Chapter 39
I’ve known for quite some time that age is settling down to some serious business and that those teeny bopper years are a lifetime past. There’s gray in my hair and the crows are leaving footprints around my eyes when the little rascals light on my face while I sleep.
My mirror doesn’t seem capable of telling a little white lie and my scales are just plumb rude! !
This week our YOUNGEST child had her seventh birthday so it’s useless to even laughingly claim twenty-one again.
Also, this week, the Mr. and I celebrated fourteen years of marriage.
Even though we had just thrown away our baby bottles, diaper pins, and stuffed animals when we got married, fourteen years IS quite a time.
And then to pile one more straw on the old bent over, broken down, proverbial camel’s back, our oldest youngun starts to junior high school this week! !
I’d begun to consider moving over to seventh street—they tell me there’s fine facilities for the elderly over there.
But before arrangements could be thought about, I did have to see to it our daughter didn’t have a presentless birthday.
After all she was SO humble and asked for so little—only a wristwatch, a rabbit coat, a baby grand piano, and a real guitar.
Tears welled up in my eyes, my joints began to stiffen with old age rheumatism, and I could feel a cardiac arrest commencin’ while a stroke tried to run in ahead of it!
! There it was in black and white, written out plainer than day.
Even the youngest of our three-member brood did NOT need JUMBO crayons this year!
!! I felt ancient! Someone had ALWAYS needed jumbo crayons—for the past umpteen years we’d bought them.
How did a person go about buying school supplies and pass up the jumbo crayons?
! It’d be like grocery shopping and not buying milk or bread.
I had a choice right then. Either be the first person my age to die of old age natural causes or else get a new outlook on the whole situation.
I decided the latter. So, I don’t get to buy jumbo crayons…
at least I don’t buy class rings or senior pictures!
The year I buy those things I have another all ready—so I buy class rings this year…
at least I don’t have to worry with grandchildren!
And then—so what if I’m a grandmother and my grandchild starts school this year…
at least I’ll get to buy jumbo crayons… and that makes me YOUNG again.