't make a hill of beans if you avoided all the pitfalls of uncool paraphernalia or how much you dressed yourself up in hip (as we said once upon a time) couture and sunglasses, with cigarettes rolled in your T-shirt sleeve with one a-dangle from your snarling lips, you somehow never quite made it into that cool crowd you so envied and hungered for acceptance from.

You know, those guys sniffling from the cold they got not wearing their rubbers (and sometimes things they got from not wearing those other kind of rubbers either), with the sprained wrist from toting books while eschewing book bags and with the infection in their arm from carving their girlfriends name down its length with a

rusty penknife. Somehow you just couldn't be as cool as those cool guys.

This is probably because you lacked the true essence of Cool, that four-letter synonym, D-U-M-B, dumb!

Methodrexate Fog, Meth Heads, Rigid Digits, Exploding Sneakers and a Cat in a Box

This morning I made a little trip and it was sometimes scary. I had to drive my daughter to work after dropping her car off at a garage for repairs. She works down in the Christiana area, so it was a zip (relatively speaking) down I-95 South and then on roads I have less familiarity with. I use to drive the I-95 part regularly on my last two jobs before retirement, since both were in the Christiana Mall so I was familiar with that high-speed, multi-lane leg of NASCAR stretch of road.  I even went over the speed limit this morning just in an attempt to survive, getting to 75 miles per hour and yet still not catching the traffic ahead. The ding-dongs behind me were riding up my tailpipe nonetheless. I can deal with the traffic, but as I have aged I struggle with driving at night and at 6:15 in the morning right now it is dark out, and this morning was positively black. Add to that a fairly thick fog and it was no pleasure drive.

My daughter's employ is down a long narrow lane, through a wood, ending in a circle. It was like a scene from a Slasher Film, the narrow wooded road and the fog. I could barely distinguish the road surface from the bordering ground going in and coming out. Best I can say, at least I wasn't in yesterday's condition.

Speaking of fog, yesterday I was very much in one. I was very fatigued and fell asleep before noon and didn't awake until 3:00. It was as if I was pulling my body up out of quicksand when I tried to get to my feet. I walked about in a haze. I wondered about this, because I have been having these weariness bouts all too often recently and what do we do when we wonder in these modern times? We Google it!

I was most likely in a Methodrexate Fog. I am on Methodrexate because of my arthritis and on Tuesday

the doctor upped my dosage...again, and on Wednesday I took my weekly fix.  Searching I discovered many others in the same state and the fatigue was worse on the day after they popped their pills. Oh, joy, one more wonderful side-effect of a medication. It ends up a Hobson's Choice. Take my medicine or leave it alone. Or perhaps it is a dilemma, for taking the medicine has these unwanted side-effects, but not taking may lead to more twisted joints. I was driven to the medicine by my paralyzed right fingers in the first place because I didn't want to risk more.

I also discovered in my research that some people on Methodrexate tested positive for

Methamphetamines, probably because they both come from the same root chemical. Looking at images of Meth Heads after looking up Methamphetamines made me think they should use these people's images like they do those extreme cigarette smoking cases to scare people from smoking. You want to see same ugly looking faces after being on meth for a while go look up Meth heads.

I certainly hope Methodrexate doesn't have such marring attributes. After all, as you have probably noticed, my handsome face is my fortune.

Yeah, right!

I did escape my fog enough to accomplish something yesterday. I got new sneakers, although nobody calls them sneakers anymore, so what I got was cross-training foot gear. What I had was running shoes. I just bought the running shoes back in June I believe. My old sneak...whatevers I wore on my feet had finally disintegrated after years of wear on the trails. I wanted something light with a good tread. These runner shoes I bought for about $45 seemed just right. They were light and definitely had a real imposing tread. Forty-five dollars was a bit high for me. I had generally bought sneak...whatchamacallit footwear under twenty dollars, and they usually held up a couple of years, so these $45 jobs should keep me moving for a lot longer wouldn't you think?

You'd a thunk wrong. Here we are just entering October, like five months or less later, and my running shoes were exploding. The tread wasn't waring, it was just plain coming off in toto. My inner sole was sticking three-quarters out the back of the shoe like a green Miley Cyrus tongue.

You do the amount of walking I do and you can't have that happening. So I made it out to a Payless and bought a pair of silver cross trainers for $23.

Let's see how they hold up.

When you buy shoes, you get a shoebox. So I'll put my difficulties behind and leave you with a smile, I give you, Mark in a Box!

Doctors Doctoring

Now that I established I was old and fine with that in my last post, I will write a companion piece about being old. The companions are apparently doctors.

I did pretty well health-wise during my life, but lately the engine light is coming on more often. I have always avoided doctors and their ilk, and especially such nasties as blood tests, because they like to stick you with needles. I haven't been in a hospital since I was ten, except to visit some other unfortunate, but I don't like hospitals either, as a patient or visitor.

Oh, I've had my occasions with the medical professionals. When I was 22 or thereabouts I was sent home an hour early from work because the staff doctor could not detect any heartbeat. He didn't want me traveling in the rush hour. I guess he thought it was unwise to have the undead wandering about in the subway.

Between then and now I was fairly safe from doctors. I just didn't get sick much  and when I did I tended to ignore it as much a possible and keep on keeping on. Oh, now and again I visited a dermatologist because of my psoriasis, which I have written about before and probably will again because of its comic overtones, but not here.

I had a bad patch back in the early to mid-1990s that forced me into the clutches of several medical practitioners. I took my children swimming in our community pool one Saturday and standing in the water I was hit with a horribly painful muscle cramp. It wasn't in my legs where I usually experience such things. It was in my ribcage. I struggled out of the pool fearful I was having a heart attack until it went away. After that I began to have regular cramps hitting me everywhere, my legs, my arms, my chest and even my neck. It was quite annoying.

Then one day I walked out of my office at Wilmington Trust, did a little semi-circle and walked smack into the wall. How odd! I was also experiencing double vision. When I looked at TV I saw two sets, one slightly atop the other. I went to the eye doctor and he said my eyes were fine, but double vision could indicate some underlying problem elsewhere in the body.

I went to my doctor and was passed off to a nephrologist. That worried me because he was a kidney guy and I didn't want kidney failure. He had me take a bunch of tests and scans and thumpings and proddings and said, "You have hypothyroidism. Take this little pill every day and you'll be fine." (Do I hear Jefferson Airplane playing "White Rabbit" in the background?)

And indeed I was for about a year and then I kept waking up with what felt like sand in my eyes. It scratched and hurt, and worst when I walked outside into the sunlight the beams stabbed my eyes like knife thrusts. The pain was excruciating.  I was driving I-95 to work with one eye closed and my hand over the other, peeking between the fingers.

Back to the doctor, who ran blood tests and then called me up one evening and said, "You better come see me. Your blood tests make no sense." Just what you want to hear your doctor say. When I visited he showed me the tests and said he didn't know what the heck was going on. This led to more tests and finally to an Endocrinologist. (Gee, the titles are getting longer.) I had done a rare thing, flipped from hypo to hyperthyroidism. At any rate they eventually killed my thyroid, drove a stake through its heart, steroided me, radiated me, iodized me, and sent me home more or less cured.

And from 1995 until last year I was doing great. I was seldom ever sick, and never seriously so. I had off and on arthritis attacks, mainly in my feet, but I bore the pain and did what I was called upon to do at home or work. I got a lot of perfect attendance awards at Wilmington Trust. I felt invincible.

But age and Doctors caught up to me.

It started with the beginning of last year. Both my wife and I were sick that January 2012. I hadn't been

ill like that in a couple of decades. It held on, too. Happy New Year! The bug went away eventually, but before I was fully on my feet my leg was kicked out from under me. I guess it was bursitis. Whatever, my knee swelled up and appeared to have a grapefruit implanted within and boy, did it hurt. I could barely hobble or get in my car. Driving was a horror, because I couldn't bend my leg and the pain was extra sharp cramped between seat and pedals. Obviously my morning walks had disappeared throughout January and February.

By mid-March I was finally back walking and things were becoming normal, but when April came I was called up home because my mom had a stroke. Most of the remainder of 2012 was taken up with getting proper healthcare for my parents through to their deaths and then dealing with the funerals and the aftermath of settling the estate. I looked to 2013 to bring some relief.

But this year started much as 2012 did, with both my wife and I ill with something like the flu. This hung on, seemed to go away and returned again. Then in March I was hit with an especially vicious arthritis attack in my left wrist. I had never had an attack in my wrists before. It usually attacked my feet, specially my toes. Arthritis attacks normally lasted a few days, then went away for a while. This wrist attack would not let go. It went on for two weeks and the pain was intense enough that I began popping aspirin for relief. I am not big on medication. I always took as little as possible and I only took pain relievers when the pain got extremely unbearable.  After the two weeks the arthritis lessened, although to this day my wrist aches if I turn it too far in any direction.

Note that up until now I still avoided doctors. I was on some medications as it was, I didn't want more. I have to take a pill to replace my thyroid hormone. I also have been on two high blood pressure piles for a decade of so now. I take them in the evening. That's all I wanted.

But right after the wrist got better I felt I was getting sick again. I had a pain in my midsection. I feared it was a stomach flu, oh joy. It eased up and on the Thursday before Palm Sunday we went out to dinner at Dead Presidents in Wilmington.  When we got home I went to the bathroom to urinate and as I stood I felt woozy. I thought I would faint. I had to lie down on the bathroom floor for a bit. I attributed it to the drinks I had with dinner.

On Friday and Saturday I was okay, but after church on Sunday I felt very tired. I plopped down on the sofa and fell asleep. When I awoke I got up, but after a few steps had to sit down on something. I couldn't walk but a short distance without being faint. I assumed I did have the flu after all, but next morning I had to rush to the bathroom right after awakening, not to urinate as was usual, but the other. I had a ghastly bout of diarrhea (dratted flu). I stood up very wobbly and looked down and saw what was there was black.  I knew what that meant, something was bleeding inside somewhere and it could mean cancer.

Now the doctors were going to get there clutches upon me. My family physician examined me and ordered an emergency colonoscopy and stat blood work. If the blood work came back that afternoon showing my hemoglobin was low she was going to put me right in the hospital. Fortunately, though it was low, it wasn't that low and I was able to remain home and make the Easter Sunrise service that week. The next Thursday I was off to doctor number two (no pun intended) for the colonoscopy and an endoscopy.

I had a bleeding ulcer, but otherwise was clean, nothing cancerous threatening. At the end of the month on follow-up the gastrologist gave me the okay to eat whatever I wished. He had also done something that closed up that bleeding ulcer while he was in there. He did put me on another medication, Prilosec.

I was happy with this result, but three days after that meeting, as we entered the merry month of May, I was hit with another vicious arthritis assault. This time it was to the middle finger of my right hand. It was awful and as it entered the second week it spread into my index finger. I also noticed that my index finger had become rigid and this scared me. If this could happen here, it could happen anywhere to any joint. Back to my family physician, who sent me for blood work again and an X-ray of my right hand. Results of this was a visit to doctor number three, a Rheumatologist.

The doctors have me now. I have two more medications. One is very powerful with many frightening and dangers possible side-effects, like death. It is the same medication they give cancer suffers as chemotherapy. The second medication is Folic Acid because the other depletes that in your body and your cells need it to stay healthy. This medication also suppresses the immune system, so I am now more prey to infections and disease than ever.

Because this medication is also a threat to liver health I must have a blood test every four weeks. I visit the doctor every six weeks. The doctors have won, they have me for life!

My medications look like those decals on the rear windows of cars, you know, the ones that show daddy and mommy and each little tyke and maybe the family pets all lined across the glass.

Doctors, medications, blood tests, oh my, I'd rather face lions and tigers and bears.

So there I am with my good buddy, whose somewhat worse off than I, waiting in the doctors office this morning for my latest six week check in. My blood pressure was 120/72 and my blood test results were all fine, but my middle finger on my right hand has grown as paralyzed as the index finger recently, so he upped my medication dosage and I must go get another x-ray of my hand (actually both hands this time). Welcome to the side issues of age, Larry.

Maybe I should write about my visits to dermatologists again. At least that is humorous and involves nudity, always a popular subject.

On to That Final 20%.

I see we are not calling them Senior Centers anymore. Some are retitled "Center for Balanced Living."I don't know what that means? What is it? A retirement community for Wallendas? Some state is renaming every one "Active Adult Center". That sounds too much like a gym to me. If I walk in the door will somebody yell, "Give me ten!"What if I don't feel like being all that active?

Why can't we ever call anything what it is? I guess people can't face the truth. I'd be happy with Senescent Center, where the Geezers and Biddies play to they drop...dead.

Frankly I'm fine with being a senior citizen. By gum (old geezer slang word), I earned it. I will not be robbed of my right to be old. And don't give me that mishmash of 70 is the new 60 or 50 or perhaps they're calling it the new 20 by now. Seventy might be on the cusp, but 72 old, man.

They have this thing called life expectancy and it says for us dudes it is 76-77 years. That puts me four or five years away, so if I ain't old now I never will be. This life expectancy thing is a bit suspect to me. Some agency puts out list by countries and the United States ranks 51 on those lists. I think its just political. Got to watch anything put out there may be some manipulation for political reasons. Like they are back on this Global Warming kick again at the United nations, even though there hasn't been any increased warming for 17 years. they dismiss this as a "pause". If it's been seventeen years, i call it a trend.

But never mind, we're talking about life expectancy and those world types say 76-77 for us fellows. Yet, if I go to the Social Security Agency I am told I can expect to live another 13 years, which would make me 85. Furthermore, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) says I got 19 more years to go, which gets me to 91.

No matter how you cut it or who you believe, 72 makes me an old man, maybe on the young side of old age, but old nonetheless.  One way I figure is this. That 91 sounds like a reasonable number to me. Most my family lived up close to that. My mother died at 92 and my father at 94, so I got pretty good genes in the aging game. So if we round off at 90 and divide by 5 we get a pretty good breakdown of a life's divisions: childhood, young adult, career years, middle age into retirement and old age.

I worked until I was 70 and then full retirement kind of happened. That was a couple years ago so I'm now in stage 5, - old age.  I have arrived in my 73rd year and essentially the last 20% of my life.

(By the way, remember, when you celebrate your 72nd birthday it means you have finished up 72 years. The day after you birthday you are working through your 73rd years.)

This is not a complaint about being old. If there is any complaint it is about those who deny it, won't accept it, lie about it, flee from it or fear it. Get over it. Everybody gets old unless they die young, so celebrate and embrace it, you have survived.

I will tell you I don't feel much different in my brain. My mind's image of myself is basically the same as ever, so I guess your subconscious does lie. In my head I look like I'm maybe 25. I don't see an old man when I look on the mirror either, so mirrors must practice deception, too. I see a man with a white beard and bald pate, but he doesn't look grizzled and worn to me. Ah, but when I see photographs of me, then I wonder who is that old man and why do I have a picture of him?

It's my body that really let's me know I'm old. It sneaks up on you and you don't always realize what

the body is saying, but gradually you get the message. For example, I'm a walker. I have walked places all my life, often for just the pleasure of the walk. My friend, Ronald Tipton, and I used to walk up and about the hills around Downingtown as children and that exploring by foot has remained a lifelong habit for both of us. When I worked, I would walk away my lunch hours and take a long walk in the evening after I got home. And these days I go every morning to one of our local parks and traipse away four or five miles of varied terrain, up hill and down.

But then I was passing everyone who appeared before me and if walking with companions would need slow or stop occasionally to allow them to keep up. Now I notice everyone is passing me. I feel I am stepping out at a good pace, my same old pace, but apparently not. I also know I am walking the same distance in more time.

Ignoring some recent health issues, such as my half-paralyzed right hand, the two main fingers stiffened

by arthritis, there is another obvious indicator that I have moved into old age. Strength. I was never an Arnold Scwartznegger, but I had some amount of strength. I us to lift weights to keep toned and I could press 120 pounds straight over my head and I did arm curls with 35 pound dumbbells. Now I struggle to carry a forty pound bag of kitty litter into the house.

Don't take this little missive as morbid. It isn't focusing on death. Death isn't just around the corner. Remember, the CDC says I have 19 more years...at least. No, I am just being realistic and admitting that in many ways I am pass it. I'm content with that. I'm happy with that. Much of the fuss and feathers of life are over. I look forward to a simpler, perhaps more placid remaining 20% of it.

Also my big hope is I will return to regular entries in what have been becoming my long neglected blogs.

Fickle Finger of Fate Don't Bend So Much These Days or A High Five Might Bring Me Low

Okay, so where were we before being rudely interrupted by nostalgia? Oh, yeah, wobbling on the brink of old age and its requisite aches and pains. We'd just scooted to the doctor and been hustled off to an emergency colonoscopy, if you can call a week later hustling. It was a long week, too, because the "Big C" hovered about my brain like an angry wasp. Praise the Lord, and I don't say that flippantly, I mean it most sincerely, it wasn't that dire.

It was merely angioectasia in the cecum, a medium hiatal hernia, granularity and friability in the antrum and an ulcer in the distal bulb. The last was the bloody culprit, an ulcer (the only word I could recognize other than hernia in all that) in the duodenum (for those such as I who don't know where the distal bulb is). There is no sense to going to all those years of medical school and racking up all those student loads if you are going to talk in plain English. Just saying, "You got a bleeding hole in your gut," doesn't sound worth all that effort learning those sesquipedalian words. (I was an English minor in college so I should throw around words worth my effort too.)

We've rather dealt with my lower G.I. problems in past posts such as Glory Be, the Lord Must Know How Much I love Tomatoes. (By the way, once upon the time "potatoe' with the "e" was the correct spelling, and in fact was the preferred spelling within "The New York Times" until 1988. The Sun Valley Potatoe Growers still use that spelling. So you say "potato" and Dan Qualye said "potatoe, so lighten up you spelling elitist, by any such spelling it is still a starchy tuber. I know it is besides the point, but tomatoes reminded of that to-do over nothing.) Anyway, as I was staying, we've dealt with my intestinal perforations so let's move on to my other bodily ravages.

My gastroenterologist must have done something while poking about in there because my bleeding ulcer stopped seeping and he told me I could eat what I wished. Oh, I came out of that follow-up appointment clapping my hands, but three days later not so much. I couldn't clap. My right hand was swollen up, was red and hurt like a tank had run over it...twice. 

Yeah, I am use to these arthritis attacks. They put one in agony for  few days, ease up, go away and then after some nonspecific time period return to plague a different joint. Not so this time. Pain gripped me like grim death for a week, for two weeks and it spread from my middle finger to my index finger and back again, like it was playing tennis with my digits. Once again I was driven to another long-named doctor, a rheumatologist. 

I got some damage in that hand that I guess is permanent. My pinky finger has an unnatural bent to it and my pointing finger has no bend at all. It just pokes straight out there with a hook at the end. I must forever avoid fights for I can no longer make a fist. Still in all, the good doc put me on a steroid (Prednisone) for three weeks and the pain and swelling dissipated. You can't stay on that stuff long though or it turns you into the Hulk.

Now I am on an antimetabolite and antifolate substance called Methotrexate,  the same drug used in

 cancer chemotherapy. It comes with a long list of scary possible side effects (one of which is hair loss, but as you can see it is too late for that to worry me). 

The biggest threats to me are to my liver, thus I must go for blood tests every four weeks to assure that organ isn't fizzling out, and suppression of my immune system. This latter side effect has the somewhat positive effect of reducing my psoriasis. So if my liver goes and I die I will at least have pretty skin.

I find myself getting tired more these days, which is another possible side issue of this treatment. And so again I claim I now qualify as elderly. Oh, I also have to take a daily dose of Folic Acid. Remember that term for this stuff, antifolate? Yeah, it depletes your folic acid and you need a bit of that. If you don't have it you may have:  diarrhea, macrocytic anemia with weakness or shortness of breath, nerve damage with weakness and limb numbness, pregnancy complications (I doubt this!), mental confusion, forgetfulness or other cognitive declines, mental depression, sore or swollen tongue, peptic or mouth ulcers, headaches, heart palpitations, irritability, and behavioral disorders, impairment of DNA synthesis and repair, which could lead to cancer development.

Ain't we gots fun when we gets old?

And He Didn't Kill Her...

I have been rereading Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I originally read it in the Bantam Paperback in 1964. It was his "memoir" of living in Paris during the 1920s and was published posthumously. Hemingway died in early July 1961 when he blew his head off with a shotgun. That head was fairly blown up inside by then anyway. The Feast recounts when he was still a young man struggling to sell his first stories. His first wife and he lived, by his telling, in near poverty at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

(A moveable feast is a term usually given to religious feast days that do not fall on a set date, such as Easter. They move from year to year.)

One of the instances of those early year musings that stands out is found in the chapter, "Hunger Was good Discipline".  Hemingway tells of having his story, "My Old Man" selected by Edward O'Brien's for that years Best Short Stories collection, even though it had never been published anywhere. He then laughs about this being only one of two stories that survived his wife Hadley's (Hadley is pictured right on their wedding day in 1921) great blunder. Ernest tells it this way:

It was one of two stories I had left when everything I had written was stolen in Hadley's suitcase that time at the Gare de Lyon when she was bringing the manuscripts down to me to Lausanne as a surprise, so I could work on them on our holidays in the mountains. She had put in the originals, the typescripts and the carbons, all in manila folders...I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me.

And he didn't kill her.

He did however, in the not so distant future, have an affair with their friend Pauline Pfeiffer, who soon there after became his second wife. (In the photo Ernest in beret sits between Hadley on his right and Pauline on his left.) 

If the loss of his work did not result in Hadley's sudden demise, it may have done so to their marriage.

In A Moveable Feast Hemingway passes this loss off as not too big a deal. Whatever brave and gallant front he may have put on, inside he had to be fuming. A writer can withstand the rejection of his manuscripts and the barbs of the critics, but it is devastation to a writer's soul to lose his work, and Hemingway had just lost all of his except two stories. He loss his first novel attempt as well. It is a wonder he waited until he was 61 to stick that shotgun in his mouth.

I have loss few of my scribblings and I mourn over them. I have since I was 12 meticulously kept my writings in duplications of duplications as backup. Even so over the decades I have managed through some moment of carelessness to lose some pages. (Granted there may be those who feel the world of letters would have been better off if I had lost them all.) I grieve for those passages. I think I lost portions of three stories. One was called "My Weekend Trip," which all that remained was the first page. I could not for the life of me remember where that story went. My friend in Florida, Stuart Meisel suggested some possibilities that I used to finish the tale. I credited him as coauthor. It was not what I had intended, but it works as a good yarn, so I am happy.

Two others that suffered this same fate were "Last Cold Spring" and "Beach Boy". Although I had penned these nearly 50 years prior to trying to rewrite them, I did remember enough of the plot to do so.

But there is one story I lost completely. Its title was "Where Are you Going, Little Man, little Man?" I do remember the plot, about an overbearing man who had to catch a train for an important business deal. He is driving to the station and experiences several delays. There was a long paragraph in the middle that consisted on one long rant of cussing and cursing that read like some bizarre poem. I personally do not curse. Yes, I know that is rare and to some even weird, but it is a fact. I do write characters in my fiction that curse, because that is real life, although I keep it to a minimum. Perhaps I overdid it in this story and that is why I lost it. I might try and rewrite it someday, but I know I will never capture the flow of that paragraph again.

Because I may someday rewrite it I will not reveal the ending at this time.

At least with my losses they were my own clumsiness, not another's carelessness. Perhaps if my wife had lost my work I would have been looking for a Pauline of my own. Or a shotgun.

 Young Hemingway in Paris.

 Young me in Philadelphia

 Old Hemingway (he died at age 61)

Old me (Taken at age 71)