Understanding the Aging

Back in the early 1980s, my boss at the newspaper asked me to go to a local nursing home and take a picture of two residents each celebrating 100 years on this earth.  Armed with my trusty camera, I went off.  He had warned me about bringing home a "Mexican bandit" shot, and at that time I really had no idea what he meant.  It was years later when I thought about it -- how the Mexican bandits would proudly pose for a picture standing in a straight line with no expression on their faces (being baddies) and holding guns. 

Thing is, the woman at the nursing home advised me that one of the women was proud that she could still walk.  The other wasn't able to walk.  The one that was able to walk wanted to have her picture taken standing.  The other resident had to sit.  When I suggested (as my boss had mentioned), that they could both sit down and toast each other with a tea cup, the nursing home employee got this stricken look on her face and kept shaking her head, "No!"

Okay, so we got a lousy picture of two women, one standing and one sitting and it was worse than a Mexican bandit shot.  I told my boss that HE should go back over there if he wanted to negotiate with them.

While I was trying to understand how it might feel to be 100, there was no way that I could.  And I still can't, not really.

Getting older is one of the sure things in life.  Like they say, taxes and death, but then there's the in between -- getting older.

In Eric's Lions Club, some of the members are getting up there and beginning to have some serious health issues.  These are people I've come to know for many years in some cases.  Plus, my husband still smokes and he has some issues too.  There have been three funerals in the past year, either Lions or their wives.

Pondering the mystery of aging, I think about older family members who came to Christmas or Easter and how for that moment in time, they must have felt vibrant and full of life, almost as though they hadn't aged at all.  But then the celebration ended and they had to go back to the "regular" life.  So part of getting older is probably feeling like the train came into the station but you missed it.

My granddaughter came over after school yesterday.  A large box had arrived at the front door and I whispered to her that I hadn't told my husband about that yet.  So a little later, I opened it and showed Eric what I bought.  He nodded in some sort of agreement, but the best was yet to come.  The padded storage ottoman came in the box with packing poppies, and a mosquito net around it!!  First, we scared all of the cats in the house from here to there by jumping around on the poppies.  My husband came by and took a pass at it too.  Then my granddaughter crawled in the box and dumped herself over on one side.  She put the mosquito netting on the front and took her root beer inside.  It was another great day on the Serengeti. 

Our Lenten quote for today is:

“It [penance] does not mean sacrifice and self denial in the first place, but a “change of heart,” a victory over sin and a striving for holiness.  The sacrifices of fasting and self-denial are only means and signs of this spiritual penance.  If people understand this well, they will not put the main effort in Lent on technical feats of abstaining from pleasures (which sometimes make them proud or vain), but in sincere contrition, prayer and humble fight against their faults.” - Fr. Francis X. Weiser S.J.