Category Archives: Life Purpose

Happy New Year: No Fakery, No Frills

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If I were writing a traditional New Year’s letter — the greetings that few people send anymore, now that photo-filled Shutterfly and Snapfish cards have replaced the lengthy recountings of successes and celebrations — I would focus on what went well in 2025. Like a Facebook post, my letter would paint a colorful picture of the past 12 months that is exuberant but only partly true.

Because it wouldn’t describe what has been difficult. Or sad. What has made me feel old and out of touch. Where I’ve been wrong, or felt wronged, or made decisions that I regret. The letter would broadcast, even brag, rather than reflect.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

As I write this, I’ve been home alone for two weeks over the Christmas holiday, mothering a tripod cat and two dogs who demand multiple walks a day. Outings with friends and a Christmas Eve gathering with my daughter-in-law’s extended family have been welcome distractions, but mostly I have kept my own company.

“I won’t feel happy all the time this holiday season,” a commentator wrote in a reflection about the 60th anniversary of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the timeless tale of an awkward boy who manages “to find hope” amid a season of mixed blessings. Author Abigail Rosenthal describes Charlie Brown as “anxious and depressed,” employing a lingo that today’s readers will understand. I find him to be honest and touchingly human, unafraid to acknowledge that this weighted holiday carries more expectations — whether religious or secular — than people can possibly achieve.

In that spirit, here’s what 2025 has really felt like for me. How it’s been, rather than what I want you to believe.

The first grandchild

How could the birth of Arthur on July 22nd be anything but a blessing? My younger son is a proud and attentive father; the growing baby came nine days early, and was a full pound and a half smaller than his dad, making labor and delivery relatively smooth; and he is healthy, alert and well loved. We are lucky.

One of the first times I fed him, as Arthur was transitioning to a bottle, I thought of malnourished babies in Gaza. When I left my son’s house, exhausted, after a five-hour babysitting shift, I wondered how overwhelmed, under-resourced single parents manage. Reviewing the photos I take every time I see Arthur, I push away thoughts of all that could go wrong, recalling my sister’s warning when I was pregnant with my first son: Once you have a child, you are always vulnerable.

What you love, you can lose. As a grandmother, in a role consistently described as relaxed and carefree (“you get to send the kids home!”), I didn’t anticipate feeling so unsure of myself, so afraid.

Heeding advice from my peers who became grandparents at a younger age, I have sought to be a helpful, loving presence. But transitioning from Mom to Grandma hasn’t come easily or naturally — I hadn’t held a baby in 30 years — and I’ve had to learn when to bide my time and bite my tongue.

“Do the dishes,” one young mother advised my older son as he prepared for his first visit with his nephew.

A traditional New Year’s letter would extol only the joys of being a grandma, and there are many. But it wouldn’t describe the generational tensions between how we Baby Boomers, the original helicopter parents, raised our kids and what our Millennial offspring expect today:

  • My son insisted that any relative who wanted to be responsible for Arthur’s care enroll in a grandparenting class at Amma Parenting, a women-owned center in an upscale suburb of Minneapolis where he and his partner had taken a daylong parenting class.
  • Given that my sons were circumcised right after birth, which my father recommended, I had to learn the particulars of cleaning an uncircumcised baby boy — and hide my dismay when my son described the procedure as genital mutilation.
  • I’ve abandoned the multicolored, gender-neutral baby blanket I was knitting because babies no longer sleep with blankets. Who knew? Recounting to my son how we tucked him in with a “blanky” and stuffed animals, I was startled by his abrupt response: “Arthur could suffocate.” Today’s babies wear a sleep sack and lie in a barren crib to prevent SIDS, the sudden infant death syndrome that took my husband’s second oldest brother.

What sometimes feels like zealous and unnecessary instruction — how to hold the baby, clean his bottles, push his stroller on a bumpy sidewalk — actually ensures that his parents will entrust me with Arthur’s care. In moments of insecurity, I wonder whether my son found me inadequate as a mother. Or has parenting just progressed and changed?

The only truth that matters is this: If I want a loving, respectful relationship with my grandson, I must set aside my ego and adapt. Healthy aging requires a willingness to learn from our grown children — as well as from our past mistakes.

A period of adjustment

My retirement in September and a deeper dive into volunteering are the other big news for my New Year’s greeting. As with the birth of my grandson, many hearty congratulations have come my way.

But for what? I enjoyed my career. I found purpose in work. It lifted me out of a difficult period in my 20s when I was floundering and making risky, unhealthy choices. And, combined with my husband’s astute investing, the income got both of our sons through college and allowed us to help with down payments on their homes.

Now, as a healthy (so far) retiree of comfortable means, I am supposed to build a life of leisure that runs contrary to my nature. Friends urge me to travel and read more books; and though I am doing more of each — including a first-time trip to London last April — I am noticing a cautiousness that has stifled me throughout adulthood, a tendency to default to the familiar.

Family wedding
June in Chicago

A leisurely ride on Amtrak to visit friends in Chicago and a stop in North Carolina last spring for my niece’s wedding enroute to see my older son in London were enjoyable, relationship-building experiences. But they didn’t stretch me. I didn’t challenge myself to take a solo train trip, which I promised myself I’d do after retirement. I didn’t immerse myself in a different culture or venture on a Civil Rights tour of the south, which long has intrigued me.

Even the warm-weather bike rides that I have loved for decades were on familiar pathways this past year. I never found time to haul my hybrid or road bike to trails and small towns throughout Minnesota, chatting with the locals along the way.

As for reading, it’s way past time to set aside the white women’s fiction that I enjoy and toe-dip into stories that will take me to new places, written by people whose backgrounds and perspectives differ from my own. Here again, I am learning from my younger son, who reads books only by authors from other cultures or with identities he doesn’t share as a middle-class, cisgender white male.

Reading widely means moving beyond your usual comfort zone to understand different human experiences and ideas. 

I thought retirement, given enough resources, would help me feel safe and secure. But challenge and ambition are what I always sought at work. Four months into freeing myself from paid employment, I recognize that the price of less stressful living can be sameness and stagnation — especially at an age when society warehouses seniors into dorm-like housing, walling them off from a community that could enrich elders’ lives and, in turn, benefit from their experience.

Not for me. Not yet. I am determined to live larger in 2026. How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?

You Can’t Know a Place Until You’ve Been There

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Leading up to my vacation in mid-April — where my modest goals were to unplug, hike, read and relax — I loved watching people’s faces when I told them where I was going.

“Paducah.”

Is that in Kentucky?

“Yes, Mitch McConnell territory.”

So, what draws you there?

In truth, it was a friend recommending the arts scene and the National Quilt Museum that got me thinking about Paducah (and trying to talk my husband into it). He and I had debated about Memphis, Santa Fe and Asheville, North Carolina, but what we really wanted was a manageable, low-key place in which we could escape city traffic and return to our small-town roots — but still have some interesting things to do. If that meant two deep-blue Minnesota liberals would venture into solid red Kentucky, so be it.

Paducah, Kentucky, sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, and had a catastrophic flood in 1937.

Paducah, the smallest of the nine UNESCO Creative Cities in the United States, seemed to fit what we were looking for. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and it cites Paducah (along with Santa Fe) as a notable City of Crafts and Folk Art. We found that to be true, during a five-day visit that included:

The population of McCracken County, for which Paducah is the county seat, is 67,400. But to find this array of culture in a town of 27,000 — cafés and restaurants, locally owned art shops, bars with bands and solo artists, a river history museum, a downtown movie theater screening Civil War — was astonishing on the southern edge of the Midwest.

Two sides of Paducah

And that’s my point. Had we simply driven through downtown, where the Republican Party headquarters sits squarely in a business district pushing to make a post-COVID comeback, I’d have confirmed my stereotypes about Kentucky (which still calls itself a commonwealth) and kept going. But we got out of the car and stayed a few days — meeting locals, walking the streets, riding bikes, renting a 130-year-old brick “shotgun house” in a weedy, working-class part of town a fair distance from the Holiday Inn where the quilters stay.

We frequented an “all are welcome here” coffeehouse, Etcetera, one of the few eating establishments that didn’t shut down on Sunday in this heavily Christian town. (The closest Unitarian church, which I would have liked to attend, was 97 miles away in Clarksville, Tennessee.) Etcetera attracts colorfully tattooed young people and has a resident cat who sleeps in a heated little house on the patio. The backyard neighbor keeps two lovingly restored Studebakers in his garage, and I was only too happy to hang out and read while he chatted up my husband about classic cars.

Owen Kim Blaisdell, Paducah Ambassador
One of 60-plus floodwall murals

In short, we found our people: the retired schoolteacher outside the Republican headquarters who directed us to Kirchoff’s, the best bakery downtown, with the bonus of a women’s clothing section in the adjoining coffeeshop; the helpful owner and bike mechanic at BikeWorld near the 135-acre Bob Noble Park (also close to the 55-acre Stuart Nelson Park, once the segregated recreation spot for Blacks and now host to the annual Emancipation Celebration every August 8); the young couple restoring the shotgun house next to our AirBnB, who’d wait to blast their music until we left.

We met other folks with whom we were more careful, like the proprietor of a cramped antique shop who piped up when I saw a campaign sign from 1980 in which Ronald Reagan commanded that we “make America great again.”

“I didn’t know that all started with him,” I told my husband. “I thought ‘It’s Morning in America’ was Reagan’s theme.” The proprietor, standing tall, proclaimed Reagan to be a great president. She showed no interest in our viewpoints, likely detecting our disdain, and said her daughter is a Democrat “only because they give her money.” We smiled and moved on to the Four Rivers Corvette Club showcase across the street.

Dogs have to wait at Kirchoff’s Bakery & Deli, too, where a line stretches out the door on Saturday mornings.

On those blissful early mornings when I sat with my journal and a fresh cup of coffee, I pondered how Paducah felt different from my heart-of-the-city home in St. Paul, Minnesota:

  • No recycling containers, anywhere. We even asked a cop.
  • No apparent mass transit system, though I did see one bus stop.
  • No food co-op; and granted, Paducah is small, but Northfield, Grand Marais and St. Peter, Minnesota, all have them.
  • No bookstore downtown and likely no zoning laws. Parking lots take up a lot of precious space.
  • No consistent infrastructure for walking or bicycling. Sidewalks in our neighborhood were in disrepair, and some just ended mid-block. The only painted bike lanes I found were out by BikeWorld.
  • No recovery meetings for women, though the sunburned men wearing bill caps and work boots welcomed me warmly to their meeting. The sayings and the steps were all comfortably familiar — “just spoken with more of a twang,” I told them with a laugh.

Those men’s generosity, their acceptance, helped me avoid a head space where I crossed my arms and complained about what Paducah isn’t or what it lacks (“another Dollar General store?”). That’s too self-satisfied, too sanctimonious, plus it’s the antithesis (or should be) of why we travel. Not to confirm our ways of thinking or insist that others conform to them, but to challenge our habits and beliefs, expose ourselves to something new.

Quilting artist Barbara Ann McCraw has an exhibit at the National Quilt Museum called “Life Stories.” Twenty-two percent of Paducah’s population is Black.

No sooner had I decided to observe rather than judge the differences in Paducah, than I was confronted for what felt like the umpteenth time by a person who declared they could never live in Minnesota because it’s so cold. “How can you stand it up there?” Try as I might to describe the beauty and variety of the four seasons, to explain that you learn to dress for the cold, to cite the social services and amenities that our high tax rate affords us: I could see it. They would visibly shut down.

Whether on the plane, or at Ann Patchett’s bookstore, Paranassus Books (our one stop in Nashville), or in a conversation where I was trying to show genuine interest in Paducah and its confluence of rivers or the stunning Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area that straddles Kentucky and Tennessee, the person who had a preconceived notion about Minnesota clearly wasn’t interested in learning more.

And that’s a shame, because I’d like to show them my home state with the same joy, vigor and gracious hospitality that they showed me theirs. I never thought I would visit Kentucky. I’m too mad at Mitch McConnell and the legacy he’s left us of a conservative six-member super majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. But if politics were a reason to avoid travel, I’d go nowhere but Minnesota in the Upper Midwest.

Beauty is easy to find in Paducah.

If Kentuckians want to write off Minnesota for the weather, the best I can say is, “Your loss.” I’m glad I visited Paducah, grateful to have pushed past a stereotype. The docent in the National Quilt Museum described the difference between 18 feet and 18 inches in examining the artwork on their walls. “At 18 feet,” she said, “you see the vision. At 18 inches, you see technique.”

From 18 feet away — or, actually, 744 miles — my vision of Paducah was that of a backwater, no place I’d ever care to visit. From 18 inches, right up close, it was a special community, with a lively arts scene and friendly people. A town I would return to, and one I recommend.

Weather or Not: The Rituals of Daily Dog Walks

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How many health habits — physical, spiritual, emotional — have I promised myself I would stick to every day? Pushups and neck stretching, journal writing and meditation: They feel good when you do them, but time gets away from me, and then I forget until the next good intention comes along.

Not so with dog walks. Ever since my family rescued our first dog (the late, great Skip) in 2000, followed by sweet Lucy in 2003, I have dog walked every morning — sick or healthy — without fail, unless I am out of town. When people ask how often I walk my household’s current dogs, Mia and Gabby, I can honestly tell them: “Every day, any weather.”

A recent article in the Washington Post, reprinted in my local newspaper, urged readers not to “skip your dog’s walk” or assume that letting them out in a fenced backyard would suffice. The reasoning shows the human benefits of dog walks, too.

  • Dogs need exercise and don’t pursue it on their own.
  • They need the mental stimulation of seeing — and smelling, always smelling — new things.
  • And they need “human interaction,” which I would reframe as bonding. You develop a relationship with your dogs when you’re outside together every day.

Though I don’t always want to leave my house early in the morning, I am always glad I did once I get out there. Putting my feet on the street and my face in fresh air is as good for my mental health as it is for theirs. Once Gabby does her down-dog stretches, or I see light softening the sky, we suit up and show up. It’s time to go.

Mia (left), Animal Humane Society, born in 2014; and Gabby, Standing Rock Indian Reservation, born in 2018.

The walks go better when I stay calm.

I like to stride when I walk: head up, glutes pumping, spine long and straight. At 66, I am grateful to be able to move so fluidly. Striding uninterrupted rarely works with leashed dogs, however. “Guardians need to take the animals’ lead,” says the dog-walking article, rather than dragging our pets along on our fast-paced walks or runs or on a bike ride — I shudder whenever I see it — with a leashed dog straining to keep pace.

“If your dog wants to sniff every blade of grass, then that’s what they want to do on their walk,” says a dog-training advocate quoted in the Washington Post piece, which, tellingly, never uses the term dog “owner.” My morning dog walks are for Mia and Gabby, not for me. If I want pure exercise, I can schedule that for another time.

Sometimes I imagine the dog walks as a metaphor for life. When the girls pull on their expandable leashes or go off in different directions, forcing me to pirouette in the middle of the sidewalk to keep us all from getting tangled, I liken the aggravation to the pressures I navigate each day. Whether it’s a project that has hit a roadblock, or an imagined slight from a friend, or my perpetually overbooked calendar — it will all smooth out eventually if I respond more than react.

So it is with my willful, unruly dogs. Praise and positive reinforcement, as well as a few consistent commands (“too icy” during the winter, when an unplowed alley looks unsafe), go much further than yelling at them or letting myself get exasperated. I can breathe deeply and watch the sunrise, or admire an artful garden, or look in a shop window while the dogs scratch and sniff. That makes the walk more interesting for them and much more pleasant for me.

My husband loves the New Yorker cartoon that shows a mid-sized dog on a leash with a thought bubble: “Always good dog, never great dog.” Our dogs are great. It’s hard to overstate how much they mean to me. If I praise Mia for listening rather than yelling at her for stopping at every tree, if I kneel and stroke Gabby’s chest while she squirms at a long red light, if I let them visit their regular haunts in our neighborhood — the yard with food scraps outside the fence, the husky with the blue eyes who never barks — then I am allowing them some agency, acknowledging their intelligence.

It isn’t always my agenda; that practice serves me in relationships with humans, too.

Sometimes, the dogs see a cat.

Our neighbor, Tim, walks his cat around the block once a day on a thin nylon rope, and Gabby, especially, goes manic behind the fence that surrounds our backyard. Installed by the previous homeowners, the wrought-iron fence allows her to see who is walking along the side street of our corner property — which, in my view (not to mention the dog’s), is critical.

I feel for the dogs behind those tall, wooden privacy fences who can hear and smell other animals but can’t see them. They paw frantically at the ground, and stick their snouts beneath the gate, baring their teeth but mainly wanting to engage. Which is what I long to tell the owners when they open the back door to yell at the dog for being just that. A dog.

We see the occasional roaming cat on our morning walks. Mia and Gabby bark and lunge while the cat hisses and arches its back, calling to mind the phrase “fighting like cats and dogs.” Rabbits are prey, not to taunt but to kill. Gabby goes into hunting pose, keenly alert, her tail straight up in the air, when she sees a rabbit freeze in self-defense. Her jaw opens and closes as if preparing to chomp down fast. It’s pure instinct on display.

Drawing by Anna Frodesiak (Creative Commons)

A rez dog whose relatives still hunt for most meals, Gabby has killed rabbits in our backyard. She’s even ferreted out a few bunnies in alley bushes on our morning walks, carrying the poor things home squirming or flopped dead between those warmed-up jaws.

We saw a coyote one summer morning, standing in the middle of the street. At first, I thought it was a long-legged, shaggy dog without a leash. But it looked too wary and thin to be domesticated, and the coyote lost interest in making a meal out of my smaller dog, Mia, once it saw me. Instead, it turned and trotted toward the river while I calculated how many busy roads it had to cross.

The beauty and rhythms of nature remain evident, even in the city, if you take the time to notice — contemplating the outsized impact we humans have had on the planet, as though we owned it, holding back leashed dogs that yearn to run.