TIME TRAVELERS

It’s the last day of April and I have a great May coming up.

I'll be traveling to visit my sister in Lakeland, Florida and a book signing at Barnes & Noble thrown in for good measure surely means a full week. I’m really looking forward to both. A Writer's Conference in NYC at the end of May rounds out an interesting month.

Part of my promotion of the George & Bob Books is this self-directed mini tour across the country. Luckily, I also get to visit with my family and friends along the way.

These jaunts across the U.S. have to coincide with my evening adult education classes I am currently teaching. Every Monday afternoon until the end of May, I sit in a classroom with some pretty remarkable women who are writing their life stories.

Talk about drama, and I mean the good kind. The youngest is 79, the oldest 88.

These women come from all walks of life, different economic and social classes. Yet they all blend in well together; they are friends. They have known each other for at least 50 years.

They are teachers, business leaders, and one is from town royalty.

What is most interesting to me is they answer the question recently hidden in the back of my mind of late – what does it feel like to be old?

“I look in the mirror and every morning it is a shock to see my mother standing there.”

“I feel exactly like I did when I was 20. When am I supposed to ‘feel’ old?”

Sure, they admit to some aches and pains, but these women are a tremendous example of what it means to take care of ones self. They continue to get their hair done at the salon, they exercise, and have not smoked in eons.

One never married; only two still have their spouse by their side. They visit their siblings in Florida when the need arises, and smile knowingly when I tell them I am visiting mine this year. Their minds are sharp and they rib each other constantly, laughing and joking about fashion trends and changes, remembering when their children were in school together, marriages and deaths and everything in between.

Surviving the depressions, the wars and the 70’s, they are stronger now than they ever were. They are what I hope I am when I am their age.

The fact that we have been thrown together in this situation is not lost on me; I am more the student than the teacher at this class. I have never thought of myself as a teacher, except perhaps to my children and their friends.

Another gift from above; to be able to look into their eyes and have them tell me their stories.

The answer to my question is really quite simple. Never allow one self to see the end of the road. Just keep traveling it.

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Robert Frost -

The Road Not Taken


TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.