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HARLINGEN — Look out!
Here comes Hazel Laverne Myrick, and if she likes you, you’re in trouble.
“You showing me your big old ugly shoe?” quips the 108-year-old resident of Golden Palms Retirement Center.
I move my shoe away and put one over my knee.
“Stop moving your foot!” she orders.
Laverne hales from the year 1916 during World War I. She remembers not having enough to eat during the Great Depression, seeing Glenn Miller perform live and dancing to his music.
The Glenn Miller band disappeared over the English Channel during World War II in 1944, after the invasion of Normandy on D-Day and before the surrender of Germany a few months later.
Yes, Laverne has seen a lot. And on Monday she met U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-Brownsville, who celebrated her birthday by presenting her with a statement entered into the Congressional Record which honored her more than 100 years of life.
Her birth day actually took place Aug. 20, but the party Monday with the congressman and his entourage, the Golden Palms staff, and her friends and fellow residents was quite a fanfare.
How was it?
“I don’t know what it was.”
“They gave you that beautiful flag and the plaque,” says Norma Colwell, senior living executive director at Golden Palms.
She comes around her desk to show Laverne pictures of her with her plaque and her flag.
“I didn’t see it,” Laverne quips sharply. “I don’t recall seeing it. Oh, I really am 108.”
She toys with Colwell’s small ensemble of bracelets and says, “You need another bracelet.”
Now she looks at me with the old ugly shoes and asks, “Who are you?” And me and Colwell both explain I am a reporter and Laverne says, “Oh! Howdy Doodie!”
It cannot be said definitively whether or not Laverne knows these things, but her fire and her biting wit indicate the strong likelihood that this is just part of her daily comedy routine which is hilarious and shocking and endearing all at once.
But, how is she doing, really?
“What do you mean how am I doing?” she says loudly and sharply. “I’m still here! That’s the main thing. My heart’s still beatin’. I don’t if it’s on the right key or not but it’s still beatin’.”
The life-long golf player has traveled to 56 countries and perhaps that eagerness for life’s adventures has kept her heart beating. Perhaps her clean life and her Christian life have carried her this far. Perhaps it is in the genes of her family. Many of her relatives have also lived very long lives.
Perhaps it is all of these things together that have kept her heart beating strong for so long.
I met Laverne two years ago at her 106th birthday party and was impressed then by her energy, her feisty humor, and her love for just talking to people — and getting after them for anything she could come up with.
“Oh, this is my day! I can tell you that right now!” she said then.
“Happy Birthday, Laverne!” said one friend at the party two years ago.
“Thank you honey!” answered Myrick. “You look so pretty! That’s a pretty color on you!”
And then a visitor brought her flowers and she said, “Oh my God! Lay ‘em on the table!”
“They ought to be in a vase!” she said.
“We have a vase!” the visitor said.
“Well, it’s not big enough!” quipped Laverne.
That same biting humor and playful sarcasm, that vitality and that embracing of life is still there two years later. Laverne walks three miles a day through the hallway of Golden Palms and the walking trails outside. She has someone with her at all times, of course, but she is so filled with life and the passion of life that you wonder if she needs any help at all.
“Walking is one of the best things you can do,” she declares. “I walk a lot. I always try to get somebody to walk with me but everybody’s lazy but me!”
Her health is so strong, you might wonder what she plans to do with the next 100 years of life?
“I’m not going to do anything, I’m going to take it easy!”
Laverne’s sharp criticisms are so funny they can keep everyone laughing — and breathing and walking and living. It is the kind of humor that can lift the weight off your shoulders and remind you that life is too important to take seriously.
And no one escapes her hilarious judgments.
When a member of a news crew was struggling with his camera, she declared, “You need to get another job, you can’t use your own equipment!”
She obviously liked him very much.
