I turned sixty in October...I really don’t mind being sixty...the time passed is showing but it feels like a kindly kiss on the face from a doting great-aunt...instead of leaving red lip stick, Great Aunt Time left wrinkles. My feeling memories are so strong I can still remember what it felt like like to be eight or eighteen or twenty eight. This is the time for 40th and 45th reunions...the time to see how old all your former classmates look...the time to count the missing ones and remember them in silence...the time to give thanks.
Old people have always fascinated me. My grandmother was my first old friend...born in 1896 to German parents...daughter of an opera singer...career teacher...mother of three...creative cusser...seer of visions...wrinkled and funny and endlessly entertaining to grandchildren...teller of family stories...I loved her, as did all her grandchildren, with an unwavering allegiance and a full appreciation for the person she had been and the person she was. Old age in Grandma did not look scary. It was full of humor, courage, grace, curiosity, acceptance and love. The painful times she experienced in her old age...leaving her home in the country, two broken hips, having her privacy invaded by someone staying in her home for nursing care, living in a nursing home...none of this diminished her spirit. My last visit with her was as dear to me as my first memory of her.
My mother is eighty now. In her hooded eyes, I sometimes see my grandmother laughing...the same hooded eyes I have. Her once dark hair is silver white...her blue eyes are as bright as ever...her passion for animals and the outdoors is as intense as ever...and she tells me stories now like my grandma did. As the two living members of our immediate family of four, these stories are infinitely precious to me. I’ve gotten to know my dad as the handsome young sailor my mother loved all those years ago...I’ve been given the wonderful gift of her stories about my sister and me as babies and young children in the time before my conscious memory began...tales of the past that both anchor and free me to move into my future where I will have silver hair and more wrinkles than God.
Pitts Hughes came into my life as a friend of my husband Michael at the seminary. A southern lady "to the manor born" who never fit the mold, went to the female version of seminary school and spent her life tending her rambunctious flock of nurses, college students, seminary students, pastors, friends of all stripes and types. Michael and I had married and I was working full time as a social worker while he finished his last year of seminary. Pitts, Michael and Gene would often have lunch together and I heard all the stories at supper...Pitts driving down Lexington Road and Gene screaming at the top of his lungs that she was going to hit that car... going into the grocery store and while Pitts shopped, Michael and Gene regaled the clerk with stories about the old lady they had taken from the "Home"...going clothes shopping with her and giving her the benefit of their fashion nonsense. Somehow, Pitts became my friend, too. I was included in the sacred circle of friendship these three had created.
From Pitts, I learned the following: 1) Manners and style matter because they ease your way through life; 2) Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself because that keeps the joke from being on you; 3) If you must mention your physical complaints, do so with brevity, honest recognition of your limits and move on to a story of how utter strangers can be angels in disguise; 4) Maintain your family connections; 5) You have a family of birth and family of choice.
Miss Ruby...daughter of Plains, Georgia, friend of Jimmy Carter’s mother, baker of communion bread and tea party giver extraordinaire, hymn writer, lover of baseball and river rafter in her eighties...the first person I knew who would stay up until two in the morning to hear Pavarotti sing...small, petite, white haired knot on top of her head...she taught me how to find joy in grief. Her only son was killed in World War Two, her husband died of a heart attack as they visited her son’s grave in Italy many years later. By the time I knew her, her grief had been transformed...a hymn written...their names a part of her daily life...the sadness had become a grateful remembrance of the good gift of their presence in her life.
