Kansas - when you're old

(Wichita Skyline - Shawn Colvin)

Dear Readers,

I’ve been away on a trip for a while. I’ve also not been myself as I deal with unemployment after being DOGE’d. I haven’t been in the mood to write, but music has a way of bringing me back to myself. So, here goes...

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You know that feeling when you step out onto a beach at the ocean... or when you reach the summit of a hike and can see out over a vast chasm to the valley below? It’s a feeling of ahhhhhhh! Your soul takes a deep breath and exhales.

Well, being the odd bird that I am, I also get that feeling when I look out at the flat prairie of the high plains in the Midwest, like in Illinois or Kansas. My whole being feels a calmness, a letting go. Everything is going to be okay, because I can see the horizon. I can see what’s coming. It’s simpler there. There’s an emptiness, but it’s soothing for some reason. It’s a beauty that possibly only I see. The big sky. The russet colored grasses stretching to infinity. The occasional barn and farmhouse or grain elevator. The train tracks that led people there, where they might not have lived otherwise. It’s so expansive and wide, you can almost see the curve of the earth on the edges of your view.

We recently drove with our Airstream trailer and two dogs to a super-small town in western Kansas to visit my mother-in-law for her 85th birthday. We were there for about a week, staying near her nursing home.

The whole time we were there, I kept hearing Shawn Colvin’s song Wichita Skyline play in my head. [Click the link to listen to it.*] The song is from Colvin’s 1996 release A Few Small Repairs. Although her big hit from that album was the song Sunny Came Home, I’ve always loved Wichita Skyline more.

From the beginning, the strumming of the guitar and pulse of the drums set the tone of a train moving across the prairie. There’s an undulating, galloping feel. Colvin acknowledges it in the lyrics right away, singing:

Down at the train, they go
to Independence everyday

Her sweet soprano voice sounds so midwestern to me. I can’t put my finger on why. It’s lovely, but there is a thinness to it, and it’s absolutely perfect in this song. She’s singing about being in the middle of nowhere and wanting desperately to get out of there, to a better place. But in her view, she can’t leave. She is stuck.

And I must have been high to believe
That I would ever leave
Now I’m just a flat fine line
Like the Wichita skyline

All of this is ironic to me, of course, because I loved being there. Who would want to leave?

I rode on the airstream
across the great lonesome afternoon
I wished hard enough to hurt
Drove fast enough to catch the moon

It got me thinking about our outlooks when we are old vs. young. When we’re young, we are ready for adventure. We want to see the world. We want everything to be dynamic and changing. In a small town, we feel like we’ve seen everything already. We want to move to the big city and see what we’re missing.

When we’re old, like my mother and mother-in-law (and maybe me, as I get older)… We want what we’re used to. We want the days to be the same and predictable. We want all the people to stay the same, too.

When I was in undergrad, one of my favorite courses was an introduction to anthropology. I happened to be going to school part-time while I was in the Air Force, and I was stationed in Hawaii. For the anthropology class, we had to pick a group of people and study them for a final project. They could be any group of people, but they needed to have their own culture, so to speak. I chose the surfers who hung out on the North Shore of Oahu.

They had their own language and customs. They were very much a tribe that I didn’t belong to. I had to try to get to know them and see what it was like to be among them. I did not become a surfer, but I got a sense for what held them together. In this particular group, the members were very open-minded and willing to talk to me, but they also had high standards for who was a surfer and who was not.

What I took away from it is that people who have this common bond of being part of a community together trust each other implicitly. They understand where each other is coming from. They don’t question a turn of phrase or a gesture because it’s what they are used to, and they recognize it.

Now, anthropologists and probably everyone reading this will hate me, but I think this has a little to do with how racism forms. Or “othering" of any kind. I think some people, especially older people (in my opinion), are at a place in life where they want what they are used to. They want to be around their “tribe.” And anyone young and new who is trying to think outside the box on how things should be seems like anathema to them. Yes, there are young people with this view, too. But I can see why it happens more in older people. (And there are exceptions to this, which I’ll mention in a moment!)

Back at the nursing home with my mother-in-law, it struck me how wonderful the staff were. They were all from the same small-town “tribe.” They showed a lot of caring for her and thought of what she needed before she needed it. She felt comfortable with them because they were like people she had always known. She knew which staff had children and what the children’s names were. They interacted with her a lot, and she was completely engaged.

Contrast that with the nursing home my mother is in outside Atlanta. There, the staff are also very caring and hard-working, but they are all of different stripes. Some of them have accents, and she already has a hard time hearing them. So, they probably sound like they are speaking another language most of the time. My mother is not as active as my stepmother, so she is at a disadvantage for that reason. (I’ve written about her being there before.) But I think part of why she is so withdrawn now and doesn’t engage with the staff very much is because they seem foreign to her, and she can’t find a common ground that she can rely on there. Nothing is what she was used to.

(I had heard of an article about Japan, where many caregivers for the elderly are Filipino. Apparently, some older Japanese people have a problem with this. They’d rather be cared for by Japanese caregivers. However, I could not find the article. If I do, I will add it here.)

On the other hand, I think some people crave change and challenges late into life. My father is like this. He is always finding something new to work on or be involved with. He always has a garden going, and is always talking about learning something new online. This is a great inspiration for me, so that I don’t fall down the rabbit hole of wanting everything to be the same. I admire him so much for this outlook! I hope I got some of these genes from him!

Our trips with the Airstream help foster this spirit. We find ourselves in a new place every few days and need to improvise and figure out how we will be there. We explore the great, vast splendor of the country and it keeps amazing us.

I think I’ll still feel that ahhhhh! whenever we are looking out at the plains, but I’ll also feel it in the mountains and at the water. I will write more about this in posts to come. There’s still so much to see! And I can return to the flat fine line in my mind anytime by listening to Colvin’s sweet song.

And I watch the black clouds roll in
Chasing me back again
Back to the flat fine line, the Wichita skyline

**Be sure to listen for the train sound at the very end after the song ends.

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