A Little Old Granny

It is curious to me how people become old; do people not realize unless life changes them, the nature of their character is intact at some point and remains so until they die? If you have never baked cookies, what makes you think your senior years are going to be spent baking cookies for your grandchildren?

The matriarch was never a "baking cookies" sort of grandmother, but she did teach all my children to crochet, knit and embroider. She also taught my husband about pastry and he has taught the children and they are really good pastry chefs; I really mean that. I have eaten enough butter tarts to prove it.

But I wonder if we ever plan the kind of senior we want to be? I know people plan for retirement and for years after work, but that's all material...I don't know if we ever try to be the kind of people we want to be; I look in the mirror and I think of people I try to emulate and how faraway from the ideal I am and I wonder what goes on in other people's heads. The matriarch talked today about how people never call her and how they have forgotten her and I asked her whom she had called.

She went upstairs.

When I walked in on her later, the matriarch was sitting in her rocking chair having an argument with herself. She looked at me and then asked me to dial the phone for her; she wanted to call a friend who had been in hospital. I don't think people have forgotten the matriarch; she has never made an effort and, now, they don't. It is kind of sad, but there is a redeeming quality to it...the matriarch did telephone someone today, a small miracle. Maybe it is never too late to change.