Gawd's Will

Reading over my last post, chuckling to myself, enjoying my own voice (yeah, I know, it's sickening), it reminded me of a characteristic I share with my sister.  As she put it, "I've become accustomed to the fact people do not figure out how smart I am for quite a while."  Yeah, I know.  We're both old enough we can laugh about that.  This is one reason I must write.  I like the idea of readers exclaiming, "Gawd, she's awfully interesting for someone who looks like someone's grandma."

It reminds me of when I heard someone had described me as a "nanna".  They said, "You know, nannas are the grandmothers who bake cookies and knit."  I love that comment.  And I do in fact bake cookies and knit.  But I was somewhat taken aback by the thought and wondered if that's how I'm perceived, as someone who bakes cookies and knits.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  I had a grandma who ran a whole bakery, and my own mother was a grandma who knitted every day.

But I also had a grandpa who tatted.  And smoked a pipe, and put glucose powder on his cereal, which he ate wearing a three piece suit.  Always a three piece suit.  And my own father was a grandpa who took over the cooking so my mother could do all that knitting.  They were all so much more than what they might have at first appeared to be, so much more than can be put into a single sentence.  The older I get, the more I know that to be true.

When my grandmother was about eighty she said to my mother, "I still feel like a girl inside.  I'm still me."  I remember looking at pictures of this tiny grey haired woman wearing an apron and sensible shoes and thinking, "Imagine that."  Well, I no longer have to imagine it, I'm living it.  I'm far from eighty, that's true, and perhaps all this cogitating about aging is my way of preparing for it, or taking stock and in the end seeing how much more I have left of my life, Gawd willing.  But we do all get there eventually, if we are lucky.