Join the conversation as three dynamic fifty-plus women walk and talk along the beautiful Southern California beaches about the changes, challenges, and situations in their everyday lives with understanding, encouragement, and generous helpings of laughter. No Rocking Chairs Yet intersperses the friends' witty dialogue with heartfelt e-mails as well as humorous blogs that cover everything from diet frustrations to hairdresser calamities. Peggy, a reference librarian and avid blogger, stopped counting birthdays at fifty-nine. Although her long marriage has always been solid, lately she is feeling restless, and temptation is lying in wait. Fifty-six-year-old Cassie is an English teacher who, after being dumped by an errant husband, vowed to remain single and free. But when she takes up line dancing, destiny is about to collide with her defensive stance. Recently retired nurse practitioner Barb feels as if she's in the middle of a panini sandwich-pressed on one side by her aging parents and on the other by her adult children. Will she be able to fulfill her aspirations? The women haven't the slightest hint about the surprises and life-changing decisions that lie before them in the months to come. This feel-good life-after-fifty book is a natural for women's reading groups.

NO ROCKING CHAIRS YET

The Default Setting for Life After Fifty Just Got Kicked Down the Beach!By RINA TORRI

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Rina Torri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-5829-6

Contents

PROLOGUE.....................................................................xiii1. AGING WITH ATTITUDE.......................................................12. HUSBAND MORPHS INTO BACKSEAT DRIVER.......................................73. ANNOYING CHANGES..........................................................114. BEACH WALKS...............................................................175. AGING PARENTS.............................................................236. SINGLE AND FREE...........................................................277. GRANDCHILDREN.............................................................298. PARENTING ADULT CHILDREN..................................................359. MOTHERS-IN-LAW............................................................39SUMMER.......................................................................10. CASSIE'S LINE DANCE SURPRISE11. AIRPLANE FLIGHTS TEST PATIENCE AND ENDURANCE.............................4912. ENDLESS ASPIRATIONS......................................................5313. TO-DO LISTS..............................................................5914. HIGH-MAINTENANCE LADIES..................................................6315. DANCING AT CASSIE'S......................................................6716. MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL...............................................6917. WHAT'S YOUR WORST HAIRDRESSER STORY?.....................................7518. DECORATIVE SURGERY.......................................................7919. STEPFORD WIVES...........................................................8320. A CHANCE ENCOUNTER.......................................................8721. WEIGHTY CHALLENGES.......................................................9122. COOKING DINNER AND EACH GUEST IS ON A DIFFERENT DIET.....................9523. INDIGESTION QUEENS.......................................................9924. WAITER, BRING BACK MY PLATE!.............................................10525. FIRST LOVE...............................................................10926. STUFF....................................................................11327. LIVING WITH A PAPER PACKRAT..............................................11728. LETTER FROM TRENT........................................................12329. FASHION CHALLENGES.......................................................12730. NICHOLAS ALMOST PROPOSES.................................................13331. BEACH LESSONS............................................................13732. PET PEEVES...............................................................13933. THE "YOU GUYS" EXPRESSION................................................14534. NOSTALGIA................................................................14935. CATCHING FIREFLIES.......................................................15536. CHRISTMAS WISHES.........................................................16137. HE KNOWS!................................................................16538. MOVING...................................................................16939. PEGGY'S PINK LADIES......................................................17340. TAKE IT ALL IN...........................................................17541. SPEAK, WRITE, THINK......................................................17942. REALIZATION..............................................................18543. TRENT'S DREAM............................................................18944. GREEN-EYED MONSTERS......................................................19145. LEGACIES.................................................................19746. HOUSEWORK ... UH, OH!....................................................20147. A FULL PROPOSAL..........................................................20548. HAPPY MARRIAGES..........................................................20749. LOVE AFTER FIFTY.........................................................21350. THE BEST IS YET TO COME..................................................21551. UPLIFTING SONGS..........................................................219AUTHOR'S NOTES...............................................................221

Chapter One

AGING WITH ATTITUDE

Grant unto me the seeing eye, that I may see the beauty in common things ... and that I may know that each age from first to last is good in itself and may be lived ... happily. —Edmund Sanford

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.

A pause in their discussion offered the opportune moment for Peggy to insert some hard facts. "About three years ago, a Scripps Health Study asked the question, 'Could genome research make one hundred twenty the new forty?' Our number of years on this planet will eventually become irrelevant.

"Already, the number of persons living to ninety or more has almost tripled since 1980 and will increase to over 7.6 million in the next forty years.

"And keep in mind that our real age is not necessarily the same as our calendar age. It's as if there's a default setting for each age; well, I say, let's delete it.

"This time in our lives is referred to in so many ways—the third age, pre-old age, the encore generation, post-middle age, on and on. But guess what? Most women in Samoa totally ignore birthdays, and Hindu women in Orissa do not label life's stages."

"Maybe we can learn something from them," said Cassie.

"All I know is each year seems to vaporize faster," Barb resumed. "I have the sensation that someone has pushed the fast-forward button, and now I am hurtling through space and time toward the final stage."

Listening to Barb nudged Peggy's memory. "I read somewhere that these are bonus years, a stretch of productive, still somewhat energetic time tacked onto the tail end of middle age.

"Author Abigail Trafford tells us that increasing longevity has added this new stage of life before old age and that with these bonus years, the need comes to reinvent ourselves. We've got to write a new script for this extra period, with all of its endings and beginnings."

"The panic du jour is that my bonus time will evaporate before I can do everything I long to do," reiterated Barb. "The nanoseconds are racing by at breakneck speed.

"I must tell you, though," she continued, "that Drew's sense of humor keeps me going forward. When I complained to him that I'm moving much too fast through time, he quipped, 'Then that means you're in good shape!'"

After a long and satisfying laugh, Peggy had more to say. "One thing I never do is say my exact age out loud. I don't want to hear the number because then it will become too real. It will become the reference point against which I measure everything from now on—how I feel, how I look, what I want to achieve, what I'm capable of doing and dreaming."

"The most I'll admit to others is that I'm postmenopausal," Cassie threw in. "People can just categorize me that way."

"Say I feel sluggish one day," Peggy resumed. "If I subscribe to old-think, I might say to myself, 'Well, women this age are expected to feel lethargic,' instead of saying, 'I feel sluggish today, so I'm going to take a long, slow walk or relax in my Jacuzzi. Then I'll be refreshed.'

"Another thing—there are too many negative age-related stereotypes. I want people to focus on my character and personality, not my age. It will be easier for them to do that if they don't look at me and automatically see a number superimposed on my being.

"Besides, the promo for the cell phone I just bought says, 'You're a spunky axis with the many facets of your life orbiting around you 24/7.' So I'm feeling pretty good about myself," she chuckled.

"Seriously, though, I like to look at the positive aspects of aging," Peggy added. "The frustrating what-ifs of our youth have been answered one way or another, we are finally released from the prison of obsessing about who's looking at our looks, and we can concentrate on being the kind of person we were created to be."

"These years, from fifty onward," remarked Cassie, "are not just bonus years, they are years in which we can become trailblazers for younger women who can benefit from the lessons we've learned. It's easier to make friends of all ages now that we are not perceived as competitors."

Barb's voice evolved from subdued to animated, evincing her otherwise imperceptible attitude readjustment. "When Drew and I were out for dinner the other night, I told him about an acquaintance's remark when I ran a bit late for a meeting. 'Well,' she told me, 'you're getting older.'

"'Next time she says that,' Drew advised, 'or if anyone else says you're getting older, just answer, I'm trying to!'"

* * *

When Peggy returned home, she found the old poem that had been nagging her from the back of her mind:

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen

After quickly e-mailing these lines to her friends, she prepared raspberry-yogurt smoothies for herself and Mack, who was already busily engaged in his daily stock market analysis. Placing her drink at a safe distance from the computer, Peggy got started on her next blog. She was glad Mack was not standing right there behind her reading it.

Chapter Two

Peggy'sMoments.com

HUSBAND MORPHS INTO BACKSEAT DRIVER

April

If my husband ever needs someone to drive him around again, he will have to hire a chauffeur.

Three hair-pulling, teeth-gritting, stomach acid-producing weeks as his driver-in-chief were enough to last a lifetime. Suddenly, I had been thrust into this role when he injured his right ankle while playing tennis, never dreaming his normally calm, pleasant disposition would morph into that of the proverbial backseat driver. Only he was not sitting in the back; he was right next to me in the front passenger seat, sitting rigidly, at high alert, eyes darting to and fro.

His transformation started with a little complaint at a stop sign. "You just made a California stop! You could have gotten a ticket for that. You're supposed to make a full stop, not a rolling stop!"

"I made a quick stop, true, but it was a complete stop," I reassured him, as I continued to drive along a totally deserted road.

One early morning, driving along the 101 in Del Mar, I noticed two bicyclists riding abreast about a block ahead. The one on the outside, in his purple and orange skin-tight outfit, which hid nothing but what God gave him, kept zigzagging slightly over the bike lane line. As I started to change lanes, Mack suddenly jerked his head around and sucked in his breath with such force he was lucky there were no flies around. "Why wait till you're right up on them," he complained. "Couldn't you have moved over to the left lane way before this?"

Tensions kept escalating. Sometime during week number two of my sentence, one of the traffic lights I'm well-acquainted with decided to turn yellow as I approached it at fifty miles per hour. I knew I could very safely make it through the intersection before the light would turn red. "You should start slowing down immediately when a light turns yellow so you can stop in time," Mack instructed, "not gun the engine and race through the intersection. You were just fortunate that light stayed yellow long enough; some of them change fast. One of these days, a camera's going to catch you racing through a red light."

By week three, every time I pressed the brake to slow down, Mack would jam his left foot into the floor mat, brace himself by pushing one hand against the dashboard, and stop breathing. "Where did you get your license," he asked in an exasperated tone, "at Sears and Roebuck?"

Even backing out of a tight parking space unnerved him. "You're too close; you're going to scrape our car!"

"Know what?" I responded, "I'm glad you inhaled so deeply. You narrowed our car!"

Now was a good time to listen to one of my language tapes instead of arguing. Before I pushed the start button, Mack spoke up. "That's going to split your attention. Driving is a full-time job."

"I could learn Spanish," I said.

"Yeah, the Spanish Hail Mary!" he quipped.

One evening, when Mack's ankle was almost healed, I was driving along, listening to his usual moans and groans when lights started to flash behind me. "Oh my goodness, that must be for me," I grimaced.

"Of course, it's for you. I knew you'd get a ticket one of these days," Mack barked.

The cop, who had emerged out of nowhere, as they notoriously do, asked the routine question, "Do you know how fast you were going?"

"Not fast enough; you caught me," I managed to smile. Not amused, the cop informed me that I had been driving fourteen miles over the speed limit.

"But, Officer, if you only knew what I've been through, driving my husband around for three weeks. He kept whining that I'd never get him to where he's going in one piece. I guess I pushed the pedal a bit more than usual as a reflex action."

Later that day, when we finally got back home alive, I vowed never to play his chauffeur again, and he wondered why his left foot kept hurting so much and he felt dizzy.

Chapter Three

ANNOYING CHANGES

It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out—it's the grain of sand in your shoe. —Robert Service

Once you reach this season of life, everything starts kicking in—tons of annoying, quirky, sometimes painful things both inside and out, from head to toe, Peggy thought, as she flat-ironed the last strand of her blonde shoulder-length hair. And the list of mysterious physical changes is open-ended. It seems that almost every day, it's something else.

Time had swallowed and digested two weeks since she had seen Barb and Cassie, and she could hardly wait to expel these latest frustrations and elicit their understanding. The tide, though, was not charted to recede until midmorning, so she distracted herself by concentrating on her next blog, which covered an altogether different topic. She would post it today, right after their get-together.

"Well, ladies," Peggy began her diatribe later at the beach, "I now know that my vital organs are plugging along just fine. After being poked, prodded, and tested, I have been told by my internist that nothing horrendous is going on. Believe me, I'm thankful for that. But my complaint is that he dismissed most of my little bodily annoyances as simply part of normal aging. He had no explanation for them.

"And what do you think Mack said about my strange symptoms?"

"What?" asked Cassie.

"He just looked into my eyes, smiled, and said, 'It's the new you!'" Peggy and Cassie's full-throated laughter startled a sandpiper and it scurried away.

"At our stage," said Barb, "doctors are truly puzzled by the nebulous symptoms and vague complaints we report. They really don't know what to do with us. Subtle changes don't lend themselves to quick categorization.

"Face it, in ten minutes, doctors can't possibly know you. And it's rare to even be able to speak with physicians in between visits, guarded as they are by a battalion of nurses and receptionists armed with scripted answers that they communicate in saccharin tones of voice.

"They can only prescribe for the medical conditions that jump out at them. The rest, they either will guess at (in which case, my guess, as a nurse practitioner, is probably better than theirs) or will schedule a procedure for.

"We have to be our own health advocates and go to them prepared with precise descriptions. My internist would not even recognize me without my notebook and pen," Barb concluded.

"I'm my own doctor too," Peggy said with a wide smile. "Belgian dark chocolate pecan turtles are my new 'take two and call me in the morning' favorites.

"The dermatologist I see got around my questions neatly when I complained about new keratoses popping up like mushrooms. He kindly looked at me and said, simply, 'It's time, Peggy, it's time.'"

Any health-related topics were right up Barb's alley and she barreled on. "Many of our aches and pains were just destined to happen. We're genetically predisposed to get certain ailments, which can be triggered at any time, sometimes suddenly."

"So you're saying that if I had never taken up running in my forties, I might not have developed chondromalacia in my knees in my fifties? That the act of running was the trigger?" asked Peggy.

"For you it appears to have been," said Barb. "What I'm trying to explain is that with certain right triggers, our predispositions descend upon us full blast."

At this juncture, Cassie jumped in. "I do know that fibromyalgia can be triggered by either physical trauma or severe illness. In my case, a car accident fifteen years ago caused the condition. After five frustrating years in and out of physical therapy, I finally was able to manage my pain. That same accident also exacerbated the arthritis in my neck (which showed up in an x-ray) to the point that it became painful for the first time in my life."

"If you already had arthritis in your neck before the trauma," confirmed Barb, "it is highly probable that eventually it would have become painful anyway, but the accident hastened the process."

"I would have been glad to wait," Cassie said dryly.

"Stone Age men and women did not have arthritis in their fifties and sixties the way so many of us do today. We must be doing something wrong," Peggy remarked.

"I look at it the same way you do, Barb," she continued. "We are programmed to develop certain maladies and malfunctions, which are quietly lying in wait, like a crouching tiger behind a boulder ready to pounce on us. The challenge is not to do anything that can trigger them."

"I'll keep that in mind," Cassie said.

Peggy had more to contribute. "You do realize that some researchers now say we have the ability to turn on the healing genes and even to turn off some of the bad genes. My analogy for this would be turning off the water supply to your toilet to stop it from flooding, which, unfortunately, I've had some experience in doing. The water is still there in the pipes, but it can't give you any grief."

During a pause in their conversation, Peggy watched as the ocean surf played its eternal game, breaking on the sand, rolling forward and dissolving in its own foam, then rapidly retreating under the crest of an oncoming wave.

"Here's something I don't understand, she said. "Why on earth would a postmenopausal woman still be going through temperature fluctuation extremes? Much of the time, I'm either too hot or too cold. I can't seem to maintain a steady, comfortable body temperature. Since weaning off my hormone replacement pills, I have been experiencing some of the old familiar menopausal symptoms again."

Peggy elaborated. "During the course of one night, I can go from shivering—I have to heat my nightgown in the dryer for sixty seconds before I slip it on—to feeling on fire—I must step outside on the patio in the middle of the night to cool down. And I still get occasional mood swings. At unexpected moments, I feel as if my nerves are ripped raw and exposed from head to foot. I thank God this doesn't happen often."

"What does your gyn think?" Cassie wondered.

"She tells me I'm one of a small percentage of women for whom the end of menopause does not necessarily mean the end of menopausal symptoms. Lucky me! I wonder if my symptoms will continue indefinitely."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from NO ROCKING CHAIRS YETby RINA TORRI Copyright © 2012 by Rina Torri. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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