Remembering

This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help Baby Boomers, seniors, and those soon to retire find joy, excitement, and satisfaction in life after retirement. Her public lecture on this subject is titled, “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement.” Her memoir, available by clicking here Amazon.com, is: Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class. Click here for her website: http://AdventuresWithDadTheBook.com

Now, on to my blog:

We all have our memories, and we spend significant amounts of our awake and our asleep time pondering them. One of the most compelling things we remember are the significant people who have impacted our lives.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the death of one of my dearest friends. She was such a major part of my life for decades, and so many things in my home remind me of her.

There is the fleece shirt I put on each winter morning to break the chill when I get out of bed that Sue bought me for my birthday years ago after seeing me finger it on the store rack while we were shopping.

There are the 1600 threads-per-inch sheets I sleep on nightly which I, along with many of her friends and relatives, ordered through her secret source with the amazing discount.

There are those small decorative, bolster pillows that sit atop the regular pillows on my bed. We each got one that day Sue took me to visit the Wolf Rescue Compound, a two-hour ride from the city where we lived because I’d chosen it as my birthday gift excursion. We had been giving each other events for birthday presents in those final years, a way to spend more meaningful time together as the annual exchange of yet another sweater, scarf, or pair of earrings had become old and tiresome. The compound owner had made the little pillows which she presented to each person who braved the trek to her isolated location and contributed a donation upon entering.  Sue gave me hers so I’d have a matching pair for my bed.

There is the…

Last week, I saw Sue’s children for the first time since her death. Her daughter held me and cried giant tears, the sight of me bringing back memories of her mother yet again. I cried my own internal tears, as external ones don’t happen for me. We all have our own way of grieving and responding to pain; mine is the dry, lump-in-your-throat type. Neither are right or wrong; they just are.

When someone has been significant to you, that never ends, it merely changes. Everyone has had a Sue in their life, and they live on in the memories of their friends and family members.

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Gender, Sex, and Power

This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help Baby Boomers, seniors, and those soon to retire find joy, excitement, and satisfaction in life after retirement. Her public lecture on this subject is titled, “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement.” Her memoir, available by clicking here Amazon.com, is: Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class. Click here for her website: http://AdventuresWithDadTheBook.com

Now, on to my blog:

So much has been in the news lately about sexual harassment. That encompasses unwanted sexual attention ranging from remarks, gestures, innuendos, touching, all the way to rape. If you’re a female, most likely you’ve been the recipient of some behavior on this continuum at some time in your life. If you’re a male, you, too, may have experienced it, or you may have someone close to you who has. Today, I have a guest blogger, Janet Maker, who was inspired to write about her own personal experiences with sexual harassment.  Here is her post:

Gender, Sex, and Power
by:  Janet Maker

Recently I got a hug from my male yoga teacher and I felt myself stiffen, even though I knew that the hug was affectionate and not the first move in the direction of sex.  I was sure of this for many reasons, not least of which was the fact that I am 75 years old.  Nevertheless, I still had the hypervigilant reaction that had been ingrained in me over most of my life.  I was never raped or beaten.  I never even had my career threatened by men.  I just had the usual stuff:  Between the ages of about 12 and 50 I would regularly be on the receiving end of unwelcome overtures, fortunately not from employers, but from pretty much everyone else– from doctors to auto mechanics to the husbands of my friends.  I’m sure I was not exceptional—I was attractive but not a great beauty, and I know I was not giving mixed signals.

Here’s the thing that was so crazy-making: Except for the husbands of friends, who were easy to deal with, I could never tell them the truth.  The truth was that in most cases I was not physically attracted to them; I did not feel any “chemistry;” or as the Brits say, I did not “fancy” them.  I was always afraid that if I told the truth their minds would snap and they would become violent.  So I made up excuses.  When I was very young I tried telling them that I was frigid or a lesbian, but I soon found out that those excuses did not deter them.  The only thing that would usually work was to tell them that I belonged to another man.  There were times I couldn’t do that—for example, I would sometimes accept a date from someone who looked interesting but for whom an attraction did not develop.  So I had to figure out strategies to parry any overtures until I got safely home.  I don’t mean that all men were wolves, but I felt I always had to be on guard.

Once in a while I received overtures from women, but that was not the same kind of problem at all.  I could simply tell them that I was not attracted to women, and that would generally be accepted with no hard feelings.

I wondered if this issue was a generational thing, so I asked my 30 year old daughter if she and her friends felt they could safely tell men that they were not attracted to them.  She said no.

The question made her recall her first experience with sexual harassment.  She was eleven, and we were Christmas shopping in our local mall.  She wanted to buy a gift for me, so she asked if she could go off alone.  I agreed, and I showed her where I would wait for her.  After a while a woman showed up with my sobbing daughter in tow.  My daughter told me she was going up the escalator when a man grabbed her bottom.  She was terrified; she found a woman and asked for help.  We made a police report.  Of course I knew that the police wouldn’t do anything, but I wanted my daughter to feel that she had been taken seriously.

I had a friend once who had a gay male couple living in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes when they would argue they would end up in a fistfight, and I felt almost jealous.  I did not want to fight, but I did want the satisfaction of knowing that I would have an equal chance of winning.

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Please forward my blog to anyone who might be interested and post it on your Facebook, Twitter and other social media. To reprint any material, contact me for permission at:  gowergulch@yahoo.com. If you want to be automatically notified when I post a new blog, click on the “Follow” button in the upper right corner of this page and fill in the information. To read my other blog posts, scroll down on this page or click on “Recent Posts” or “Archives” under the Follow button. To opt out of receiving this blog, contact me at the aforementioned email address, let me know, and I’ll remove you from the list.

Photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar via VisualHunt /  CC BY-ND