Virginia Buckingham - Marblehead Current

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Grow old along with me

22Mar

By Virginia BuckinghamNo Comments

Opinion, Views & Reviews, Virginia Buckingham

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Grow old along with me

We snore. Our eyesight is getting worse. We both gained weight during the pandemic. We walk slower. We’re easily distracted. Our joints hurt. We don’t like spending too much time alone. And, oh, do we love our afternoon naps on the couch. Our cockapoo April and I are aging together. How I wish she would continue to “grow old along with me” as the Robert Browning poem and John Lennon song entreat. I picked up April in New Hampshire during a nor’easter not unlike the one we had last week. I hadn’t committed to the breeder that I would take the last of the litter. But the minute I saw all four pounds of her, white with black spots, you would have had to muster an army to keep me from bringing her home. I held her in one hand as I signed the paperwork and she licked my face with her tiny p...

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Positively triggered

Google being “triggered” and content is served up about the psychological effect of being returned to a traumatic experience, a terrible inheritance for those with painful pasts. I recently had two experiences, though, which made me wonder why “triggering” is only associated with pain. Google “recalling happy memories” and the results include terms like “reminisce” which doesn’t come close to capturing what it feels like to revive a happy moment in the same way triggers revive trauma. To reminisce is what you do when those old Facebook posts pop up in your feed, evoking an “Awww” or “That was a great day” or “The kids were so little” or “I was so young.” Triggering is different, it’s visceral. A sound, a smell, a comment, a backdrop actually returning you to the moment before it became...

EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Reconsidering the seagull

“Rats with wings.” That’s the common derogatory descriptor about that common sea bird, the gull. Last summer, one wily airborne rodent grabbed an entire overflowing lobster roll from my hand just as I was taking a first bite. Darn rat! Mostly though, gulls are a casually observed but uncontemplated part of our daily landscape. We might notice one pecking at an unlucky crab or perched on a neighbor’s chimney. But we don’t give their presence a second thought, even seconds later. Unexpectedly for me, the merely observed recently became the deeply contemplated. I was given the gift of a week staying in a friend’s apartment overlooking Boston Harbor. It was a respite from construction at home, as well from the frustration of a mobility-reducing broken ankle. Dreams of wandering...