Gabrielle Burton's Blog

She stood with enormous dignity, addressing the world with eloquence and grace, her multicultural poem "On the Pulse of Morning" offering inclusiveness, possibility, forgiveness, and above all, hope. She had done more than survive, she had prevailed.

Just as I was settling into my golden years, I quit writing full-time to become a salesperson full-time.



I only have one product, but it's a great one: my current unpublished book, Don't Sit Down Yet.



A little background on my late-life career change: For some years, authors have had to do our own book publicity, but that was after our books were published. Now we have to do our own publicity BEFORE ANYONE WILL PUBLISH OUR BOOKS.



Whipping up this pre-sale publicity is called developing "a plat...

Just as I was settling into my golden years, I quit writing full-time to become a salesperson full-time. I only have one product, but it's a great one: my current unpublished book, Don't Sit Down Yet.

Some people think Mother's Day has become too commercial, and there are always those cranks around still harping on the US lagging behind other developed countries in providing high quality early child care, don't get them started on paid maternal leave or unequal pay for women. Not me: I'm all for mothers getting anything they can, bring it on, I mean, really, just make sure to give them enough stuff on Mother's Day to get them through the other 364 days of childcare without that village tha...

Let's see, what Groupon suggestions for Mother's Day presents are flooding my inbox today?



Skydiving? Come on. My kids wouldn't get me skydiving lessons Would they? Might. One great year they got me black fingernail polish and a Betty Boop handbag. But I was only 50 then. Now I'm 75. Maybe I should casually mention that the only time I seriously considered skydiving was when I was 34, depressed, and looking for ways to perk myself up.



A makeover? I don't have to even give that one a second tho...

Some people think Mother's Day has become too commercial, and there are always those cranks around still harping on the US lagging behind other developed countries in providing high quality early child care, don't get them started on paid maternal leave or unequal pay for women. Not me: I'm all for mothers getting anything they can, bring it on, I mean, really, just make sure to give them enough stuff on Mother's Day to get them through the other 364 days of childcare without that village tha...

There are countless images celebrating motherhood from just about anything by Mary Cassatt to those adorable polar bear cubs snuggling with Momma Bear.



Here's my nomination for an image that says it all (or at least a lot of it): Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne." Painted in the early 1500s, it hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris.









There are many biblical and artistic interpretations of this picture and its symbols, (including a wacky one by Freud about vultures and nurs...

I’m married to a man who has absolutely no vanity, I mean none, which indicates either a healthy self esteem or cataracts, while I have stood in front of a mirror more than once pulling my facial skin back behind my head, tie it in a knot tie it in a bow, even though there’s a lot of evidence that smooth is never youth and often smooth is alien being.

Here’s something to ponder for a nanosecond: Why do celebrities with the world’s resources available to them go to quacks who stretch their eyes so oddly they can’t see how strange they look? What do they see when they look in the mirror? I know what I see in the mirror even if it takes me a second to recognize that old woman. Are they like anorexics seeing fanciful illusions or do they ever say, Holy Cripes, I really messed up there, oh well, maybe nobody will notice.

It’s a free country (for the moment), what you do to your own body is your own business, and really, what will a facelift matter when we’re moldering in the ground? Only this: We will never learn to love old people, love ourselves old, until enough of us let ourselves get flat out, unadulterated, unselfconsciously old.

I am going to be totally righteous about this just as soon as I stop dying my hair.

Gloria's 80, I'm 75. So far, I've stopped lying and I'm doing my damnedest to get a new definition for 75. But I know if I'm lucky enough to still be alive in five years I'll have a head start because Gloria's showing us one vital way to be 80.