77 is the New 76 Friday Round-Up

Except for being pretty old, nothing is really wrong with me. That could change in five minutes. Say, I fall down the stairs and break my hip and then barrel down that slippery slope of decrepitude. Luck is fairy dust that can disappear the minute you look away. I take nothing for granted.

I am nearly always the oldest person in the room. What’s happened in the past few years is that I wear that age like a queen’s ermine robe. Brain tricks (always my specialty) now include telling myself to look majestic when I walk. Inherent in this is the refusal to be small in all the many meanings of the word.

My birthday started with a terrific thunderstorm that turned the morning sky black and battered the windows with rain. It was utterly the best birthday present ever. Symbolic and wild, thunder bolts and driving rain. At 77, I deserve more than an ordinary April day and so I claimed the storm as my own.

It’s not clear when the tide will turn but I feel it coming. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) speaking, oh so quietly, about her fear of retaliation is the cellar door being pulled open just a crack. There is filth and fear in that cellar. We’ve known that for a long time. Otherwise intelligent people don’t dummy up when faced with lies and gaslighting unless they are terribly frightened. There is more here than politics. Lisa needs to say more.

Tomorrow, I go to a town hall for our Republican senator who won’t show up so we will be speaking to an empty chair. Then maybe I’ll go hold a sign on a freeway overpass. I’m not keen on that idea but we’ll see. I’m hoping the letter to the editor I wrote gets published on Sunday. I’m hustling folks to come to a listening session on Social Security on April 30th. I’m showing up whenever I can but trying to keep from losing my shit. You can’t be a regal, ermine-clad 77-year-old lady and lose your shit. It’s a bad look.