Pat Bean's blog

Aging My Way

I turn 84 in three days, yet I feel like I’m living the best years of my life – and I’m not alone.

We old broads and old farts are still passionate about life according to a recent New York Times article. It doesn’t matter that our faces have begun to resemble topographical maps denoting crevasses and ridges, we’re still moving and kicking.  

The “old” people interviewed for the NY Times piece ranged in age from 71 to 88. They were going on cruises, had day planners for their active lives and were even falling in love – aches and pains be damned!

I think I finally began accepting I wasn’t going to live forever on my 69^th birthday. It was the one in which I decided I needed to try something new instead of what I had done for the past 20 or so years, which was to climb Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park on my birthday.

I hate to say it, but that climb on my 69^th birthday kicked my butt.

Instead, I went skydiving to celebrate my 70^th birthday. Afterward, I continued traveling around the country in an RV with my canine companion, something I had already been doing for five years – and would continue doing for another four.

On my 75^th birthday I got my first tattoo, and on my 80^th I took a solo road trip around Texas to see some of my widely scattered family.

This year, I’m going on an RV road trip with my best friend of 40 years. On our return, I’ll be celebrating at pub party planned by my granddaughter and her wife.

I didn’t grow up celebrating birthdays. They weren’t all that special in our family. And after moving away from home, I often didn’t even tell the people I was around that it was my birthday.  

That didn’t change too much until I hit that 69 birthday.  Now I shout it from the roof tops – and on my blog: Hey, I survived another year.

Birthdays mean more, I think, when you accept that there are more of them behind you than ahead of you.

So, A great big Happy Birthday to all of you out there who fall into that category. Let’s all just keep moving.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, 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