Shrinking
“Shrinking.” noun: a popular series on Apple TV.
“Shrinking.” adjective: becoming smaller in size or amount.
Lately, the word brings the TV show to mind first. Harrison Ford, Jason Segel, and Jessica Williams play therapists sharing a small private practice. I’m quite fond of it. It manages to be funny while taking on friendship, parenting, grief, and the frequent ethical angle. I really look forward to each episode.
But there is also a more personal meaning these days: becoming smaller in size. It turns out that is not just a definition; it is my life.
The older I get, the smaller my world becomes.
Last fall I traveled to my high school reunion, only the second trip I’ve taken since the pandemic. Both trips have been to small-town northern Wisconsin. Travel has become such a physical ordeal that I now approach it with the strategic planning of a minor military operation. Fortunately, I had enough frequent flier miles to upgrade to first class each time. I am not sure I would have survived the cattle-car-in-the-back alternative. Or at least with not much dignity; my claustrophobic tendencies would likely have taken up too much attention.
Closer to home, my world has settled into a familiar circuit. The UPS store for my Amazon packages. Three grocery stores in regular rotation. And then the medical offices. So many medical offices! I seem to have assembled quite an impressive team of specialists, each responsible for a different body part that is no longer performing as originally advertised. Most of these businesses and offices are in North Eugene where I live. My ophthalmologist, pain doc, and therapist are in South Eugene.
Yes, I have a therapist. At this age. I still have issues.
There is also my daily walk, which remains essential for body, mind and spirit. Not that long ago I was walking three miles a day, more than a thousand miles a year. These days I manage about one mile, often pausing halfway to stretch and negotiate with my back. Spinal stenosis and its accompanying nerve pain have reset expectations. They have also reduced how often I attend protests or head out with a camera, both once reliable parts of my routine.
And then there is my height. I used to measure 5 foot 7 at my annual physical. Last month, even standing as tall as I could, I came in just under 5 foot 5. Apparently, I am not only aging, I am compressing. Yes, I have osteoporosis. I do not like this. In high school I was among the shortest in my class, often the last chosen for teams. I remember the feelings of inadequacy that resulted. While I am no longer being chosen for teams, the world is still a different place for a short man. It always has been.
What I am left with, it seems, is a smaller map. Fewer miles traveled, fewer places to go, fewer things I can easily do. Even a shorter reach upward.
Despite everything, though, I seem to be getting a better look at what’s right in front of me.
And if necessary, I suppose, I can always stand on tiptoe.
Soundtrack Suggestion
Well, I don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
‘Round here
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
To love
(“Short People” — Randy Newman)
Everything Continues
I just finished reading Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss and a Really Long Walk. At first, I thought this to be sort of a rather odd title. But it turns out to be spot on.
The author is Lauren Kessler, who lives here in Eugene, Oregon, or at least somewhere in the countryside around our city. I have known of her, heard her name now and again over the years. She has written several books and is considered a local literary presence. I had not read any of her earlier works, but last fall I came across her three-part series on food insecurity in our new, local online newspaper. I was struck by the depth of her reporting and the vividness of her writing. She placed herself in the story, not as a distant observer but as a participant, and what emerged were word pictures that stayed with me.
At the time, I learned that she would be publishing a new book in February, so I reserved a Kindle copy to be delivered on the publication date.
So that is how I came to know of the book. But I admit that I was also drawn to it, and ordered it, because of its promised discussions of love and loss. If you know anything about my writing, you know that I return to those topics with some regularity here in Musings. As it turns out, those themes are inseparable from the journey she undertakes.
The “really long walk” that Kessler documents is her journey along the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain, and concludes at Santiago de Compostela, a famed Roman Catholic cathedral. The “love and loss” in the title refer to the twin deaths of her husband Tom, to cancer, and eight months later, her daughter Lizzie, to a drug overdose.
After these back-to-back earth-shaking tragedies, she writes that she desired “a solitary, immersive adventure, a physical, logistical, emotional challenge that would catapult me out of my life.” Prior to this, she had little familiarity with the Camino. She did almost no research about its history or even about how to navigate it. She notes, somewhat wryly, that she had not even seen Martin Sheen’s 2010 film The Way, a story about this very journey that nearly everyone she met along the path seemed to know well.
I came to the book with some prior familiarity. I had seen the film, read Shirley MacLaine’s earlier account, The Camino, and at one point in my life had even considered making the journey myself. That background did not diminish the experience of reading Kessler’s account. If anything, it sharpened my awareness of what she chose to notice, and what she chose to leave unexplained.
The book is organized in a way that draws the reader in completely, or at least that is how it worked for me. Alternating chapters follow the chronological progress of her walk, interspersed with non-time-linear accounts of the lives and deaths of her husband and daughter. Early on we learn that her husband’s torturous path through cancer led him to make use of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.
Kessler frames this work as a memoir, and that it is. But as I read, I could not help but experience it as something akin to a form of ethnography, an inquiry not only into a journey across a physical landscape, but into the social and emotional domains of grief. What emerges is a set of richly detailed first-person narratives, both of the walk itself and of the intimate, difficult terrain of illness, addiction, dying, death and loss. She observes not only the world around her but also her own responses, occasionally with a level of candor that does not place her in the most favorable light.
One passage in particular stayed with me. She describes her reactions to friends and acquaintances who attempted to express sympathy and support. She found herself recoiling from the superficial, hollow-sounding sentiments such as “sorry for your loss.” The observation follows from an earlier, critical blog post of hers entitled Performative Condolence.
I found myself sitting with her perspective for a while. Not because I agreed with it entirely, but because I recognized it contained some element of truth. Grief unsettles not only the person who carries it, but also those who try to approach it. We reach for familiar words, knowing even as we speak them that they will fall painfully short. Yet we offer them anyway because, for most of us, silence feels worse.
Kessler does not provide a tidy resolution to that discomfort. What she offers instead is something more useful: a sustained, honest account of what it is like to keep moving forward when the life you knew has been irrevocably altered. The walk becomes less a quest for answers than a way of continuing.
In that sense, the title is not strange at all. Everything changes. And then, somehow, of course, everything continues.
Soundtrack Suggestion
As I walk this land with broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion
What becomes of the broken-hearted
Who had love that’s now departed?
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind
(“What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” — Jimmy Ruffin)
Sardines in the Back Bar: My High School Reunion
I graduated from high school in 1965, right in the middle of that turbulent, unforgettable decade. Last month, I made the cross-country trek from Eugene, Oregon, to Rice Lake, Wisconsin, for my 60-year reunion.
Traveling to rural northern Wisconsin isn’t easy. These days, I take two days just to get there. This time I flew to Minneapolis via Seattle, rented a car, and drove to a nearby hotel in the dark. Car rentals, of course, come with their own set of challenges. I drive a 2020 Subaru Crosstrek at home, so when I found myself behind the wheel of a 2025 Nissan Rogue, I had to pause in the airport lot, dig out the 600-page manual, and acquaint myself with the vehicle’s basics. Eventually, I made it to the airport Holiday Inn Express, tired but in one piece.
Day two was the drive to Rice Lake. I stopped in Menomonie to see my friend “BA,” a classmate I’ve known since I was 12. We’ve been in steady contact — often over Zoom during and since the pandemic — so our conversation flowed easily, even if it wasn’t about anything in particular. Politics and religion are off-limits between us, so our chatter resembled a Seinfeld-style “conversation about nothing.” Still, it was grounding to reconnect before the busy weekend ahead.
On day three, I had breakfast with another classmate, “CJ.” We first reconnected at our 40th reunion and in recent times have grown a bit closer through regular Zoom calls. Our conversations are different from most — personal, probing, unafraid of difficult topics like family dynamics, belonging, and the choices that shaped our lives. Sitting across from her in person gave those exchanges a richness I rarely find elsewhere.
That evening was the first group gathering at a local pizza place. I had gone in with low expectations, and still, the chaotic setup surprised me: thirty or so people crammed into the back corner of a bar with no clear plan for how to mingle or sit together. Consequently, BA and I retreated to a booth for dinner before cautiously rejoining the group once the crowd thinned. To my relief, I found a few familiar faces and even received a warm hug from a female classmate who had been reading my writings over the years. Those small moments of recognition helped balance out the initial frustration.
The next morning, BA and I met again for breakfast, this time joined by “WJ.” Our conversation took a surprising turn when, at one point, he asked, “Do you believe in vaccines?” The question startled me, but to my relief, all three of us agreed. Still, it was a reminder of the cultural divide I often feel when I return to Rice Lake — a blue-leaning visitor navigating a visit to a deeply red part of the country.
Saturday night was the main event at Lehman’s Supper Club, the classic Rice Lake venue for special occasions. Drinks started at five, but I stuck with ginger ale while classmates sipped their cocktails. I chatted briefly with a few people, but the connections felt fleeting. Dinner was buffet-style, serviceable but unremarkable, and I found myself at a table where conversation was scarce. By 7:30, much of the room had emptied out.
