Kitchen Tables & Other Midlife Musings

Kitchen Tables: & Other Midlife Musings by Niela Eliason

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"Niela Eliason worked for many years as a registered nurse ... She returned to college at midlife, receiving a BA in English in 1980. She then began writing, starting with a letter to the editor. Now a freelance writer, she has written an essay column for the St. Petersburg Times for ten years. She has been writing her 'Fiftysomething' and 'Sixtysomething' columns since 1990."

This book is obviously a sampling of those fiftysomething & sixtysomething essays. I didn't much care for the book in the first part of it. The essays, which follow a common theme of how women cope by depending on each other and being more resilient that men, etc., seemed banal to me, and not particularly insightful either. I almost put the book down as one of those books that aren't worth reading, in the all too short time I have left for reading. But it's a slim volume, and so I soldiered on.

Gradually the focus shifted from our salad days, with parenting and introspection survival through middle age and its accompanying resurgence of us as people with lives and talents of our own, to that often uncharted territory just past middle age. "Am I Old Yet?" which starts "I don't know how we know when we're old." and goes on to laud the joys of moving from middle age towards true old age: "I enjoy being old more than I enjoyed being a teenager. I know who I am now, I'm more sure of myself and have more fun."

The book turned around for me when I reached the chapter entitled "How To Know When You're An Oldie" wherein she talks about one of my favorite publications: The Oldie magazine published in London. It's a grand & glorious magazine: "properly attacks young people--or at least youthfulness. The cover sports a triangular road sign that was once used by the British Department of Transport until they were forced to drop it because it was thought to be offensive to older people. Now graduated to the magazine, the red triangle encloses a drawing of two doddering oldies, one with a cane. At last we have a magazine that isn't unrelentingly cheerful. Old fogies, after all, are allowed to grouse a little."

The remainder of the book explores the realities & vicissitudes of growing older, and some of the joys inherent in the process as well. Oldies of immense courage, oldies who know what they want from their declining years and set out to get it. And although it's not one of my favorite reads, I'm glad I read it through after all.