Pam the Elder: It's my 75th birthday!

It'll soon be my 75th birthday, Nov. 5. Reaching three-quarters of a century is daunting, and what some may call the new 55 takes some bravery, although I somehow feel ageless.

I recently saw an ad in the Cape Gazette about a free series of lectures about Old Testament painters, including free sandwiches and soup to follow at a local church. Maybe it was the free sandwiches and soup that tipped the scale of decision for me to attend, as I am not a Bible story lecture or group person, but soup is my favorite food, after all. Or maybe it was Jeff prompting me to go with many infomercials. What was he up to at 11:30 a m. on Wednesday that he kept prodding me to go? Luckily he is true blue, so no worries there. Probably watching the 12 p.m. news without me turning up the volume and cracking up raucously at the fun-loving dentist. "You need to go out there and be like a politician," he said. "Meet new people!"

The ad for the lectures was attractive and intriguing. It took up half the page and had illustrations of “Samson and Delilah” by Alexandre Cabanel and “Adam & Eve” by Albrecht Dürer. I am not much of one for something called Bible study, but I fondly remembered my art history classes with my professor, Elmer Schooley, sitting in a darkened room, no devices then. He was a fascinating raconteur. Scents take us back, and I remember a female classmate sitting behind me in class wearing Este Lauder's Youth Dew perfume. And the dew of youth was upon me then. She even resembled a Flemish Madonna, with brown hair parted down the middle and a pale face. Paintings from Giotto, da Vinci, van Eyck, Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, and my favorite, Cranach the Elder, glowed on the classroom wall.

The Madonnas in Prussian Blue robes, a color of blue that somehow doesn't glow like it used to anymore, thanks to chemicals instead of crushed lapis lazuli used by Vermeer. Sitting there in the stained-glass-hued chapel slide show, the thing that impressed me most was noticing that the lifespan of most of these artists back then was very long, even compared to today's standards. Did they go into a soothing yoga-like trance? Did they spend their lives doing what they loved, or did they simply work mostly alone and therefore avoid becoming exposed to the various killer germs and diseases out among the general population?

To return to today, I stayed for the soup and sandwich reward, and was as anonymous as Hieronymus could be; I didn't return the following week. To get back to my hopefully upcoming birthday, these occasions were not a big day in my family when I was growing up. I usually got a card with my age in money and dinner out. I had to be 20 to get a 20-dollar bill in the mail in New Mexico.

My sensible Aunt Virginia usually gave me a U.S. Savings Bond, a delayed gratification that did not thrill me. They sat forgotten in the safe deposit box until I was 58 and were almost expired when I finally opened it years later to look for a will. I had one birthday party in the Milton Episcopal Church hall as a child and gave a boy a black eye playing spin the bottle.

Really feeling reborn and free when I reached New Mexico for college, I felt that I had lived there in another life and was actually coming home! However, I feel like the Cape Region is truly my heartfelt home now. When my mother learned she was having me, she said that she was in the wrong pew, as she wanted to be a full-time schoolteacher. My father even broke his toe walking me at night.

There was once a segment on the TV show "60 Minutes" that showed two substitute mothers in the form of monkeys. One was warm and soft with only a hug to offer, and the other was made of iron, but dispensed a bottle full of formula that she tipped when needed. That was my mother. She was always there when I needed her, but was made of iron. She always said I was a mystery to her, and she didn't know where I came from.

One of my best birthday presents ever was the birth of my first child, daughter Misty, just three days before my own 36th birthday on Nov. 2, 1984. She's an old soul, probably here during the pyramids, I thought as the nurse handed her to me swathed in a blanket.