More like Mom, Dad every day

They say that as you get older, you turn into your parents. And I say I can't wait.

I'm afraid, however, that it's not going to be easy.

My parents each are 75 - in fact, my mom is 75 today, so "happy birthday, Mom" - and they're incredibly awesome people who know everybody in their middle Tennessee town and everybody knows them. They are active, respected, smart and strong and go around doing good works every single day.

My mom, for example, is a sweet and kind woman who loves children. She taught preschool in my hometown for years. Even though she's been retired for a while, every time I'm out with her people come up and smile and hug her and say, "Oh, Miss Susan, you were the best teacher ever. We still love you." It makes me wonder if this is the same woman who made me finish my homework before I watched TV and finish my lima beans before dessert.

It is.

After my brothers and I were grown, my mother decided the school board needed her. So my dear sweet mama actually ran a political campaign with "vote for" stickers and signs.

Naturally she won. And she's still at it - attending state and national school-board conventions and talking about things such as the "impact of the updated baseline on value-added assessment and achievement scores."

Me? About the only thing I can talk intelligently about is whether Evil Russell is going to get voted off "Survivor" and will Mya ever make a misstep on "Dancing with the Stars?"

Then there's my dad. He owned a John Deere dealership for years. Now that he's retired, he works at his tree farm and nursery almost every day. He mows, hauls, loads, lifts, clears, plants, weeds - and that's just his warm-up. His real passion is volunteer work with the Court Appointed Special Advocate program for abused and neglected children. He cares about every one of his cases and spends untold hours with the children and their parents. There's no telling how many phone calls he gets in the middle of the night - and how many broken families he's helped put back together.

Me? Well ... uh ... see above paragraph about Evil Russell. I admit it. I've got a long way to go to be like my parents. But things may be looking up.

As unlike them as I think I am, on a recent visit home as we sat down to breakfast, I noticed all three of us laid out our morning dosages of those daily growing-older meds.

Hey, it's a start.

Cathy Wood is a freelance writer living in the Shoals. Her column is published Fridays. For more from her, visit TimesDaily.com.