Four Score and
Four Years

This June I’ll be 84.

The things I remember.

Small, unimportant things.

Not my young mother’s funeral but the card table she’d open up in the living room because we didn’t have a dining table or dining room.

Not a husband’s proposal but the shock that someone wanted to marry me.

Not childbirth but a daughter’s kindergarten dress.

Not my college graduation but Cathy saying to Heathcliff in the movie Wuthering Heights: “Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.”

I have memories of times when my older sister and I were children. We shared a bedroom and when we’d fight (what in the world could we have been fighting over?), I’d tear down the pictures of Frank Sinatra she’d cut out of movie magazines and taped on the wall over her bed. And then she’d scratch my arm with her long Revlon red finger nails. I wonder if she’d remember that. But her memories died with her.

I remember making believe I had to go to the bathroom during Latin translation in high school so the teacher wouldn’t call on me.

I remember a pair of red T-strap shoes I always wanted but never got.

         

I remember my father played a harmonica, rolled his own cigarettes, and took me to Loew’s State Theater to see the Harvest Moon Ballroom Dancers stage show and a movie.

 

I remember my father walking around in our railroad flat apartment in his boxer underwear while my mother yelled at him, “Jack, put pants on. You have daughters.”

But I can’t remember what my father looked like. I never saw him again after I was 12. Somebody sent me a picture of him and me at somebody’s wedding.

I didn’t know which man he was.

I remember trying to figure out how to kiss by kissing my hand but I don’t remember my first boyfriend kiss. I remember my first night of love at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival and how I still didn’t know who did what.

I don’t know why such unimportant things stay in my memory when times I wish I could remember are gone.

I’m lucky to be 84 and reasonably healthy. But I wonder why I’m so old and why those I’ve loved died so young. The more you love someone, the more joy—and sorrow—they bring to you.

I’m making new memories—there are grandkids to watch grow and a good marriage of love and friendship.

But many desires have gone. I don’t want to travel, or need a fancy pocketbook, or to be a blonde or to be Botoxed.

I like to write my thoughts to you in a blog. Sometimes funny, sometime melancholy, like this one. And I like to hear from you. It keeps me in touch with a world I hardly know anymore.

Before I go to sleep at night I think about all the things I want to do the next day—but the next morning I don’t feel like doing anything—and that’s okay.

Once I thought I could solve just about any problem and I usually could. Now I known that I can’t. That’s hard to accept. But I do.

Once I was the center of my children’s world.

That ended a long time ago.

Once I needed things. I don’t anymore.

I don’t even need everybody to like me

I hope to use my time to be more truthful, kinder and more understanding of others.

Maybe I’ll turn up in somebody else’s good memories.

 

You’re just a button click away and I’d love to hear from you.

About your world, your family, your joys and frustrations, growing up, growing older, even recipes– even though I stopped cooking–by request–years ago.

Goodbye until next time…

Hope your day turns out as well as I hope
(but doubt) mine will,

Gingy (Ilene)