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Commentary
AGING WELL: The story goes on Missy Buchanan, Dec 16, 2008
Missy Buchanan
By Missy Buchanan Special Contributor
Strolling around my mother’s senior center is like walking through a storybook. Each windowsill is filled with a menagerie of trinkets and keepsakes: a large wooden shoe, a hand-carved gazelle, some railroad memorabilia and a miniature Eiffel Tower.
One item that has piqued my curiosity is a 2-inch wide length of black fabric, neatly stitched and coiled among keepsakes. Not long ago I asked the owner about it. She broke into a huge grin framed by oxygen tubes that fit in her nose and stretched around her ears. “That’s my black belt,” she said excitedly. “I was a martial-arts instructor.”
You could have blown me away. I had only known this older adult as a frail woman whose breathing problems cause her to use a scooter and be tethered to an oxygen tank. I never would have guessed that she had once been a karate guru.
That made me start thinking about the other residents, about how I had known them only as older adults. I knew stories about recent health issues. I even knew the names of many of their adult children. But I had never really explored the untold stories of their younger days. Stories about favorite vacation spots and unlikely career paths. Stories about childhood pranks and first dates.
Until a decade ago, I had never thought to ask my own parents how they met. In my mind, they had been married forever and the idea of courtship had escaped me. If I had not asked, I might never have learned that just before the war, she worked in a bakery. He was a nut salesman who tried to sweet talk her into buying 20 pounds of pecans.
Recently I asked some of the senior residents to tell me about their own mementoes and the special stories behind them. My mother’s tablemate brought a ceramic coffee mug shaped like a telephone. More than 60 years ago, her new sister-in-law had hand-painted the phone numbers of family members on the mug. For a young Texas bride who was moving to Chicago, it was a practical gift that welcomed her to the family.
One resident showed me a newspaper story about how, as an off-duty railroad worker, his quick thinking had saved a major railroad accident from occurring. Another told me about the pink stove in her former home in Oklahoma and how she had canned fruits and vegetables.
Stories have a special way of connecting us, heart to heart. Ask my grown children about their favorite childhood memories and they will likely tell you about sitting around the dinner table, listening to their grandfather tell a funny tale.
Our family believes so much in the power of stories that if anyone is absent from the table at a celebratory event, we pass around the phone until everyone has shared a story or two with the missing member.
I have a group of friends who have told the same stories so many times that we threaten to number our tales, just to save the effort of retelling a familiar story. We decided that one of us would just call out a number; then we’d all start laughing.
Last December, one resident at my mother’s center displayed an antique musical carousel in her window. The porcelain figures stretched out along the entire length of the windowsill. Every day, my mother and I would pause to watch the horses move up and down as it played “Joy to the World.”
Not long after, my minister gave a wonderful message about how the song of Christmas cannot be silenced. The musical carousel reminded me of that important truth, how the story plays on, no matter our circumstances.
It plays on through gray drizzly days and the cacophony of the holidays. It plays on through wailing sirens and TV broadcasts about car bombings and natural disasters. The Good News plays on, even as older folks take slow steps past the window.
It is the joyous Christmas story that goes on and on.
Ms. Buchanan, a member of FUMC Rockwall, Texas, is the author of Living with Purpose in a Worn Out Body (Upper Room Books).
Missy Buchanan
