Let's Row Together

Feeling frisky as life in my 70s transitions. As this happens, my life's core aspects still anchor and sustain the person I've become.

I’m feeling frisky.

Oops! Perhaps “frisky” isn’t a word an old (er) woman like me should use to describe herself.

Trust me on this one: “frisky” for me isn’t the same as what leapt to your mind when you read that word.

I’m not feeling flirty. Nor playful. Nor teasing.

And I’m not in search of a mate.

What I am is energized. Eager for the renewal I’ve felt coming my way for quite some time.

Where will this take me? What will happen along the way to toss me onto a course that I can’t imagine now? Nobody can know, least of all me. And that’s okay. I’ve navigated transitions before without finding a map to guide me. I found my way then, and I will this time.

And like my walks in Venice, I’ll enjoy getting lost along the way.

I’m entering this time of transition after I launched my two books – Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside and Touching Home in China; in search of missing girlhoods. Writing, editing and producing them, marketing them, serving them up to media, and traveling to talk about them has consumed the last dozen years of my life.

So, my new task is to meaningfully fill the void left behind.

This week I took a few baby steps; the first one, impulsive; the next one, precipitated by my cat’s sudden health issue; and two others, both anticipated, now activated.

For starters, I fulfilled my long-held hope of owning a hybrid car. The car I drive should align with my fervent climate advocacy for a just transition to a fossil-free future. Finally, it does.

Here’s my video of my first transition, as the honk evokes my impulsive decision to snap up a seldom-driven 2007 Prius while donating my 1999 Toyota Camry to a local public radio station. It’s a win-win: I own a hybrid car and my NPR station - confronting federal funding cuts and a slackening in sponsorship dollars - gets to keep whatever money my car gives them. My car was running fine when I waved goodbye to it on Wednesday afternoon, so hopefully it brings them needed case … and me a tax deduction.

Another big transition is a week away, this one involving my home. For the first time in three years, I’ll be living alone. Well, Cassie, my cat, will be with me, but no person will share my relatively small space.

Cassie is foreground, with her late brother, Orion, tucked in behind her.

But just as this transition is underway, Cassie frightened me with a health issue. Yesterday afternoon, she experienced a violent seizure, her first. This was also the first time I’ve watched any animal or person shake uncontrollably. With Cassie, I saw her legs hang limp. Forty minutes later, we were in her vet’s office – thank you, Heal Veterinary Clinic – where her physical exam showed all of her vitals are good. By then, she had her legs under her. Blood and urine analysis are ongoing.

Now, I’m on alert for another seizure. Let’s hope she doesn’t have one, but there is no way to know. So far, so good. But it’s been less than 24 hours.

Cassie’s sudden seizure happened after she’d had a typical day for a normally healthy cat. Seeing her go through this reminded me, as if I need reminding, of our tenuous hold on any predictability in our own lives. Cassie’s sudden seizure transported me back to the December day in 1998 when my mom took a short walk to the post office. When she returned a few minutes later, she found my dad, who was fine when she left, still seated in his favorite chair but unable to speak. The few sounds he made were not coherent.

Soon, we learned he had a glioblastoma tumor in the speech area of his brain. Surgery, radiation and chemo followed, with doctors estimating he had seven months to live. Until his diagnosis, my father never missed a class in his 50 years as a university professor. He was never sick. He also liked reminding us that in his seventies he was still fit enough to fit into the Navy uniform he wore on the World War II destroyer on which he served in the Pacific.

He died 18 months later after he’d flown West to say goodbye to his brothers, visited friends in Berlin and Prague, and gone on the rigorous South American trip that had to be postponed when his tumor appeared. Even as his chemo treatments took a toll on his capacities, my father insisted on visiting Pearl Harbor to pay his respects to those who perished in the attack that led to the war that reshaped his youthful years.

Witnessing my dad’s long-planned retirement plans be upended by this fatal diagnosis and how he responded taught me so much about living my own life fully. Lessons he taught me in the time he had left now inform my transitions in my seventies.

In memory of my dad, Maya and I will ride as B.J.’s Team (named for him) for the 21st time on Sunday, May 18. In recent years, Maya’s older cousin, Allison, then Matthew, and now the four younger cousins have joined this ride, as have friends, some of whom have also lost family members to the same tumor that ended my dad’s life.

If you want to support our ride to raise medical research funds for brain tumors, click here to contribute and/or join our biking team.

Let’s return to my next two transitional steps, #3 and #4 – each one long anticipated, and each now activated.

#3 is the return to my empty nest. After Maya moved out, my friend Maria Balinska, who directs the Fulbright program in London, presented me an idea; a wonderful English woman would be spending the fall semester of her Fulbright year at Emerson College in Boston, so would I consider having her stay in Maya’s bedroom? Intrigued by Maria’s description of this gifted Fulbright playwright, I said “yes.”

Then, word-of-mouth hand-offs took over as one woman handed the room to another, with my acquiescence. My sought-after room remained occupied until now.

With my life-shift commencing, I realized that my home should again be my home, so I asked its current occupant to leave, giving her time to find a new place.

On May 1, no one will be sleeping in Maya’s bedroom.

So, on to transition # 4: Does it get any bigger than the marriage of an only child?

The wedding happens in September, but tomorrow Maya will go with me to a small, local women’s clothing shop, where I’ve gone to find outfits for each of my book tours. This time, however, I’ll be looking for my mother-of-the-bride dress. This is bound to be challenging; I need to find an outfit (maybe not a dress) to wear at Maya and Matthew’s “formal garden party”that celebrates their marriage – an outfit that suits me and is suitable for this joyous Cape Cod occasion.

Matthew proposed marriage to Maya just shy of this mountaintop in early November 2023. They knit the two photos together as the banner for their wedding website.

Perhaps hinting at my future mother-of-the-bride moment, Maya and Matthew called on Saturday insisting that I go with them for a pedicure. In 73 years, I’ve never had a pedicure and only once did I have a manicure as a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding. I’m not sure I’d have said “yes” at a different time, but with my transition mindset, I felt open to experiencing the unknown.

I went, and now my toenails are lilac. Chosen for the season!

Let me end this rumination on transition with what’s staying the same.

I’ll still be rowing.

I chose these photos for this rowing collage because they are from the time in my life after I’d broken my ankle while I was carrying a crew shell on my shoulders. That break was in August, and by October, my rehab underway, I relied on crutches to get myself down the ramp. On the dock, I slid myself into the cox’s seat. Late in October, I coxed this fabulous crew to a wildly successful race in the Head of the Charles.

Breaking my ankle that summer rekindled my love for rowing. During the weeks when I was in bed with my leg raised to speed my healing after surgery, I was sustained by the vision of being back in a crew shell as quickly as I could.

The cox’s seat beckoned.

So, along with my rowing, what will remain intact is hanging with friends, hoping friends stop by for visits now that I have my guest room back, enjoying outdoor café time with old and new friends, going to the MA State House to testify on bills I care deeply about, writing to legislators, local, state and federal, venting my anger at their inaction in a time of crisis for our democracy and praising them when they take tough stands.

In Massachusetts, I’ll push for bills I want passed — climate bills, state and local, and at the State House, I’ll be at lobby day for the End of Life Options Act. I’ll work with groups coming together to urge the elimination of climate-risky investments from the state’s pension plan and support bills to ban certain plastics (such as bags, etc.), along with a vital bill to prohibit the sale of toxic-sludge biosolids, which are fertilizers that are sold but can poison farmland and gardens with their PFAS and other harmful chemicals. In Cambridge, I’m in year two of my efforts to convince the city council to insist that our city’s food waste be tested for PFAS and other harmful toxins as it is being processed into biosolids. Our food waste is mixed with sludge at a wastewater facility before being turned into biosolids.

To join this webinar on April 30 at 2 PM Eastern Time, click on this Zoom link.

I also will be using my iPhone as a telephone. Some of you probably won’t pick up since it’s seen as rude to call someone without making an appointment to talk. But I’m going to call, as I always have, if talking is better than texting, so look for my number on your phone and pick up my call!

Oh, yes, for the first time in 14 years, I’m also returning to my beloved Italy, its northern part, mostly new to me. This trip emerged when I saw that two college classmates would disembark on August 31st from a Wellesley College cruise from Sicily to Venice. I said I’d meet them there and they said “yes.” We’ll travel by train for 12 days, Venice to Milan, with centuries-old cities and gorgeous lakes in between.

Lake Como beckons me, as I am carving out “free” time in my transitional life to hang out in distant places with dear friends. My notion of Nirvana.

To augment my travel experience, I enrolled in Babble last week to refresh my Italian. In 1968-69, I spoke and understood conversational Italian when I was a senior in high school in Rome, Italy. (My dad was on sabbatical in Europe. Now we’ll see if my aging brain hit the reset button and I can arrive in Italy being able to understand and speak Italian.

Another iteration in my transitions.

Now, I want to hear from you, if you are moving into or through a transitional time. Please share your thoughts in comments, and we’ll talk there.

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I’m also loving the time I’m spending with journalism students due to my book, Locker Room Talk. Last week I moderated two panels about women in sports media at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for students of Professor Jeffrey Gerson. I was joined by seven women who work in Boston sports media, in-person on one day and online on another.

Then, this week, Elizabeth Hahn, a student at Northeastern University, interviewed me for her paper: “From Locker Rooms to Legal Precedent: The Lasting Influence of Melissa Ludtke’s Lawsuit on Gender Equality in Sports Media.” Hahn wrote these kind words at the end of paper:

“This research left a lasting impact on me, not only deepening my understanding of the legal and cultural shifts surrounding women in sports media but also connecting me personally to the subject. In the first page of her book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, she wrote a note to me that reads, ‘Elizabeth, I’m inspired by hearing your love of writing and sports. You sound like me when I was 22 and about to start my job at Sports Illustrated. Follow your dreams.’ Her email to me later echoed that same encouragement and purpose. She wrote: ‘You start to lose touch with why you spent all of the years you did writing it… Your email reminds me of this.’ She told me she wrote the book for her daughter, who is only a few years older than I am, to help our generation understand the formative decades that laid the groundwork for the lives we lead today. That message, and her belief that I will be among those ‘fighting to restore the rights that women have lost,’ remind me why stories like hers matter, and why telling them is both a responsibility and an honor.”

It’s my honor, Elizabeth, to be interviewed by you, just as it is having opportunities to talk with lots of young people who are blazing new trails.

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To buy Locker Room Talk — and learn a lot more about Constance Baker Motley – at a 30% discounted price, go to my book’s page at Rutgers University Press and apply this code RUSA30. You also get free shipping.

When you buy a book, if you’d like me to inscribe a bookplate for you, e-mail me – melissa.ludtke@gmail.com – with info about the person to whom I will write the inscription, along with the mailing address.

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