A View of a Garden Ready and Waiting: Sunday musings…5/25/2025
1. 64. Happy 64th Birthday to my brother Randall who is almost certainly on the upper deck of his home away from home, sipping coffee and dreaming avian dreams of glory.
2. Orioles. One of the wonders of our home here on the North Coast of the U.S. is the annual arrival of a flock of Baltimore Orioles, a real bird, not just a perpetually underperforming baseball team. This year our early summer visitors seem to be channeling their MLB brethren: they have failed to show up for the game.
“Where are my Orioles?” Beth and several of her birding friends have been lamenting the absence of our colorful friends. We’ve not been able to discern the reason, though we all surmise that it may be due to our unseasonably cold and wet spring. Perhaps they are channeling the “snowbirds” of NE Ohio, the smart ones at least who looked at the weather and stayed down south.
Plates of grape jelly sit unattended as we await their return.
3. Sprezzatura? Beth and I are prepping for our next great adventure, this one a trip to Italy with our great friends Bill and Nancy. We four were married a month apart almost 40 years ago. Bill has been after us to visit Italy, the country of his ancestors, for some time now. An experienced visitor to Italy, Bill has assembled an itinerary presented in a Powerpoint and outlining our agenda. Historic sites, restaurants, wine tastings, accommodations and logistics, all there.
In Italian!
Why “sprezzatura” (nonchalant, convention-flouting)? Bill is also an experienced packer when it comes to Italy. Conscious of the space limitations of the cars he will drive as he squires us around the “mid-south” of the country, Bill has reached out no fewer than 3 times to ask about our luggage status. He also had some “helpful” advice for me regarding appropriate garb for an elderly-adjacent American tourist in Italy. While very practical (“it’s gonna be hot in southern Italy in June”), his advice is hardly sprezzatura (“men don’t wear shorts”).
There’s a strong sense of deja vu in all of this. When Beth took me along for her grand Portugal riding adventure I was very concerned about looking like an American tourist. 57 years old at the time I made a bunch of purchases, many towards the effort to look like a “native”. Now, at 65 and facing the Italian summer? I don’t know if I will be able to describe my style for the trip as particularly sprezzatura, but I say for sure it’s gonna be practical.
Shorts take up less room in the suitcase, too.
4. Durable. My longstanding interest in health and activity monitors has flared once again, this time in a fairly comical way as has been my wont. When my Biostrap became non-functional–the company has decided that it is a research endeavor now, no longer interested in the individual customer–I found myself adrift. Honestly, as silly as that sounds, that’s really how I felt. I’ve come to really enjoy waking up and checking on some of the hidden aspects of stuff like HRV and basal HR, PO2 and sleep stages, and comparing them with how I feel upon awakening, and I without my Biostrap I kinda missed that.
This is not in any way a new phenomenon. Beginning with my beloved Nike Fuel band more than a decade ago, I’ve been deeply interested in not only the area in general, but also in the fairly meaningless minutiae about the differences between the devices themselves. For those not so afflicted, what matters is not so much the actual readings that one obtains from your tracker, but rather trends that you uncover and track to other parts of your Healthspan plan (diet, alcohol, exercise, stress, etc.). All you really need is a device that is unobtrusive enough to ignore, and the willingness to wear it.
Nevertheless, off I went on yet another “journey” into the weeds of tracker land. This time I had the dubious advantage of all things internet and search. Dubious, of course, because there is so much more opinion out there than anything that could be described as solid fact. I did manage to find a couple of reasonably knowledgeable folks who were close enough to me philosophically to be helpful and to save me a little bit of time. Fitbits and Apple watches and Whoops and Ouras, all mixed in with smaller niche players.
In the end it boiled down to Whoop vs. Oura. Wrist strap or ring. I promised myself just one. Honest. Really tried. But just like the reviews, all of which said basically the same thing (Whoop for activity, Oura for sleep), I found that just one wasn’t going to really replace the Biostrap. I started out with a Whoop, felt I needed more granular night time information, and ordered an Oura. Just in time to learn that the latest version of the Whoop would be out 3 days after my ring was delivered and would probably handle everything.
Foiled, despite my good intentions.
I have no idea how it’s gonna play out. For the moment I am parsing the differences in the information I’m getting from each and hoping that one or the other will be sufficient. Honestly, it’s still one part true intent as part of my Healthspan project, and one part pure hobby. I’ll keep you posted.
5. Friendship. Last week’s family wedding in the Low Country was all the more fun because it brought together bunches of friends, men and women, who got to enjoy the festivities together. If you’ve been reading my drivel over the years you know that friendship is one of my pet topics. I find reason to return to it again and again. I am very fortunate in that my siblings and their spouses are also my friends, so the wedding and surrounding activities brought together not just family but also friends.
Watching, I was reminded of some of the differences between male and female friendships. We’ve covered this before, but it’s always interesting how this particular truth bears up under the test of time: men and women enact their friendships very differently. In a nutshell, women tend to anchor their friendships around shared feelings. When you watch a group of female friends they spend most of their time interacting face-to-face. While close proximity always makes for stronger friendships and better interactions, the ability to share feelings over the phone, by text, and through any number of social outlets seems to make facilitating friendships a little easier.
Men, on the other hand, form friendships and bond over shared experiences. Yes, for sure as we age and (presumably) mature, we too solidify our friendships through the sharing of feelings, however sparingly. But it is in these shared experiences that our friendships blossom and grow. Indeed, if you watch men in the act of friendship, after the handshake or bro hug of greeting, we can most often be found standing shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face. Long stretches of silence are interspersed with breaks of high energy interaction. Watch us; it’s just like that.
This rather fundamental difference in both the orientation and “activity” of “doing” friendship is often put forth as the reason women are typically so much better at making friends as adults of any age. Once we’ve left the structured environments of our youth, the locker rooms and barracks and training grounds, we lose the easy access to experiences for us to share. This is one of the reasons that CrossFit found so much success with men (and women to be sure) of pretty much any and all ages: the shared experience of (mild) suffering in pursuit of a common goal, all occurring at the same time and place. Men and women worked out side by side (it helps us make friends with women, too!), and then we all talked about it. (IYKYK)
This week’s Sunday Times Magazine has a story about a man who has many guy friends, but wonders why they don’t hang out together. He takes an incredibly circuitous route to the conclusion that anybody paying the least bit of attention over the years comes to as soon as they think about it: he, we, put way too little emphasis and assign way too little importance on the blocking and tackling of friendships already made. It was so easy when we were younger. It just was. Everyone was there, all the time, doing the same stuff as you were, right there. We had school and class, sports or clubs, silly kid jobs which felt kinda like school or sports or clubs.
Real jobs with real responsibilities could be an obstacle for sure, and work friendships have all kinds of booby traps (hiring and firing, corporate hierarchy, etc.). Looking back, the stuff we all tended to blame, getting married and having kids, was actually really more of the same; we were just sharing a different space with the other men in and around our lives. We went to games and concerts and plays, they just weren’t OUR games and and concerts and plays. But we were still there, standing side by side, being friends.
It’s what happens next, after the kids have graduated, after you’ve become an empty nester that it really becomes an issue. No longer is there an institutional shoulder to shoulder experience. The garden analogy is an apt one for friendship. A garden requires tending and so, too, does a friendship. Left untended, left to chance, it is certainly possible for a garden to flourish. All too often both gardens and friendships ignored too long have a beauty that is but a cherished memory, seen only with the mind’s eye.
For all of my literary legerdemain when addressing the ongoing challenges of friendship in advanced adulthood, my prose can hardly be described as actionable advice. Today’s NYT column authored by Sam Graham-Felsen, is quite the opposite. Adrift and lonely despite a very happy home life with spouse and child, Sam enlists the help of a couple of podcasters, Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter, who provide a very practical “how to water your friendships” guide they call TCS: text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly. The hack as described by Karo is to create a regular event that happens automatically. It doesn’t matter what that event is, only that it happens on schedule.
I really like everything about this. The garden analogy is one I have used often when discussing friendship. An ongoing need to work on friendships no matter how old or young they may be. All three of the available contact methods engaged: text, call, see. It probably doesn’t matter what intervals you choose (they go weekly, monthly, quarterly), only that you set up a general schedule and keep to it. Especially the “see” part, scheduled in ink in everyone’s calendar. I like that very much.
We men are still lousy at making new friends in adulthood unless we are somehow thrown together in a way that we can have those shared experiences. The women in our lives still crush us in this endeavor. For sure we should take advantage of any and all opportunities to make a new friend if one arises. You can never have enough friends. But we DO have friends. We have a lifetime’s worth of friends to call upon, many of whom are just as ready as we are to get back in and tend to the garden of those friendships. It’s not that we don’t need new friends, it’s that we cannot really say that we don’t HAVE any friends.
We all have a lifetime’s worth of friends. We just need to pick up that watering can and get to work.
I’ll see you next week…
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