Musings On A Life Half Spent: Do I Get Change With That?
Middle age. A good deal of this blog is going to be about middle age. Not the Middle Ages—you know, the black plague, Knights, etc... not those ones, but the middle part of one's life span. Oh eh yeah, that one (it's got it's own kinda plague.) Forty-four. Everytime I hear that number, I think, I can't possibly be! I have to be still in my thirties. I want to shout, "Forty-four? Forty? Fight!"
Really, I don't feel forty-four—however old that must feel, I can't feel that way. Yes, sure in the morning when I wake up everything aches. It takes my feet at least twenty minutes before they even feel the ground under them. So what if I weeble when I walk? There's still a giggle in my talk. And, I started going gray young. I did too!
Sigh.Alright, yes. I am middle aged. How I realized it for certain was when I was looking through old photos found put away in trunks in the basement. We are getting new water lines put in the basement this spring so have been cleaning out the unnecessary things, (let's make that years of garbage) four households of women have aquired over three generations of combined lifetimes. If you aren't gasping in horror, it's ok, we all still have perminant jaw drops from the ceiling high stacks of needless nic-nackery ourselves.
But, I digress...I'd been wanting to show Jated (my life mate) a picture of my father's mother. I had many of my mum's mum, but none of Dad's. They'd all been put away when we had others move in with us, but I couldn't find where I'd put them. (Early onset?
) To my delight I had found some in an album. While I was looking at the photos, I was chatting with Dad over facebook.
“Oh, no no no!” I typed furiously, not believing my own eyes.
“What?” Dad typed back. I added anxiety to the flashing curser, sure he was worried.
“I have become Gramma!”
“What???”
“No really, I just looked at Gramma's picture at your twenty-fifth with Mum. I am Gramma” Tears were running down my face. (OK they weren't, but it did add to the drama!)
“Oh, come on!” He typed.
I quickly took a photo of myself and sent him both mine and a scan of Gramma's picture.
“LOOK!” I demanded all in caps. “Remember how everytime we tried to decide who I looked like, and everyone said they couldn't figure it out. I looked like you, yet I looked like Mum, yet...”
“Yeaaaas.” He drew out. I could picture him nodding—thumb on his chin, forefinger on his upper lip.
“Well, ok look at the pictures now.”
His curser flashed at me. Winking, “You're your own Gramma; nener ne ner neeeee ner.”
“Well???” I asked.
“I don't believe it... You ARE Gramma!”
“I told you! See. Well don't think you're getting off light. I look like you too, so you look like Gramma too. At least I'm a girl.” I stuck my tongue out at him.
Dad sent me a grin.
Gramma was a lovely woman. What startled me the most? How my face now looked like the face of a woman who had known pain, suffering, loss and love. My face knows age and wears it, not so much in wrinkles, but in the shadows and vales of it's ansesterage of canvas. I wanted to jump up and celebrate! Oh, ouch...my knees. I gotta remember to get up every hour and stretch!
--Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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