Author Archives: Amy Gage

Unknown's avatar

About Amy Gage

A community relations director in higher education and mother of two adult sons, Amy Gage spent the first 20 years of her career as a journalist and public speaker in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The issues addressed in her award-winning newspaper column, "On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home," remain relevant today. In "The Middle Stages," she continues the vital conversation about women's work and lives, with a focus on the challenges and contradictions of aging, the mixed blessings of forsaking family time for the more immediate rewards of a career, and how middle-aged women can continue to forge full lives even as their priorities and sensibilities change.

Stay Cool, You Don’t Need Air-Conditioning

3 Replies

At night during the summer, my husband sets up a big metal box fan — yellow, decades old, with three speeds powered by three dusty blades — and blows it out the west-facing window in his upstairs den. Then he sucks in the cooler evening air from outdoors by closing every window in the house except three in the bedrooms and one in the living room (to please the dog who commandeers the couch).

This is our old-fashioned, climate-friendly version of air-conditioning, along with ceiling fans in the kitchen, the main bedroom and my home office, a north-facing spare bedroom where I sleep on hot nights because of the bed’s access to the open window. When we first moved to this old house in 2013, we occasionally used a portable air-conditioning unit in the front bedroom, but it was noisy and blocked the light during the day and kept waking me at night every time it clunked off and on. So, we hauled the dripping unit out to the boulevard, where someone quickly claimed it.

For them it was a find, like the perfectly good snow shovels I lugged home from an alley last spring. For me — raised in a household with open windows and floor fans, back when air-conditioning was a nonessential for the middle class — the portable unit symbolized the hedonistic tendencies of our self-absorbed culture. Doing without it was one small way to side with Mother Nature in a battle she inevitably will win.

Billboard at the corner of Grand and Fairview avenues in St. Paul

Where comfort counts

Air-conditioning is a luxury that the vast majority of Americans now judge to be a necessity, and far more of us, especially in Minnesota, could live without it. As a person who tolerates the heat fairly well, in part because I have trained myself to do it, I would welcome not having to shiver in every bus, grocery store, movie theater and office building — enduring this artificial, overcooled air because some HVAC company tells me it is civilized. A symbol of prosperity and progress.

That progress, unfortunately, is costing the planet — fueling the very climate crisis from which air-conditioning helps us hide.

Ninety percent of households in the United States have air-conditioning, compared with 60 percent in China, 16 percent in Mexico and 5 percent in India; versions of those data, from 2016, were cited again this July in news alerts about the record-breaking heat worldwide.

Indeed, air conditioning represents one of the most insidious challenges of climate change, and one of the most difficult technological problems to fix. The more the world warms, the more we’ll need cooling — not merely for comfort, but for health and survival in large parts of the world.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review, September 1, 2020

Summer in the city

On a cool Sunday afternoon, a comfortable 74 degrees, it’s easy to forget how daunting July 2023 has been. More than 90 million Americans were under heat alerts earlier this week, according to PBS NewsHour. The month itself was the hottest on human record.

I read about farmers trying to keep their animals cool in rural Minnesota; about a man who died at a bus stop in Phoenix, Arizona, where temperatures climbed to over 110 degrees for 27 days in a row; about wildfires blazing in Mediterranean countries. Closer to home, I smelled acrid air in my own yard from Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles north and saw more watering bags going around the thin-trunked saplings that the city planted on boulevards to replace sturdier trees lost to Emerald Ash Borer.

But still, I went outside during our recent record heat wave. I like the heat. I’m a lifelong Minnesotan. We wait for months, from late October until mid-April, for warm weather. Even on the afternoon when it was 96 degrees, with an excessive heat warning, I stood by my decision not to cave on air-conditioning, to cave in to the popular notion that we couldn’t live without it.

Front-page news in the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune on July 28, 2023

Years earlier, when we were selling the family home in Northfield, I wouldn’t budge when the Realtor said the house would move more quickly — and fetch a higher price — if we installed central air. My family had lived comfortably in the house for 20 years. “There’s always one hot week in July when we hang out in the basement,” I told her. “Otherwise, we have plenty of cross breezes and ceiling fans. Find buyers who are green.”

And that’s the point. Minnesotans readily adapt to changing seasons. We think nothing of living differently in the winter: reading more, wearing layers of clothing, making stews and soups, staying home at night with Netflix. Similarly, we can find novel and healthful ways to stay cool, if we resist or cannot afford the immediate relief of air conditioning.

I sent my husband, who is less heat-tolerant than I am, to see Oppenheimer one evening this past week at our historic local movie theater. The next day, he wandered through the cool galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

There is a long history of industry-funded “deflection campaigns” aimed to divert attention from big polluters and place the burden on individuals.

Michael E. Mann, Time magazine, September 12, 2019

I chose to embrace the weather, as I do during the winter: biking to my errands with an extra side of water and sunscreen; reading on the porch at night and watching vehicles sealed up like tombs against the heat. Moving more slowly, giving myself permission to push away from the computer and relax, to call a friend. Like a snow day in July.

This heat wave, now over, was of our own making: our driving, our air-conditioning, our consumerism, our conveniences. Personal habit change won’t solve the climate crisis, it is said. But right here, today, surveying what little I can control: I see it as the only choice we have.

What the fuck! I’m tired of all the swearing

3 Replies

It isn’t that I never swear. It’s just that shit and fuck and goddamn and all the rest have become so ubiquitous that they’ve lost their ability to stun or shock, which, to my mind, is the whole point of swearing.

There are swear words, like the ones just mentioned, and there is crude or offensive language, and all of it seems subjective and so very public these days. On a bus ride recently to downtown St. Paul, a woman started swearing a blue streak into her phone as another man and I were exiting the bus to participate in a City Council meeting. Amid audible shouts of “Fuck this” and “fuck that,” I said to him: “This is why people are uncomfortable on mass transit.”

No one swore giving testimony at the City Council, except to say “damn” once. Clean language was a sign of respect. We know that swearing has its place, and it’s not in front of public officials whom you are asking to vote yes on your pet issue.

The older I get, the less natural that profanity sounds in my speech, as though I’m trying to sound younger, with it, more relevant than I really am — like putting on an outfit from the 1980s that still fits but no longer suits me.

A study reported on CNN Health shows that people who do swear may be more intelligent and creative, have a useful tool to control pain and are less likely to physically strike out when angered. If that’s true, then why is our society so fractured?

Because other studies from the same period, sometime in 2021, say swearing is on the rise, especially since the pandemic; and I know few people whose mental health has improved since then.

The C-Word

The call came in on a weekend, as they usually did. This time, it was a Saturday afternoon. Everyone in the neighborhood had access to my cellphone number, so I wasn’t surprised that the caller was a woman I had never met.

She had been dog-walking, she told me, across the street from the private-university campus where I worked, near single-family houses that had been given over to student rentals. That meant beer cans and weeds in the once tended yards, sagging and smelly couches on porches, and, on this late October afternoon, carved pumpkins lining the steps that led to the front door of a student house.

The word cunt was carved conspicuously, in capital letters, in one jack-o’-lantern where the teeth should have been in the grinning mouth. The woman said she could read it from the sidewalk. Based on the audible indignation in her voice, I took her to be about my age and stage — a product of a time when women’s liberation, as it was called then, sustained and shaped us.

Yes, I assured her, the C-word offended me, too.

As director of neighborhood relations at the university, I handled infractions and misbehavior among students who lived in the quiet residential blocks that surrounded campus. I prided myself on responding promptly and in person. And so, within 10 minutes, I was pounding on the students’ door. Expecting to encounter guys (entitled football players, maybe?), I was surprised to see they were all women.

“This is sexist hate speech,” I told them, after listening to their story of a (likely drunken) pumpkin carving party the night before. They shrugged it off, as did my colleagues in the Dean of Students’ office, who were dealing with the ramifications of what they considered a far more serious offense — the N-word being scrawled that fall semester on a Black student’s residence hall door.

Photo courtesy of Flickr: Creative Commons

My sons later told me the C-word was part of everyday speech in England and Australia. A female colleague called to gently explain that young women were reclaiming cunt as their own. “I don’t buy it,” I shot back. “They’re participating in their own oppression.” One could argue that Black male comics have reclaimed the N word. That doesn’t mean it should be written on a jack-o’-lantern, in full view of pedestrians — and children — on a public street.

I told her that when I type cunt in a Microsoft Word document, I get a “vocabulary” reminder: This language may be offensive to your reader. What I didn’t say was that the one time a man hurled the C-word at me, he then hurled a gob of spit in my face as well. Luckily, the assault ended there.

“CUNT: An informal name for the vagina. The word was in common use during the Middle Ages and was the name given to a number of streets in various British towns. Parsons Street in Banbury, Oxfordshire was once called Gropecunt Lane.

Urban Dictionary

‘Seven Words You Can Never Say’

We inhabit the speech patterns we heard and learned as children, until we’re old enough to develop and embrace our own. My parents raised my siblings and me to use quiet voices in the library, to address our friends’ parents as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” a practice I carried into adulthood, and never, ever to swear.

Though I never had my mouth washed out with soap, it was an approved parental practice at the time, much like the paddle for rowdy boys in junior high.

The first time I heard my father use foul language was, oddly, when he was quoted in our small-town newspaper, the Mankato Free Press. He’d been canoeing up north on his annual getaway with the guys, and a fish of some species and considerable size hit my dad’s paddle and landed in the boat. My brother recalls a headline that played on “a real fish story” theme. I was 9 or 10 years old and shocked to read my father quoted in the paper as saying the fish came at them “like a bat out of hell.” I had never heard him swear.

I refused to let my sons say sucks or sucked when they were small, encouraging them to speak more descriptively and expand their vocabulary beyond the vulgar. Both swear liberally now, punctuating their sentences with fuckin’ so often that the word has lost its meaning, or any punch.

I ask why they find it necessary to use fuckin’ as an adjective (“Move your fuckin’ car”) or an adverb (“It was fuckin’ great”). “The concert or the restaurant was great,” spoken with gusto, would convey the same meaning. But this is how their Millennial generation communicates. It’s what they hear on social media and on Ted Lasso (“he’s here, he’s there, he’s every fuckin’ where”) and on countless comedy specials.

That I was raised in an era when comedian George Carlin was arrested for enumerating onstage the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” seems irrelevant to my grown sons. Nowadays, young adults might concede the seven words as slang, even as vulgarities, but not as swear words.

For the record, here are the seven words as Carlin uttered them in 1972:

  • Shit
  • Piss
  • Fuck
  • Cunt (there it is!)
  • Cocksucker
  • Motherfucker
  • Tits.

Two describe private parts of women’s bodies; three are sexual acts, one of which is particularly demeaning (you guess); two are bodily functions. The profanity that people spew so readily these days bothers me not because I’m a prude — though my sons might dispute that — but because I value women in a world that still does not.

Consider how many of these so-called “dirty” terms and phrases denigrate or poke fun at women’s bodies, sexual practices or health habits (yes, a douche bag is a legitimate thing; look it up). And then tell me they are harmless.

“Fuck!”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then-President Bill Clinton upon his appointment of her to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993. Photo courtesy the BBC.

A friend who is a recognized leader in the abortion rights movement in Minnesota telephoned me on September 18, 2020, to break the news that U.S. Supreme Court Justice and feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. “I wanted you to hear it from me,” my friend said.

We both knew this spelled the end of Roe v. Wade. The president, after all, was Donald Trump.

Among the first people I texted was my sister-in-law in Boston, an attorney who, as a law student, got to meet Ginsburg and hear her speak. She replied immediately and with as much fraught emotion as I was feeling.

“Fuck!” the text read. That said it all.

The full weight of the utterance hit me because I rarely hear her swear. It was powerful punctuation to a moment that began to reshape women’s rights and freedoms as my Baby Boomer generation had known them. That was swearing as it should be: effective, to the point and rare.

It Can Take Years to Recognize Your True Colors

2 Replies

Anyone with grown children surely can recall elementary school field trips to an apple orchard, a local park or a science museum where their kids were assigned to wear matching T-shirts. Decades back, I took it to be a simple, visual way to keep the kids together and prevent the wanderers and rowdies, like my older son, from getting lost, which soothed my maternal anxieties.

But now that I’ve had opportunities to wear my own matching-color uniforms in both professional and volunteer roles, it occurs to me that the T-shirts also provided children with identity and pride, a reassuring sense of place. Like a sports team or a squad of soldiers, the kids felt special. Like they belonged.

My own, more recent experiences with uniforms and matching T-shirts tell a similar story of belonging — and of recognizing our true colors as we age.

Dressing alike at work “builds rapport and makes us feel safe. If there is a sense of conformity, then we feel able to identify ourselves in others, which can bring a level of certainty.”

Dr. Sarah Jane Khalid, METRO.co.uk

Years ago, when I was head of marketing and communications at St. Catherine University, our president had a penchant for morphing the annual launch of the academic year from a standard motivational speech into a stage show, complete with musicians and dancers. I tap danced twice, alongside other game faculty and staff members who saw the assignment as a novel break from our workaday routine.

The president had a canny ability to showcase her subordinates’ creativity while nurturing their loyalty and sense of place. That was most evident the year she ordered hundreds of matching T-shirts, swore department heads to secrecy and then closed campus after her opening-day address so everyone could hop on chartered buses and enjoy a late August day at the Minnesota State Fair.

I still remember the giddy thrill of strolling through the fairgrounds and acknowledging other purple-clad Katies with a wink and a wave. Whether friends or strangers, we felt this unmatched sense of belonging, all because of matching shirts.

Though examples abound about how the potent mix of power and uniforms can be brutally misused, in this case the common colors served the common good. Matching purple T-shirts helped us show the world that we were part of, and proud of, our campus and its women’s college culture.

“It is always an honor to put on a uniform.”

San Diego Padres third baseman Manny Machado

A less happy experience with uniforms occurred recently at the headquarters of Planned Parenthood North Central States when I arrived for my monthly shift to make donor thank you calls. The usual array of protestors was on the public sidewalk as I passed by: kneeling to pray and count rosary beads, pacing and chanting with gruesome signs, yelling at patients as they left their vehicles and before they’d made it safely to the main door.

As a volunteer, you try to tune out the racket. As an older woman, I have learned that temper rarely serves me. But the fall of Roe v. Wade, the misogynistic bills in state legislatures around the country, the sanctimony of Trump’s conservative court that, I believe, will harm democracy even more than the insurrection — all of my simmering resentment boiled over into rage that day when I saw a protestor wearing a hot pink vest, in the exact style and color of Planned Parenthood’s volunteer security team.

I strode past her, toward the building, and then pivoted and marched back. I’d never shouted at a protester, something we are ordered not to do. “Hot pink is our color,” I said, standing inches from her face. “That is the most cynical thing you can do, to impersonate a volunteer and make women think you’re here to help them. You have no idea what people are here for.”

I ignore the woman now when I arrive for my volunteer shifts as an escort or a phone banker, and breathe a sigh of relief when I see someone in the driveway wearing the pink security vest branded with white lettering: smiling, waving, welcoming me inside the gates. Hot pink is our refuge, our code and color — our symbol of collective resistance to a society that increasingly restricts voting, that fears other freedoms and that will not stop with a rollback of abortion rights.

“One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten into serious old age, it’s not nearly as scary when you’re inside it.”

Jane Fonda, “Wiser Than Me” podcast with Julia Louis-Dreyfus

I am 20 years younger than Jane Fonda, one of my icons; and yes, in my darker moments, I do fear growing older, dreading mobility loss the most. Aging is intimidating, and if any person 65 or older tells you differently, take time to ask a few follow-up questions.

Among the health risks for older people, cherry picked from a list of 15: dementia, incontinence, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis, depression, hearing loss and cancer. No wonder the United Nations declared 2021–30 the Decade of Healthy Aging, given the exploding population of older folks worldwide.

One can deny aging, as I am prone to do — stubbornly insisting, for example, that the name of my blog remain “The Middle Stages” (“Do you plan to live to 130?” one sarcastic reader inquired). So, it’s no surprise that I’ve resisted participating in what I’ve derisively called the “old people” classes at Lifetime Fitness, the facility I joined for free once I qualified for Medicare.

During my first class in the Aurora “community,” Lifetime’s program for active seniors, I announced to anyone who would listen — and likely more than a few folks who didn’t care — that I’d transferred recently from CorePower, the youthful yoga chain founded in Denver. When I didn’t return to my Aurora class for weeks, the front desk at Lifetime reached out to entice me back with, yes, a colored T-shirt.

In contrast to the industrial black-and-gray shirts pedaled to younger members of the club, the Aurora shirts are a calming shade of blue. Would this relegate me, a former fitness instructor, to forever exercising among slow-moving seniors?

“Healthy, active, social,” the back of my blue shirt reads. I swallowed my pride and wore the T-shirt to an Aurora program full of bald and graying heads, a Pilates class that acknowledged realities like foot neuropathy and shrinking muscle mass. I was one of four people wearing the blue T-shirt in class that day, and like the schoolkids of decades past, that helped me feel at home.

“People eventually show their true colors,” the saying goes. Mine are now hot pink for social action and a soft sky blue for safer, gentler physical activities that encourage both self-acceptance and self-care. All of us 65 and older are journeying toward a future that none of us can see. It’s a different sort of field trip, complete with matching T-shirts.

It is the place where I belong.