Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Quality of a life

    My mother Irene would be the first to blame good genes for her longevity. After all, her mother, Yvonne, lived to 105, and Yvonne traveled independently until she was about 102, visiting kids, grandkids and greatgrandkids all over Canada and the United States.

    I think Irene’s love of life and curiosity about the world may have played some part in helping her reach 99. And those aspects have surely enriched her days.

    Here’s a thing she did yesterday: played the piano and sang a lovely lullaby that she often sang to her children.

    The song, “Sweet and Low,” began life as an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem later set to music.

    Also, she complained to me that her one-pound weights (she’s strength training, you see) are insufficiently challenging. I have been instructed to acquire two-pound weights.

  • Nia on the road

    Trainer Ann Christiansen dancing “Ignite.”

    Two days of driving (sitting motionless for hours) followed by a day of sitting and talking with my mom has brought me to this morning’s feeling of lethargy. What’s going on? No dancing is what’s going on.

    The internal dialogue goes like this:

    Tired me: I’m too tired and fried to dance this morning.

    Wiser me: True, but you can always dance your today body.

    Tired me: My today body doesn’t want to dance.

    Wiser me: Maybe that’s your today brain. Maybe your today body would like just five minutes and then your today brain might come on board.

    Tired me: Five minutes? You promise?

    Wiser me: Yup.

    So the various selves cue up the online routine “Ignite.” And we keep the lights off, letting dawn slowly brighten the room. This routine starts with my favorite song: “The Groove is You,” which tired me starts getting into.

    My today body did 30 minutes, staying with some moves longer because they felt so good, skipping some moves that seemed too fussy for today.

    And tired me is kind of surprised at the fresh energy. It leaves me thinking, when you don’t know what to do, turn on the music and dance.

  • Staying curious

    Me and my beautiful mother Irene

    I never know where a conversation will go with my mother Irene. She can talk music. She can talk politics. She can talk literature. She can talk spirituality. She can talk travel. And, of course, history.

    Today, we hit a little bit on all those topics, but my favorite conversation came when I asked her to name a famous poet that she didn’t know a whole lot about. I figured we could go browsing on the Internet and find some poems to discover together. She thought about this for a few minutes, and then she looked over at me and said, “Christina Rosetti.”

    To me this was one of those Casablanca “Of all the gin joints” moments. What are the chances my 99-year-old mother would name a somewhat obscure 19th-century British poet whose “Goblin Market,” is one of the most rythmically sensual poems ever? I’ve loved this poem since hearing it as a dramatic reading at an experimental theater in Anchorage in the early ’90s. It has a line that I periodically use to describe how I feel at the beginning of something exciting: “Like a vessel at the launch when the last restraint is gone.” So we read it together. I was glad to be reminded that at its core it’s about the redemptive love of sisters.

    We also visited a website that is among my favorites for poetry, The Poetry Foundation,” and found a good bio of Rossetti, including the fact that she wrote the lyrics to a Christmas song we both find haunting and beautiful, “In the Bleak Midwinter.“

    So that’s why I drive two days in January to southern Alberta. Who knows where a conversation with Irene will go? It’s always worth the trip to find out.