Old Broads and New Tricks

 

Jesus said unto him,

If thou canst believe,

all things are possible

to him that believeth.

-- Mark 9:23

 

Dang, but I blew it when I was in the hospital after giving birth at age 44. News had spread among the nurses that there was a really, really old mother in Room 1407. They made a spectacle out of me. Head after head would peek in and smile with a cruel mixture of mirth and pity.

 

 Now, at the time, my own grandmother was in her 90s. She came to see me. We should've switched places, like in Little Red Riding Hood. If we'd have put HER in that post-partum recovery bed, and ME in the visitor's chair, we would have fixed those rubber-neckers' wagons!

 

"Holy cow! That's an old new mother, all right!"

 

We could even have put Grammie's teeth in a glass of water on the bedside table. But get this - even in her 90s, she still had all her own teeth, and not a cavity in 'em!

 

That's the thing about old broads. We're endlessly surprising.

 

And that's been proven true this week in a trio of unlikely news stories that crossed my desk:

 

1. A farmer's wife in India became the oldest woman in the world to give birth when she delivered twins recently at age 70. The boy and girl were a month premature and weighed just two pounds each, but are expected to do fine. Omkari Panwar underwent in vitro fertilization because she and her husband wanted to produce a male heir to fit that culture's inheritance customs.

 

 

 

2. First-time author Mildred Armstrong Kalish, 84, produced a book that was picked among the 10 best of 2007 by the New York Times. She was a retiree walking her granddaughter to preschool when she started telling stories about her childhood on an Iowa farm, and the girl encouraged her to write them down. Now she stars at standing-room-only bookstore events all over the country, and gets thousands of emails from readers who love the stories, recipes, remedies and warm wisdom in Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.

 

 

 

3. Omaha is hosting the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials this week, and 41-year-old Dara Torres has qualified first in both the 50-meter and 100-meter freestyle races. She'll represent our country in the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, China. Incredibly, it'll be her fifth Olympics. She thought she retired in 1992 at age 25. Ha! Today, her oversized swim goggles are older than most of her competitors. She's the mother of a 2-year-old, has defeated bulimia, been twice divorced, and suffered through five knee surgeries. She frankly admits that when she swims, sometimes it feels like she has a piano on her back. But she's got spirit: her favorite treat is a root beer float with IBM root beer and Breyers vanilla ice cream.

 

 

So next time I gripe about being so old I can use my AARP discount card to buy my kid's Sponge Bob toys, remind me about Mrs. Panwar, and how it must be to nurse a newborn when your own shriveled dairies are dangling somewhere down around the Equator.

 

Next time I feel waves of self-pity about reaching midlife as a writer without achieving book-publishing success, slap me, and show me a picture of Mrs. Kalish, going out in her walker to the mailbox to get her new wads of royalty checks.

 

And next time I go a whole week using only the muscles in my right arm, stuffing food into my face, while whining about that darned old middle-age spread, paste Dara's picture on my refrigerator. While she's going for the gold medal in Beijing, maybe I'll smarten up enough NOT to go for the Gold Medal - flour, that is - to make chocolate chip cookies.

 

I've got a new favorite, anyway: root beer floats. If it worked for Dara. . . . Hey! It might! Have a little faith! With it, isn't anything possible?

 

We old broads aren't the only ones full of surprises. †