REFRAMING THIS BLOG: growing older/growing.older

Lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock:
“Well, maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning.”
 
For me, as I move inexorably closer to my 78th birthday, a part of my attention has turned inward, toward knowing who I am at this point in my life and what does it mean to be an oldster in this country and planet in the late 2020s.
 
Two of the things that I am involved him have spurred this reflection. My son Parker and I are making the documentary Growing Older in Rural Wisconsin. After a year and a half of filming, we are pausing to get a better handle on the structure of the film and to raise funds to finish the project. Out of interviewing and listening to older rural Wisconsin residents came the idea of putting together a 45-minute storytelling piece: “Growing Older: A Storyteller’s Journey,” which I performed seven times in 2025 and will be reprising it on a Symposium on Aging in Milwaukee in March, 2026.
 
The first digital stories I will be sharing relate to looking back: looking back at life decisions that got me here, a meditation on time and adaptation, and on living in the present, which is so hard to do.
 
I remember a brief argument from a movie (I can’t remember the movie) in which a parent tells a teenager: “Act your age!” The teenager responds: “I’ve never been this age before. How am I supposed to know how to act?” Well, I have been in this age before, and I’m trying to figure it out, because life is for learning, and writing and making digital stories are ways for me to do this.