On Turning 80
For my 50th birthday, my mother Alice gave me an extraordinary gift—a history she compiled and annotated called “Travels with Cathy: 1945-1995.” On a map of U.S. Highways, she traced my travels from Pyote Air Base in Pecos, Texas to Breakfast Creek in Hartsburg, Missouri, filling in gaps in my memory as well as in my front teeth when I was in the first grade in Roswell, NM. It was a labor of love that I revisited this week as I turned 80.
Mother began her chronicle when Dad was stationed at Pyote AFB (Rattlesnake Field) where he and his B-29 crew received their training. She wrote, “Because there was a housing shortage, we lived nearby in Pecos, TX in a former filling station and country store. Our picture window had a clear view of two Phillips 66 gas pumps, but we were just happy to be together. The crew shipped out by train in March 1945. I drove to Hot Springs, Arkansas with Molly (my older sister) in our 1940 Ford for the duration of WWII. Cathy went along for the ride!”
And so my peripatetic life began even before I was born on October 21, 1945. In 1995 when I turned fifty, Kit and I were living in Missouri at Breakfast Creek. While Kit chaired the University of Missouri’s Geography Department, I drove around in my red Chevy pickup truck looking for subjects to weave into weekly newspaper columns that I was writing for the Boone County Journal and the Columbia Daily Tribune. Writing offered a new world for me to explore. With a notebook in the back pocket of my jeans and a camera slung over my shoulder, I began gathering threads that I wove together into stories.
Our friend Orion Beckmeyer let me hitch a ride on his International Harvester combine as I captured the wheat harvest in our local farming community. When traveling with Kit in Europe and Asia, I kept journals and took photographs constantly. Eventually, I published two collections of essays drawn from those years of weekly writing—Notes From Breakfast Creek and Notes From Boomerang Creek.
During our 30 years in Missouri, I became an active part of Columbia’s Unbound Book Festival board and met authors who came to town to talk about their books. As volunteers at Columbia’s True/False Documentary Film Festival, Kit and I met film makers and listened to them talk about what inspired their work. Writing a weekly newspaper column offered me a way share my love for the arts with the community.
During the pandemic, I joined a circle of women in creating a website called “The Common Ingredient” that inspired the community to share comfort food recipes as a way to call attention to food insecurity both local and across the nation. That passion for sharing food continues to inspire my life and my writing. I have a new circle of amazing neighbors now with whom I share life and food. And across the miles, I’ve reconnected with old friends I’d lost touch with for decades. Across the miles, we share food for thought on how to navigate the world we live in today, one day at a time.
Six months before Kit and I left Missouri in the spring of 2021, I created a website and began posting a weekly blog managed then and now by Sunitha Bosecker. Today’s post on turning 80 is blog number 268 in this current chapter of my writing life.
As Kit wrote four years ago in his book Episodes in a Life, every life is filled with stories and friends met along the way that are worthy of being captured and shared. For me, writing has become a way of breathing. On my 80th birthday, I am profoundly grateful for Kit’s constant love and his amazing caregivers at the Lodge where I visit him every day. My wonderful Riggs and Salter families and my circles of friends old and new keep me breathing by sharing love, light, recipes, and thoughts on the meaning of life. Thanks to each of you for being along for the ride.
