I love this picture.

At this time of year, we celebrate the birth of a baby who grew up to change the world.  Painting upon painting has been created, song upon song have been sung about this event.  We have firmly fixed in our minds the picture of a small, innocent human ensconced in a straw filled manger.

We do not live in an over fifty-five community officially, but it might as well be. All our neighbors have gray hair and the only children in evidence are visiting grandchildren.

I have recently realized that our lives are lived in a series of brackets.  These are a series of befores and afters; before the first job after the last job, being single then being married, before the baby then after the last one leaves home, before that move then after that move.  But one bracket that I am in the middle of just occurred to me the other day --- before the car and after the car

I am probably one of the last people on earth that knows more about soup and how to eat it than is necessary. I even have silver flat ware from my grandmother that includes two kinds of soup spoons --- one for cream soups and one for clear soups. And not only are the spoons different, but the bowls from which those soups are eaten are different too.

I have spent most of my life watching carefully as the tide slowly went out. I have watched for my children's safety, analyzed their friends, helped with school work, worried about their goals, and watched them get married and start families of their own.

This rather hackneyed literary phrase has suddenly taken on new meaning for me. I was watching TV the other day when a picture of a walled city in Europe came up on the screen. I found myself, a few moments later, returning to the show I had been watching. But for a few moments I had been lost.

Absentee ballots were my voting lifeline for many years. Never once in all the years I put that ballot in the mailbox, did I think that the vote would not be counted or that the priveledge of participating in our precious voting system would be denied to me.

I recently visited an old and valued friend whom I have known for more years than I can count. We knew each other when our children were babies and now those babies have children that are heading off to college.

From Diogenes wandering about ancient Greece with his lamp looking for one honest man to the current furor over fake news, the search for truth has always been central to our human condition.  I ran into this recently when I came across a quote from Robert Frost that is all over the internet.  The quote is “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”  This struck me as a wonderful quote to use in the discussion of what it means to be older. 

I am beginning to think I am like an old computer. You know the one. It has the baby pictures of your college student on it, and never was quite the same after you spilled coffee on it and dropped it on the concrete floor at the airport.

I have just finished watching the new Ken Buns documentary called The United States and the Holocaust. In the film an older survivor of that horror tells of his very moving arrival in America. Both he and his sister were German Jews, and had been separated from their parents in the maelstrom that was the Jewish experience at that time.

The foods that are available to us today in no way resemble the foods of my youth.  Here are the startling facts that will make that obvious: I never saw or tasted pizza, the most ingested food for the under ten set, until I was in my twenties;  not one fast food joint served breakfast food of any kind; and  spaghetti was a glamorous ethnic dish. 

I am not particularly a sports fan. Oh, I watch the Olympics sporadically when they come around every few years, seeing sports played that I never knew were sports. (Curling??? Who knew.) And I watch football sporadically while I sew or quilt, but my husband must tell me what team to root for.

My vocabulary has been expanded. This increase in knowledge happened on a recent road trip with my 17-year-old grandson. I was invited to join this new college freshman and his mother on a two-day drive to his chosen college.

We hear the term heroes a great deal during our current health crisis.  And certainly there are heroes, particularly those who march into hospitals every day to take care of their fellow countrymen struck down by the virus.  I think particularly about the nurses who have been doing their jobs day in and day out for years without the recognition they are finally getting.

I am not into cars, and I have always said that I would like to have owned one car in my life and be buried in it like a Viking in his ship. However, I have begun to realize that cars have changed as much as I have and maybe I do not want to go back to that particular ship.

      Prepare yourself.   I am going to be a bit crabby.  I recently made an investigative expedition to my local library to see what the experts were writing on aging.  I not only perused the books, but also the periodical shelves as well as the internet.  I have two takeaways from all of this research.

Even the title of this blog shows my age. Does any young person out there even know what this phrase means? And while we oldsters may know what it means I, along with many others, did not know its origins. It actually comes from the word umble which was old English for the organs of a deer.

Recently the tragic history of a ten-year-old has made the news which has caused an uproar on both sides of the divide that seems to have currently afflicted our nation. But putting this divide aside, I would just like, for a moment, to look at what it is to be a ten-year-old girl.