Pat Bean's blog

Aging My Way

In the 1980s, I became a big fan of Dorothy Gilman’s books and many of the words spoken by her unlikely heroine Mrs. Pollifax, ended up in my journals. Her telling someone that we can’t live our lives the way we set a table especially spoke to me, because that was exactly how I was trying to live my life at that time.

While knives and forks may be arranged in perfect order, I was learning that it would be a cold day in hell before my life would work like that. Mrs. Pollifax helped me accept this, and was also a rung for me to hang on to as I passed through a messy season full of challenges, love, heartbreak, and almost too many changes to count.

While my life is more peaceful and calm these days, I still treasure the written word. Perhaps it is because I, too, am a writer. Whatever, I just know I’m thankful for the inspiration and enlightenment printed words have given me.

It seems as if for every emotion, every passage (Gail Sheehy’s Passages. 1976) I pass through, some writer had the same thoughts, the same emotions. Their words let me know I’m not alone. Which is why my journals are full of quotes that were meaningful to me.

The first quote I remember striking my fancy happened in high school when the class was studying Shakespeare. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Those words mean even more to me today than when I first wrote them down.

I’ve learned that certain writers touch my inner thoughts time and time again. Dorothy Gilman, John MacDonald, Robert Frost, Louise Penny, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, Gloria Steinem, Mercedes Lackey, Edward Abby, John Irving, Rod McKuen, Jan Morris, even Hunter Thompson in my crazy moments. And so many, many more.

Once, during a period of insecurity, I came upon the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay that cheered me onward. “Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand. Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand,” she wrote. I didn’t read these words in a book by Millay, but rather in a biography of Margaret Mead, who had also found meaning in the quote.

Meanwhile, the words of Rod McKuen were, and still are, one of my favorite quotes. “Nobody’s perfect, and that’s one of the best things that can be said about man.”   

 Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.