Happy and content at 72

Happy 72! I don’t know about you, but I never imagined being this old. I don’t know what I thought because my father died at 41 and my mother at 53. Fortunately, my paternal aunts and uncles all lived well into their eighties and nineties. And my PawPaw, my mother's father, died at 94, and her siblings lived into their eighties and nineties as well. Each of them led full and amazingly productive lives until the final bell. They were also not wealthy by any standard, but they were happy and content.

Despite growing up very poor and feeling like an outcast, when I look back at my life, I am incredulous.

Much has been written about the strength of the eldest, and I think there is something in that. When I was ten years old, my PawPaw gave us a set of World Books, and the world opened up to my imagination. We never had a TV, so we would take one of the encyclopedias and sit down, going through it for hours on end. I still remember one of my siblings asking, “Who has the “S” book?” or whatever it was they wanted to look at.

Around the same time, a mobile library started coming to our little town of 300 in the summer, and we would make our way down to turn in books and get another one. Soon I was checking books out of the school library, and my favorites were Jane Eyre, Withering Heights, and Charles Dickens. But once, when I was in Grade 7, I checked out a contemporary novel about a young woman living in a big city and her little basement apartment. She had a job as a secretary and took a bus to work. That became my dream, and it was fantastic because I didn’t know anyone like that, but suddenly I knew of a very different world. I had no idea how I would ever make that happen.

So when I look back on 72 years, realizing how many places I have lived, all over the world and in the US, and even more visited, it seems a bit unreal. It is so far away from the pages of the World Books.

I am rich, not with money, but with memories, people and places.

Yes, I am happy and content.