Turning Sixty . . .

 

 

In less than a week I will be turning 60 years old. It doesn’t seem to bother me. “It’s just a number. You’re as old as you feel. Sixty is the new 40!,” are the wise adages we have created to help us feel better about getting older. But I don’t feel the need to soften the blow. At 50, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I didn’t expect to hit sixty. So, you better believe I am damn well happy about being able to celebrate this birthday, sharing it with my family and having a nice piece of cake.

Sixty years can feel like a long time or as though they went by in the blink of an eye, depending who you talk to. For me, the years went by pretty fast, even though I am living a fairly boring life. There was very little excitement to speak of, just the normal, every day challenges to deal with. I can probably sum up my whole life as: I was born, graduated college, married, raised two daughters, and you can fill in the blah, blah, blahs yourself. I lived the life I envisioned, the life I wanted to live. I can’t complain. I have been very blessed. I do the things I want to do, the things that make me happy. I don’t care what most people think of me, just those I am closest to. I have learned from my own experiences and those of others. I have given and taken advice. I have known the heartache and grief of loss. I have known the joy of love and happiness. I have acquired wisdom. It’s been a good life and I don’t dread turning 60 for one minute.

However, I can’t speak for all my body parts. Some of them are having a bit of a hard time dealing with the changes of this past decade. My eyeglasses need to be “tweaked” a little more often than they used to. Making the font larger on the computer seems to help them feel they as though they are as sharp as ever. The past year, my left ankle gets swollen every day. It needs a little pampering and elevation. I don’t want my right ankle to feel bad because I am favoring the left, so I put both my feet up during the day to keep them happy. My muscles, if you can call them that, ache with every little thing I attempt to do. If I carry a little shopping home from the store, my arms ache. If I bend to do a little cleaning, then my back aches. If I walk around the park for exercise, then my legs ache. It seems like my muscles have taken early retirement and forgot to send me a memo. My stomach, which has been fine digesting whatever I liked in the past, has decided to become much more finicky. Everything seems to upset it. For example, though I have been a meat eater all my life, but beef and pork have become difficult for me to digest. My stomach prefers chicken and fish now. Salads are great, except my stomach doesn’t like any kind of vinaigrette dressing and immediately acts up. Too much of anything upsets it: too much junk food, too much candy, too much fiber, too much fruit . . . it doesn’t matter if the items are good or bad for me, my stomach will only tolerate so much of it. Ironically however, that hasn’t stopped me from gaining weight or having high cholesterol. Hearing and memory diminish greatly with age. This is really difficult to adjust to because most of us need to remember the things we hear, that is, if we hear them in the first place. When my husband tells me something and then has to repeat it, I don’t know if I forgot what he said or didn’t hear it in the first place. To save face, I tell him he never said it. Sometimes I say something and repeat it five minutes later because I forgot I said it. It’s not always something that bears repeating either. Thank God my husband has the patience of a saint. I still have all my teeth, but some of them have become very sensitive to cold things. No one has tampered with these teeth that I have had all my life. The fillings are all the original ones I got as a kid. So why are my teeth causing me problems now? Maybe they don’t want to be left out? It could be peer pressure from the other body parts or maybe they just want some attention? Who knows? As for the rest of the body parts, they still work pretty well for now. I’ll have to reassess my situation a year from now and see if I have any more setbacks.

Last week I went to the salon to get my hair cut and colored. My hair is vain and still wants to look 40. While I was there, an older woman started chatting with me and asking me all kinds of questions. I am an open book so I volunteered the answers and then some. She asked me about my family and I told her I was 29 when I got married and have been married 31 years with had two daughters. Then we got to talking about my parents and how they were first cousins and had an arranged marriage. She said, “but they loved each other right?” I immediately answered with a drawn out and emphatic, “No.” To which she burst out laughing at my honesty. Then she asks, “How old are you?” I answer, “Sixty.” She almost falls out of her chair with disbelief and tells me it can’t be. I tell her I just told you I was 29 when I married and I am married 31 years, the numbers don’t lie. Then she tells me never to tell anyone my age because I look 40 and don’t have a wrinkle on my face. I think to myself, looks can be deceiving, as my other body parts would attest to. As I leave, she wants to know when I am coming in for my next appointment so she can meet me there and chat some more.

The next thing on my agenda is looking into taking a college class on creative writing, maybe even this fall. I love to write, but my imagination needs to be resuscitated, if it isn’t totally dead. We’ll see what happens with that adventure. If it doesn’t work out, I always have blogging.

　

My Mother The Angel With “Horns…”

It’s very hard, knowing my mother as I do, to picture her in heaven today, on her 97th birthday. When I think of angels, I picture delicate, pure, kind souls with wings. But when I think of my mother, I see a little angel with horns, because she had a mischievous, bordering on slightly devilishly, trait about her. I almost feel like she is up there running some things and raising a little hell.

My mother had a big heart and was kind and compassionate. She was a nurturer and a caregiver. It came naturally to her, almost like she couldn’t help herself. If someone needed her, she was always there. Even though she was the youngest of three sisters, she was the one they came to in times of trouble, even when she was the one who caused the trouble. For example, you may recall the blog I did on how my mother had her older sister’s fiancé picked up by immigration, only to have to help her bail him out when her sister called for her help.

My mother’s halo may be a little tarnished too. What mother tells a four year old not to tell her father about calls she was making every morning to her bookie? What mother, when she receives her favorite plant, red carnations, for Mother’s Day, tells her kids, “Why did you buy these, they are only going to die?” She had comments for plenty of gifts we got, like, “How much did they soak you for that?” and “You are wasting your money” when it came to things like jewelry and flowers. Then again, she never complained about boxes of chocolate. Those were quickly unwrapped and devoured without a peep. She appreciated lottery tickets, especially the scratch offs. Those were never a waste of money. She also didn’t raise hell when she got practical things like housedresses, nightgowns and slippers, but it would be a long, long time before you’d see her use them. She was always saving new things for the future even though she needed them at the time.

My mother was overly critical too. I was a naïve glutton for punishment and would ask to do chores like clean the bathroom. Maybe I was trying to win her approval or just plain stupid. One day she let me clean it. After being in there maybe an hour, I called her for inspection. I hoped to hear some praise, but instead she critiqued the work I had done. She showed me all the places I had skipped “to teach” me the right way to do it. The same went for ironing. She wanted me to iron her way because naturally my way was all wrong. Now you might think she was being helpful and not critical so let me give you another example. My brother brought home a report card once and all his grades were 90 and above. In the parent’s comment box my mother wrote, “I will see to it that he tries harder.” I cannot tell you how many times we have laughed till we cried over that one. We still have that report card too. Then there was the time I was dancing to American Bandstand one Saturday afternoon. When I felt I had perfected the dance steps, I called her in to watch me dance. After a couple of minutes she tells me I am no gazelle and have two left feet. In later years I discovered on my own that I have absolutely no rhythm and grace, my brother got all the genes for that. My mother was just being honest…to a fault. And once, when I told her I wanted to grow up and enter the Miss America pageant, she told me I wouldn’t win. She said I was too plain. So I instantly abandoned that idea because if your own mother won’t vote for you, who the hell will?

My mother was a smart cookie and insightful too. She had loads of common sense and you would have never known she was forced to leave school half way through ninth grade. She always valued an education and made sure that we went to college. My father thought college was a waste of time and money for girls. But my mother would tell him that I was going. She wanted to make sure I would be able to support myself and not be dependent on a man. My father clammed up. Four years later, when I was about to graduate, I brought up the idea of my going to law school. My father was all for it, but my mother said, “When the hell are you going to leave school and get a job?” What a difference four years makes!

I don’t know what things they do up in heaven, but I am pretty sure my mother is adding her two cents. I’ll bet she is criticizing the other angels or bossing them around or creating a little havoc, because she sure as hell is not just quietly floating on some cloud. If she is with her brothers and sisters, then you can be sure they are playing poker or gossiping or rehashing family history. If they have a race track in heaven, my mother will be at the ticket window placing bets. And, I’m sure that much of the time she is watching over us down here and putting in a good word for us up there when we need it. I think she is probably bragging about her children and grandchildren and showing our pictures to every angel that will listen…until we join her…then we will get no credit. My mother isn’t going to change just because she is an angel. And if her halo is a little tarnished and her horns come out every now and then, I’ll bet they love her all the more for it.

It's hard to believe my mother passed away almost nine years ago. We really miss her so much and she said we would.

Ah Michele Bachmann!

There is never a shortage of things to blog about when you look into the world of politics is there? I have heard about Michele Bachmann throwing her hat into the Presidential ring, but I haven’t paid much attention to what she has to say…so far. But, it’s come to my attention that on Tuesday, August 16^th, she started off one of her speeches in South Carolina, by wishing Elvis a Happy Birthday on the 34^th anniversary of his death. Yes, she is just another politician who just can’t get her facts straight. This was something so simple to look up that a five year old could do it.

You have to wonder what kind of fact checkers she has on her staff? This was part of a written speech, she wasn’t just shooting from the hip, like some other female candidate we won’t mention today. I have to get her direct quote in here now:

“Before we get started, let’s all say ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today. We played you a little bit of ‘Promised Land’ when we pulled up. You can’t do better than Elvis Presley and we thought we would celebrate his birthday as we get started to celebrating Take Our Country Back tour.”Elvis was actually born on January 8^th. The crowd tried to correct her, but she admirably went on with her speech, with egg on her face, because the “show” must go on. It even looks worse than it sounds in the video below!

Maybe if this was her first mistake, we might be able to overlook it. Campaigning is a long and hard ordeal, day in and day out. I am sure it’s tiring and stressful at times. Mistakes will be made. But what else has Michele said? Well, in kicking off her campaign, she referred to Waterloo, Iowa, the hometown of actor John Wayne when it is actually the hometown of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Another fact that could have easily been checked to avoid embarrassment.

These kind of mistakes do no inspire much confidence in her, at least not for me, but they sure do get plenty of media attention and headlines. Still, I’m not so sure I would want to become well known based on my gaffes. As far as I am concerned, those are the only two things I have heard from her since she got her campaign off the ground. And you know what? “I’m All Shook Up!”