Strands of Silver: The subtle highlights of experience worn gracefully by the Heroines who’ve earned them. These are the stories told through time, passed down with love, and marked with strength. They honor the women who are reinventing, celebrating, and owning every chapter of their Heroine journey – who wear their strands with honor and let life’s breeze guide them into the next chapter. After all, Seventy is the new Fifty. Fifty is the new Thirty. Silver is the new Bombshell Blonde.

Back in the 1960s, my high school boyfriend, Paul, surprised me with an enticing date: dinner at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis, where a violin ensemble, the Golden Strings, would serenade us. It sounded so romantic. When we got there, the waiter escorted us straight to our table—right next to the kitchen. The pure sounds of violins were replaced with the cacophony of slamming drawers and screeching voices.

Come to find out, Paul and I had been assigned to the Cat’s Table, a German term for the least privileged location at a banquet. Our shortcoming: we were teenagers.

Author Michael Ondaatje thought “Cat’s Table” had a similar ring to “Captain’s Table,” so he wrote a book bearing that old German moniker. The Cat’s Table follows young Michael and two other boys traveling on a ship from Ceylon to London in 1954. Like Paul and me, the boys, along with several “insignificant” adults, had been relegated to the Cat’s Table, as far from the Captain’s Table as possible.

As you might have guessed, the story goes on to reveal that the “Golden Insignificants,” as Ondaatje calls them, were far from trivial—they were pure gold. Michael’s three-week voyage set him up with the gift of a lifetime: “It would always be strangers like them, at the various Cat’s Tables of my life, who would alter me.”

Assigning and denying people status seems to be part of the human condition. We’ve finally put safeguards in place, such as zero tolerance for bullying and nondiscrimination policies, but here’s the problem: we can’t control what we don’t see. No parent, teacher, or boss can catch every word etched in a note, every whispered vitriol, every cruel glance. If the “sticks and stones” defense were really effective, we wouldn’t have organizations promising that “It Gets Better.”

I propose we make it better right now. And I know just how to do it: resolve to sit at the Cat’s Table.

The Cats are those people you wouldn’t ordinarily invite to your feast, for whatever reason. They are Ondaatje’s Golden Insignificants.

Golden Insignificants are as diverse as their beholders. Yours might be the recluse in the office, or the obnoxious one who talks too loud, too much, too often. She may be the classmate with a disability that makes you uncomfortable. The colleague with a tic, body odor, or skin condition.

Humble people may be easier to befriend, but arrogant people can be Golden Insignificants, too. They polish their exteriors to perfection, but deep down fear they are inadequate. Your Golden Insignificant might be the charismatic woman, man, or child who, it appears, doesn’t need any more friends. They are those who seem to have it all together. They may intimidate you, making it hard to see that underneath the attractive veneer is someone just like the rest of us, someone who craves a genuine friendship with a person who likes and accepts all their dimensions, not just the glamour. They would love to sit at your table.

Golden Insignificants are even people who are cruel to you and don’t deserve your time. Invite them to your table. Make it your goal to dig beneath the egotism, the condescension, the conceit, and find the gold.

Your Cat’s Table has room for a varied group. The local celebrity, the class president, the loner. The overconfident, the under-confident. The mainstream, the unique.

In truth, we’re all Insignificants to someone. Everyone is a Golden Insignificant, everyone is a cache of beauty.

I can only imagine the impact a sit-at-the-Cat’s-Table way of life would have on our world. There isn’t a person on this planet who doesn’t have gold beneath the surface. It’s our loss not to enjoy that beauty.

So go ahead, grab a seat next to someone with whom you wouldn’t ordinarily associate. If every day someone invited another to the Cat’s Table, every day someone’s life would change.

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April 2015 Issue