Annette John-Hall: Almost 108, she ages with grace and dignity

I used to think it was strange that my grandmother Orelia would wish the unspeakable on her bad days.

By then, well into her 70s, her gnarled fingers aching from arthritis, she'd sigh and say, "Lord, I know you're not through with me yet - but you better hurry up!"

Well, at 107 years old, neither Willie Lassiter - nor the good Lord - is in any rush.

No one knows for sure, but it's safe to say that Lassiter, who celebrates her 108th birthday Tuesday, is one of the oldest residents, if not the oldest, in Philadelphia.

And that's saying something in a city full of centenarians.

Philly can boast of 415 seniors who are 100 and over. So big a group that the mayor's office hosts a birthday blast for them every year.

It was a party Lassiter seldom missed, and she has the pictures to prove it.

But a minor stroke suffered in 2006 slowed her down, forcing her to move out of her West Philadelphia home and into the Penn Center for Rehabilitation and Care. Her right arm doesn't work anymore and her hearing's going. And, like a lot of elderly people, she stays cold.

Still, after spending an afternoon watching Lassiter reminiscing, opining and advising, I found it pretty clear why she's here - as clear as her eyes that sparkle youthfully whenever she laughs at her own jokes.

"You 78?" she says, teasing her niece, Lucille Murray. "I didn't know you were that old!"

After living through segregation and lynching, poverty and prosperity, war and peace, Lassiter serves as a reminder to all of us that aging doesn't necessarily have to be a downer.

She's the living proof that you can age with grace - and dignity.

"Trust in God," Lassiter replied when I ask her the secret to her longevity. A deaconess at Mount Olivet Tabernacle Baptist Church in West Philly, "I served in my church faithfully for 70 years."

It was her husband, Walter, who brought her here from North Carolina in 1926. They had been married seven years by then.

She ran away to marry him despite her mother's objections.

"I asked my mother, and she said, 'I don't want you marrying that Walter Lassiter. Those [Lassiter] men beat their wives.' And she didn't want nobody hitting on me."

Walter, of course, never did.

"I didn't have any children - we tried and tried. But I had a good husband."

Walter worked in U.S. Customs, and Willie was a department-store clerk. He was 66 when he died of leukemia in 1961. She was 61.

That horrible day in her husband's hospital room was the only time she ever smoked a cigarette - all the way down to the filter, she said.

Old photos get her reminiscing. Hers is a rich family tale of a grandmother who was a slave in North Carolina, of an uncle, John J. Smallwood, founder of the Temperance Industrial and Collegiate Institute, a school for disadvantaged black students, in Richmond, Va., in 1892.

And there was a photo of her mother, Mary, the child of her black grandmother and a white slave owner.

Lassiter had four brothers and one sister. One brother, who was niece Lucille's father, lived to be 100.

When you've been a senior citizen for 43 years, as Lassiter has, you've seen a few things.

Too many wars to count. Traveling by horse and buggy. Standing in line with ration cards for a piece of meat during the Depression.

"People helped each other then," she said. "This economy looks bad, but it wasn't like the Depression. That was awful."

And she remembers when women and blacks couldn't vote.

She never thought she'd live long enough to see a black man be elected president.

"I love that young man," she says of presidential candidate Barack Obama, "but I hate to think about him, because I think someone's might kill him, and I don't want that to happen."

"We just have to keep on praying for him," her niece injects.

"Yes, we do," says Lassiter, her eyes lighting up. "They said at 100, you've seen it all. I say, you ain't seen nothing yet!"