A Bird in Flight

Anaïs Noemie Beaulieu, Born May 5, 1934, lives in a retirement home. At age ninety, as she writes a memoir, she reflect on her one life's passion. She lived during, and can remember, the "armed conflicts;" WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and everything in between and after. She lived when there were no televisions, no computers, and no smart phones. She watched the first man in space and the first to land on the moon. These things barely caught her attention. Fiercely determined to succeed, she had little time to reflect on these traumas and advances of the greater world. She still pays little attention to them. Instead, with the aid of her granddaughter, she writes about what totally involved her for most of her ninety years, ballet. From age six on, she had no greater ambition than to fly across the stage en pointe and leap high, like a bird in flight, and then make a perfect, graceful landing.