Birthday telegrams arrive to celebrate her 105 years of living.
President Nixon even sends a birthday greeting.
“I was happy and thrilled to get these messages,” my great-great grandmother tells the reporter. “It was thoughtful of the President. But he’s just another man. But I’m honored.”
As my grandfather, her ninety-six-year-old grandson, slathers strawberry jelly on wheat toast and dips hash browns into a burst and bubbling packet of ketchup, I hungrily consume the photo-scanned copy of my great-great grandmother’s birthday interview.
The writer’s questions leap from topic to topic: life advice (she reports that she doesn’t like telling other people how to live), regrets (she can’t live life over so why even bother going there), “Is God dead?”(people who say so don’t know what they are talking about), and mini-skirts.
“I don’t see anything wrong with today’s girls wanting nice clothes. The skirts are short but they are nice.”
And there’s the openness to life that I gather carried her to 105 spins around this globe.
The birthday article is three years shy of her finale of 108, but still it’s a present to me, to sit at my grandfather’s kitchen table and read the words of a woman who I’ve heard described as stern and “a tough old bird.”
But this is a tough old bird who learned how to navigate the challenging winds of life and flied.
Even though she retorts that she doesn’t want to give others advice, her response on what it feels like to be 105 reveals her developed ability to witness and flow the ever-changing currents of being a human in this life:
“I don’t know how it feels to be 105. I just couldn’t tell you. Sometimes I feel pretty good and sometimes I feel down in the dumps. It’s hard to describe, like some things make you glad, and some things make you sad. I don’t know. I don’t worry about it.”
And there’s the printed permission from an ancestor to let my emotional tides flow as they need to be. To let the sadness and the gladness be liberated and accepted aspects of the human journey.
Perhaps great-great grandmother Baker lived to 108 because she let her emotions naturally emerge and organically shift, and didn’t get bothered and burdened with creating and believing a self-written story around the feelings. She let the times change from long dresses to mini-skirts without forging a narrative of resistance. She appreciated the esteemed birthday wishes from powerful officials and still saw them as human beings, “just another man.”
I didn’t expect to find her this morning. I didn’t expect to have breakfast with her presence.
However, when I glance back over the course of my morning, I see hints of her coming.
When I pull open the blinds, I catch the sight of a lone dove majestically perching on a tree limb, and she invites me to leave my thoughts, to return to the moment, to remember I’m loved, guided, protected, and that I am love.
When I brave the cold to toss out the recycling, there’s a red cardinal who musically flutters from barren limb to limb, and she interrupts my thoughts, coaxes me to reenter the now, to remind me that I’m loved, guided, protected, and that I am here to be love.
When I drive to my grandfather’s house to deliver a breakfast of scrambled eggs, hashbrowns, bacon and toast, I glance up to the blue sweep of sky where a vulture glides like an floating ice-skater in the invisible currents of frigid air. She lifts me out of my thoughts, broadens my perspective on this chapter, this particular timeline of my life, and reassures me that I’m loved, guided, protected, and that I am love, here to be love, and am aligned with love.
Tough old birds.
Tough old birds to take flight, to sing, to wake and be alive in the bone-nipping temperatures of Kentucky January.
Those tough old birds soar through my veins.
They keep unexpectedly and purposefully flying into my view to repeatedly wake me up to life -- to the sadness that stings and the joy that dares to be unapologetically bright, to the breakfast table where my grandfather sips orange juice and I read out-loud about Nixon, mini-skirts, the sheet cake great-great grandmother Baker ate for her 105th.
Our worries float away as we muse on her life, as we live ours today.