Might As Well Dance

When Mozart was my age, Tom Lehrer said, He'd been dead for three years.

In another year, I will turn sixty, an age I once considered tragic, ancient, and impossible to attain. An age of paper mache skin, blue rinses, sensible shoes and fractured hips, an age where there was nothing to discuss but health risks, offensive music, pharmaceuticals and medicare. Sixty was my grandmother with her face powder and aprons, sixty was wisdom, sixty was decrepit and just plain one foot in the grave old. How foolish we are when we are so young.

I look in the mirror and see an all of five foot tall, slightly overweight redhead in bluejeans, tee shirt,

running shoes and tri-focals. This is not sixty, not even close, and I can't quite make sense of it. I know how old I am, the evidence is in the circles under my eyes, the loss of strength in my hands, the absent mindedness, the fact that when I kneel to take a picture, I have to reach for something to get back up again. My memory, which still holds the entire score to "The Music Man", can't come up with what I had for breakfast and without a list I can't function or get much done. I can't see without my glasses, all but five of my natural teeth have gone the way of all flesh, and if I sit cross legged for more than a minute or two, I can't walk. But this is still not sixty. Sixty is permed hair and glasses on a chain, sixty is walking with a cane, sixty is stout and heavy sighs when you sit. Sixty is face lifts, clip earrings, indigestion, slowing down, support hose and fiber.

And yet, here I am. Age, I tell myself, is between your ears, a state of mind not appearance, a matter of attitude not chronology. I often read Jenny Joseph's poem that begins "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple ....." . I am coming to realize that sixty is not only me, sixty is being free.

Life may not be the party we expected, but as long as we're here, we might as well dance.

Anonymous