The young and the old

Yesterday I went to visit my friend who is in her eighties. Her eyes are so bright. So pretty and so blue. It was Friday so she just had her hair done. She gets a taxi wherever she needs to go. Her long nails were a deep hot pink. She'd gone out to get those done too. She was wearing blue jeans and a zip up French striped navy sweatshirt. She looked so good. And she felt good.

I dropped her off a copy of the Sunday Letters. She told me about five times how happy it made her. I knew after I left she would read every letter. Look at every rug closely. That she would go back to it time and time again. On her floor were a couple of my hooked rugs. She had commissioned them about twenty five years ago from me for another room in another house. She has kept them and she still enjoys them. I always forget about that in between our visits and I am happy to see them again. She ordered those rugs when I was just starting out.

I first met her when she interviewed me for a job at social services which I did not get. A few years later when I was working for a transition house for women she came and did some training with us. She was talking to us about her work as a family therapist. She said, "When you marry, you marry the whole family, not just the person." I was twenty two and this was news to me then. So many times over the years I have gone back to that advice and thought about how good it was. We always kept in touch.

I have several friends who are much older than me, twenty five or thirty years and I enjoy it. I like having their wisdom and their example in my life. They have been good to me. They have been helpers and teachers, and I have benefitted from watching how they live and how they have grown older.

Sometimes they have had health challenges, memory or mobility issues, and some of them when faced with these things, have still retained their taste for the sweetness of life. I love this. I love that my friend calls a taxi to get her nails done. That she treats herself well and good and appreciates her own beauty.

I called another older friend yesterday and there was no answer. Within minutes there was both a message and a call back. If something was happening he was not going to miss it. I laughed to myself. We are going out to supper next week. I talked to his daughter because I was worried about his walker and if he fell. She said it would be ok, and to just go slow.

It is so easy to marginalize each other because of age or health challenges. It is just as easy to reach out. When I do, I often find an unexpected joy. Life is more interesting when we share it with people of all ages, at different stages in their lives.

I feel the same way about younger people, mostly friends of my children. I like watching the way they embrace life. How they navigate jobs and relationships and come into their own. I have watched some of them since they were small children. I love to see them grow. They too provide a great example for living, for not being afraid to embrace change. They are so open and flexible and curious. Like puppies really. Watching young people grow into their life makes me happy. 

Life is richer when we are in the mix, and can see lives that are at a different stage than ours. These other lives are like windows that we are looking through. We can see and when we look through them there is lots of wisdom on either side of us.