Federal Way woman zip lines for 92nd birthday

Published 4:57 pm Thursday, August 21, 2014

On her 92nd birthday this past July, Monica Mary at Village Greens Retirement went zip lining.

On her 91st birthday, she went skydiving and on her 90th birthday she sailed across the sky in a hot air balloon.

“Age is not a criteria for what you can do and what you want to do,” Mary said.

For her 93rd birthday, Mary hopes to parasail.

“They lift you up and you scoot across the water,” she said, noting she’d also like to go mushroom hunting.

Mary’s zeal for an adventurous life stems from her love of books. “My mind to me, a kingdom is,” a poem by Sir Edward Dyer, is written in her high school yearbook and for a good reason.

Mary had goals of reading every book in the library but her macular degeneration made it hard to see the tiny text so many books have.

Fortunately, Mary was about to get audio books provided by the Washington Library.

“Without them, I would be completely lost,” she said.

For two years, Mary sat in her Village Green home and listened to the books. Curious, Mary requested a list of all the books she had read throughout the years.

“Most are nonfiction and stories about women and how they conquered sailing the ocean and things like that,” she said. “I thought, you know what, I can do some of those things. Not sailing, but I can go in an air balloon. I want to do something like those other women. So, I did.”

And the hot air balloon led to skydiving.

“Man, when I got up, I was so exhilarated,” she said. “It was the greatest feeling to accomplish that.”

Her parachuting instructor told her it was “the thrill of his life” to take someone like her.

Zip lining this year was also exhilarating for Mary, but more of a challenge she said.

The Camano Island zip line by Canopy Tours Northwest provided Mary the chance to slide between trees but taking that first step made Mary think twice. She was hesitant because she has a “mechanical knee” and isn’t as agile as she used to be.

She remembered getting mad. Everyone was waiting for her and they thought she was going to quit, she said.

But when she took the leap and got to the other side, she remembers her son saying, “Mom, you are the most awesome person I know.”

“It makes you feel if I can do this, I can do anything,” she said.

Mary has lived in Guadalajara, Mexico; Pago Pago, Samoa; Honolulu, Hawaii; Bangkok, Thailand; Panama; the Philippines and Vietnam, to name a few.

She was born in Auburn, Maine on July 30, 1922 and graduated in 1941 during World War II. Although she went to junior college to learn typing and shorthand for a job in Washington DC with the Department of Revenue, has married, had children and lived a full life, the one thing she regrets not doing is attending a university and obtaining her bachelor’s degree.

When asked what she would have wanted to study, she simply replied, “To be an astronaut. I want to go to the moon.”

Photos of Monica Mary illustrate her zip lining adventure that she went on to celebrate her 92nd birthday. Raechel Dawson, the Mirror