July 28, 2012...will be a very good year.
Queenie here was really treated like royalty!
Mother-in-law, and Mom
James 4:14 says...It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanishes away...
Psalm 39: 5 says... You, indeed, have made my days short in length, and my life span as nothing in Your sight. Yes, every mortal man is only vapor.
Sooooooooooo......make each day count, whether you are blowing out 1 candle...
Gotta love Ellen:
April 25, 2005|By Ellen Goodman
This was startling enough
except for the fact that the paper had lopped about three years off the actual
number.
What's a good journalist, let
alone a good feminist, to do? Did I have a moral obligation to write a
correction? Was it ethical to live with the error of their ways?
I never had to resolve this dilemma
because apparently some college classmate outed me.
This brings me to the number of
candles that now grace the cake of my life: 64.
By any normal account, this is a
thoroughly unremarkable birthday. There are no zeroes to attract attention. Nor
any fives, for that matter. Not even Medicare cares.
If anything, 64 is designated as the
outermost edge of middle age, as if we were all going to live to be 128.
But it's unexpected numbers that have
meant the most to me. I was struck by 29, because it was officially too late to
be the youngest anything. I was hit upside the head at 36 because at 36 Mozart
was already dead. I decided I'd rather be alive than be Mozart. I was startled
by 58 because I had outlived my father. 'Nuff said.
This birthday, however, came humming
into my mind. It's not the bureaucracy but the Beatles, not the near-senior
status but the song, that imprinted 64 into my consciousness.
In 1967, when the members of Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and I were all in our 20s, 64 was the
impossibly distant and decrepit old age that raised the question: "Will
you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"
Now I am just ahead of Paul McCartney
himself in getting those "birthday greetings, bottle of wine." For
me, at least, 64 feels less like a slippery slope toward slippers - "You
can knit a sweater by the fireside" - than another adolescence, only
without the acne and the hormones and the identity crisis. Usually.
It turns out that 64 is an
out-of-body experience. I'm not just talking about cellulite and memory loss.
The magazine articles that promise "Look Great At Any Age" don't
count my age in their "any." I am not even eligible for Extreme
Makeover - though with friends who have survived cancer, the idea of
"elective surgery" sounds like tempting the gods.
As for the in-body experience, the
goal of exercise is no longer to look buff in a tank top. It's to get the
carry-on bag in the overhead bin. With luck, by 64, you finally have
perspective on the 32-year-old who was so critical of herself. Ha. Do you
really want to be miserable about the 64-year-old ripples and wrinkles that you
will look back on with envy at 82? Fuggedabout it.
More to
the point, 64 is a kind of adolescence because, in numbers that would shock our
Beatle-crazed younger selves, we find ourselves asking, "What am I going
to do with the rest of my life?" It doesn't actually matter that the
"rest" is shorter than it was - we approach it with the same sense of
curiosity. Or maybe it does matter that there is less of the rest: We better
get on the case.
At 64 you can still buy green
bananas. At 64 you can - and should - plant a tree. But you also better know
that there's no time to waste. And better figure what is and isn't waste.
Anne Lamott once wrote that on the
day she dies she wants to have dessert. I want to have chocolate. Dark
chocolate. I don't have time to waste on milk chocolate. Or on resentment, or
on regrets. At least not on good days.
You don't get to 64 without losses.
Huge losses. So this adolescence is also about resilience in the face of loss
and gratitude in the face of bounty.
At twentysomething, the Beatles sang
a love-and-fear song. I wish I could have told the younger me what the older me
knows about love and fear. At 64, I do have people who need me, feed me. And I
have people I need, feed. Here's the funny part. It looks like - who knew? -
these are my good old days. OK, my good and not-quite-yet-old days!
