Our Lives Are Measured By These

As I’ve waited for the cashier at Hawkins to ring up my groceries in recent weeks, I’ve noticed a sign near the cash register: Tuesday is Senior Citizen Discount Day. Yet until this week, Tuesdays and my craving for delectable donuts hadn’t coincided. But finally, I was at the right place at the right time – with my Golden Buckeye Card in hand. Somehow the day didn’t have the same thrill I experienced at age sixteen when I first held my long-awaited driver’s license in my hands, but my first use of that golden card did bring a smile to my lips. I’ve carried it around for some time, but finally got the chance to use it. Mark that on the calendar!

While I doubt that particular milestone will make our Christmas newsletter, October is a month of official milestones for our family. Over the next few days, we’ll celebrate our son Dan’s birthday, one marked by the loss of his parent-provided medical coverage extended through the Affordable Care Act. Larry will have his sixty-fifth birthday, grateful to have his own Medicare Card, a more valuable addition to his wallet than the Golden Buckeye one. And in this same week, we’ll celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. Forty years seems like an incredibly long time to me. How can this be?

Now in our seventh decade (yikes, that sounds ancient), most of our milestones will be marked vicariously, as others graduate, marry, and give birth. What I’m recognizing is that the major milestones of life will now belong to someone else. As Lilly Ledbetter, a retired supervisor from Goodyear Tire and Rubber in Gadsden, Alabama remembers, “I sometimes worried I’d never experience that sense of wonder you’d feel meeting a new friend or traveling to a new place for the first time. I was afraid the major milestones of my life, marriage and childbirth, were past. Was it foolish to hope I still had something exciting ahead of me, something even important, that I could have a life of my own?”

Yet retirement, as Ms. Ledbetter discovered, wasn’t the last frontier. Her subsequent lawsuit over what she believed to be a discriminatory policy based upon gender ultimately led to what’s known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. As she stood at the podium of the Democratic National Convention in 2012, she’d found her personal “something even important.”

She is not alone, as I have many friends who are reaching exciting milestones of achievement well into their sixties, seventies and eighties. At times, I do feel a twinge of envy as they accomplish, achieve and soar. But I do have to ask myself, what is “something even important”? Susan B. Anthony helps with that question: “Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, nor the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.”

In that light, these October days are blessedly interspersed with milestones great and small, yet valued nonetheless. The lively Elizabeth Holiday rolled over twice (but hasn’t yet repeated that trick in my presence). I completed the first draft of my new book on teen women in the Bible. We’ll celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary and that milestone birthday in the company of family and friends. My car’s odometer hit the magic number 123456 this week, although I missed capturing a photo for posterity (or at least for Facebook). A major change of policy within my denomination, one that I’d championed for nearly forty years, was finally achieved. The lovely Madelyn Simone brought home her first school pictures, proudly telling me the names of her classmates, with a shy grin when identifying two of the boys (not ready for that milestone).

With tremendous achievement and unfathomable tragedy as her companions, Rose Kennedy still understood. “Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.” Here’s to savoring these moments that sniff around and never leave, for indeed, as Ms. Anthony reminds us, “our lives are measured by these.”