Forward from Here: Leaving Middle Age--And Other Unexpected Adventures

I usually try to read at least one book per week and, also, listen to one book on tape or CD . . . it was difficult to find the time to do the listening while away, so this past week I instead managed to read a second book . . . its review follows: Turning sixty is something I can relate to, in that I'll be celebrating that birthday next June. Anne Morrow Lindbergh in FORWARD FROM HERE describes how she went through a similar experience . . . as she enters the period her mother once described as "the youth of old age," the author details the many unexpected surprises she has encountered. Her observations were amusing at times, yet also oh-so-insightful--such as this one: * As I grew older and older, I got more used to the idea that death would happen to everybody, including me, but that in my case it would not happen for a very very very very long time. By the time it happened, I hoped, I would be so old that it wouldn't bother me. This is not quite true yet, but again, I think I may be getting there. I hope it takes me a while longer. There's no need to rush. As I journey on, I carry my lost loved ones with me: my sister, my mother, and all the others. I have learned over the years that I can do this, that love continues beyond loss. It continues not abstractly but intimately, and it continues forever. My experience has also made me understand that loss is inevitable, and that loss, too, continues forever, right along with love. I also liked what the author had to say about pets of all kinds . . . she devotes two chapters to birds . . . however, it was this observation about her dog that especially caught my attention: * Many of our visitors, seeing that we had a dog, entered the house with loud voices and waving hands, making a noisy fuss over him. This kind of behavior just caused the poor dog to slink off into a corner and stay there until the visitors left. Helen Wolff came in without commotion and then sat quietly and drank her tea, like the well-behaved guest that she was. The dog came over to greet her, eventually, sniffing her hand and wagging his tail, probably grateful for her good manners. She told me once that she felt it was better to let animals or children come to her, if they wished to, rather than the other way around. The part of FORWARD FROM HERE that most caught my attention was Lindbergh's account of how she discovered thirty years after the death of her father (famed aviator Charles Lindbergh) that he had three secret families in Europe . . . upon this discovery, she then went to meet them--discovering that her new extended family was far more complicated than she had ever imagined.

Forward from Here is Reeve Lindbergh's best book yet. Funny, tender, compassionate, profound, Lindbergh reveals herself to be an accomplished and graceful writer--something you might already suspect if you have read her earlier books, Under a Wing (about growing up Lindbergh, with two extraordinary parents, Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh) and No More Words (about her mother's decline and death). In this book, Lindbergh (an author of books for children) explores the happiness and hazards she encounters as she journeys from middle age into her sixties--the "youth of old age." "I might as well enjoy the view as I travel along from my birth to death, inhabiting this being I call myself," she writes. "I may be a passenger on the journey, or I may be the vehicle itself, but I'm definitely not the driver. I'm here, but I'm not in charge." Maybe, but she's not just along for the ride. In this collection of nineteen personal essays, she laughs at the pleasures of her rural Vermont life--the joys of reading, writing, raising lambs and boys and encountering turtles--and takes a sober look at the challenges of living in an aging body. The vanities of youth are gone (she quotes her beloved sister Anne, now dead of cancer: "After a certain age, there's only so good you can look.") and she is making "friends with reality." Not sure that she wants to wear purple, with a red hat that doesn't go, she looks back on a time when she wore lavender eyeshadow and white lipstick (do you remember doing that? I do) and laughs at herself. In fact, she knows that's the best thing to do: "laugh at myself when laughter is called for, weep when I need to, and feel all of it, every bit of it, as much as I can for as long as I can." As far as feeling all of it goes, the most remarkable essay is the "Brain Tumor Diary," an account of the months (July 2006 through May 2007) when Lindbergh was dealing with a brain tumor--benign, thankfully, but large, intrusive, undeniably there, and needing to come out. It was a difficult time for her and her family. The saving graces were her writing and her focus on daily life: "Dailiness outlasts despair," she says. "For a while the rhythms of daily life may seem to be submerged, even drowned in disaster, but that is never true." The "Brain Tumor Diary" is a report from the front lines of daily life, lived in the face of possible disaster. The Lindberghs are no strangers to life on the front lines and in the public eye. Reeve and her siblings have had to deal with as many as fifty men who have claimed to be the Lindbergh child kidnapped in 1932. But there is more, and in her final essay, she writes movingly about the way she felt when she learned that her father, the picture of rectitude, a "stern arbiter of moral and ethical conduct," had three secret European families and seven children. Indignation, anger, rage at her father's deception and hypocrisy, shame--it's all there. But in the end, there is compassion, and even humo

Reeve Lindberg is a sensitive, wonderful writer. The subject she chose for these essays are pertinent to us over 60 and beyond. I'm recommending this book to all my lady friends.

"Forward From Here" is written in good humor tinged with irony: anecdotes about aging, insights about the natural world and observations on how the 'dailiness' of our lives can help us outlast any despair. The author, Reeve Lindbergh, combines revelation and commercial instincts. but with the philosophizing that comes from maturity. "Lindbergh" falls in the category of a never-to-be-forgotten name. At the age of five I was terrified by the stares of strangers in slow-moving vehicles, all because of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Newsmen seized on the frightening, sorrowful story of the loss of the baby with a voracious appetite almost equal to today's media. Reeve Lindbergh discusses her "fraught relationship" with her famous father. I am no psychologist but it has long seemed to me that explorers of this planet have a corner on certain personality traits. My own uncle who explored Antarctica in the late 20's & 30's, and much later as a climatologist in the Arctic, seemed to have a 'solitariness' not found in most men. Perhaps this develops as a bi-product of celebrity status? The author learned thirty years after his death that "Lindy" - - the nation's hero & her famous father, had fathered three other families in Germany & elsewhere in Europe. The reader is confronted by the sad reality of selfishness, of which we are all guilty to a degree. Reeve Lindbergh writes of the "unutterable loneliness" her father must have endured in his later years. It is a moving experience to read her conclusions about her parent's flawed personality. Readers will be equally moved and grateful for other chapters of her book. We can all wish to age with the grace that helps us "not to utter unkind words" - - and further, to "love the reality of wrinkles"!

I was so excited to see that Reeve Lindbergh had written another book! I love her writings. I appreciate her for telling of her life and how she deals with the circumstances that come her way. So personable and down to earth. Everytime I sit down with her books, I feel I am visiting with an old friend.