05.08.14  Today is my birthday.  How did I get to be 67 years old already!?  “A woman in her late sixties.”  The last birthday my Dad had, when he was 75, a bunch of us siblings celebrated with him on the beach in Hawaii.  He was happy then, and reminisced about what a great life he felt he had lived.  I remember him saying that although his body was older, in his mind, he felt that he never aged past 50.  My husband likes to say that the only time he doesn’t feel he’s aging is when he rides his bike; then he always feels like he’s 22.

I guess I just feel like 67.  Whatever that means.  Thinking back to age 50, it was such a pivotal birthday when I moved to Montana that year.  Our lovely home in Colorado was sold; my last child was off at college; my mother astonished me by dying.  And, there was menopause!  Unlike Dad, I’m glad that my perspective has moved past age 50.  And 22–oh my!  Married two years, living in a government housing project in St. Louis, working several jobs to support my husband in medical school.  I love it when my daughters have asked me what it was like to live back in the Sixties, and I tell them, “I have no idea.”

I’m fine to just be 67.  I think I’ll save the reminiscing for my 70th birthday, when I hope to be fortunate enough to feel as good, be as happy as I am now.  It can take its good sweet time in getting here, I might add.  Although I’ve been brushed by the wing of the raven with cancer, I’ve lived such a truly charmed life, which somehow seems to even get better, even as it’s also true, “old age isn’t for sissies.”   Happy Birthday to me!

“What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”  –Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890)