I haven’t been blogging much lately. The truth is, I seem to have run out of words. That’s not surprising since this is my 1,639th blog.
So, for today, since writing a blog tops my to-do list, I’m sharing some words of the Dalai Lama – ones that that have personally come in handy over the years:
Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
Spend some time alone every day.
And remember that silence is sometimes the best answer – This is especially good advice for someone like me who has foot-in-mouth disease. I should have followed it a lot more than I did.
Finally, to add to these, I would simply say it’s good to laugh a lot, particularly at yourself. What would you add?
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
Just a small rock detail I captured during a hike along Mesa Trail in Canyonlands National Park in 2011. — Photo by Pat Bean
Aging My Way
I’m currently reading Ann Zwinger’s Wind and Rock: The Canyon Lands of Southeastern Utah. It’s a landscape that I spent many hours exploring when I lived in Northern Utah, back when hiking was part of my life.
The book is one of more than 20 on natural history that Ann wrote before she died in 2014. Another one is Down Canyon, which is about her rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in the mid-1990s. I read it after my own 1990 trip through the canyon, but before a second adventure rafting the Colorado through the canyon in 1999, which was a 60th birthday present to myself.
The two trips were entirely different: The first was for the pure adventure and thrill of the river’s wild rapids. The second for the experience of the canyon itself. I couldn’t help but be influenced in how I saw it because of Ann’s detailed descriptions in Down Canyon of the little things that she saw as much a part of the canyon as the river itself.
Her book made me more aware of the whistle of a canyon wren, which I sometimes awoke to in the mornings, and such things as the orange globemallow and blue penstemon wildflowers that added color to the canyon floor.
Meanwhile, I’m reading Wind and Rock because in late September, I will once again be driving through southern Utah, through places like the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument, Garden of the Gods and Lake Powell. I suspect Ann’s book will once again have an influence on how I see the red-rock landscape as we drive through it.
Books are magical. Don’t you agree?
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
In 2004, I retired from being a journalist. This was my retirement party with colleagues and friends all around me. And my son, D.C., who now subscribes to the newspaper, where it all started, is sitting on the ground third from left.
Aging My Way
A furniture maker creates an ugly chair. No problem, it’s firewood. A chef’s unpalatable casserole goes in the garbage. An artist doesn’t like a painting; they can toss it, use the back for a different painting, or paint over it.
But a newspaper journalist’s mistake is out there for the world to see, and can even be put out there for the world to see again 55 yearslater, which is exactly what happened to me this past week
My oldest son lives in the same circulation area for the small newspaper, The Brazosport Facts, whose back door I slipped into many years ago. I wanted to write for the paper, but without any experience the only job I was offered was as a darkroom flunky. The year was 1967, before the digital age and when film was developed using chemicals in a blacked-out room.
I conquered the task, however, and then became a nuisance in front of the city editor’s desk asking if there was anything I could do. Just to get rid of me, I suspect, he started sending me out on reporter assignments, which was how I began an award-winning 37-year journalism career.
I worked for The Facts, which my son now subscribes to and reads daily, for four years. It was the equivalent in my mind of a master’s degree in journalism. Of course I made mistakes along the way, but those mistakes only made it into the Facts twice that I can recall. One was a wrong name, and the other a wrong accounting number from a city council meeting.
Both times, I had to write a correction and an apology, one of which was repeated in the YEASTERYEARS column that my son read. It started off with: It seemed like such an appropriate assignment for Facts reporter Pat Bean to cover the opening for Pinto Bean (no relation) Ford …. and then went on to describe my mistake in a kind of funny memory.
My son thought I would be upset at the mention of my goof. But I was simply delighted to be remembered after 55 years.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
Add Tucson’s Agua Calliente Park, where I saw this green heron, to the list of places to visit for beauty and birds. — Photo by Pat Bean
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” – Confucius
Aging My Way
During the nine years I was traveling around America in a small RV with my canine companion Maggie, I was often asked what place I liked best. The question always had me stumbling for an answer. To name just one and leave out all the rest of Nature and man’s wonders just seemed wrong.
Everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, I went had its own kind of beauty. This was brought home to me at an overcrowded El Paso RV Park where I was parked on a cement slab with large RV rigs hooked up six feet away to both my right and left.
I was bemoaning the fact that I had been stuck here because nothing greener was close enough to reach before dark. And then I happened to glance outside my RV window.
Strutting across the cement was a California Quail with six young chicks following her. The sight made me rethink my idea of beauty, especially since one goal of my RVing years was to see as many species of birds as I could.
Meanwhile, here are a few other special places I’ve visited that have impressed me in one way or another – and where I got a new bird for my life list.
Maine: Acadia National Park, where one can stand on the top of Cadillac Mountain and be the first person in the United States to have the sun touch their face. I saw a black-billed cuckoo here.
New Hampshire: Flume Gorge, for an unforgettable hike and birds like an ovenbird and a black-throated blue warbler.
Oregon: Brandon National Wildlife Refuge, where my bird list grew by a pelagic cormorant, black turnstone and a whimbrel.
Utah: Zion National Park, a longtime special place for me, and where I saw a California condor flying overhead. These birds were brought back from the edge of extinction and I wrote about their recovery several times.
Texas: Brazos Bend State Park, even if an alligator sometimes required me to detour off a favorite hiking trail. It was here where I saw my first pileated woodpecker, a close look-alike of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker.
And I could easily list another 100 sites without much thought. Look around you. Beauty is everywhere.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
“We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.” – Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything.
Aging My Way
The above sentence stood out to me like a yellow sunflower growing among rose bushes. Perhaps because I’ve come to realize how much I’ve been influenced by people and things that have gone before me.
Like all of life, some of the people and things I’ve experienced have been positive influences toward my becoming a better person — and some of my life’s experiences would have been better going straight into the garbage.
Now, at 86, I have this egotistical belief that I can mostly tell the difference. But then my still-with-it brain laughs at myself for even thinking such a thought. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t realize I still have much to learn. Morning chats with a granddaughter assures me of this.
But I have been fortunate enough over the years to have been exposed to a wide view of the world. First, because I read a bit of everything, including polarized versions of the same events; and second, because I was a journalist for 37 years during which time I saw both good and bad.
Now, as I read the news and try to relate to the world from an old-broad’s point of view, I worry for young people who are denied such exposure because of such things as banned books, religious isolation and histories written by the victors.
Unless one sticks one’s head in the sand — which by the way ostriches do not do — one can’t help but wonder about the things young minds are being filled with today.
Will these children be influenced by what their parents and friends and politicians say and believe all their lives, or will they begin to draw their own conclusions at some point? It’s something an 86-year-old with eight great-grandchildren ponders from time to time.
Meanwhile, I just hope my grandchildren all just grow up to be kind, regardless of what they believe. But then that’s my hope for all of us.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
Old age means you don’t have to set your alarm clock anymore. — Art by Pat Bean
After 30, a body has a mind of its own. – Bette Midler
Aging My Way
As a 30-year-old editor, I would have changed that to read: After 30, a mind has a body of its own. But as an 86-year-old editor, the only change I would make to Bette’s quote would be to change 30 to 70.
Accurate, or not by medical standards, my body and my mind felt most alive and healthy when I was between the ages of 40 and 60, perhaps because those were the years when I was most active – both physically and mentally. I was quite a late bloomer in all departments.
My body continued to mostly behave itself until I hit my 70s. By the 80s, however, all I can say about my body is it’s in the toilet, which makes me want to repeat, at least a dozen times, my favorite word: Shit!
But life goes on. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
Trees have long been a subject of my art. I’m a tree hugger.
Aging My Way
“Over the past twelve years I have learned that a tree needs space to grow, that coyotes sing down by the creek in January, that I can drive a nail into oak only when it is green, that bees know more about making honey than I do, that love can become sadness, and that there are more questions than answers.”—Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions.
These words in the opening of Sue’s book, not only made me want to read more of her words, but also made me question what I have learned the past 438 days. That’s how long since I suffered a major heart attack. Although thanks to modern medicine, a good cardiologist and three stents later, I am in much better health than I was before, it was still a life-changing event.
The biggest thing I learned was that I didn’t fancy at all being taken care of. I acted, sometimes still do, like a two-year-old stamping her feet and saying: “I can do it myself.”
The second thing I learned is that I’m loved, because loved ones have been with me every step of the past 438 days. No one could be more blessed than this, and despite my continued feet stomping I am beyond thankful.
This said, Sue’s words resonated with me in another way. It’s about the tree.
Since I moved into my current apartment almost three years ago, the cottonwood tree in my small patio yard has grown more majestic. As I stared at it this morning, I wondered if my love for it had been the fertilizer because nothing else has changed.
But now, because of its spreading roots, which are destroying my gate and fence, I may lose it. Just the thought brings wetness to my eyes. Sue nailed it when she said love can become sadness.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
Yellow warblers sometimes visit my small yard. — Art by Pat Bean
Aging My Way
“Old age is something only the lucky get to do.”
I was surprised on a recent morning to realize I was sitting in my small patio yard – doing nothing. I had gone out to sit in a cool breeze and watch birds as I drank my morning cream-laced coffee.
But the wind was not gentle, typical for Tucson, and the birds had gone into sheltered hiding somewhere. Their absence barely resonated with me, until I finally realized how comfortable and peaceful I was just sitting there, a state of mind that is fairly new to me.
But I guess that is what happens when one is an 86-year-old broad. In my younger years there was a time I was so impatient to get from one place to another that I ran instead of walked. And my mind was always racing.
This morning when I sat outside with my coffee, birds were twittering all over the place. Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which I’m currently reading – and enjoying – inspired me to go inside and get a notebook and start my own chronicles. While my small patio yard doesn’t compare to Tan’s bird haven, I do have a tall cottonwood and two tall oleander bushes in it, plus a couple of bird feeders and one for hummingbird nectar.
As I watched and listened, house sparrows, verdins, lesser goldfinches, house finches, mourning and white-winged doves, Europeans starlings and a spotted grosbeak made their presence known. The bonus was a rose-breasted grosbeak that as far as I know was a first to visit my backyard.
I enjoyed this morning, too, — but not more I think then I did the one in which I simply sat quietly, with only my mind wandering about. It has never stopped racing.
Scamp: What do you mean we can’t go for a walk at sunrise?
Aging My Way
“Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternative.” —Maurice Chevalier
I’ve always been a morning person, but things are changing. Instead of popping up out of bed bright and cheery and ready to tackle the world as I have done almost all my life, I stumble out of bed with a stiff achy body of an 85-year-old. Perhaps that is because I am 85 (86 in just a couple of weeks) and have the arthritis to prove it.
It takes a while for my body to warm up for the day ahead, something I keep trying to tell my canine companion Scamp, who is ready for a walk as soon as the sun creeps into our bedroom.
I’ve told him that I’m an old broad and suggested that all he needed the first thing in the morning was a quick pee, and that I would take him for a longer walk a little later, like 10 a.m.
He readily agreed to the quick pee, but still grumbles a bit about waiting until 10, preferring a nice long 9 a.m. walk. So, I compromised. We now usually get out for that good walk around 9:30 a.m., which gives my body time to slowly enjoy a bowl of oatmeal, which is good for my cholesterol, and two cups of coffee, which is good for my heart.
You think about these things when you’re 85.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll have a companion like my Scamp to talk it over with.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
A beach in South Goa — Image from a Goan government travel brochure
Aging My Way
It all started with a word I had never heard before: Vindaloo. From how the word was used in the sentence I was reading in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikryby Gabrielle Zevin, I determined vindaloo was some kind of food, as the book’s protagonist was heating it up in a microwave for dinner.
But what kind of food, I wondered, and thus begin my journey down the internet rabbit hole, a place I visit almost daily. My surfing told me that vindaloo is a spicy Indian curry. To be more exact, a Goan curry dish, according to Wikipedia.
So, what is Goan, my curious brain asked – and Wikipedia answered: Goan is the demonym used to describe the people native to Goa, India.
So, where is Goa? India’s Southwestern Coast, and additionally it is the country’s smallest state.
And since I’m into travel, even if it’s just from an armchair, I spent a bit of time researching Goa. The Indian state is nicknamed the Pearl of the Orient and its motto, according to the Goan government, is: “May everyone see goodness, may none suffer any pain.” I like that.
Among the other trivia tidbits I learned along the way is that vindaloo is based on a Portuguese dish called vinha d’alhos, which caused my rambling brain to remember that my great-great grandfather was a Portuguese sailor who jumped ship on America’s East Coast.
And with that, I jumped out of the rabbit hole and got back to my day’s activities, which a little bit later found me reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, in which he encourages writers like me to stop procrastinating and write. And as if Steven had been peeking at me through a window, he wrote: “Resistance mounts to a pitch that becomes unendurable. At this point vices sink in. Dope, adultery, web surfing…
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Pat Bean is a writer, avid birder, hiker and passionate nature observer with wanderlust in her soul. She spent nine years living and traveling in a small RV. She now lives in Tucson with Scamp, a rescue who was supposed to be a Schnauzer mix but turned out to be a Siberian Husky-Shih Tzu mix who is as stubborn as his owner, her granddaughter says. She was also a journalist for 37 years, and can be reached at patbean@msn.com
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