“I’m Going to Make You Coffee….”

By Joan Price | September 1, 2010 |

If you ask me if I still miss Robert, two years after his death, I answer, “Only when I breathe in or out.”

I still start each morning recapturing a memory. Today it was the way he opened his ocean-blue eyes in the morning and smiled, his face melting with love. “Let’s snuggle,” he would say. Then one of us would decide, “I’ll snuggle you,” and we would shift to our sides, the snuggler wrapped around the back of the snuglee.

I loved when Robert snuggled me, enveloping me, so close that we couldn’t tell where he ended and I began, if indeed there was a distinction. I would take his hand in both of mine, push my nose into his palm, and inhale deeply. His palm smelled of sleep, a warm, enticing smell that was totally Robert. I can still smell his hand, still taste his skin as I kissed him everywhere my mouth would reach.

Other mornings he woke ready to meet the day, his garden or art studio beckoning, no time for snuggling. He announced, “I’m going to make you coffee,” and I always responded, “I love it when you make me coffee.” He padded out to the kitchen to grind beans, boil water, and arrange the filter cone over a metal coffee pot that had journeyed with him for decades.
In a while he brought me coffee in bed with the newspaper and arranged both lovingly on a tray. Before bringing me my coffee, he told me once, he held the cup to his cheek to make sure it was just the right temperature.
He liked me to stay in bed while he had some quiet, private time in the morning to contemplate his latest painting or tend his garden, so he gave me a cowbell that he had decorated with a heart made of Japanese paper. I was to ring it when I desired a coffee refill.

The “make you coffee” ritual started early in our seven-year love affair, and persisted wherever we were, home or hotel, and whatever else was happening in our lives. Towards the end, when his body started succumbing to cancer, he told me, “As long as I can make you coffee in the morning, I know I’ll be all right.”

Then one morning, he tried to get up, and he couldn’t. He stumbled, his legs trembling, his back stabbing with pain, his brain unable to emerge from sleep. He sat back on the bed. “I can’t do it,” he told me, and we both cried, as I’m crying now, remembering the day that everything changed.

…Now I make my own coffee in his special coffee pot and carry it to the living room where I’m surrounded by Robert’s paintings. I write memories in my journal—snippets of sweet conversation, playful games we invented, afternoons that turned into evening as we made love as if life depended on it. Maybe it did.

Even though I write for a living, using a computer and all the tech tools available to me, I write my memory journal in longhand. Somehow writing longhand comes from the heart more than the brain, and I rediscover memories I had forgotten.
My hand lingers over the page, and I picture Robert’s hand –the artist’s hand making love to the canvas, the gardener’s hand making love to the dirt, the dancer’s hand making love to the music, and my lover’s hand–making love to me.
During Robert’s last ten days, I held and kissed his limp hand. I told him of my love, narrated memories from our seven years together, sometimes not knowing if he was asleep or unconscious or moving from this world to the next. “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me,” I would say, and sometimes he would. Over the last week his squeeze became weak, then just a twitch, and then… nothing. I continued to hold his hand and talk to him, not knowing if he could hear me.
I still talk to him, and sometimes his words come to me in response. “Are you really answering me, or am I making this up?” I asked him. He replied, “It doesn’t matter.”

What does matter, at this point in my life, is that I’m taking with me the best of what Robert and I shared. That’s what he’d want for me, and what I want for myself. I find joy in my writing, in dance, in close friends, in physical and mental exercise, in learning, and yes, in my memories of Robert.

I hold my coffee cup to my cheek. It’s just the right temperature.

Tagged , , , ,

Danny and Annie, “a beautiful song from a busted old radio”

By Joan Price | August 28, 2010 |

“Listen, if we’re going anywhere, we’re going down the aisle, because I’m too tired, too sick, and too sore to do any other damn thing,” Danny told Annie 27 years ago.

I love this story from StoryCorps. Danny and Annie are narrating their love story, and they sound just as romantic now as in the first bloom of their relationship. “It’s like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio,” Danny tells Annie about why he tells her he loves her every day. “Thanks for keeping the old radio around.”

Listen to the whole 5:50 minutes — but be prepared to cry half way through when you hear about Danny’s illness, and at the end, when you read the final note on the video. I did.

As I’ve learned personally, when we love each other at our age, part of that loving is facing and accepting that one of us will lose the other. That’s a strong reason for embracing each other as closely and lovingly as we can, while we can.

Thank you, AARP Blog for posting this video, and to StoryCorps for recording it.  I’ve listened to it three times in a row now — let me know how you react to it.

Tagged ,

Jan’s Story: Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer’s by Barry Petersen, reviewed

By Joan Price | August 23, 2010 |

Jan’s Story: Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer’s by Emmy Award-winning CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen is a stunning, wrenching, valuable book about loving and living with a spouse with Alzheimer’s Disease. Petersen writes from his heart, his gut, his personal truth as a loving husband who watches his wife disappear and is powerless to change the course of her disease.

Jan and Barry had an intellectually and sensually vibrant marriage. “We were blessed with being two people who couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” he writes. “Our lovemaking was sometimes slow and easy and sometimes quick and instant, as I sought for her release that left her satisfied and the more hungry for me, and me for her.” Although this is not a book about sex, Barry doesn’t flinch from sharing that part of their relationship when it was strong, and the heartwrenching loss of their sexual closeness–along with every other part of their closeness–as the disease progresses. 
Petersen shares with us his panic and his great grief (“I learned how a man can fall to the floor because he is weeping so hard”), and also his admirable attempts to keep Jan safe and happy, to the best of his ability — sacrificing his own health and quality of life until… no, I need to let you discover that part on your own. Although I itch to write about the ending of this book, the tears still wet on my face from reading it, I’ll hold back to let you take his journey with him, step by step, memory by memory.

View the trailer here. And please read the book, whether or not you have a spouse with Alzheimer’s disease. Barry and Jan never expected that this disease would invade and obliterate their marriage–but as we age, it’s likely that it will happen to us or to someone we love, and we should know what Barry learned the hard way. Highest recommendations.

Tagged ,

Fast Girls: Erotica for Women

By Joan Price | August 18, 2010 |

Fast Girls: Erotica for Women, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, from Cleis Press, is an anthology about women (not girls, though many are young) who zestily pursue their sexual desires and fantasies, flaunting social norms and going after thrills and sensations with bravado. Whether or not we see ourselves in these women (and mostly I don’t, personally), we can get a vicarious thrill by reading how they go after whatever turns them on: pretend or real whoring, sex with strangers, danger, pain, bondage, submission, domination, you name it.

Yes, but this is a blog about sex and aging. Is anyone in this anthology over 50? Yes — one character — 51-year-old Shirin seduces a much younger classical pianist (who can resist those fingers?) in “Waitng for Beethoven” by Susie Hara. Many other characters could be any age, so if you like imagining them 50+, as I do, you can get away with it.

One writer that I know of– D.L. King–is over 50. Her story “Let’s Dance” is about a woman who seduces an “adorable” young dancing man (we love our dancing men!) from the “vanilla club” dance floor into a cab to her photo studio/home equipped with pulleys and restraints, and introduces him to his fantasy (“Cute Boy was a total bondage slut”) and hers. Though D.L.King doesn’t make a big deal about the narrator’s age, you know she’s older. If dom/sub stories turn you on and you’d like to read a story by King expressly about a man’s 65th birthday gift (think a lifesize crate), read “The Gift” online. Check out her blog, too, for more about King’s books.

I asked D.L. King her views about age and erotica:

My dominant female characters are often my age and their submissive males are usually quite a bit younger, but that isn’t to say I haven’t written the obverse, too. I don’t always do it, but sometimes it’s fun to play with age.

I think erotica is a great way to get the juices flowing. After a while, people tend to lose interest in the same old sex. Erotica’s a great way to explore other options and spice up a relationship. If you read a story that really turns you on, bring it to your partner and see if he or she would like to try it on for size. Erotica can also help to stimulate your own fantasies. Anything that helps you to enjoy your sexuality more can only be a good thing!

I love to do readings and meet readers. Most of the readers who turn up for those events are young. I think many of my contemporaries don’t attend those kinds of events. I wish more would. After all, we’re the original free love generation.

I also asked the editor, Rachel Kramer Bussel, a prolific erotica writer herself, if she thinks that characters who are over 50 will become more common in erotica. She replied:

 

I hope so! I like to see a range of characters, though the ones that cross my desk when I’m editing an anthology tend to skew younger. I’d definitely welcome older characters and in general themes I haven’t seen before or as often in my anthologies. I’m editing two new anthologies now, Obsessed and Women in Lust and if there are older authors or those who simply want to add a little more variety, I encourage you to submit your work.

Let me know if this blog post results in your story being included in one of Rachel’s anthologies, will you?

Tagged ,