Ruby Tuesday, Birthday Edition!

This weekend I had the great privilege of attending my Great Aunt Bella’s birthday party:

Yep, she did it – hung in there for a century!  And she’s still beautiful, with her Angel’s heart shining through:

Can you begin to imagine the changes this woman has seen?  Being born into a world of horse-drawn wagons and dirt roads, where mail crawled across the continent by train (at 2 cents a pop!)  Where the Modern Miracle of the Telegraph had shrunk the world, where radios were magical and televisions existed only in the dreams of madmen.

She was a child during World War I, a beautiful young woman through the Great Depression, a hard working seamstress praying for the safe return of her nephews during the dark days of World War II.  She watched in disbelief as a man first walked on the moon, cried when John F. Kennedy was shot, cared for her elderly mother throughout most of the ’60s and well into the ’70s (and whose 100th birthday celebration I attended in 1969!)  She’s outlived the corded telephone, analog television and the Soviet Union…

And through it all, she’s managed to attend Catholic Mass most days (as did her Mom, ’till she was this same age.)

God bless this sweet woman, with her easy smile and her kind words for all.

Oh, and Auntie…  see if you can get your little sister (Rita, left, a mere girl of 94) to lighten up a bit…

I asked Aunt Rita if we’d be seeing her here in six years, and her reply was full-on snarled back at me (think Dick Cheney in drag):

“Nope!  Not me!  This world is rotten, rotten, I tell you,  and I’m sick of it! ”

My obvious discomfort wrung the only “smile” of the day out of her:

Oh well.

See a short video of my Great Aunt Bella on the local evening news here.

Happy Birthday, Gurrrl!

And a big thanks to Mary over at Work of the Poet for hosting this Ruby Tuesday meme!