White hair (this might be a long one)...

So yesterday someone said I was a "hero" and it got me thinking. Just about everything has gotten me thinking lately, which you'd think would make for good journaling fodder. You would think. I must need more mental RAM; my head gets too full to synthesize anything into words or onto pages, and sadly, the most meaningful and thought-provoking times in my life usually correspond with the longest gaps in my journals.

Running is a good time to sythesize life. I went this week for the first time in a long time, as the weather here was begging to be traipsed through. Five minutes of traipsing at a jog is apparently long enough to put a stitch in one's side and get one over the thrill, but one has an obligation to save face with all the other sporty traipsers, especially the elderly ones. (The last time I went jogging, Jayson and I were passed by a spandex-clad gentleman of at least 70 years. It was not good for morale...) So I walked and jogged for another half hour, mostly trying not to puke in front of the schoolbus kids, pretending I was going to be one of those strong, vibrant women you see in the vitamin commercials.

Each of my grandpas has one sister, neither of whom had ever caught my attention as being particularly strong women, probably since my grandmother was such a saintly matriarch. But during my Centrum Silver jog, I was thinking about my dad's aunt Sarah and how she's been divorced for as long as I've known her and how her kids live out of state and don't visit and put her in a nut-house nursing home with smelly, slobbery, mentally-absent old people after her heart attack two years ago. I mean, growing up, she never topped my favorite relatives list because she lived out of town and played favorites. But I watched her get yanked suddenly from her home into this Creep Ward in the middle of nowhere, never to see her house or most of her stuff again, only to take it in stride and grow as a person. I'm sure she figured out that her ex-husband Herb helped us haul most of it to the Goodwill, and that her kids could afford a better place for her if they wanted to, but she's just upbeat, and thankful to be alive. When I was living at home, we would go out for Bible study and coffee afterwards, and she had all kinds of questions about faith since she started reading her Bible again. Now, instead of whining that people there don't converse intelligently (or know it's unacceptable to sit on the lounge furniture without pants on), she's helping the grouchy, incompetent aides do their jobs, and I think she's even some sort of unofficial chaplain at the home's prayer group.

She and my mom's aunt Cora are two of the most elegant women I've seen, probably because their hair is totally white. Cora lost her husband George to a brain tumor when I was eight, and from what I hear, he was a pretty cool guy. In all the old pictures, she always looks like she thinks so too. She has three daughters, two of whom live as far out of state as you can get and not be in an ocean, and one lives about an hour away. Pretty sure if I was a widow and all of my kids moved out of town, I would be lonely and unstable. But she never seems needy or resentful, and frequently hops on planes by herself to fly to Florida or Seattle without missing a beat, although I'm pretty sure she'd rather not. She's one of those women who grew up poor and knows how to cook and can every vegetable but not without her own paring knife, and you never really hear her complain or talk in a sad way about how life changes.

So now that this is a novel, I feel like I should say I was motivated to do something really special, or at least that I found five dollars or something. I could try say something profound about being a hero, but thanks to Enrique Iglesias, I'm not sure I can even take the word seriously anymore. I guess I don't mind being thought of as one though, as long as I get to have white hair.