Hentrietta Hay's Column

One of my favorite columnists, Anna Quindlen, recently quit journalism to devote full time to the care of her new daughter. In her last column she gave as one of her reasons that - at 35 - she thought she should quit examining life and start living it.

With me it is the opposite. I think that, after about three quarters of a century of knocking around becoming whatever I am, it is high time that I start examining my life. So I have decided what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a writer, which gives me a great excuse to examine all sorts of things.

One of the first things I have discovered is that what Rachel Carson calls the sense of wonder is not limited to the young. I have just gotten mine back after years of disuse and it is very exciting.

We have all watched a child discovering something brand new - the widened eyes, the tentative reaching out to touch and then the excited desire to share this wonderful new experience with someone. But then the child becomes an adult and gradually the demands and stress of modern living tend to push out wonder. There are college pressures and career building and the beginning of families. During those years about the only thing most of us wonder about are how to pass Psych 1A, how to get a good job and how to keep the baby from painting the walls with spinach.

Now that things are much calmer I have the time and desire to reflect and wonder at what is really going on around me. Things that I took for granted are suddenly mysterious. I wonder what really happened when that little bald headed infant of mine suddenly overnight became a long haired bearded marcher on Washington who now wears three piece suits, has two children and has forgotten more about computers than I ever knew existed. Did it happen molecule by molecule or protein particle by particle? Or did it just happen one night when I was asleep? I wonder.

I sometimes wonder why my Siamese cat, Antigone, looks exactly like the stylized drawings of cats from ancient Egypt. How could a blood line stay so pure over 2000 years? And for that matter, I wonder whether the conversation she shares with me daily at 5:00 am is the same as that which one of her ancestors used to awaken Cleopatra.

Years ago when my other son climbed Mt. Garfield, as do most Mesa County kids; he came back with his pockets full of seashells. Seashells on the seashore in the desert where there has been no water for millions of years? I still wonder what our ocean looked like then and how those seashells survived.

I wonder whether there really is such an unbelievable animal as the giraffe or whether it is, as I suspect, a figment of my imagination. I wonder how a flock of geese knows which of its group is to be the point man and lead the V and whether they punish the poor guy that gets out of formation. I wonder how that little dot of a humming bird that was hatched outside my window this summer got to South America this winter.

The scientists have, of course, explained all these things and I believe them, I think. I am a rational soul. But the awe is still there, and we have so much to learn from the children about our ever new and exciting world. I hope that when I am 90 I will still be wondering even as I did when I was 5.