A year ago, I started this blog as a way to reach out to others while keeping brain and fingers well exercised. The column below is among the first that appeared, and it seems appropriate today. Enjoy the trip down memory lane.
WHAT IS AGE?
The calendar tells me that I am 62. There are days when the body agrees. Most of the time as long as I don't go anywhere near a mirror, I think I'm 36. See the picture above taken a quarter of a century ago. It was a wonderful year so I chose to freeze in that state. There is nothing that makes me sense physically, mentally or emotionally that I am beyond that age.
I can tell myself that the hair is grey. I can step on a scale and groan with dismay, but when the mirror and the scale are gone, that picture is me. The only place I feel old is in the reflection of other peoples eyes. They see me as I appear, not as I am.
Rodin did a sculpture, "She who used to be the beautiful Heaulmiere". Robert Heinlein remarked about this sculpture that it takes a genius to look at what is and see the person behind the reality. Heaumiere was always 18. That the facts said that her breasts drooped, that her stomach hung, that her cheeks and jowls were sagging over the bones was unimportant. To herself she was a young and beautiful girl. In the movie "All that Jazz", the central character on his way through a hospital ward stops off in the room of an elderly, semi-conscious woman and gives her a passionate kiss to which she responds in kind and for a few moments you believe that she is young.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm a few years younger than my own children. Fortunately, they have inherited their mother's total disregard for the years. Welcome to joy and experience and adventure ... the future is a wonderful thing to view and I have a lifetime to enjoy it all.
