Sit and spit

My friend asked, facetiously, in a poem: "Am I too old to skip or sit on the sidewalk?" My reply was, "Oh, no, no, no! Now you are getting somewhere near old enough to look for a new metaphor, to go from Peter Pan to this poem."

Warning
by Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and a pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

See? When you get "old" enough, you may not only sit on the sidewalk, but also learn to spit! I'm all for making up for the sobriety of my youth. Now, would you like to join our red hat circle?

She responded, saying, "I was actually thinking about that poem when I wrote that line. I don't care much for spitting, but I do like to skip, something you just don't see mature adults do that much of."

I still skip occasionally, so we can do it together.

Spitting isn't my thing, either, but I'm glad it's in the poem. In the summer of 1998, when I was exhausted from 24/7 caring for my mother whose Alzheimer's was advancing, the first-ever Alzheimer's Camp came to my rescue. With one-on-one counselors, they took twelve AD patients to camp for a week. Mother died in 2004, but I have a video of her that a film crew put together, showing the dozen campers swimming, dancing, playing games, smiling, enjoying themselves. One man and my mother are the only speaking campers on the video because they were still able to speak more or less coherently. The video ends with Mom saying something like, "We all just do the best we can, right?"

Now to explain the spitting. There were contests at the camp, and every single camper won an Olympics-type medal for something. My dignified 80-year-old mother was so proud of hers that she wore it for months afterwards, sitting in her recliner wearing the wide, red-white-n-blue ribbon around her neck, with her award dangling at the bottom of the V. She even wore it to church. I still have her medal and stop to look at it once in a while. And what contest did she win, you ask? The one for watermelon seed spitting! She managed to spit a watermelon seed farther than any of the others. Obviously, somewhere along the way, my mother learned to SPIT.