Using Our Words To Re-Define What It Means To Age By Nancy Peckenham

By Nancy Peckenham

Back in the winter of 2018, I had a revelation. I was spending long days with my 100-year-old mother at her assisted living residence and witnessed how many residents in their 80s and 90s led multi-faceted, upbeat lives. Tired stereotypes of older people fell away before me, and I was determined to tell others it was possible to stay positive despite aging bodies and minds. Fired up, I started writing about these folks who embraced life with tenacity and humor as they neared the finish line.

The more I dug into it, the stronger I felt about spreading the message that getting older could be a positive experience if met with wit and grace. That’s why I decided to launch a publication about aging on the Medium writing platform. I called it Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age.

At first, the publication only presented stories I had written, but within a few weeks, I had a couple dozen writers who wanted to share their experiences with aging. Today, five years later, more than 550 writers are contributing to Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age.

Among the essays that appear in Crow’s Feet are stories of people who are challenging the belief that people become irrelevant once they leave the workplace. Many older people choose to keep working long after 65 and the Crow’s Feet publication – and its companion podcast by the same name – are proof of how skills learned over decades can be put to good use when you have the freedom of choosing what to do with your time.

One thing I’ve learned since starting Crow’s Feet is that people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are eager to explore creative impulses they put aside to raise a family or have a career. Many of the writers for the publication have only recently decided to try their hand at writing. Others already had skills in writing, producing, and human relations – and were looking for ways to apply them to meaningful projects.

About a year after starting Crow’s Feet, I invited writers to join me on a Zoom call to talk about how we can do more. Eighty people attended that first meeting and the energy was palpable. Several people suggested starting a podcast and about a dozen of us – writers with lots of ambition but few technical skills — began to discuss how we would meet the challenge. After a couple of meetings, we had a good idea of what would be required but we still couldn’t edit an audio file professionally. Enter Rich Halpern.

Rich is a former Top 40 jock and sports/talk producer with 25 years of experience working as an ad agency creative and producer for public radio, where he won a National Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Audio News Doc.  When he read in the Crow’s Feet publication that we were seeking an audio expert, he offered his services. With his guidance, we learned how to record a decent-sounding interview and launched our podcast in June of 2022.

Our podcast team meets weekly to discuss future guests and to improve our production techniques. Each team member, except Rich, has hosted at least one episode and in the process learned how to set up and conduct an interview. Over time, technophobes have transformed into users. 

Each episode of the podcast is unique. We’ve interviewed people like Elaine LaLaine, widow of exercise guru Jack LaLaine, who does a workout every morning at age 97, or Dr. Gladys McGarey, a founder of holistic medicine who is still an advocate for healthy living at age 103. Some of the episodes feature the work of Crow’s Feet writers who read their essays about life as we age. Other episodes bring insightful interviews with people like Ellen Langer, who studies the psychology of positive aging, or Gloria Horsley and Frank Powers, a couple who wrote a book about dating late in life. 

As the podcast has taken off, the Crow’s Feet publication has provided a gathering place for people who are thinking about aging and how to embrace the inevitable changes that it brings. New writers apply regularly, wanting to add their voices to the chorus of people who are defining what it means to get older – the good and the bad. The essays published on Crow’s Feet are honest and lead to conversations among readers and writers about their own experiences.

At Crow’s Feet, we are all volunteers.  For me, not getting paid relieves the pressures I once felt as an executive producer in the cable news arena. I have only one boss now– and she looks right back at me in the mirror and smiles. I’m trained to meet deadlines but if I miss one, I shrug my shoulders, knowing it is not the end of the world. 

At our weekly meetings, no one thinks less of you if you forget a word or a thought but accept it for what it is, a sign that we are aging. We choose to focus instead on the wisdom and insights we have developed over decades of living and to do our best to share these on our podcast and in print.

If you’d like to learn more about Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age, visit our website where you will find links to our stories and podcast. If you are interested in publishing an essay on Crow’s Feet, send a draft of your work to [email protected]. We are only able to publish work written by people who have set up an account on Medium, which offers both free and paid accounts. With a free account, you can publish as many stories as you like but are limited to reading only three stories by other writers. Also, your stories will not earn money unless you become a paid member at $5/month. 

This year we began offering workshops for people to develop and polish their writing. A professional writing coach works with folks to shape stories about the lessons they have learned through a lifetime of experience. 

Over five years, I have morphed from a person worrying about my loss of identity as I got older to a person excited about all the joys and simple pleasures that still await me in life. For this, I credit the people I work with and the new ideas I read about  on Crow’s Feet Life As We Age.

Nancy Peckenham is the founder and editor of Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age. She is a former cable news executive, local news reporter, and documentary filmmaker with a focus on Latin America. She has published three books and has written about her life traveling the U.S. in a Sprinter van with her husband. When not on the move, she loves gardening and spending time with her two sons.