Getting Excited about TURNING SIXTY-FIVE!

Five years ago this month I turned 60. With great jubilation I proclaimed that this was the start of Act III of my life. As everyone knows, Act III is the best act, when all the dramatic questions that have been put into play in the first two acts are answered in the long-awaited climax. As Chekhov famously reminds those engaged in playwriting, if you have a gun hanging over the fireplace in Act I, that gun needs to go off in Act III.

BOOM!!!

Now, five years later, all I can say is that Act III did not turned out as planned.

What happened instead was . . . life. Two little granddaughters born to parents who would almost immediately divorce with enormous hostility and bitterness. A husband who would be diagnosed with Parkinson's and end up, almost entirely immobile, in a nursing home. A son entangled in the unbelievably cruel and barbaric American criminal "justice" system.

And then me: puttering along writing my little books and giving motivational talks about how to find joy in your life despite everything. (Despite Everything is the working title for my memoir, if I ever write it.)

This month's birthday makes me officially a senior citizen (even if Denny's has already been giving me senior discounts for a decade now). I can officially count myself as a Wise Old Woman. Some women friends my age host "crone" ceremonies for themselves.

Maybe this is the REAL start to Act III of my life?

No. I can't just pretend that the last five years didn't happen. They did. They made me not only older and wiser, and older and sadder, but older and kinder, too.

But this IS the real start to something big and important - actually to lots of big and important things!

1. I can now get half-price tickets to ride on Boulder's fabulous buses. With yet another car wrecked this past week (this time, for the first time, in an accident that was NOT MY FAULT, unlike all the others), my plan is to reduce my amount of driving drastically. I will walk everywhere! I will take the bus when it's too far to walk! I will save money, sanity, and THE PLANET!

2. I have Medicare now, which is not a big deal for me as I already had excellent low-cost insurance through my former employer. But now I get. . . . Silver Sneakers!!! I've never gone to exercise classes, still haunted by the horror of high school P.E. But although I'm a faithful daily walker, my arms are feeble and flabby, and my balance and flexibility are poor. So I'm planning to trot myself into Boulder's fabulous rec centers to work on all of these things FOR FREE!

3. I'm going to become a vegetarian, which I should have done decades ago - actually, which I DID do decades ago but then lapsed, as I hate to be a Picky Eater. I seldom eat any meat even now, but I can't say I'm a vegetarian as I also seldom eat any vegetables. I'm more of an English-muffin-tarian. But I'm going to start finding ways to like eating vegetables - starting with shopping at Boulder's fabulous farmers' market. I bought myself a vegan cookbook and plan, terrible cook though I am, actually to COOK SOMETHING FROM IT!

4. I've become addicted to the Duolingo language-learning app, with the goal of reviving my many years of high-school and college French. Current plan: find myself a cheap airfare to Paris and go there ALL BY MYSELF (the best!) during some gray and gloomy month (my FAVORITE!), and spend a week eating baguettes slathered with butter and jam - and wandering the streets alone - and writing poetry in cafes while sipping hot chocolate. I AM GOING TO DO THIS!

And maybe  .  . . just maybe . . . Act III will start to develop its own strange and lovely momentum.

BOOM!