Life Begins

One of my Dad's Fabulous Four Sisters

My father had four sisters.  He is gone now (passed away in 1991) but they are all alive and living in California, sprinkled from Napa Valley down to San Diego.  I’m really looking forward to visiting with them when we move back.  I could dedicate entire blogs to each of them and what they have taught me over the years.  The funniest one is Aunt J. who lives in L.A.  She paints portraits as a hobby, picking a photo most representative of her subject and then painting it in oils.  I remember admiring her self-portrait.

“This is great!”

“That was from the photo taken for my 40th birthday.”

“You look so pretty.”  (All of my aunts are knock-outs.)  “Why did you pick your 40^th?”

She laughed out loud.  “Because life really does begin at 40.”

“Really?”  I was in my thirties at the time and convinced it was all going down hill from there.

“Yes, really.  I didn’t even know how to enjoy sex until I turned 40.”  My ears must have turned bright red.  While I didn’t want to picture my aunt and uncle discovering each other behind closed doors, I was interested in what she had to say.  I somehow thought there was a finite amount of pleasure to be had, most of it having already happened.  It was similar to my childhood notion that a wound had a finite amount of pain and all you had to do was press the pain out of the scrape until it was gone.  It’s no wonder I am not in the medical field.

The Professor contributed to my ill-founded fears by announcing how many nights we had left together if we both lived to be 80.  I had news for him, my grandparents did it well into their nineties.  I know this because my grandmother wrote me letters about it when I was in college.  I was shocked to see her perfect penmanship spelling out for me that she and Grandpa were enrolled in a class called, “Sex and the Ageing.”

My father also filled my head with more interesting news, explaining to me when I was on one of my trips home from school that he and my mother were having the time of their lives now that they had the house to themselves.  He winked at me and I suddenly saw the patio furniture in a very different light.

I realize this post is over sharing but I think it’s important to reassure each other that the twenty-somethings are not having all the fun.  Your family might not be as open as mine, so now that we’ve made it past the end of the world, let’s use our time wisely.  Wink.