Do Not Tell the Grown Ups

I play word games two to four hours a day, I hold a fulltime job as an elementary school counselor, I am currently working on twenty-two new paintings, and I look up new words on a daily basis. “How old are you?” a child sometimes asks me. “I am a hundred and four,” I lie, and the children laugh. They think I am much younger. “Don’t tell a grown up,” the youngest ones often say to me, not realizing that I am one. At seventy, I never thought I would still be working, but I am, because I love my job. Every day is an adventure, nothing like any day before, completely different than tomorrow. I teach character education classes, I help children learn to be friends in small groups, and I do individual counseling as needed. Teachers try to come by to vent, but I am usually out of my office – in a classroom or arranging a place to meet students for lunch. I have worked since I was sixteen, and I have liked a little something about each job I have had. I focus on the positives, and I teach children to do the same. When they come to me in an angry or sad way, I help them to refocus on something good about their life. I often give them an assignment of listing a hundred things they like about themselves. Some are reluctant. A few say they cannot do it, so I bribe them. We have school “bucks” they can use to buy marvelous items from a school store. I use them, and it often works. I am thinking up new strategies, new cartoons, new stories, new lesson plans, and new poems daily. The secret to staying young is to never think of yourself as old. My parents were never old. My mother at eighty-six was taking meals to the “old people” for Meals on Wheels. She used to laugh, because most of them were younger than she was. But she said they “think like old people" No one in my family ever thought they were old. It is not going to begin with me. Shh! Don’t tell the grown-ups!