Robyn Palmini Anzelon

ROBYN PALMINI ANZELON...

Does writing (and reading) these “life updates” remind anyone else of senior year yearbook signings, but in reverse? ….writing a kind of reply to the 50-year-old (!!!!!!!) wishes for good fortune, success and happiness penned by ‘forever’ friends and first loves, girls and boys who could barely imagine a year post-graduation, much less five years, 10 years, 25, 50, years, years that turned them into women and men, parents, grandparents maybe…….

could be just me……….. anyway……..

I never found the fairy godmother Walt Disney had led me to expect, but turned out I didn’t actually need her, her magic wand or her fairy dust……I had the amazingly great good fortune/luck/blessing to live my happily-ever-after anyway…….and I am crazy grateful and thankful for it every single day

Happy has been there in every one of the 46 years spent with my husband, George….. we met when we were both at UCLA and my two roommates and I moved in to an apartment next door to his…so he was the boy-next-door and I knew he was The One the moment we met, just like in all the love songs, sappy romantic movies and novels…….especially the novels……..

so what could I do except write (and publish) four of them,  romantic suspense novels where all the mysteries have satisfying resolutions, struggles are rewarded, and love does indeed conquer all……researching for them took me Scotland, to a meeting with a wooden boat builder in Washington state, to an offshore oil rig, to houseboats in Sausalito, and to a conference of adoptees desperate to find their biological histories…….

George and I have one daughter, one granddaughter, one grandson and two step-granddaughters, each of them cherished beyond words, and all of them the most brilliant, beautiful, brainy and wonderful children/grandchildren in the history of the universe…well, at least in the opinion of their mom/grammy…..

George’s job took us to the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, where we lived as expats for 2 ½ years…..i tried, and failed miserably, to learn German, did slightly better at adapting to the cultural quirks of a ‘foreign’ land, waltzed at a Vienna Ball in the Hofburg Palace, and was able to travel to several other dreamed-of countries, Greece, Switzerland, France, Czech Republic Germany, and Italy………..we were still in Vienna when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and so saw 9/11 from a very different perspective….we felt the sympathy of  another country’s people, the disorienting isolation of being in a distant country, unable to fly home in those first immediate grounded days…..and then, later, when we moved back home to California, we felt lost all over again, because it seemed we came home to a very different country than the United States we had left such a short time before

I’ve suffered frequent,  disabling migraines since college, but then every fairy tale has to have at least one evil curse in it, right? And on the grander scale of possible curses and tragedies people suffer, mine ranks pretty small, so again, I’m grateful……….

I spend a lot of time now taking care of my 92 year old mom, whose numerous health issues take us to appointments with an almost unworkable number of doctors, since each of our parts nowadays seems to require a different specialist…which leads me to ponder often the issues of an aging population, medical breakthroughs that can extend lives, but sometimes does so beyond a life worth living, and questions of how we pay for all of this……….

but much of the rest of my time is spent visiting grandchildren, enjoying their childhoods as much as possible, reading them fairy tales, watching Disney movies with them, making princess and pirate costumes, and praying the world we are leaving to them learns to be safe and healthy and beautiful for all its children, and soon…….

So, 50 years have shifted a lot of things, faces, body parts, perspectives, hopes, wishes, expectations, and what matters most in life…..but I still love reading, beaches, dogs (we’ve had four goofy, loving, lovable golden retrievers and hope to have more soon) , and cats, sunshine, family, George……and happy endings……….