Is It Part of Growing Older?

Tags

aging, good old days, illusions, life in the foothills

I’m greatly afraid that my generation has lost its collective marbles. I take comfort in the fact, that every generation at some point is spoken of this way. If I’m right, then we are doomed as a society, and that would displease me quite a lot. I’d hate for civilization to end on my watch.

A friend suggested that he thought we got a “pretty good high school education.” I spent more time in social studies and literature and thought the offerings mediocre (looking back from of course the lofty position of “higher” education), while he spent time in math and science and thought he got a rather good effort from his teachers.

The problem is one of perspective of course. Those that have nary opened a serious book since they paraded around the gymnasium in their blue gowns and little hats rather think they were “well-educated” since they have managed in most cases to chew gum and walk at the same time, which is, albeit for some a herculean effort.

Those that either attended a reputable university (all the TV preacher colleges excepted please), or those motivated by someone or something to learn on their own, have a better  perspective I would argue to decipher the puzzle.

If you mean, did I learn to read and write a simple enough declarative sentence, read road signs and interpret them correctly, follow the directions at the polling place (and be there in the first place), stand when I heard the National Anthem (unless I was flirting with Marxism at the time), and pay my taxes on time  even while cutting every corner I thought I might get away with, then yes, I was well-educated in high school.

If you mean, on the other hand, was I taught to read carefully, discriminatingly, and with a critical eye, was I taught to evaluate arguments, avoid straw men (what the hell were they?), reserve judgment until more facts were accumulated, heck define a fact from a feel-good facsimile, then no, I was not well-educated in high school.

The fact is that education, publicly at least, has probably always been the former, more or less.  We are required to attend school to accomplish this: (1) become “good” citizens however defined but including being law-abiding, honest (on the big things at least), voting (again at least on the big things), and willing, oddly enough, to offer one’s life up for the entity known as “one’s country”, and (2) to fill out simple forms and read directions such that one can do the above as well as become a good cog in the economic machine.

A certain number of those being so groomed are culled from the herd as “college material” and will go forth to don the white collars and supervise the rest, or provide other medium level services, such as accounting, teaching of the young, druggists, and so forth. They may at will also participate in low-level political jobs such as school boards, city councils, mayoral duties in smaller towns, and so forth.

The malady of which I speak or was alluding to in the title seems to affect mostly those who rather blithely go through life, thinking themselves both learned and intelligence with nothing but a faded high school diploma to assure them of their abilities. The malady?

Thinking that things were better “back when”.

I belong to a forum or two dedicated to the high school I once attended, and it is fraught with this sort of talk. The old neighborhood has “gone down”, it’s not longer “safe”. All the old hangouts are “torn down”. Many a sentence begins with “when we were kids” and then goes on to explain how we were safe, happy, well-fed, drug-free, healthy, robust, patriotic, god-fearing, obedient, polite, mannerly and so forth. By contrast today’s youth are none of the above, except  one’s own grandchildren which are all perfect and the best ever produced.

Of course there are myriad causes for the “decline”, but it usually breaks down to one of several causes: (1) Democrats, i.e., liberals, (2) Republicans, i.e., conservatives and tea party adherents, (3) lazy people, i.e., people of color including immigrants, (4) crime and drugs, attributed to number (3) and condoned by (1).

The life seen in retrospect was akin to Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver rolled into one.

We seem to have forgotten a lot of real truth here. More than a little I would say. In fact while we remember the “good” we have forgotten the bad. In the 50’s and 60’s most children who contracted leukemia died.

Most African-Americans were trapped in ghettos in the north and Jim Crow lives in the south. But at least we could boast that the tax rate on high incomes was upwards of 90% something which causes gasps today as we have been taught that asking the rich to pay any taxes somehow inhibits their ability to “create jobs”. They created plenty back then. Today big agribusiness has driven most small farmers out of  business, while they reap farm subsidies alongside the natural resource people  adding to their billions of profits each year, but it’s somehow really bad to give people food stamps to eat. Those are handouts and wrong. Business subsidies are good. Those things remain with us from our youth.

Women made less on the dollar than men than they do now, back in the 50’s.

(The ad denotes that a man wearing these pants is so amazing that a woman can’t wait to be walked on by him). This is how our mothers were thought of. It is the role model many of us grew up with. We looked to “marry well” and have kids, and keep a clean house. My mother and her sister-in-law waged a silent battle to out do the other at Thanksgiving and Christmas meals and my grandmother joined in for who could be-ribbon their gifts with prettier and bigger bows.

How far back to you want to go?

Not as far, I gather to the great depression?
Not so far as World War II? Let’s skip that part about Russia and the Cold War, and practicing duck and cover under the desks. Let’s skip the Cuban Missile Crisis when even us kids walked on egg-shells knowing something awful was afoot.

If you stopped at the high school level, then you know so damned little about the reality of this country that you’re bound think that the 50’s were great and should be returned to.

That’s why when people who have some knowledge of the unconscionable things this country has done in the name of “security” or its economic interests”, naturally point out those evils, you feel attacked. You then come with your misunderstood “history” which was never really  true in the first place but was fed to you to make you a good obedient citizen.

You tell us your distorted recollection of the founding fathers, now lacquered with Christian fundamentalist fervor. You tell us of “unfettered free markets” which never were in the first place. You tell us of all the bullshit you’ve been fed since by a propaganda machine that claims it’s “fair and balanced” so you trust it. It’s all crap, but now you’re defending your “way of life” which was nothing like reality in the first or last place, but makes you feel relevant once again.

The fact is you don’t know the real world and don’t want any part of it. It makes you feel uncomfortable because it goes against all you remember from the past plus what Fox has told you to fear and blame. So you do, and you wail for the “good old days” when life was perfect, although it wasn’t, and you’re neighbor was beating his kids, and another was raping his daughter, and another was suffering with knowing he was attracted to other guys and had no one to confide in, and this family was fighting over money every day and night, and that mother was a secret drunk, and the lady across the street took pills to keep from screaming.

That’s real life. And it’s a damn shame that you are in your sixties and still have no clue. And you won’t learn because shit, it’s just way to easy to pretend, and blame somebody other than your little group. And the beat goes on, my friend, and you never grew up and you never will.

And that’s why your education sucked in high school, because nobody ignited the spark of curiosity in you, and you didn’t have it naturally. At that’s most of you. Thank god, apparently society functions like that. Or maybe it would be better if it didn’t.

I just know I’m not like most of you. Not better in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways worse. But man I cannot live in a dream world created for comfort. I cannot. It will not be part of growing older for me.

 

You Really Can’t Go Home Again

Tags

aging, Autobiography, life in the foothills

I’m in one of those head scratching modes. I’m thinking that perhaps I’m the “duh” one, not the others.

The others?

Oh, all those folks I expected more of and got so much less from.

Truth be told, they probably think the same of me.

But I conclude that it was really all my fault from the beginning. And they were generous in their open-armed acceptance. And I was a fraud.

Once upon a time I lived in a place called Flint. It was a factory town, where most everyone got their paycheck one way or another because of cars. We lived in a subdivision called “Mayfair” and my childhood was, as others no doubt saw it, “idyllic”.

People love that term.They mean, you grew up thinking you were fairly normal and you had enough to eat, and TV to watch, and a yard to play in, and got new clothes for the new school year, and a decent load of presents at Christmas. You got to swim in lakes in the summer, and skate on ice ponds in the winter. You ate blueberry pie from wild blueberries picked by your aunts and uncles and cousins. That sort of idyllic.

For no good reason that I ever figured out, kids like to join cliques. Being a “only” child, I was always looking for friends. My best friend as a small child was one of the kids across the street. She was a year older, but when you are young enough, that was okay. Still she was different than me. She came from a big family, me the “only”. She slept in until 9 or 10 in the morning, while I knocked on her door at 8, having waited an excruciating hour at that, to be told by her mom, that she hadn’t gotten up yet.

I sat some more.

Then when I got to older pre-teens I was with another group. I was, for a while, second to the leader, a dark haired girl name Patty something or other, who told us about the $400 dollar couch her parents had, which seemed to make her rich.

You were either on Patty’s good side or bad, and when on the bad, nobody else would play with you, meaning you couldn’t play jump rope with the gang. I tried hard to be on the good side of Patty. It was painful to fail. I was, as you can tell, not principled. I shunned who she shunned and did my best to lick her shoes.

Then there was the middle school years. I tried hard to be in the “in” group. The one that played sports, and were cheerleaders, and that sort of stuff. I was successful for a bit, but the funny thing was, that I was always hanging on by my fingertips, and I knew that.  If we were going to meet at someone’s house to go out for pizza say, I had to be there early, because they would not wait for me. I was one they “put up with” until they didn’t.

Either they didn’t or I grew tired of trying to be “in” and being left “out” too much.

So I drifted to another group whose main attribute seemed to be a general dislike for almost everything that had to do with “that” school and “those” people. We hung out with some guys from another school. We were starting to drive now, and that broadened our horizons.

I felt accepted by them. But still, I probably never felt completely at ease. I was always having to “try”. We had fun for a few years, mostly going to dances, and walking to strip malls and drinking cokes and eating fries. We hung out every evening after school until it was time to go home.

Then we graduated, and I went off to college, and they went off to marriages and babies, and finally I left Flint, only visiting now and then to see family.

And I didn’t contact them, and they didn’t contact me, because I suppose we all knew it was never a proper fit. I was the one who got good grades in spite of trying to look very much that I didn’t care. I was the one who apparently had dreams they did not.

Not that they didn’t have dreams of course, they had them I’m sure, but they were very different from mine, and there was nothing to keep up “friends” after graduation.

I saw Flint as a place to escape from, they saw it as home. I saw education as the means to a life where I did important things, met important people, talked about important things. I met mayors and congressmen, and brilliant jurists  and traveled on “business”, and they did what they did.

I no doubt felt superior, based on my assumption that everybody should want what I wanted, which is surely stupid on my part. But as the years went by, we had less and less in common surely.

Now we are all on the cusp of being real senior citizens, and we’ve reconnected and had those chats about the “old days”. And it was fine for a while. I tried to interact with those from the old groups whom I abandoned in my middle school years, and that was kinda sad.

Some were polite, some were friendly, until we realized that we believed radically different things. Several cut me out of their Facebook life. Others just ignored me. Even though I would dutifully “like” their constant “if you love your daughter share this”, and fishing trips and other stuff, they never returned the favor. My links to my writing was left with stony silence. My birthday was left unremarked about.

What the hell did I do to you?

Some were  “friends” and we maintained the facade a bit longer. A few (those who share my general uber liberal beliefs) still share and “like” a lot, and chat on the side sometimes. But mostly even those who were my “best friends” for a good four years of the high school years, have silently slipped away, no longer interested.

Perhaps my beliefs offend them too. Who knows? As I said, they were open to me, while I always was trying to fit into that square hole with them. So I account it as no one’s fault, just water seeking it’s own level.

I cannot fathom the thought of living in that town still, and having always lived there. I’ve lived in four parts of the country, five really, and I don’t find that a lot frankly, from the friends I have now. We are all people who have traveled from location to location following jobs or dreams. It makes us different from people who haven’t I guess. Or at least it seems so.

I don’t bemoan any of it really. My life is too special to me here and now to lament that I don’t have friendships that are real with people I haven’t seen in 40 years. I just find it curious. And then I don’t. For if we had nothing much in common then, then it can only be worse now.

Mostly, I find that people who stayed in Flint became people I don’t like much. Not all, some seem to have escaped the provincialism and the tribal indrawn mentality. But most are hatin’ kind of people. I don’t know enough about their lives to judge. They say that each generation has it better than the last. My gut tells me that this was not true for most of them.

I guess its good mirror. My desire to learn served me well, bringing me out of a stultifying world and into a cosmopolitan environment where I met people from all over the world, enjoyed other cultures, and lost any sense of “them or us” in my thinking.

I’m a boomer, through and through, an Idealist. I scratch my head and wonder, “how can you think like that????” But dirty factory towns apparently do that to people. Flint became a mean place, in some ways worse that Detroit, because it was always “at least we aren’t Detroit”, and the fall was all the harder I suspect.

Or maybe this is all just me trying to defend me. Funny thing is, I don’t care. Aging does that. No more time for people who aren’t  on the same page. As the meme says, “not my monkeys, not my circus”.

May your life bring you peace–mine has to a degree I would never have thought imaginable. I imagine that pisses some of you off. And that tickles me frankly.

 

“It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South–so much in balance, in agreement–and yet… the whole world lies between.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

Benjamin Button Be Damned

Tags

aging, Congress, food, Humor, nincompoops, Obama, psychology, racism, self control, teabaggers

A couple of weeks ago, we watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Since then we’ve had a lively discussion about the relative merits of being born old and growing younger and the more conventional method of growing older. They both that their plusses and minuses.

Aging definitely has its down sides. I mean take eating for instance. One finally begins to appreciate food, and the old taste buds are wearing out.

If you don’t believe me, try eating someSpaghetti O’s and see what I mean. I mean seriously, yuck! But they were a real treat when I was ten.

I must go through a bushel of jalapenos every week. We add them to hotdogs and hamburgers, meatloaf and casseroles. I mean, I caught myself the other day engaged in this give and take:

Me: So what do you want for breakfast dear?

Contrarian: Oh, maybe just some Cheerios. I’m not that hungry.

Pause. . . .

Me: would you like a little chopped jalapeno in that?

You get my drift?

Food just seems blander all the time, and needs more pepper! I never used much pepper growing up, now I liberally twist that damn pepper mill with more vigor than a farmer wringing a chicken’s neck. On the other hand, I have less tolerance for salt I find. I find myself buying no-salt stocks and no-salt tomato sauce. Go figure.

Which brings me to just a little note. I made a fabulous southwest chicken salad yesterday, and we scarfed up the entire dish. I thought it would be too hot with a smoked jalapeno in adobe sauce and two pickled jalapenos, but it was just right. I’ll be posting on What’s on the Stove? the full details, so mosey on over if it sounds good to ya. I got the recipe from a lady over on Justapinch.

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Zander has a great take on the TeaNutz® historical twisting and turnings on the issue of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is amusing to listen to them now hail him as the “conservative Republican” who would have “hated” all things liberal. Not so many years ago, they were saying exactly the opposite. I good read.

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Months ago we were watching a show about learning about chimpanzee intelligence. Pursuant to that they showed a testing of small children in which they were offered a marshmallow but told that if they waited fifteen minutes, they would get two instead of only the one.

Well, that study was continued and the results of how these kids turned out as adults is in. The self-control kids, as you might expect, did better in life. But there are other surprising results from the study. About how we can exercise our willpower and enhance it. Good reading and you can decide if you might want to read the book that resulted.

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An amusing letter than might have (should have?) been sent to Speaker Boehner by WH chief-of-staff, Bill Daley, regarding the Thursday speech. comes from Beeryblog. Oh but we wish so much it had been. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

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The Blaze is all a-tizzy with grave conspiracy theory swirling. The Prez, on his way via helicopter to Camp David, was diverted to a nearer airport and motored there due to “weather concerns” Now da Blaze cannot find any “weather concerns, so they wonder what could have been the “real” reason.

I figure Obama wanted to make a quick stop to introduce Sasha to Osama Bin Laden, who had been secretly closeted at the airport awaiting a big family re-union with all the O’s worldwide. The president was heard to remark that us O people, first name or last, are a small group especially when you consider the OB (ama) and OS (ama) coincidence.

 The two figure to be first cousins-seventeen times removed and can’t wait to meet in Madagascar on Tuesday, October 31 for the big barbecue ta-do. Auntie Katerina OK (ama) from Siberia is the matriarch of this disparate clan. The big O’s, Ladin and Barrack, are hoping to finalize plans to introduce the Muslim Brotherhood into state school boards in 2012. OW (ama), an uncle from Ecuador is working on the Sharia law angle, and figures most of the US will be under its control no later than April of 2012.

Captain Crunch, one of the nincompoops suggests this reason for the set down:

BS! This sounds like another secret meeting with Soros…just like his daughters ball game he never made it to, which game never happened, in the dark of the night. I can see his shiney white teeth and eyeballs glowing in the dark as he creeps around town with his cloak and daggar.

But EP46 thinks he has it all figured out:

Maybe to pick-up Larry Sinclair…….the Minnesota man who claims he took cocaine in 1999 with obama and participated in homosexual acts with him.

Secessionista is quite sure that it has to do with this:

He probably wanted to meet with the new black panther party leadership to urge them to unionize. And to learn how to kill Americans when they come for him. It’s a win win for them all.

But JamesR thinks it’s all got to do with the suspicious Marine who is standing at attention at the helicopter. We have vays of making you talk. . . .

Something doesn’t seem right. The marine’s coat is to long and does not fit right and his dress slacks are long enough for him to be walking on them. This picture may be of a kid. The copter flight would make it easier for Obama to get away from the office and head to Camp David. Americans need to insist on a tight belt and all future use of jets, and copters need to be grounded. Bama has an office in the white house and come to think of it, just about everything a family would need for a long weekend of relaxation.

Errr, there were six pages of this crap. Crazy is as crazy does.

Have a good one.

Nature? Nurture? Hybrid?

Tags

aging, beauty, Diane Sawyer, Elizabeth Taylor, genetics, Katherine Hepburn, Raquel Welch, skin care

I happened to run into Raquel a couple of weeks ago. No, I don’t mean I ran into her, as in, oh nice to meet you Ms. Welch. No, I mean I saw her on TV, and then again, a week or so later on GMA. (new book)

As anyone would, I was utterly amazed to learn that she was about to tip over to 70 years of age. Neither her face, hands, or neck would alert you to that fact, in fact, I would hazard a guess that she could pretty much pass for 45-50.

I recall calling the Contrarian to the TV just to see. “Isn’t that amazing?” I whispered. “Mmmhmmm,” he replied. Raquel is apparently not his type. To elucidate, substitute Holly Berry or Elizabeth Vargas from ABC, and his heart goes like a jack hammer.

I continued to marvel at how impossibly great she looked, and then I was confronted one day in my reader with this:

Liz Taylor is 78, so the two women are reasonable contemporaries.

Shocking isn’t it?

I know something of the history of Ms. Taylor. She has had severe back problems for years, operations, and subsequent addictions to both alcohol and pain killers.

She has been a food addict, and a yoyo dieter, finally succumbing it seems to eating what she wants. She apparently is mostly confined to a wheelchair.

Still she has been ravaged by age. Compare photos of each from their hay day.

As you can see, both women were gorgeous in their youth. In fact some would claim that Ms. Taylor was the most beautiful woman of her era.

So one has to ask? How could this be? Is this all genetics? Was one blessed and the other cursed? Or is it all how one cares for one’s body? I have little or no idea what Ms. Welch has done over the years to preserve her looks. But I can assume that it is highly probable that she has been careful about what she ate and drank. I can assume there is a high probability that she used a serious skin regime over the years and maybe that she even exercised.

But who can really say what has been the most important? Her hands are young looking, as least as far as I could tell, while Ms. Taylor’s bear the marks of severe arthritis. Clearly there is some genetics involved, since plenty of women do all the right things and end up being dried up old prunes with skins as taut as any Joan Rivers/Wayne Newton/Kenny Rogers incompetent surgeon could make one.

And plenty do very little and end up aging gracefully. I have no idea what regime if any Katherine Hepburn used.

Yet, she managed always to retain that glimmer of beauty to the very end. She was handsome. And that might be said of people like Meryl Streep, and a few others.

Somehow one doesn’t sense that women like Hepburn and Streep are obsessive about how they look, so it’s easier to conclude the are just genetically lucky. Welch, I place more in the very lucky and fairly obsessed category–and she reaps the bonanza.

It just got me to thinking about how much time we should waste or not on retaining our “youth” either physically or in terms of a healthy body. No doubt we can have an effect, but at what price? How much time do we have to spend in order to achieve what level of return?

I would have hated to have spent an hour or two a day and end up looking only five years younger than I am. But the tables turn drastically I suspect if you factor in longer life.

But even there, trades offs are subjective. Many wouldn’t give up their bloody mary’s and mash potatoes and gravy to gain an extra two years. Diane Sawyer who is in her 60’s looks a good ten years younger, yet she freely admits she hates exercise and munches potato chips.

I recall as a young girl hating the fact that I had oily skin. My mother used to tell me I would be happy about it when I got older. Girls with lovely dry skin, porcelain beauties, would end up with vastly more wrinkles at a much younger age. And in that she was mostly right. I have few wrinkles at 60, though only a legally blind person would mistake me for 45.

The cosmetics/food/beauty/plastic surgery/exercise industries of course make a mint off promising us everything under the sun. Heck buying the right car will bring Mr. Right to our door, so surely losing 25 pounds will do the trick, as will something called Stiletto mascara.

We to one degree or another buy into the dream that we too can make Mr. Perfect fall at our feet merely by drinking Silk, or eating some Activia. Deep down we suspect it won’t but, depending on our lives, we think it worth the try. And where most all fail, there is always another one around the corner promising us the results we dream of of, if we but part with another $19.95, or so. And for calling within the next thirty minutes, we’ll double your offer! Though how I can use two ab-twisters I have no clue.

Push it up, down out or in. Suck it down. Pin it over, lace it up, gotta suffer to be beautiful as momma used to say. But momma was never beautiful and all the creams and potions never made her so.

Ironic that a woman like Raquel, who was no actress in any real sense, and made her living off her looks and body, was graciously blessed with being able to carry on that facade for decades, leaving all her contemporaries with  Dr. Scholls, canes, full girdles, and all manner of fake accessories meant to hide as best as one can, the inevitable cruel finger of time. She has somehow escaped, and we can rejoice in her victory, while we now can nod at Liz and see that she’s rusted down to be just like us.

One is the icon still on the pedestal. The other, the funny old lady next door who we can share a cup of tea with. Go figure. And they say God doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Aging Disgracefully

Tags

aging, authentic living, expectations, peer pressure, psychology, sociology

Let’s face facts. There is precious little that is good about getting old. We put on a brave front of course, we claim we are just excited as all get out to play golf and lounge on the veranda. We are lying.

Youth is wasted on the young. Every older person knows this. It’s one of the ironies of life. You don’t get how to “do” living until you are near the end of life. One of God’s little jokes.

A very young person, with a very old soul, said something profound today on a piece looking at the effect of being “short” on children’s development. The kid was short, thirteen, and only five foot. His dad was a giant, being nearly 6’8″ but his mom was only five foot. His dad had spent a lot of time infusing him with lots of self-esteem, making height merely a fact, and not a defining one.

The profound statement? He said, “In the end, the only person you have to live with is yourself.” Meaning that he was not pushed to be what others expected of him. He only had to satisfy what he expected of himself. Profound no? True? Yes.

That may be the only thing that’s good about aging. We finally release all that crap about living up to other’s expectations. We, as children try mightily to be who and what our parents express as “good.” We try, some of us try for years, well into adulthood. Others of us, at some point, take the opposite tack, trying to be exactly other than our parents desire. In that we are usually as untrue to ourselves as when we struggled to be as they wished.

We try to be as our peers suggest we should be, and then as our teachers, then the opposite of that, then as our bosses, as our romantic encounters dictate, and, well, you see we seem to always try to be what others expect. Sometimes we impose upon ourselves standards we perceive as good or proper. We become Martha Stewart.

I guess age makes us tired at some point. We no longer can manage to lift the banner of what is expected on a given day, and we start to be authentic. Younger folks call us eccentric. Yeah, eccentric all right. No, I’m just tired of pretending that high heels are a shoe of choice. They are what they are, torture devices, and as an adult finally I see them as they are and discard such violent pain as fashion.

Of course, not all of us have that aha moment. Some of us, for whatever reason stay mired in being what is expected. No doubt financial considerations can apply. Keeping a job can be essential and so meeting workplace expectations may still override our general disgust at putting on the facade each day.

We are like aging entertainers who enter the safety of bedroom and pull off the girdles, the wigs, the eyelashes, and all the other accoutrements that serve to uphold the “image.” We are left a sagging weary body, now encased in an flannel pj’s and ragged robe. We shuffle in our slippers and we rub aching muscles.

Not a pretty picture? No. But some of us remain caught in the illusion that somehow we can stave off the inevitable. Sooner or later we become caricatures of ourselves. We can be found all over Florida and Arizona.

Others of us, well, we see it all for what it is, and we say enough. I’m getting old, I’m into comfort not only in the confines of my room, but out in the big world where all those kids reside. But I’m at peace. I’m me. I’m sagging, and greying, and I’m pudging too much. But I’m not concerned about that. I have better things to do. I’m not out to snag any trophy spouse any more. I am not vying for some top plum job in your corporation.

I, you see, have only to live with me. And, there I will not make any more compromises. I don’t need to. We are fitted in her quite tightly, and there is no room for all the wigs and girdles. I have room for books and yarns and recipes, and walking sticks, and binoculars to see my bird friends up close. I have room for wonder and awe, and peace, and quiet, and music and beauty, and thinking.

I have room for opinions, and I don’t care if you don’t share them, though I am happy to have a civilized discussion on points where we differ. I am unafraid to stand up and be counted. I would have no qualms in telling a Dick Cheney or a Dubya, a few choice remarks should our paths cross.

As I said, youth is wasted on the young. I have all the ideas in the world, but far less time than I used to to execute them. I suffer fools less willingly. I have no truck with stupid at all. I try to be kind, because I know how much it can mean to another, yet I can’t have stupid people wasting what time I have left. So, I may appear from time to time, short, and direct, cold in fact in my laser assessments. That’s what you call eccentric. You smirk, shake your head, and of course never think it will happen to you.

News? It will. You should be so lucky to get to my age. That’s what I say. What brought this forth? Oh, nothing, just in six weeks, a new birthday. . . . and a six figures prominently. Who would have thunk I would be . . .well, I can’t even say it quite yet. But damn, I’m authentic. Just ask me, and I’ll tell you. You bet I will.