Harmless Little Old Ladies?
Here I sit outside nearing noon on an August day—the ground is damp from yesterday’s nearly one inch of rain, the temperature is in the low eighties, and there is a nice little breeze blowing. My keeper, my Australian Shepherd, is lying on my foot, so I cannot escape without waking her. I am usually hiding in the house on a day like to today to escape the brightness and the heat. But what an odd 18 months we have had, the weather being only one of many odd things.
A young man came over this morning and was telling me about a lady he knows who just turned 79. He was talking about how sharp she is—smart, perceptive, decisive, thorough, and very direct in her speech. He was telling me he does not want to run afoul of her and would have really hated to have done so when she was younger. I surmised he meant that for as sharp as she is now, she was even more so when she was in her fifties or so.
I know enough about this lady to know that she has had some circumstances in her life where she has had to be tough. She has not had the luxury of stepping back and letting someone else take care of things for her. At the same time, she had and has standards, and has not been willing to relax her standards to make life easier on herself or others. Beneath that granny facade is about a hundred pounds (if that) of grit.
The young man assumes that people soften a bit as they get older, and some people may, but I am thinking that in many cases people simply choose their battles more carefully as they age.
After thinking about the conversation for a while, I told him my theory. I know this has been bounced around in medical science for a while and is a theory, and therefore not proven as a fact, but I think that to some extent the aging brain is a “use it or lose it” proposition. The lady has most certainly kept her brain well-exercised and gainfully employed. Now take 79 years of life experiences and feed them to an active and healthy mind, and the result is a very perceptive and intelligent person. She may have lost some of her physical agility and strength, but her mind is growing ever stronger. He is right to be careful around her because in a battle of wits, he would be bringing bare knuckles for a laser-guided missile fight.
I am a very realistic person, and reality can often be negative. For this reason, I try to find the positive in as many situations as possible so that I can keep at least a balanced perspective on life. Yes, our odd year and a half (so far) has had many, many negative realities, many more challenges most of us normally face. On the other hand, facing challenges provides opportunities for growth, for greater understanding, and for finding strength we did not know we had. Often, hard times make the good times much sweeter when they roll back around, and they always roll back around. Sitting outside on a coolish, August day with a dog sleeping on my foot is looking very, very sweet to me these days as I think about the lessons of our very odd period of time in which we find ourselves still. Here is to hoping we can all come out of this better, or at least smarter, than we started. SpringCreekArtsGuild@ gmail.com