Yesterday I was telling someone the URL for my blog and all of a sudden I felt sheepish. Pilgrim_girl_? What am I thinking? I’ll be 40 in a few years, for crying out loud! Is it time to let go of the girl and become something else? Something more mature and scholarly-sounding?
BTW, I think pilgrimwoman sounds dorky. Waaaaay too puritannical. I could just be pilgrim, but that’s a bit vanilla-ish. Your ideas?
The great Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige — who may perhaps have been the greatest baseball player of all time — once said, “How old would you be if you didn’t know when you were born?” Paige himself did not know when he was born — not even the year — but went on to have a long and spectacular career, well into his… his what decade? No one knows. It wasn’t important.
You are truly as young or old as you feel in your heart (and as you act). If you are a girl in your heart — as I believe you are — and act like it, then you are a girl no matter how old you are. My sister’s mother-in-law is a girl even though she’s almost 80. But if you have lost the girlish youth and charm in your heart, then you are no longer a girl, and I have know teenagers who I would not consider to be girls.
Live the way Satchel Paige did. Don’t count the years.
gs:
I agree with you in so many ways! The rub for me is that I don’t want to be one of those women who is forever denying their age or yearning to be/look younger.
I don’t dye my hair, I haven’t had any cosmetic surgery and I don’t wear makeup (‘cept on Halloween). Not that I diss those who do these things, but they are my way of saying “World, I am not afraid of my age.” Perhaps the pilgrimgirl moniker is one way in which I continue to assert my youth(fulness)??
==The rub for me is that I don’t want to be one of those women who is forever denying their age or yearning to be/look younger.==
I don’t think you’re getting Satchels’ drift: You cannot deny your age or yearn to be younger than you age when you don’t know how old you are.
==Perhaps the pilgrimgirl moniker is one way in which I continue to assert my youth(fulness)??==
There you go again: You do not “assert” youthfullness (sounds so aggressive! :) Rather, the youthfullness which you already have expresses itself through the pilgrimgirl moniker.
Believe it or not, I am not an academic :) And you are a bubbling brook of youthfullness :)
Thanks gs. :)
I think I think too much about what other people think!
brainstorm:
‘howdypilgrim’
‘sojourner’
‘peregrina’
‘west or bust’
‘into the west’
‘wild westess’
‘pilgrims progress’
‘pilgrimess’
‘pilgrima’
‘pilgrimjana’
‘lourdess pilgrim’
‘pilgrims pride’
dont mind the silly
madam pilgrim
pilgrim warrior
xena pilgrim
i like pilgrim girl .. i’ll be forty in just over a year and i still love my girly girl side and i suspect i will at 50 and 60 and 70 and even 80 :) we are women, we are humans, we are wise and wizened and sometimes we are girls …
yes, we should always embrace our childlike aspects. That is perfection.
thanks for all of the encouragement and for the great ideas, mck!
the possibility of a blogname change is going to the backburner for awhile as other projects/deadlines are imminent. but this isn’t the last you’ll see of this topic…
I like “sojourner”!
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