Age: Perspective from An Artichoke Farm

Age is a definer, not that I want it to be. I say this because of how other people insist on regarding me. "Oh, you're so cute," in response to some funny thing I may have said or done. I've been saying funny things all my life. Now such behavior makes me so cute. People call me "Sweetie" or "Hon" or, yes, "Cutiepie" instead of my name. They might as well just call me old woman. That is what those titles mean. I insist I have never done this kind of thing to anyone.
And I insist that inside me, like in my soul, age matters little. Only when my joints hurt or I get more tired than I like do I feel my age. That is, those are the times I feel old.
Here is something I wrote many years ago. It's about age and my dad and about me, hence the title of this blog post.

Part 1

I walked around the corner of the house and saw my dad perched at the top of that tall ladder with his can of paint and brush.  Painting the house again.  It was a tall ladder, though never quite tall enough.  That and Daddy's five feet, six inches meant that the eaves of our 2-story Victorian never felt the slap of the paint brush, never wore the fresh cream color.  But Daddy painted often.  Perhaps he thought sometime he would reach the eaves.

            I wonder now if the neighbors chuckled when they saw him painting again--his stout, round body not quite filling out the white overalls, his white hanky knotted at the corners, covering his bald head for protection from sun and splattered paint.  I knew how he looked, but I never laughed.  Always when I saw him on that ladder I was frightened he would fall.  I can still feel the fear I felt for him then, though he is now gone and long before he died had given up climbing tall ladders.

            Daddy was about 60 years old then and I was eleven.  But I didn't know his age, not then.  He was just my dad.  When we would walk the six blocks from our house straight to the beach and the big slide there, it wasn't Daddy's age I thought about.  It was trying to keep up.  I had to run because my dad's walk was a stride, full of purpose and direction, a real executive walk.

            In the 89th year of his life, Daddy proposed marriage to a middle-aged spinster with history of emotional instability.  That was charity in him.  Yes, he was lonely without Mama, but to him, this was a charitable, loving act and the woman's family would be flattered.  Through the mail he proposed because he lived in Utah and she in California.  Her parents responded by mail, not flattered.  We--all of his children--suspected they would refuse. After all, Daddy was 88 years old.