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"Your life is so exciting! You really should write a book." "Weren't you scared to do that all alone?" "You're driving where all by yourself? I'd be terrified!" "You worked where? Man, I've never done anything like that!"

Are these, in your opinion, questions that would be asked of, or statements that would be made to an uninteresting person? Are the comments something you might expect to ask a young adventurer? How likely are you to have these reactions to a story told by a senior citizen?

We all have preconceptions about how people in any age group act, a problem I've dealt with far too much in my own life. My family, what's left of it, act their ages (three years to six or seven years younger than I am). They are settled down, live sensible lives, don't do outrageous (for mature people) stuff and pride themselves on being pillars of their churches and their society. They are sensible. They are somewhat in a rut, from my perspective, and not quite interesting enough for me to encourage them to write their autobiographies.

They worry about me and try to explain me to their friends. I'm sure they have "What are we going to do with her?" conversations about me. Why?

I'm in the process of recovering from a recent misadventure, the first one that got me into a lot of trouble and that will take a while to recover from. I made a perfectly good decision based on the information I had at the time. Unfortunately, there was some really important information I didn't have. I'll recover. In the meantime, they continue to scold me, try to get me to act my age, and shake their heads in despair.

Me? A 67-year-old, four-times-divorced, retired female currently working hard to recover from an adventure gone wrong, while I plan my next adventure-a little more carefully than I did the last one. My mistake last time: I didn't know what I didn't know. Next time, I'll definitely do all I can to at least avoid making the same mistake again.

The comments in the opening paragraph were almost all delivered by people much younger than I am, some less than half my age. They were all trying to be safe and sensible; trying hard to act their ages and win the approval of family, friends, and co-workers. They were/are putting off what they want to do today until some day in the distant future when they can have an adventure in a safe and sensible way. The most frequent question when they found out my plans: "Are you planning to drive 2,600 miles to California all alone? Aren't you scared?" My response:

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