The Best is Yet to Come

Today would have been my mother’s birthday. She was in bad health for years, but always told me that she wouldn’t trade being where she was to be my age again.

I guess wisdom and perspective trump youth.

Age is a funny thing, especially when you don’t feel older. Sometimes I wonder if other people think I’m aging and I’m the last to know.

It’s a state of mind, state of mind.

I’m reading Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes (affiliate link) and I love what Shauna Niequest says about her mom: “My mom is sixty and she’s never been cooler . . . When I get frustrated that there aren’t enough hours in a day, that I can’t do enough or be enough or experience everything I want to just exactly right now, my mom reminds me in her gentle way that this is not where she thought she’d be at sixty, and that the best is yet to come.”

My parents aged well, and yes, my mom was cool. When she needed to create an ID to join an email loop, she used “Coolat55.” I’ve still got my dad, and he continues to gently push back my concept of what constitutes old. Last week he and my stepmom took a 1K+ mile motorcycle trip to the beach.

My great aunt Mayme lived to be almost 96 and retained an uncanny empathy with children. She remembered what it felt like to be any age.

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.” ~Madeleine L’Engle

This Friday marks my blog’s 7th anniversary and I’m not sure how to celebrate.

Is there anything you’d like to know? A question I could answer?

{A post with this title wouldn’t be complete without some gratuitous Frank Sinatra.}