Editors Note: This was originally published in the Federal Way News in January of 1983. It is written by Mike Robinson the eldest of the Robinson clan of five boys.

By Mike Robinson

We drove out to visit Great Grandma Daisy in the nursing home last week. At 93, she doesn't remember her family, but we remember her.

We took Anna, who is four going on 35, like a lot of kids her age.

We took Baby Owen, who at two months old sees life from the opposite end of Grandma's telescope.

Grandma was not among the white-haired ladies in the dining room who sat around in shawls, nodding and chat-ting. But many of them looked up as if we might have come to see them.

They reminded me of baby birds, their sharp eyes were so quick.

We found Daisy down a long hallway, still as a statue in her room. We approached her gently.

"And who might you be?" she said in her reedy voice.

I introduced my wife, Daisy's granddaughter.

Grandma doesn't wear her hearing aid. I had to introduce her again. I explained that Julie was the daughter of Daisy's own daughter, who had spent several hours with her that same afternoon. She didn't recall her daughter's visit, but it pleased her to hear there was some connection between her and these visitors.

We introduced Anna, who instantly grabbed Grandma for a long hug. Daisy grinned in surprise. She wondered what was the occasion.

"You have many people who love you here I said. She said, "and   I suppose you love me, too." "Yes, I do," I told her.

"Well, you'd better," she said firmly.

I was caught off guard by her sense of humor, coming as it did after several fuzzy questions. Did she think I was joshing her, telling her we loved her just to soothe her?

I looked at the frizz of white curls around her forehead, the long bones of her hands, the way her rosy dress draped over her thin legs. I wanted to memorize her, to commit her to a kind permanent life in my heart. I do that with all the old ones in my family, taking mental photographs, insurance against their eventual deaths.

Daisy raised her family in the Middle West, and lived 90 years there. I have imagined her moving through a frame house in South Dakota, but have only known her a year or so. Still, I am married to a part of her legacy. In some odd way I feel swayed toward her. It may be the fierce life I see in her strong face.

While we talked I tried to look beyond those opaque eyes, beyond the fierce old face. Daisy does not give many clues. If she knows what we are thinking, how we are feeling, she does not say so.

Perhaps she replays old scenes, but has ceased to wonder as her mind decays.

If that is so, it is the saddest consequence of age. A mind that cannot wonder is something like a broken toy. that goes in circles.

Wondering means breaking out of the circle.

During that visit Daisy never broke out, as far as I could tell. She returned our hugs, she smiled, she held intelligent conversation about things of the moment, like Anna's new dress.

When we asked if she would like to take a walk. with us, just a short walk down the hallway, she gave one heavy glance in the direction of the open door.

"Oh," she said, "I don't think I want to bother with that. I've done a lot of walking in my life."

With a lot of walking still ahead of us, we gave her another hug apiece, and then said our goodbyes. In ten minutes she would probably forget us. But if Daisy could not make all the connec-tions, that was all right. It was an important visit for Anna, important for Anna's mother, my wife, and for me.

We need the reassurance that Daisy is more than a name in the family tree, not merely a picture on a wall, or a memory relayed by someone else.

Anna held Daisy in her own arms, and kissed her with her own lips. She knows in her own heart the story of the generations. If that knowledge does nothing else, at least it will prepare her for her own aging. It will help her to know there is a natural progression, that time is not something we measure bywatches and clocks alone.

Time is an old woman who once was a girl. Time is an old woman who once was a wife. Time is an old woman who waits in her room.

Time is also a father at 40, standing between the old woman and the wife, holding the hand of his four-year-old daughter, with a line from Shakespeare ticking in his head

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

He was speaking of Cleopatra.

But Cleopatra didn't have the nerve to be 93.