Rodriguez: Reach for your dreams

I’m Helena Rodriguez and I’m a coffee drinker. As I confessed last week, I’m also an aspiring “early bird.” One age-ism which I can’t seem to embrace just yet, though, as my countdown to the half century mark begins, is talking about surgeries and illnesses.

That’s going to take some reconstructive brain work on my part as I turn 49 in two months and still have a whole year to hit the half century mark and AARP’s mailing list. If possible, I will run and hide. I may further protest and return to drinking Dr Pepper for breakfast too, although, as I have noticed over the past few years, coffee drinkers seem to be getting younger and younger these days.

Perhaps I’m protesting the rite of passage of becoming an expert in surgery because I had my share of major surgeries when I was in my 30s, from my ears down to my feet. No surgical knives have touched me thus far in my 40s — thank you, Jesus. Although I know there’s still one more year to go, I will have gone through most of my 40s without having to deal with the men and women in green.

One age-ism that has struck me now, though, in my 40s, is the growing list I have of dearly departed friends and loved ones. As a practicing Catholic (and that means I’m still in training; I have been all of my life), my list of prayers for possible souls in purgatory keeps getting longer and longer. It’s almost to the point that I have to write down these names. When I had a mini reunion last weekend with some of my former newspaper colleagues in Hobbs, that was the part that interested me, the inventory of newly-winged (I hope) byliners of the past.

Perhaps obits interest me more than surgery updates because they are constant and growing reminders of the limited time I may have left to grab ahold of my dreams from my bucket list before I kick the bucket. But as I wrote once before, quoting singer Grae McCullough, as I reach for my dreams, with whatever time I have left, “I won’t reach for the stars. I’ll reach for the one who made them.” And I’ll reach mighty hard.

Helena Rodriguez is a Portales native. Contact her at:

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