Another busy morning arranging to rent vendor tables for my fledgling business. This is so much fun to do and, being a senior, I have lots of time to fool around with it.
Cottage industries (home based businesses) have been around forever and some of them pyramid into real businesses where you can make a darned good income. I know if I'd started working like this years ago I would have gradually fallen upon a line that would have succeeded well but I'm content with just making a tiny profit now.
I will never understand seniors who spend their golden years sitting in front of the T.V. when there are so many options available to us. It doesn't have to involve starting a business but could include volunteering, joining social clubs, researching new hobbies, etc. Our minds need to be constantly stretched with new ideas or we become boring. I may be a little nutty but I hope no-one thinks I'm boring. Heaven knows, I've got a million ideas for projects that I won't live long enough to accomplish so I'm doing all I can to keep my mind active.
I read in the newspaper this morning about a lady of 103 who is still alive and well, although at a nursing home. Oh, the stories she could tell about all those years she's lived. There is so much wisdom in the aged because they've lived it all and seen it all. The young can learn from our mistakes and they can learn from our successes. We're not just shaky, wrinkled old humans, we're encyclopedias.
My main example of what old age means came from my grandmother whom I made the big mistake of not respecting enough. Now I realize I'm very much like her in many ways and I understand her much better. She did what she could as a housewife during the depression and became a smalltime bootlegger because there weren't many options open to her. But she did open her mind to possibilities instead of sitting on her duff in front of the radio.
Nan (my way of saying Gramma) loved to laugh and was very sociable, a good quality for a bootlegger. She was generous to a fault and gave away more preserves than she sold in beer. She ruled her little apartment with an iron fist, though, and wasn't one to mess with. She was an entrepreneur in her own way just as I am in mine.
I guess what we've left and are leaving is a legacy for our progeny and it's not such a bad thing, is it?
2 comments:
I wanna be a bootlegger just like my great-gramma! ;-) That's such a cool story!
Nan was a little shorter than me, had henna dyed hair, and loved to quote Mae West..."Come on up and see me sometime"...with her hand on her hip and a gleam in her eye. She was a marvelous cook and a bit of an actress when it came to explaining to a bill collector why she couldn't pay.
I hated all of this when I was a teenager but have grown to admire the character she was.
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