Hired Help for an Old Lady

People in their eighties don’t like to hear me call myself old. But I am old. Now, when health problems arise, I ask my doctors “why?”

“It’s age related,” they say. That’s the only proof I need.

Except when I look in the mirror at my face, I like old. The kindness of strangers, my patience, intellectual clarity, and confidence all work in my favor. Being old justifies a lot of fun things for me. I like that the boy next door mows my lawn, and my Monday piano student shows up every week to weed and help me clean. At my age, I have friends who are in their 30s and 40s, but a teenager rarely wants to hang out with me. When I pay them, all that changes.

My mower leaves for college tomorrow. He taught me to have a sense of calm, even when the snow became higher than my knees. My weed gal, now called a Turf Engineer, starts her senior year in high school at the end of the month. She taught me to stick by my principles and be myself. Even at my age, that can be difficult.

Hired helpers become real friends. They enter my home, accept my foibles, then wait patiently for their gas money. They don’t care that I’m a bit of a hermit. They don’t care if my hair is a mess and I wear stained clothes around the house. Their intuition takes them through life, and will steer them through the perils of college and freedom.

I embrace old. At some point, maybe in another thirty-seven years, I’ll make way for the babies, as my mother did five years ago. But for now, as Ann Margret (and I, in high school) sang in Bye Bye Birdie, I “Got a Lot of Livin’ to Do.”