OPINION: Break a leg

We told my granddaughter Halle to “break a leg” before her performance in the spring musical for the Iowa Conservatory she attends in Iowa City. This is her third year at the school for performing arts. She’s had excellent roles in every play and musical, but this one was special. In her first lead, she was playing Princess Winifred in “Once Upon a Mattress.”

Halle has always had good representation from her family at each performance, but this time, they turned out in force to watch her comedic, singing and dancing skills - and some pretty spectacular physical antics on stage. She was thrilled to have family filling a whole row at the theater for her performance.

Making her day even more special was the fact my sisters were with us and seeing her perform for the first time. My older sister, 88, and her husband; my younger sister, 83, and I at 85, made the trip to Iowa City and back, and got along just fine with lots of help from the younger generation. We left Saturday morning at 8 a.m., with my daughter who lives here in Creston doing the driving, and met for lunch before the play with Halle and her mom (my other daughter) and my son and daughter-in-law from Dubuque. We attended the musical from 2 to 4:30 p.m., and then drove all the way back, arriving home by 7:30 pm. (My granddaughter from Dubuque went to the final performance on Sunday.)

It was a long, tiring day but well worth the effort. My daughter who drove bore a lot of responsibility for our welfare. She called us “the four elderlies.” We were glad she is a nurse as there is always the possibility of a medical emergency with four passengers of advanced age. In fact, my sister’s husband took a bad fall in the theater but, fortunately, his only injury was a bruised hip. We had not told him to “break a leg.”

I’m sure our nurse/driver was amused as much of the conversation during the trip revolved around our collective health issues. She heard discussions of back pain, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, AFib, vertigo, blood thinners, heart palpitations, cataract surgery, knee surgery, medications and falls.

The condition of our health, however, was not the only topic of conversation. We visit and text often enough to keep up with the activities of our respective families, but when you’re confined to an automobile for a total of six hours, it’s possible to cover a lot of topics in depth.

As usual, we talked about how fortunate we are to still have one another in our lives. We all have various health problems but our minds are intact. Obviously, we all struggle with recalling names and thinking of the right word as we converse, but generally, we do well and can easily share memories of when we were kids growing up on the farm.

We all three remember the good things about growing up with wonderful parents and playing together as children. We recall the chores we were responsible for and the pets we loved, and all the kittens we played with in the barn. We played dress-up and hide and seek, and spent hours tossing a ball back and forth over the wash house and shooting a basketball into a makeshift net Dad attached to the corncrib.

We love sharing memories of our experiences at Thayer Consolidated School and our years of playing basketball. My sisters were both guards and I was a forward playing six-on-six basketball. As a freshman, I played with my older sister during her senior year, and as a senior I played with my younger sister when she was a freshman.

We pursued different careers, lived in different towns, married and each had three children. There were many years of less involvement in one another’s lives as our families were growing up, but the close bonds remained intact. At our age now, memories are a big part of our lives so we are blessed that none of us is afflicted with dementia.

We’ve all experienced sadness and sorrow, but mostly, we’ve had full, wonderful lives. We like to talk about our good fortune and the joy our children and grandchildren bring us. That’s why we cherish every extra year we keep on living.