THE GOLDEN YEARS

I would like to meet the person who made up the term, The Golden Years, and give them a piece of my mind! The Golden Years. Really?

I think the golden years of a person's life is when one is young. That's when you have all the energy in the world. Your body is in the best shape. Your mind is less cluttered with all the life experiences you will have, both fantastically good and tragically sad. The world is your oyster and there's a pearl growing inside your shell. You haven't lived long enough to be pessimistic and jaded. There's a blue bird singing on your shoulder and the future is bright.

But . . .  then you get older. Not only is the future not as bright as you imagined but your eyesight is getting dimmer to boot. Thanks!

All that High School football you played is catching up to you in your joints, and every time the weather takes a turn for the worse, so does your neck, back, and knees which got clobbered over and over on the playing field to the roaring cheers from the bleachers. Now you ask yourself, “Was it worth it?” and you reply with a smile that you'd do it all over again if your knees weren't bad.

So, you take up golf, but as you have gotten older, so has your thumbs which can't quite grasp the club as elegantly, your back is out of alignment most of the time as well, so your swing runs wide and the ball lands in the rough or you try to dig it out of the sand trap like a cat in a litter box. Thank God for the nineteenth hole where you can soothe your golden aches and pains with a drink, and I'm not talking coca-cola.

And if you're a woman, you just don't age like a fine wine as a man does who, if they were a nerd in High School, look like Clark Gable at sixty. But you, on the other hand at the ripe old age of fifty-something, look like an elephant with all the wrinkles and the sags and your memory is on holiday for good.

The Golden Years? Bah humbug. And then The Market crashed and all those who were trying to tell themselves they were in their Golden Years and could relax with their arthritis are now greeters at Wal-Mart.

Something's wrong with this picture, right?

If you are reading this and you are young . . . it's your golden years!!!! 

If there is something you want to do . . . like climb Mount Everest . . .  DO IT NOW. Don't get old and think it's getting better and you find yourself making a Bucket List of the things you wished you had done when you were younger. DO THEM NOW. Do you really want to jump out of a plane when you're eighty-five? Yes? Go for it, then. But go for it NOW while you have good knees to land on. Don't wait for your golden years in the sunset of your life. The key is the sun is setting and then the light goes out. Do it while the sun is up in the sky and you can see!!!! There's no time like the present. At least right now in the present moment you have that moment, so take a bucketful of those moments and DO IT NOW. Your moments aren't going to roll over like your cell phone minutes and you'll have more minutes the next month to live. Nope. It's like a woman's ovaries. They only have, at birth, a certain number of eggs to fry and when the carton is empty, there ain't no more.

So this is your still-small-blog-voice telling you to enjoy your golden years because it is NOW. If you've got air miles, then go now to St. Lucia! Or jump out of a plane. Or climb Mount Everest. Or tell that person that you want to spend the rest of your life with them!!!

Remember . . . NOW is your golden years. Tomorrow the sun may set forever.

© nancy 1.27.2010

The Fox

A few days ago I was opening a sliding glass door to my backyard and heard a rustling of remaining fall leaves. I looked towards the noise and saw that I must have caught an animal off guard who was minding his own business in the last fragments of warmth produced by the afternoon sun which would quickly leave us all a bit colder in about an hour when it would melt into the western sky. My mind at this point was trying to connect the picturesque dots to form a conclusion. Was I seeing a really big raccoon? No. At first glance, the marks around it's eyes along with its crouched position led me to that error of deduction. The animal was very still and looking right at me with great stillness. I continued to look back and realized  . . . Aha! It was a fox.

Even though the cold air was flowing past me from the chilly 30 something degrees, which was forecasted correctly the night before, I kept the door open to observe my wild visitor. It was unusual to see a fox during the daylight hours so I took it as a gift. I looked into his unblinking eyes and tried to send it a clear message through my own eyes, “I'm not going to hurt you. It's okay. Please stay.”

We remained like that until I decided he wouldn't go away, and I slowly slid the door closed and stood inside for a warm moment, watching. I decided to risk losing sight of him by backing away seamlessly from his view to stand behind the door frame. Now I could walk briskly to my camera that was on the bookshelves close by. Coming back into position, I once again moved in slow motion to bring the camera up to my eye so that I could capture the moment. After all, how many times have I had the pleasure of a fox in my yard during the day! He began to move and that was when I noticed that he was limping. It was hurt.

I happened to have my cell phone in my pocket and knew I had my Vet's number in it. My veterinarian's practice is literally just around the corner and rather than lose sight of this creature I pressed the vet's number in hopes that they would know who to call and do it for me. They did and I waited for a call back, taking pictures of this lone animal who had decided my yard was good for a late afternoon nap. I wondered if it was in pain as it settled in dragging its injured leg beneath him. Was it too painful to even sleep? My heart went out to it, and I was glad at the same time that my cat was inside and wouldn't come across a resting fox in it's own back yard startling it into a fuzzy, spitting frenzy.

What seemed like a billion pictures later, my doorbell rang and a lady animal officer was at the ready with a long pole with a noose at the end of it. I asked that he/she be taken to the Veterinary School here in town. She was excited to see the fox, but when I showed her through my camera lens where the sleeping fox was camouflaged in the leaves, she couldn't see it. I suppose if I didn't see him lay down earlier, and train my camera on him, I wouldn't have been able to spot him either since the sun was doing its thing, vanishing with rapid speed to parts unknown leaving the fox
invisible in nature.

On another note, but in the same vein . . .  I have a friend who has been teaching me about Animal Totems. It's nothing new. Indians believed in totems for centuries. You may have seen one or two wooden ones and were told the significance of animals to humans along with their meaning. So she looked “fox” up online and told me what seeing a fox could mean to me on that day. What follows is my rendition of a synopsis and not plagiarism, so please excuse any similarity in wordage (actually I'll put things in quotes for my own simplicity):

If I take this fox showing up in my yard during the sunlit hours as a sign, then it would read something like this: “It is a time to be careful and discriminating, aware of your communication abilities, and be alert to your surroundings. Fox teaches how to be still and silent and all qualities of patience”. The fox may be showing you “a new world and creative process opening up”. (These quotes are taken from starstuffs.com if you are interested.)

Interestingly enough I am venturing into a new world at this very moment in time . . . going back to school. At my ripe old age of 57, that's me jumping completely out of my box. But like the fox who ventured out into the light of day to become visible to me, I will take it as a good sign that I am doing the right thing but will take care to be discriminating and alert to my surroundings.

Thank you my foxy friend for showing up and looking at me straight in the eye. I hope I read your mind. Maybe you were just telling me it would be a good time to take an afternoon nap???


© nancy 1.13.2010