At Age 97
What does one wish for at age 97?
Mary Anthony wishes to see Kyoto. Because it’s old. Like it used to be. Not like the rest of modernized Japan. (Mary Anthony has never been to Japan except on layovers.) Alternately, she’d like to go anyplace cold and old. Maybe someplace in Alaska, or northern Canada, Scandinavia, or Russia.
That’s what she’s like and that’s what she’d like, at age 97.
When I first met Mary Anthony seven years ago she was 90 years old. She watched me walk through her 7th floor apartment-dance studio near Astor Place in Manhattan and promptly informed me that I wasn’t using my metatarsals or rotators. (This came as little surprise given that I barely knew that my body had either.) She made me walk again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. Still not satisfied, she then sent me home with explicit instructions to get in touch with metatarsals and rotators.
Today Mary Anthony celebrated her 97th birthday and not much has changed since that first day I met her. (Except, perhaps, that I’ve found metatarsals and rotators.) She continues to ask students to move across the floor again, and again, and again, and again. And again and again.
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