I met the coolest woman today at the Bob Crippen presentation. Her name was Ernestine and she was 87 years old.
A real spitfire. She was passionate about the Kennedies, always referring to JFK by his full name -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That's the reason she attended the presentation -- because she believed in Kennedy so much and supported all of his ideas, especially the space program.
She was politically active, talking about what a mess it is to vote down party lines and about North Korea's nuclear policies.
After watching a pretty indoctrinating video provided by the Astronaut's Scholarship Foundation, she proclaimed, "That was worse than church!" pretty damn loudly.
She giggled with excitement over meeting an astronaut, wore bright Schiaparelli pink and held my hand for the full fifteen minutes that we spoke. She referred to her husband as her 'honey' and proudly told me that they had been married for 51 years.
You know, it seems more and more people fear getting old. They lift and tuck. They enlarge and reduce. They fill up and suck out. They inject poison into their faces, rendering them as emotionless as mimes.
Why? So you can look like a 25-year-old with three kids and a minivan as opposed to a 40-year-old?
The hell with that. It's cool to get old. To have stories and scars. Every wrinkle, every crow's foot, every laugh line is a memory, so why would you want to erase all that? I want my body to be a roadmap of my life -- wrinkles, scars, bruises, birthmarks and all. My right ankle may not be pretty, but its misshapen form will always remind me of a time when I was passionate and reckless.
You earn all of those things and to take them away through whatever means is betraying yourself and your experiences.
It could be the folly of youth talking and maybe I'll think differently when I'm 80 and my face is puckered up like a baked apple, but I really can't see that happening. I want to get old. I want to live my life and earn everything I can from it.
P.S. -- Caffeine-free Diet Coke tastes like battery acid.
A real spitfire. She was passionate about the Kennedies, always referring to JFK by his full name -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That's the reason she attended the presentation -- because she believed in Kennedy so much and supported all of his ideas, especially the space program.
She was politically active, talking about what a mess it is to vote down party lines and about North Korea's nuclear policies.
After watching a pretty indoctrinating video provided by the Astronaut's Scholarship Foundation, she proclaimed, "That was worse than church!" pretty damn loudly.
She giggled with excitement over meeting an astronaut, wore bright Schiaparelli pink and held my hand for the full fifteen minutes that we spoke. She referred to her husband as her 'honey' and proudly told me that they had been married for 51 years.
You know, it seems more and more people fear getting old. They lift and tuck. They enlarge and reduce. They fill up and suck out. They inject poison into their faces, rendering them as emotionless as mimes.
Why? So you can look like a 25-year-old with three kids and a minivan as opposed to a 40-year-old?
The hell with that. It's cool to get old. To have stories and scars. Every wrinkle, every crow's foot, every laugh line is a memory, so why would you want to erase all that? I want my body to be a roadmap of my life -- wrinkles, scars, bruises, birthmarks and all. My right ankle may not be pretty, but its misshapen form will always remind me of a time when I was passionate and reckless.
You earn all of those things and to take them away through whatever means is betraying yourself and your experiences.
It could be the folly of youth talking and maybe I'll think differently when I'm 80 and my face is puckered up like a baked apple, but I really can't see that happening. I want to get old. I want to live my life and earn everything I can from it.
P.S. -- Caffeine-free Diet Coke tastes like battery acid.
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