<Welcome to Sandwich Season, adventures in middle age, sandwiched between aging parents and growing children ... and other duties as assigned.>
Dear friends,
In last week’s post, “’Deferred maintenance’: It happens to houses and cars and people … (oh my!),” I shared that I sometimes feel as if I’ve focused so much on everyone else’s stuff over the past couple of years that my own life has gotten lost in the shuffle.
I also shared some of social psychologist Cassie Holmes’ findings on “time poverty” and how setting aside as little as two hours of discretionary time per day can make a huge difference.
Well, in the interest of science (hah), I tested out Holmes’ assertions and took some discretionary time. Put in ordinary terms, I went out and had fun! Turns out it really was like hitting a refresh button.
I’ll share what happened below …
Thank you for being here with me!
Sarah
P.S. If you enjoy this post, would you please give it a ❤️? It will help more people find Sandwich Season.
‘We’re lovin’ life’: This too is Sandwich Season
Last week, Jon and I bicycled with our friends Melissa and Rachel past fields of drying corn under a robin’s-egg-blue September sky, full of anticipation. I thought to myself, Ah! This must be what people envision when they ask us about our life as empty nesters.
I had spent much of the day on a freelance assignment attending a bioscience conference in an overchilled ballroom, where I listened to speakers and interviewed industry professionals and students. Then I turned around and took our son, Max, to a doctor’s appointment. All very responsible endeavors.
Yet now, here we were rolling down the sidewalk like a little bicycle gang on our way to an outdoor concert. On a Tuesday evening—a school night!
Jon and I had work and other responsibilities to consider on Wednesday morning, but with Max settled into his group home, we didn’t have to think as much about how a late night would impact him and, therefore, all of us. We could do this, right?
We locked up our bikes, got our purses and persons checked, entered the venue full of smiling people, and made our way to general admission—a green grassy hillside. We spread out our blankets among hundreds of others.
Whose life is this? I wondered. Who does this? Have these events been happening all along, just a couple of miles from our house?
To think, as I have been orchestrating Max’s appointments, moving my parents’ stuff, running errands for my dad, schlepping antiques, housewares, knickknacks and books around town, people have been sitting on this grassy hillside listening to music, drinking beer and eating food truck dinners. All this time. Unbelievable.
We had bought tickets on a whim last spring when I saw a social media post announcing that the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies was coming to our city. What we didn’t know was that Toad the Wet Sprocket would be the opening act, and it truly sweetened the deal.
Toad (along with Hootie & the Blowfish) provided the soundtrack for my life in Japan a quarter century ago. It was a two-year break I chose after an early-life divorce, when I put grad school on hold, packed my stuff into a storage unit and left my beloved cat Thornton with a trustworthy friend.
My assignment in Japan was to teach English in an isolated rural community, where there was no trainline and few buses. Many months into my contract, I was finally able to convince my Japanese supervisors that it would be OK for their community’s lone foreigner to lease a car—even though I’d have to learn to drive on the left side of the road. Details, details.
That tiny white Suzuki Alto L’Epo became my escape pod, my ticket to freedom. I buzzed on my own terms along winding country roads to my teaching assignments and hightailed it all the way to nearby cities, where I could buy canned tomatoes (my staple ingredient and odd obsession at the time). On weekends and holidays I parked my car near a bullet train station and boarded fast trains that took me all over the country.
Reveling in my newfound freedom, I cranked down the windows and popped Toad the Wet Sprocket’s album In Light Syrup into the cassette deck. My mind and heart full of regrets for the mistakes I’d made, I sang along with these bandmates from California as they crooned about how unreliable good intentions can be.
At the time, I was still trying to suss out how my life had gotten off track after college, how in one short season I had entered not only an ill-fitting marriage but an unsatisfying graduate program. How, I wondered, did that happen? And now, how could I create a future with fewer mistakes, less heartbreak?
— If you’d like to read more about my adventures running far, far away—to Japan—to find my way home, they’re in my memoir, The Same Moon (Camphor Press, 2020). —
Singing along in the shadow of Yamaguchi’s soft, green, bamboo-covered hills, I never imagined all that was ahead of me. More relationships, more breakups. Job searches. Degrees. Friends. A new marriage. Many changes of address. New pets. An adoption journey that introduced Jon and me to our son. A full and busy nest. And more losses—grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends, and last year my mom.
I certainly didn’t imagine one day living back in my Minnesota hometown, sitting with my middle-aged husband and friends on a grassy hillside, listening through spongy ear protectors to Toad the Wet Sprocket as they sang the song that helped get me through a tough season, long, long ago.
As I watched the band members perform, I began to wonder what it was like for them to play these songs they had written in their youth, and about all the changes they must have gone through and are going through now, in middle age, like Jon, my friends and me.
I leaned over and shouted into the ear of my friend Rachel, “You know, these guys are having colonoscopies too, just like the rest of us.”
We both laughed, mostly at the joy of being middle aged, being aboveground, being able to get up and dance in the grass, watching our age-compatriots bounce and sing and play on the stage below.
The evening’s main attraction, Barenaked Ladies, are also of our vintage, their lead singer laughing at his recent DIY haircut—when he realized his hair had grayed and thinned to a point that it didn’t even matter that he used the wrong clipper attachment. I looked at Jon’s hair and nodded. We get it.
They played with an energy that kept many of us on our feet for most of their set, bringing out moves learned in much younger days.
Toward the end of the concert they sang “Lovin’ Life”—what could be my theme song for this sandwich season time of life.
If I’d heard that song back in my younger years, driving among Japanese schools, cajoling young students into speaking English, negotiating a new but short-lived romance, wondering what my future would hold, the lyrics wouldn’t have struck me the same way. I wouldn’t have sensed the flicker of melancholy that I heard in their words last week, the acknowledgement that we might be lovin’ life, but we’re past our halfway mark, heading all too quickly toward our expiration dates.
Now in my mid fifties, I can imagine the path ahead. I know that energy wanes, that there will come a time when I will be ready to let it go, to let all of this beautiful, heartbreaking life go. I know this will end.
But today, I get to love life—the highs, the lows, the work of it and the play, the responsibilities and the freedom, empty nest and full.
And I will carry with me that moment last week, when Jon, our friends and I bounced carefree, like popcorn on the lawn, as a full autumn moon rose above us.
Delightful!!! A reminder to maximize our daily blessings and opportunities!!!💕
It could not have been a more perfect, joyful outing!