I grant you that there are lots of things to think about, but today is another day to recover, mourn, cheer, blame, cry, or curse, depending on your position on the scale. They are all emotional words if you read them right.

Some analyze, too, but I will leave analysis aside as best I can.

Here is a bit of what you might call a thoughtful distraction by a famous writer, Robert Heinlein, and then a closing comment from me.

Well, how’s that? I love Rodin, as Heinlein clearly did, but the tragedy eludes me, maybe because I am not a woman.

We all age, and it is the nature of things. I have seen lovely older women, and I recognize not only the beauty of the present but automatically recreate, in my mind and my vision, some approximation of what Heinlein writes of their past beauty. But am I alone in seeing through the years and missing the tragedy of lost allurement?

I see the character in their faces, the aspect and complexity that only time allows.

My perspective as a man observes no sorry catastrophe in myself, though I am well beyond 70 and have had some challenging moments. We endure, regardless of gender, and know some things beyond this time and times past. We have no voice in trading our youth for that knowledge, but what can we do? Accept it and be grateful for what we’ve lived and still have ahead—quite a show ahead, I’d say!

We are on to what the ancient Chinese parable might characterize as “interesting times.”

Many women who are not young possess wisdom about this and other things. Their tragedy has been in their place in the world and its consequences. They are “interesting” in a way not captured in the parable. Such ladies have seen a lot, endured a lot, and won the character only they possess. I will have lunch with one soon, and she is over 90.

If I were you, I would be jealous!

Here’s to my lunch date, still a woman of mystery and much hard-won knowledge. She knows what it means to be a woman and the definition of misogyny.

Her name is Joan.

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The photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões is called A Very Beautiful Older Woman, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.