"
My seven-year-old
daughter sat in my grandmother's lap,
moving her finger along the folds of
Grandma's face.
"Those are my
wrinkles," her great-grandmother said.
"They mean I'm getting old."
Later, Ann asked me
if wrinkles hurt and I pulled Margery
Williams' classic, The Velveteen
Rabbit, from the shelf and read it
to her.
It's the story of a
new toy rabbit that came to live in a
little boy's nursery. More than
anything, the rabbit yearned to know
the secret of becoming "real."
One day he asked Skin Horse, who was
so old his brown coat was rubbing off,
how to become real. "Real isn't
how you're made," he told the rabbit.
"It's a think that happens to you.
When a child loves you for a long,
long time...then you become Real."
The rabbit then asked, "Does it hurt?"
"Sometimes," he
answered. "Generally by the time you
are Real, most of your hair has been
loved off, and your eyes drop out and
you get loose in the joints and very
shabby. But these things don't
matter at all because once you are
Real, you can't be ugly, except to
people who don't understand."
"You see, Ann,
Grandma is just getting 'real.'
That's all."
Ann bounded off, but
I was left to consider for the first
time that growing old could be a
wondrous passage. The markings
of it didn't matter, except to those
who didn't understand. What
mattered was becoming "real."
What mattered was loving and being
loved for a long, long time.
