‘Getting OLD’

February 16th Twenty-ten!

Dear Anne & Carter:

Tonight I’m teaching a class on “Aging Positively” in other words “Getting OLD!”
I wonder what “old” means to you? Food in the refrigerator that’s gotten moldy?
Bigger kids who are teenagers? People over 30? Or 60? Or as I now see it: over 90!?

I used to think it was cute when Willard Scott on the Today show showed pictures, of somebody, usually of a woman on a Smucker’s Jelly Jar on her 99th or 102nd birthday. Guess what? I don’t any more.

I turn si … six …sixty-five on my birthday March 1st, and every day I get reminded of how long a life that’s been. When I go to the gym and set the time I want on the treadmill, and have to enter my age, I have to hold the button down til the digital numbers climb up from 35 to 65! When I fill out a form on the computer and it asks what year I was born, I have to scroll down from 2010 through 1990’s, 1980’s and so on back past the 1950’s to 1945! Yikes, those few seconds seem like a long long time. Almost every day in the mail I get envelopes with advertisements on the outside with things like a picture of a woman looking up at a cloud raining down on her that says “Turning 65 and worried about it?” or from Physician’s Mutual with “Who inherits your debts if something happens to you?” Or from something called The Trident Society with a “Free Pre-paid Cremation” offer right under my address! And the television commercials about all the prescription drugs and their side-effects: don’t get me started. The women’s magazines with all the ads for “anti-aging” creams and pills make me crazy. People injecting botox which is actually poison into their skin to keep them from lookin ‘older’ … Forgettaboutit!

So Anne as you turn 8 and want to be 13, or Carter you turn 10 but want to be 16 so you can get a drivers license, or 21 to legally drink; remember to accept the truth of your age and fill each minute with love and fun.

I sure wish I could be in more memories of your minutes.!

Your ‘old’ but happy GRANDMOTHER PAT