Aging Gracefully

OK, damn it, I'm getting old.

I plan on being a crotchety old lady. There used to be a British sit-com called "Waiting for God," about residents of a retirement home. The main character was a crotchety old lady. She is my role model.

You can't just wake up on your 75th birthday, and decide, "Today's the day." You have to work into the crotchets gradually, over time.

That's why I'm starting early.

For several years, I helped my MIL get around. She was 81 when she died. She had been a premature baby, born in 1921, and not expected to live. The hospital staff refused to let her mother see her, saying that as the baby was not going to live, it didn't pay to get attached. Addy's mom called her husband to come and get her and the baby, and they went home. They kept Addy in the oven for warmth.

She grew into a strapping 5'10" redhead who won medals in every athletic event available. Track and field. Marksmanship. Softball. Basketball. I have her baseball uniform. She was tapped for the Olympic Team in track and field for the 1940 Olympics, but declined. Just as well, as the Olympics declined to be held that year. Well into her seventies, she was a champion bowler.

She taught school in Iowa, in a two room school. She put her husband through college, and he became a professor of biology, first at Texas Tech and then at UNO. She was a faculty wife. She was an activist, almost single-handedly desegregating the senior prom at Lubbock High School in the 1960's. She once threw a man up against a wall when she caught him groping a high school cheerleader. She told a Governor of Texas to his face that he was an ass. Look at the picture. It was taken in 1979 or '80, when my FIL retired.

This is not somebody who should be called "Hon" by a 19-year-old clerk in Walgreen's. I spent a lot of time helping her get around after her hip was broken, watching people being impatient with her walker. I'm the one who picked up all the stuff she knocked over in the grocery store because she wasn't used to their electric scooter/basket things. And I'm the one she called for at 3 o'clock in the morning to scratch the foot that was no longer there.

She was a lot more patient with people than I will be.

So that's why I get grouchy when I hear people griping about old people being slow and ugly and grumpy.

I hope those who grumble will be lucky enough to live so long.