Did someone drop a hat?

I just read a post by Wife in the north and it got me thinking about how our attitudes change as we get older. She was a little put-out because a colleague she mentored years earlier didn't remember her. I've been a teacher for 17 years and I can count on my hands the students that have written to me or told me that I've made a difference in their lives. Of course that might be because I'm a really bad teacher! I hope not.

I just think we are pretty self-involved until we get to a certain age, or period, and then we get this heightened sense of other people. Since I had Jack (or maybe just because I'm older) I feel for people. And I cry at the drop of a hat.

I was at a banquet this week and an award was given to a business owner, a contractor, who had donated his time, manpower and materials to helping out a local university that had suffered a tragedy this year. The university baseball team's coach crashed on the way to a game and seven people died (five students, the bus driver and his wife). When he got his award he stood at the podium and he could hardly talk he was so emotional. And I cried. I'm sat on the front table, with the other board of directors, and I'm crying for goodness sake. I'm looking around the room at the other 50 people thinking, "Oh, please don't say it's just me that finds this upsetting?" Apparently, yes, I was the only big soft lump in the room.

Will it get worse as I get older? Oh, I hope not. I always saw myself as an old cantankerous biddy, talking to myself and wearing outrageous clothes. I never imagined myself a blubbering idiot.