Neenah Ellis - If I Live to Be 100: Lessons from the Centenarians

I OPEN MY EYES to daylight in the tent. Six-thirty. Surely Anna cant be up yet. I peer out through the pines toward the glassy lake to look for her.

Its the morning after Annas birthday and my tent is pitched a few feet from her bedroom window. She liked the idea of my camping here; it appealed to her sense of adventure. She is fun-loving but not foolish. When I asked her last night, she thought for a second before answering.

Yes, okay. That would be okay.

It had been a long day. Id arrived at her home in western Massachusetts at noon and her cabin was already noisy with visitors; the phone was ringing, and Anna and her son, Freddie, were greeting everyone boisterously.

Hey, you made it! She held open the screen door for me. I gave her my present right away.

Wow! You didnt have to do that! Id brought a bottle of champagne.

Should we open it now? Anna said. No, wait, Im gonna save it for later. Come on in and make yourself at home.

She brought me into the living room, bright with August light but cool on this breezy point.

Come and see what I got, she said, heading for the screened porch. On a table in the corner was a vase of long-stemmed red roses. The blooms reached higher than Anna and four feet across.

Guess how many? she asked, as if I didnt know. A hundred and three. She leaned toward me for emphasis. One for each year. Her smile seemed to know things I couldnt imagine.

Anna Wilmot was born in 1898.

M ORE PEOPLE arrived and she hurried to greet them. Neighbors and relatives and longtime friends had brought their children, and birthday cards and gifts. Some had taken off work to be here. A six-year-old girl gave Anna a bucket full of presents: pencils, stickers, a seashell, a hand-colored page torn out of a coloring book, and a card shed made herself. A young woman who was leaving soon for college said she just had to stop by. Anna knew all their stories; she asked about their families, catching up on their news. She hugged everyone, read their cards aloud, and passed them around the room for others to admire.

Thats a real hot one! she said now and then.

In a while Anna and all her guests left to walk to a neighbors house down the road. Anna leaned on her old broken shovel handle to support herself as she limped along. More people were waiting to wish her a happy birthday on the neighbors patio by the lake.

We stayed all afternoon. There was wine and soft drinks and hot dogs and salads and, finally, a chocolate sheet cake that said: KEEP ON ROWING .

We went back to Annas afterward and retold stories wed heard, and at 8:45, Anna announced, Im dead! and went to bed.

I TS EIGHT OCLOCK the next morning. I throw off the sleeping bag and reach for the tent zipper. As I sweep the hair off my face, I see her green rowboat on the lake; shes pulling on the oars, moving steadily across the silvery water, heading back to her launching beach. Shes already coming in. I rush down through the trees to the water and she glides toward me.

Hey, youre up already! she says.

I had not asked to go along with Anna this morning. She had taken me out for a boat ride when I stopped by a couple of weeks earlier, but she wouldnt take me early in the morning. It will be too cold for you, she said. (It was August 1.) Anna protects her time alone, so she went out in the morning and again at midday with me. I carried the oars down the footpath from her house and she followed, holding on to a wooden railing. She has arthritis in her knees and she grunted with each step down.

Youve got to push yourself, you know? she said.

Theres a name painted in black on the side of the flat-bottomed boat: GRANNIE ANNIE . It was half out of the water and tied to a tree. She directed me to sit in the stern. Then she laid the oars in and, steadying herself on the gunwales, slowly lifted first one foot, then the other, into the boat. I helped put the oars into the oarlocks as she got seated. Anna grabbed the oar handles and then pushed on them hard, but the boat was touching bottom. We both jerked our bodies away from the shore and it floated free. She rowed confidently and slowly, with small strokes, bringing the boat out around the point and into the center of the lake. We sat knee-to-knee. I felt happy but useless. She gave me the role of navigator.

Am I headed for the island?

Directly, I said.

Can you see the bottom? Its pretty shallow here.

I could.

You know, you could go in if you want. Take off your clothes and go right in. Go ahead. Why not? Anna laughed but she meant it. I know shes done it herself.

I VE ALWAYS thought I would live to one hundred. When I was eight years old, a girl who lived down the road from us in rural Indiana showed me the lifeline on my palm and told me that a long line meant a long life. I believed her because she was two years older than I was and owned Beatles records. I stood in her backyard by the swing and traced the crease all the way around to the top of my hand.

And around that same time, at the Newton Yost Elementary School Fair, a gypsy confirmed my findings. When I found out that the gypsy was really my brothers fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Renfro, in hoop earrings, and not a real gypsy, I was not dissuaded. She was a real teacher and they dont lie.

As an adult, I have new reasons to believe. My grandmother is ninety-nine. Since I was a child shes been telling us that she wouldnt live much longer, but now shes on her second pacemaker. Never mind that shes blind in one eye and often forgets which pills shes taken. Shes decided shes gonna make it. But I only recently started thinking about what my life might be like at one hundred.

In 1997 I got a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to do a radio series, an oral history of the twentieth century. Id proposed that I would interview hundred-year-old peoplecentenariansand ask them about the past. Some told such vivid stories that I felt transported in time. Some wanted to talk about their work, some about their children, others about their parents or spouses, now long dead, or their God, who was very much alive. I sat with them for hours and sometimes days at a time. Our conversations became the basis for a radio series on National Public Radios Morning Edition in 2000 called One Hundred Years of Stories.

But after a while, as much as I love history, I wanted to know about their lives in the present tense. Most of the centenarians were models of perseverance and positive thinking. They had open minds and open hearts. They were curious and generous and fun.

I had stumbled upon a demographic group that I had not known existed: hundred-year-old people who, unlike most people their age, suffer no dementia, have never had a major illness, and remain engaged with the world.

As I listened to their life stories, I realized that I was being given the chance to choose my own future, like Ebenezer Scrooge. By lining my life up alongside theirs, I got a better idea of where I might be headed. Id always had a sense of my life as a leaf floating down a river, on a course that seemed unalterable, but suddenly, in my mid-forties, I felt the need to make more choices: I could decide what sort of old person I wanted to be.