“Deliberately Diverse” represents the opinions of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but enjoy diverse discussions.
At 30 I assumed that by 80, I would be decrepit, regretful of my past and sad there was little future left. At 30, I was ill-informed.
Not yet totally decrepit, now at 80 I can remember and smile about most of my past, and I am confident there is still some future for me.
I admit I have been extraordinarily lucky. I was born into an intact family who lived above the poverty level, valuing Appaloosa horses more than money, but always emphasizing learning and education for me and my sisters.
Only now in these later days can I begin to ascribe meaning to the sounds, smells, and predictability of that early life. That is what you think about when you are 80.
In 80 years, there were successes and setbacks.
The first real humiliation was at 17: I was told by a university registrar that I could not register my major as architecture — women were not allowed. Instead, he said I should go to home economics to study interior design.
“It is almost the same,” he said. (It is not.) But I did because I was raised to be respectful and obedient.
There were tumultuous times.
In my senior year of high school returning from lunch one day, my friend George shouted across the plaza: “Hey, they shot (President) Kennedy!”
A year or so later, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; then Robert Kennedy; then the students at Kent State.
A war raged in Vietnam. Boys my age were drafted and sent to fight about something we didn’t understand. When they returned, it was too often in a body bag or with the kind of damage that made their lives unbearable.
But in 1969, we watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. There was a music festival in Woodstock. The Beatles came to the “Ed Sullivan Show.” The word hippie was used to describe boys who grew their hair down to their shoulders. Girls wore very short skirts, hitchhiked and burned their bras.
The 1970s produced the Watergate trials, civil rights efforts, Stonewall, Roe v. Wade and Nixon’s resignation. Then the Beatles broke up. Elvis Presley died. And at 30, I got divorced.
I was a full-time working mother through the 1980s and most of the 1990s; too busy to think about my future until suddenly I had an empty nest.
My children had apparently grown up overnight. With my new independence, I went back to school, got my doctorate in architecture and became a tenured professor. I won some nice awards and was invited to address forums in Europe, Asia, Saudi Arabia, Australia and universities around the United States.
My parents died. My sisters died. There are very few who remember what a bratty child I was all those years ago in Oklahoma.
At 80 I am lucky: My children gave me eight grandchildren. In retirement I moved to Taylor where I found “my people” who make me feel nurtured and valued every day.
So, this is how I feel at 80.
McCoy is a retired architect, professor, community volunteer and innkeeper living in Taylor.
