Hentrietta Hay's Column

Several years ago May Sarton wrote a book called At Seventy, A Journal. I keep thinking that I should be able to come up with some deeply philosophical wisdom called, Thoughts on turning seventy-five. But unlike May Sarton I have not kept a journal for seventy years, or even five, and so I find on looking back at 75 that I remember things in fragments. And I have not succeeded in dredging up any major philosophical insights.

Actually, my first reaction to writing this is my gosh, what would my mother think?" which tends to prove that there are some things we never outgrow, some voices which are always back in our subconscious. To her, as to most women of her generation, her age was a most private piece of information. She would no more have admitted her age any time after she became 18 or so than she would have appeared in public undressed. I began to suspect that she might be approaching senior citizenship when she and my father celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. She really thought aging, if not a bit disgraceful, was certainly something you did not talk about.

A person writes an autobiography and in 200 pages or so tells little bit about her background, human relationships, the triumphs and the failures, the achievements, the things that presumably made her the person she became. But biographies are misleading. They deal generally in observable facts. They make it sound as though a life is a continuum, as though the person knew what was going on in her life while she was living it. And I suspect that even the greatest among us just stumbled along most of the time on a day-to-day basis.

What we need to do in the last quarter of our lives is try to make some sense out of it. There are, of course, some facts on which we can tie our memories with certainty. But it is not the facts that make a life. It is the feelings and the values. I like the "memoir" approach. William Zinsser edited a recent book called inventing the truth: the art and craft of the memoir. And that is my deep thought on this memorable occasion. I will invent my past as I remember it, which is not necessarily the way I lived it. But in the remembering I will, as Zinsser says, validate it.

There have been changes over my lifetime in every area of living. Communication by way of TV is, for better or worse, an integral part of our lives. But I remember the first communication from the air. I ever heard. The first radio I ever saw was hardly in a class with the big screen. It was a round oatmeal box, carefully wound with fine copper wire, a crystal and a "cat's whisker" which my father carefully constructed and fastened to a pair of earphones. Hearing music coming out of that oatmeal box was surely a scientific miracle as great then as TV today.

I wish I could remember in more detail my progression from being a born and raised rock-ribbed Republican to becoming a liberal Democrat. And more specifically, at what moment did I become a Feminist, or was I always one without knowing it? My mother was a delegate to the Republican convention that nominated Wendell Willkie. I marched in Denver with NOW for the ERA. And this was in just one generation. Our goals were different, but we were both involved in what we considered political idealism. As I invent my past, I choose to believe that my political activity is inherited. I also expect that my successors will continue it even more vigorously. My friends tell me that I have mellowed politically. Not true. It's just a slight touch of fatigue.

The best thoughts on turning 75 are of the future. I want the world of my sons and grandchildren to be better than the one I have known, although mine has been wonderful. I try to figure out whether I have done anything in three quarters of a century to make it any better, but I'll never really know. In any case, like Caroline Bird's Salty Old Woman, I wake up every morning wondering what's going to happen and looking forward to it, whatever it is.