Street Level

On the last night of the year, people will hug, kiss, sing and either lament or welcome the coming of 2007.
Not Maisie Hinchey.
“Kiddo,” the Kamloops centenarian says, “one year is just like another year to me.”
Hinchey, who marked her 100th birthday in November, won’t reveal how she plans to spend New Year’s Eve — “sweetie, I’m not gonna tell you” — but it won’t surprise her friends if she bids adieu to 2006 by singing and dancing.
Or perhaps making snow angels.
On the day KTW visited with her, Hinchey had tried to convince a friend in the Glenfair complex where she lives to join her on the lawn and take advantage of the fresh snow.
“I can make a jolly one,” she says of the art of making snow angels. “But I need help getting back up again.”
Suffice to say, Hinchey’s not a stereotypical 100-year-old woman. On many days, she’ll hike up nearby Peterson Creek, no mean feat for a woman who is legally blind and deaf.
She eschews those traditional family Christmas letters — “they’re a bore” — preferring to get together with friends and family and have a good, old-fashioned singalong.
Dinners in restaurants aren’t popular with Hinchey, either.
“You sit around a table and this person starts talking to that person and pretty soon, you can’t figure out what anybody’s saying. And you just sit there.”
She loves riding motorcycles, although not in the driver’s seat anymore.
Age really doesn’t matter to her. In fact, she says she hadn’t even thought much about reaching her 100th “when, all of a sudden, this birthday thing comes up and, honest to God, they made such a big deal of it. I went to Edmonton to see my family and I thought it was just going to be the family, but there were relatives from all over Canada there. I mean, I’m 100. It’s no big deal.”
Age meant something when she was a child, she says, because it meant a party and friends. But now, “it’s just one of those things that passes you by and you just hope you make it.”
Which is why, should she decide to celebrate the coming of 2007, she’ll be doing it with friends.
Not because of her age, she says, but because “friends are the beginning and the end of it. Friends are who you can go to and just let it all out. Friends listen to you and then don’t judge you.
“And if we want to have a giggle about somebody else, we can do it and it stays there.”
Family is important, though, and her home is filled with pictures of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But one photo has a special place. It shows a group of children in Sierra Leone, standing in front of a building. The caption says “Maisie’s school.” Her family has chipped in to build a school in that African country, to be named after the family matriarch.
“Isn’t that so great?” she says. “A school, named after me.”
© Copyright 2007 Kamloops This Week

Posted by Dale at 10:47 a.m. Comments