Pat Bean's blog

Aging My Way

I’m reading A Murder of Crows by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett. It’s a cozy mystery with an ecologist as the protagonist. With all the many, many books out there to choose from, I was attracted to this one simply because of the title. You see, I once was a member of a small group that called itself The Murder of Crows.

The group membership numbered a half dozen women or so, all well past the age innocence, with marriage, children, divorces and life experiences in our varied backgrounds.

  We met once a week for lunch and got together occasionally for other activities and events. Our conversations were filled with interesting chatter, raucous laughter, irreverent remarks and commentary about politics and world events. We were a liberal group with four journalists, in various capacities, among us.

 I was in my early 40s when I was introduced to the group by a younger female colleague at the newspaper where I had just been hired. She didn’t stick around long, however, as she soon departed to a job in another state. But by that time, I was firmly ensconced in the group.

 We got our name from one of the women’s teenage sons who referred to us as a bunch of old crows. Instead of being insulted we started calling ourselves The Murder of Crows, which is actually the proper name for a group of crows.

We stayed together for the next 20 years or so before moves and deaths begin taking their toll. Only three members were left behind when I retired in 2004, sold my home and took off to tour America in a small RV. I kept in touch, but while I was traveling around another member died, and then after I settled in Tucson in 2013, one more death occurred.

That’s what happens to friends when they reach their eighth decades of life. I got to visit with the other lone Murder of Crows’ member when I visited my old hometown last September. And I got a nice long snail mail letter from her a couple of weeks ago.

While I hope there will be many more visits and letters, I know it’s important that I treat each treasured get-together and letter as if it were the last – because it just might be.

Now I think I will stop here and go write that return letter to one of the last two still-standing Murder of Crows’ members. It’s important to me.

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.