Repeating Myself

Wrote this one a couple of years ago. Hope you enjoy – again. Happy Monday!

Yesterday I had to mail a small package from the post office. There was one person ahead of me at the counter whom the postal worker obviously knew. It’s like that in our small town. I wasn’t paying too much attention to their friendly conversation until the postal worker, a woman, mentioned that she’d turned fifty this year. Boy, you could have fooled me. She looked good, tanned, painted nails, a cheerful attitude.

It got me thinking about aging – something we all do every day. A newborn on day two of his life is twice as old as he was the day before. Talk about aging! Whereas I’m only twice as old as someone who is thirty two. Dancing numbers around is fun and sometimes helps to put things in perspective. To my grandchildren I look old, I guess. But if I hadn’t aged how would they recognize me? Could I still look twenty five and be Grandma to them? I don’t think so.

The fertile ground of a writer’s imagination is seeded with thoughts like this. Working around in my little gray cells came the idea of cross generational ties. Is there some great divide that cannot be crossed so that say, a teenager, could never appreciate anything an octogenarian might offer? Can a twenty year old ever come to the aid of someone who’s fifty? Aren’t we all just human beings at different stages of life with something to give in any of those stages? We should dismiss the idea of a great divide and take wisdom, wit, charm and grace wherever we find it.

That’s why I’ve given one of my favorite ladies, Minnie Markwood, young sidekicks. I am a bit weary of the over-emphasis on things Baby Boomer and all the baggage that comes with it. Yeah, yeah, a lot of us were born in the twenty years following WWII. So what. You’ve gotta be born sometime. Minnie is a child of the those years, but Rashawna and Joel are Right Now kids and trying just as hard to make it in this world as Minnie ever did.

So they band together, giving and taking from each other, and solving a long standing crime while they’re at it. With wisdom, wit, charm, grace and a whole lotta scary. I’m so hoping this particular formula will hit a sympathetic note with my readers – no matter their ages.

When it was my turn at the post office counter, I shared some stories of turning fifty with the nice postal lady. I told her I began writing at that age and her eyes popped wide. “Really? That’s great.” Then I told her about my mystery coming out in November and that my launch would be right in Kinderhook. And she said, “Oh, you’ll have to let us know about it!”

“I’ll send you a flyer,” I said.

And I will.  

PS: That postal worker has moved on and I never got to tell her about book #2. But I’ll bet she still looks great!