This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help Baby Boomers, seniors, retirees, and those soon to retire find joy, excitement, and satisfaction in life after retirement. Her public lecture on this subject is titled: “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement.” Her memoir, Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class, is available by clicking here Amazon.com. Click here for her website: http://AdventuresWithDadTheBook.com
Now, on to my blog:
Take off one candle from the birthday cake. I’m a year younger than I thought!
When the subject comes up, I’ve been telling people my age, or at least, what I thought was my age. I’ve never shortchanged my years, trying to drop five or ten of them to represent myself as being younger. I am what I am, and I have never bought into presenting myself otherwise.
Last week at my gym class, I got into a discussion with another member about how old we were going to be on our next birthday. She thought she was the oldest person there and was so excited to find someone older–by one year. As we continued talking, we discovered we had been born in the same year, she in March and I in December.
Wait a minute, something didn’t compute. It seemed that either I was a year younger than I was claiming, or she was a year older. I was sure I was right. After all, I’m pretty sharp and don’t usually make significant mistakes like that.
I rushed home and grabbed my cheapo calculator. It seemed to tell me that she was right. Naw, it must be defective. How long had it been since I changed the batteries? I took to google and typed “age calculator” into the search box. After inputting my date of birth, up came a number that agreed with cheapo and my gym mate. But, how was that possible? I had been claiming the wrong age, even on written forms where it was requested, upping it by a year.
The only thing I can figure out is that I went to my high school class reunion a few months ago, and many attendees were a year older as I had been among the youngest in that class having been born nearly at year’s end. So, hearing them talk about their age, I guess I started saying the same thing.
The silver lining to my faulty memory is that I just got a year younger! Now, how often do we get that, folks?
Funny, though; I don’t feel any different. Yes, it’s the same old me. Being a year younger doesn’t make any difference. My takeaway: calculations of ages and birth dates are just numbers’ games. It’s what you do with those precious years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds that matter.
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Photo credit: gotbrimmed on Visual hunt / CC BY-ND
We use our bodily parts in various ways to hold the objects necessary in our daily life. We balance glasses on the bridge of our nose and the tops of our ears. We hold up our pants by cinching belts around our waists. We strap watches around our wrists. We tie young babies to our backs. As the child grows larger, we hoist it on our hip bone to straddle our body for balance as we carry it.
I was on an amazing trip to Africa a few months ago. One day, we stopped at a giraffe rescue compound. Up close and personal was their philosophy. The staff even gave us food pellets to feed to our long-necked friends. What a privilege to be able to touch such a beast.
Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years 