Henrietta Hay's Column

I was having coffee in my favorite coffee shop the other day and doing a bit of people watching while I drank my latte. At one table there was a beautiful young woman drinking her coffee and reading the morning paper, but one eye and half her attention were on the baby car seat at her feet. A very small human person was sleeping peacefully under the watchful eye of her mother.

At another table was a friend of mine whose father had just died at the age of 91.

I kept wondering: how do you get from here to there, or perhaps I should say from there to here, from infancy to 91? I am old enough by now that I should have figured it out, but I still don't know the answer - beyond living it just one day at a time. It's a long journey and a very exciting one

A friend of mine who is going through a bad stretch in her life commented that each of us carries around with us a bag of stuff - our reactions to everything that has happened to us from birth. And since each bag is filled with different stuff, it is a miracle that we learn to communicate with each other at all. The trick is to know which stuff to keep and which to toss out.

The baby has no idea what is ahead for her, and I'm sure the old man had forgotten whole big chunks of his past. To try even to imagine the differences between the world he was born into and the world that will exist when she is 91 is beyond me. He had some good times and some bad times, and so will she, but one thing we all have is a sense of wonder.

I do believe that the sense of awe and wonder is a luxury indulged in chiefly by children and old people. In the in-between years most of us are too busy surviving and procreating to have time to wonder. One of the best things about being a Little Old Lady is finding that the sense of wonder was not lost at all. It just got pushed aside for a bit. Now I have time to reflect and wonder at what is really going on around me.

Now I can look at a baby with the same awe with which I greeted my own babies, but without the overpowering sense of responsibility. So I can just look and wonder how the tiny creature can be so beautiful, why its fuzzy hair is gold instead of black, why it's nose is so tiny, what it will look like when it is six feet tall. I wonder how it grows, molecule by molecule, cell by cell or all at once. Science can tell me, but I'd rather wonder.

Last week one day as I was driving out of my driveway, three deer ambled onto the road and stopped and looked at me with those big, soft eyes. I stopped and we looked at each other. They seemed completely at ease, merely saying to me, "What are you doing here?" They were right, of course. They were here first. I wonder how they manage to survive so close to Horizon Drive, in the midst of people and traffic and confusion.

The physical world we live in is a never-ending wonder. Why are the mountains so high? Why is the sky blue instead of red or green? Are the beautiful, feathery clouds at dawn really just water and smog and sunlight or something more magical? I wonder.

The old man's bag was full and I hope with a lot of good stuff. The baby's bag is still pretty nearly empty. If I could tell her a little bit about what is coming, she wouldn't believe me. But I would tell her to keep her eyes and ears and her mind open all through her life. I would tell her to laugh and dance and be happy, to believe in herself and to love.

I would tell her what Rachel Carson wrote many years ago, "If I had influence with the good fairy ... I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life."

Whatever else the our bags contains, the sense of wonder will help us get from there to here.