April 12, 2007

Patti Dallas, left, and Marianne MacQueen will facilitate a Friday journaliing workshop called “Living Your Legend,” which is designed to help participants share their life stories. The sessions run from April 20 through May 11.

By Lauren Heaton

Growing old gracefully is an adage that local residents Patti Dallas and Marianne MacQueen find difficult to follow in a culture that values youth so strongly. At 61 and 62, they notice their own bodies aging, and as they care for Dallas’s parents in their home, they wonder, what does it mean to grow old anyway? And how do we value the life we’ve lived and still connect to the present with curiosity and joy?

Part of the answer, they think, might be found in helping elders to making connections to their community through their own life stories, in which they are their own living legends. To that end, Dallas and MacQueen are starting a “Living Your Legend” workshop designed to get people talking about their personal histories and finding the connections they have to each other and to the community.

The four “Living Your Legend” sessions will take place at the Senior Center Friday afternoons at 3 p.m. on April 20 and 27 and May 4 and 11. The focus of the sessions will be on discussions and activities that prompt participants to remember the various stages of their lives and to get to know others in the group in a meaningful way. Participants will then be encouraged to record their memories in a journal for the generations that follow them. The workshop is free of charge if participants bring their own journals, but journals will also be provided for a $15 fee. Participants should register by April 16 by calling 767-7884. Transportation is available from the Senior Center for those who need it.

MacQueen holds a sepia-toned photo of her late father, James MacQueen, posing in a petticoat as a child. She is grateful to have this precious memento, along with other letters and documents that tell something of both of her parents’ lives. But she wishes she had more detail, more stories that would tell her about her roots.

Last year she and Dallas remodeled MacQueen’s home in Yellow Springs to house Dallas’s parents, Willa and Meredith Dallas, in a connected but independent space on the ground floor. Dallas has played music in retirement homes for many years and has befriended many of her parents’ peers and other elders in the community. She has also held memory sharing groups at Friends Care Assisted Living and helped local residents Irwin Abrams and the McCown family record their family histories. She appreciates hearing the stories of elders and would like to forge deeper ways to connect aging residents with those who come after them, she said.

But according to MacQueen, the current culture is “so infatuated with being young, that even old people are supposed to be young.” According to William H. Thomas’ book, What Are Old People For?: How Elders Will Save the World, adults are targeted as the biggest consumer group, and children are edged into adulthood earlier as elders are held in adulthood longer in order to increase consumer spending, she said.

“We push elders to live up to this thinking that we’re no longer worth anything if we’re not buying or producing anything,” she said. But both children and elders have so much to offer, and they model how to live in the moment and focus on being rather than doing, she said.

And that is the space where relationships are formed.

“Living Your Legend” is meant to help adults of various ages tap into their memories in chronological order, beginning in the first session with the childhood years and continuing on through the teen years and early adulthood and onto the later adult years and beyond. Participants will have a chance to talk about their school days and make a group timeline highlighting the world events that shaped their youth. They may sing their childhood songs or play the games they used to play, and maybe act out as a group a scene from someone’s past. Participants will also be paired with a buddy to talk to and get encouragement to keep journaling outside of the sessions.

“It’s a way to see your own life as a movie, where you’re the star, the writer and the director, and you get to develop your character in the story,” Dallas said.

Though the journaling will be part of the workshop, the main goal is to create a community where people can really get to know each other on a deep level, she said. She hopes to combat the social orientation toward the television and return people’s focus toward the sharing of oral history with each other and with future generations.

“We want to apply the 1960s values we brought to birthing to the aging process. We want to bring more consciousness to it,” Dallas said.

The fourth session in the workshop will hopefully be a time for inviting family and friends of participants to share the stories they have created.

“The sessions are a way to look at the things that have made us who we are, a record of our heritage to be passed on to the people that go after us,” Dallas said. “It’s important to have an idea of where we come from.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com