Living Fantasy

 I am a dreamer realist and I make my ninety year old, well travelled and reasonably well educated former professional life, fun. Being this old, is quite lovely and I quite adore it. Why? Mostly, because I am forgiven almost everything, except when, as we all do, I feel a bit cranky. What keeps  me from being cranky all the time, is that I live alone. There is nothing more satisfying than being so, although all the nice do-gooders who think they know what old people need, worry about it. They say lose weight, excercise to a sweat, go out and socialize because you're lonely ( I never am) and, bottom line, go to something called loosely, a "home" and finally, get a thing to put around your neck, dog-like, that beeps if you fall down. All these lovely hints by those in their forties perhaps, I try, desperately, to avoid. No one knows the elderly, like the bona fide elderly. No kind of degree in elder matters or social worker courses or medical counsel should give advice to the persons actually in the situation. Well, they can and do, but all we elders want is to say, "buzz off". Back to fantasy. I am not bragging when I say I have been all over the world, at least as far as I could, and some of it I loved so much I wanted to stay there. In my condo place, it's like a small geographical museum. Africa, of which I have seen not enough of, is  my bedroom where a stuffed giraffe, Raffy, and I share the space along with our tiger striped pillows and jungle fake greenery. I use a lot of fake greenery and quite adore it. My living room is in leather and steel, modern black and white but has corners of  aborigine art, cedar tree tables, carved wood and obsidian figures and cracked family antiques that are revered. The inuit collection is there, too,  but now high on shelves since the hand carved arctic bird persisted in losing its balance falling over knocking down the two soap stone hunters lugging their dead seals home with a bone ivory husky leading the way. The spot where I sit solo, in my nice black pod chair and footstool amongst the leather and black iron legged tables and marble counters rests in a forest of greenery dripping off the ends of what and wherever with forest ferns peeking out from under the white grand that is seldom played but oft, I hear. My fantasy of living in the forest of memories lives on. It doesn't breath as I do living on in my perfect dream.