You may be aging awkwardly

If you know a formula for getting older with any kind of style, please send it my way.  I don’t think it’s too late for me; but at the same time, I’m not sure I can trust my own judgment.

There are days when I just want to get me to the plastic surgeon and stretch my jowls up over my ears.  Hearing is overrated anyway.

My search for steps to follow, a manual of some sort, anything that could point the way to doing this thing without looking like a fool has produced limited results.

I feel as though the vanishing cream has kicked in – a loss of pigment – from technicolor to sepia to 1950’s black and white, right on down to chalky charcoal daguerreotype.  This is psychological, of course, except that my hairdresser now dyes my eyebrows along with my roots. 

In the meanwhile, Dear Reader, from astute observation and painful self-recognition, I have begun collecting guideposts.  I offer excerpts here from my Notes to Self: 

#1 – Keeping up

Dear Carolyn,

If you’re on Facebook trying to convince Millennials and Gen-Xers that Boomers are the coolest – because we had muscle cars and Mick Jagger – you may be aging awkwardly. 

Furthermore, even if you tweet and tumble and podcast your guts out, you have to admit that you are a tourist in the technological world.  You’re quick witted, but you’re learning that stuff like a second language.  Younger people were born into it:  They’re natives. 

So make jokes about it.  Put up that picture of a telephone booth with the caption, “When I was a kid this was my mobile phone!”  But, when you post pictures telling people they’re awesome because they remember VHS cassettes, or roller skate keys – you might be aging awkwardly.

#2 – Holding onto your looks

And, if you’re shopping online for “plus size high-waisted skinny jeans,” you could be aging awkwardly. 

AARP offers “11 Ways to Look 10 Years Younger”:  Among them – wear V-necks and exfoliate.  Gosh, thanks. 

Oh and by the way, I’m sick of Christy Brinkley and Jane Seymour.  Why don’t they just stay home?  All those grinning celebrities on AARP covers are air-brushed and photo-shopped daily – just like I would be if I could be.  But I'm not bitter!

Yeah, I want someone to skirt around me at all times holding one of those giant light-reflecting umbrellas for the photographer and making sure I always turn my good side, the youthful side – the other side – the one I remember from my 35^th birthday party.

Do I sound angry?  Oh pshaw!  (It’s a family blog – I’m tempering my epithets.)  Pshaw, I say! 

#3 – Winning

You can’t win by ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ the post that says, “I graduated high school without Google or Wikipedia.”  Or, “I’m old school:  I was raised to respect my elders and have good manners.” It just makes you sound like an old you-kids-get-off-my-lawn sourpuss.  And, you are aging awkwardly. 

So, play a different game.  Be nice. 

That is all.

Senior sleigh ride

After a couple of weeks of being obliged to deal with minor – but extremely annoying, persistent and impossible to ignore – physical nuisances, I am put in mind of Zeus, the father of the Gods, and the shenanigans of King Sisyphus.

You know the punchline in the story of Sisyphus:  He’s the guy Zeus condemned to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this frustrating and meaningless action forever. 

His days at stone rolling can be likened to those of unnamed persons, working at the futile task of staving off the siege of years.

The truth of it is Zeus got sick of Sisyphus’s scheming and deceitfulness.  So, he designed that particular punishment for King Sisyphus to match the hubristic belief that he could outsmart Zeus himself.  

Yeah.  Ole Mr. S. was a tricky and slippery dude.  Back in the day.  But not that clever: So far as we know, he’s still rolling the rock. 

And I was wondering if there are any parallels in the real world today.  Like for other people who try to deceive – not Zeus, or God or Morgan Freeman – but themselves. 

Not that I know anyone like that.

But let’s say there is a person who has taken up residence in Denialtown, right down the road from Who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding.  Around the corner from Getreal.com.  Maybe you’ve visited that neighborhood.

Let’s pretend that such a person could never admit to herself certain things that she does not want to admit.  Why should she?  What is the value?  Who benefits from such confessions? 

No one that I can think of except maybe the I-told-you-so crowd that insists on being right all the time and gloating.  Who needs ‘em?

You can speculate on what such a person might be pressured to acknowledge if you want to.  Go ahead.  What could it be?  That she’s been coloring her hair since 1998 not because it’s the cool thing to do, but because it would be white – white! – without her steady commitment to color and chicanery.

She dyes her eyebrows. 

She wears athletic shoes!  O.M.G.  And skinny jeans!  Hahaha!

She maintains a Facebook account and even Instagram in what some might call feeble and grasping efforts to be ‘with it,’ though it’s fairly certain that she doesn’t know what ‘it’ is. 

She tweets for goodness sake.

(She has the niggling feeling that all those followers are perfunctory.  Most likely they are following her just in case she has something they might want some day.  They will say they knew her when.)

She’s rolling her own rock up the mountain of inevitability!  She thinks she’s fooling Father Christmas.  Or someone.

But let’s say Sisyphus overcomes.  Yes!  Let’s say he reaches his goal and pushes that boulder up to the top of the incline.  Then what? 

He finds himself at the top with that big ole rock under his arm by his side, like a pal.  He surveys the landscape with a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration.  He inhales deeply.  Cool at last!

Here’s what our protagonist fears:  She fears that just then, when she, er, Sisyphus has had only a moment of glory, when he’s only just begun to take in the panorama before him, he will feel a tremor.  A faint wobble.  Was that a tiny earthquake?  Maybe it was a gust of wind.

Poor King Sisyphus doesn’t know that Zeus employed his fiendish wit by enchanting the boulder to perpetually roll away.  File it under You Can’t Win, old Buddy! 

That rock will lean; then it will strain in place, pause for the briefest moment, perhaps drawing a breath before lurching and throwing itself down the other side. 

It’s all over now for Sisyphus, right?  He can never catch up to that rock.  And what if he could?  Is he going run around in front and stop it in place midway down that slippery slope?  Spoiler alert – no, he’s not.

And even if he did, what could he do but start trying to push it back up the hill! 

I’m beginning to see as I near the crest of the mountain, I need to outfit myself with a toboggan.


It’s downhill from there and I want to enjoy the ride.    

Never give up! Never surrender!

A foldy toe.  Of all things.

I didn’t see this one coming.

You never truly expect all the inevitable "aging" crapola that’s coming your way, though, right?  Even though you’ve known all along that some telltale stuff is marching straight at you, two abreast, you can look over, under, sideways, down, and plain old ignore the certainty. 

For example, you know you’re going to wrinkle.  But still, it offends.  Wrinkles scandalize.  They appall.

There’s that OMG! moment when you look and you see and you understand that while you slept, creases crept up from the pillow case and settled onto your face.

Like you always knew they would.

They found their home, their happy home, and they don’t want to move.  Ever again.  Barring surgery of the type that would stretch your face into a Jack Nicholson Joker of a caricature of yourself. 

Nevertheless, you can’t help yearning for what you can no longer have.  It’s gone and there in the mirror is the new, old you.

And those rumpled ruffles didn’t arrange themselves appealingly in the socially desirable and marginally acceptable region set aside for laugh lines.

Oh no.  These are not crinkles that accentuate a twinkling eye.  These are lines and furrows more appropriately assigned to a wheat field.  And the crop is set for harvest.

We all know wrinkles are coming.  But who accepts their arrival?  Who welcomes them as an anticipated tenant?  No one! 

Some liars claim to love and respect them as signs of a live well-lived.  Ha!  I once had a dermatologist call liver spots “wisdom spots.”  Yeesh.

But OK.  What are you going to do?  Better than the alternative, right?  Hahaha. 

And gray hair.  OK, white hair.  Big deal.  I crawled into the bottle years ago on that one.  Denial perfected.

An ache.  A pain.  A spider vein.  Means nothing.  So what if I can’t eat fried food like I did back in the day?  Big deal!

Sleeping through the night?  Any sissy can sleep through the night!  Only the stout of constitution can nod off at midnight, get up at 2:30, 4:30 and again at 6 and still be (mostly) alert and productive every fine day!

But the foldy toe may take me down.

It developed on the golf course.  See?!  I play golf.  Twice a week!  I walk the course too!  Pull my own cart!  I’m young and strong and tough, I tell ya!

Anyway, as I was saying, I was walking up for my second shot.  This is when I usually give myself an “attaboy” for hitting it straight or a stern admonition for shanking it – again. 

But this time, my thoughts were drawn away from the bucolic 4^th fairway to the migration of my little toe.  As though responding to a hypnotic suggestion, it turned unannounced, inched away from its assigned station at the edge of my foot and worked steadily until it was tucked under its upright companions.

Whaaaat?

It didn’t hurt.  It just felt weird.  What are you doing there, Little Toe?  Why would you fold yourself under, thus?  What fear ye?

The toe said nothing and I kept quiet.

Members of my foursome suspected nothing.  They have seen me duff a fairway wood enough times.  They didn’t detect the shift in my sunny disposition.  That 3-putt was par for my course.

The rest of the nine, my mind held silent communion with the toe.  Instead of staying after for a celebratory Anchor Steam, I hustled to CVS and the Dr. Scholl’s aisle – you   know, where the old folks find remedies for foldy toes.

And there, nestled among the corn plasters and the arch supports, next to Odor-X and Freeze Away, I found these little gel cushion thingies that fit between and force errant toes to face the future head on, like the rest of us. 

So hooray. 

But how can one recover from the demoralizing knowledge that she’s shopping on the aisle right around the corner from the Ensure and down the way from the All New Silhouette Depends?

Stubbornness, that’s how.  Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall again on the hundred and first.

I will not surrender!  Oh no!  Not to a foldy toe!  

Our own profile in courage

OK.  Tell me if you ever heard of this before.  Ever. 

In your history of observing your own aging parents or the parents of friends, or even elderly strangers, I challenge you to match this story for courage.  Find a better role model and tell me all about him or her. 

In your own experience, can you remember an older adult who took care of himself and his family by relieving them of the struggle during the inevitable transition from independence to any sort of assisted living?

I’ll bet not.

What we hear over time is the familiar story of a proud and independent person who finds himself in a situation he knew was coming, but never wanted to be.  And in spite of the inevitability of the circumstance, that person will engage in an emotional battle with himself and his family, resisting the changes mandated by the passage of time and the impermanence of flesh and bone.

We hear of strong-willed and intelligent people abandoning their own stated principles.  After a lifetime of claiming the right to self-determination, they oblige saddened and distraught family members to step in and make the clear choices for them that, barring dementia, they could make themselves.

Rather than making their own decision to hand over the car keys, for example, they will continue to drive after accidents and near-misses and the admonitions of physicians present evidence enough of the need for change.  They tussle and brawl and hang on to the thing they know they must let go.  In so doing they force their family members into the roles of conspirators and thieves. 

But not my father-in-law, Mr. Lloyd B. Plath, aged 95. 

A year ago he fell in his beloved home up on the hill in Danville. 

This was his home on Kuss Road just below the historic Eugene O’Neill residence.  The home his wife of 55 years designed and he built.  The home where he raised three children and loved multiple pets.  The home with stairs to get in and stairs to get out and stairs between levels inside.  The one with a sweeping view of the San Ramon Valley and Mt. Diablo where he’d been living alone since his wife died in 1998.

He tried to get up and fell again.  He lay on the floor for sometime recovering his strength and thinking about the phase of life that had come to meet him that morning.

Then he did get up.

He called his sons and said, “I think it’s time for me to sell this house and move into some place more reasonable.”

Wow.  What brought this on?  Sure we had all been thinking about those stairs and those levels and the life he’d led in that house.  But we hadn’t broached the subject straight on.  We had only tiptoed around the idea.

“Oh, I had a fall this morning.”

He wouldn’t hear of living with any of us “kids,” so we sold the big house.  We moved him to the flatlands and a one level apartment on the ground floor.  He adapted just like that.  Chuckled and insisted he liked it.  Enjoyed his new neighbors and their comings and goings.  They quickly found affection for him too.

In March he mentioned his long-time friend got a great deal on a place with some jazzy amenities.  He got all his meals and laundry and housecleaning services.  Medical attention.  It was pretty nice Lloyd said.  We knew he had never been much for planning meals or shopping or cleaning or serving himself.

Lots of stuff going on in that place, Lloyd said; people to meet.  No kidding.  We looked at that place and a couple others like it.

Then he fell in his new apartment.  And he fell again.

It is hard to see him diminished.  He is wobbly and cannot walk much at all.  His eyesight is failing, maybe due to a small stroke.

We know what all this means.  As does he.  So he told us to get him set up in assisted living.  And we did - because he told us to.


He remains in charge of his life.  We are his loving and humbled servants.


I only hope when it’s my turn I will be so brave.

A sissy's approach to getting older

Some of these old folks are feisty! 

“Feisty” is the only f-word I’m allowed to spell out in this family publication, but let me tell you – if you ask a person at the upper end of the actuarial table what it’s like to get older – step back!  Because she will answer!  And, it turns out, one of the salient qualities of the senior set is that they have shed their inhibitions and donned their daring.  I love that!

Just to cut to the chase, consider Madonna.  I wasn’t a big fan of hers until I read what she said to Nightline six years ago about approaching the half-century mark:  "Yeah, f*** you, I'm 50.  That's what I'm going to say when I turn 50."

OK, you’re right.  I hardly consider 50 to be old, but I appreciate her bold spirit!  At the same time, I admit I’m pretty tame in contrast.  

Still, I kinda wanna be like that! 

But gosh darn it!  There’s so little a person can do between going all ‘Madonna’ - chest   bumping Old Age and shouting in its face – or meekly inviting it in – aging “gracefully.” 

To me that’s the same thing as surrender.  I don’t want to give up being cool!

So I say ‘no!’   

I know.  I talk a big brash game, but in the execution, I revert to diplomacy.  And clearly, Old Age is about as susceptible to diplomacy as ISIS.

Therein lies the dilemma.  A person like Madonna can express the rage that comes with the daily realization that time is not just slip, slip, slippin’ into the future; it’s downhill racing.  Time is screaming and careening around the track toward the checkered flag.  

What is a mild-mannered ‘fraidy cat supposed to do?

I figured I’d better get busy and figure out how to deal with this aging thing.  So what if I’m about a decade slow on the uptake?

I went to my loving husband first.  “Honey,” I said, evincing the timidity I felt both at broaching the topic and at facing the inevitability.  “I don’t know how to get older.”

“Well you’re doing it!” he said.

Ah.  OK then.  Let’s see.  Maybe I should study some role models for aging; they will show me the way to forward progress without loss of cache. 

Just look around and ask the question, “Who do you know who’s getting older while retaining that certain je ne sais quoi?” 

(I looked it up:  In French it’s literally, “I don’t know what:” An intangible quality that makes something distinctive or attractive.  You know – cool.)

A few folks leapt to mind:

First I thought of Mork.  As you recall, he got to go backwards.  That’s the dream:  As we get older, we get younger!  Alas, it’s fiction.  Not a good example.

Next, inexplicably, I thought of Keith Richards.  He’s defiant; and so far as I know he never gets in anyone’s face like a certain Material Girl does.  But, but…  Well, I hate to succumb to vanity, but I don’t want to end up looking like a smokin’ zombie either!  (Sorry Keith!  You are still very cool.)

Maya Angelou!  Now we’re getting somewhere!  Could I please mature into her kind of patience?  I want that same steady gaze of experience and wisdom. 

Mahatma Gandhi!  He was a courageous old guy.  And, that wardrobe!

What about Dolly Parton?  I love her approach to getting older:  “I will never retire unless I have to.  As long as I'm able to get up in the morning, get that makeup on and my high heels on … I'm going to do like Mae West; I'm going to sit in a wheelchair with my high heels on.”

I wouldn’t mind being like Dolly except for the likelihood that we would both end up like Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”  Uncool.

Bette’s the one credited with saying, “Old age ain't no place for sissies.”

That quote used to scare me, maybe because I am pretty wimpy.  But now, since I’m doing it, I only feel scared some of the time. 

Other times, I get that I can grow older and retain my awesomeness. 

OK, got it!  Helen Mirren!  Eh?  Right?!


Yeah.  Helen Mirren!

Love letter to Byron Farquhar

We cleaned out the desk of Byron Farquhar today.

Byron Farquhar, man of mystery.

You can learn a lot about a person from the contents of his desk.

As might be expected, in that beautiful burl wood roll top, we found office supplies – multiple boxes of American Standard staples (no stapler, by the way), paper clips, pencil leads, funky pink parallelogram erasers, carbon paper (!), batteries, Diamond strike-on-the-box matches, and a small canister of crushed red pepper.  OK…

In the file drawer, bottom left, we found documents cached long past the recommended ‘save until’ date per the IRS’s mandate:  Bank statements and W-2’s from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Photos of colleagues atop empty picture frames.  Nesting dolls?!  Rubber bands linked, perhaps the product of a meditative mind.  Boxes of business cards from each stop along his progression up the ranks in his professional life.

Then, in the top right hand drawer, at-the-ready, glasses.  No, not reading glasses.  Not even old prescription bifocals kept in case the new ones were lost or stepped on.  No.  These are plastic frames without lenses but sporting a rubber nose complete with fluffy black moustache.

Now we’re getting down to the real Byron Farquhar.

It’s a pseudonym, of course.

Byron Farquhar exists only in the mind of a 94-year-old born on April Fool’s day – my facetious father-in-law, Lloyd Plath.

He first called himself Byron Farquhar when he set about unraveling the puzzle of how he wound up on so many mailing lists when he had subscribed to only one magazine – Forbes.

His sleuthing compounded the problem, getting him onto duplicate streams of multiple mail-order solicitations, the first in his own name and the second sent to the attention of the illusive Mr. Farquhar.

Lloyd never trusted Forbes after that.  At the flea market he found a framed picture of a chimpanzee studying the New York Times and hung it next to his massive desk – his new financial advisor.

I first met him in Tulsa when my husband and I were courting.  We took him and my future mother-in-law to an outdoor arena for a live musical performance of “Oklahoma!”  The master of ceremonies informed the audience that senators from around the country were in attendance that evening and asked them to stand and be acknowledged. 

To my amazement Lloyd stood and accepted the round of applause graciously even though he never was a senator from anywhere. 

After I became a Plath, people started to ask me if I am related to Sylvia Plath, the well-known award-winning, if ill-fated author.  Once this happened at a party when I was standing next to Lloyd.  He said yes, I was, by virtue of my marriage into the family.  He said that Sylvia was his cousin and he went on to recount an anecdote from their childhood times together, playing in the kitchen.  A recollection made melancholy, he said, by her choice of exits.

I began retelling the stories of my famous cousin-by-marriage, until I learned from Lloyd’s flabbergasted wife one day that this too, was another of his pranks.

The good news is that we have the roll top desk now not because Lloyd Plath has passed away, but because he decided to move.

He decided.

He called us and his other offspring and their spouses and insisted that we come and collect all the things that he’d made us claim years ago when his wife of 57 years passed away. 

They just won’t fit in his new apartment, he said.  It’s a one bedroom affair on the ground floor of a fresh new complex in his tiny, picturesque town.  No more stairs.

He figured it was time to make a change since he took a fall and banged up his knees. 

He gave us the gift of making this decision himself, no matter how stress-laden or painful it must have been.  He’s always been, and remains, his own man. 

So we brought home the desk and the glasses, but not the portrait of the chimp. 


Lloyd wants to live long enough so that on April Fool’s Day, 2020, he can send that picture to Willard Scott for display on a Smucker’s jar labeled:  “Byron Farquhar, 100 years old.”

BOTOX, pantyhose and the Fountain of Youth

I’m not saying I want to be irradiated, but I’m just thinking.  Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.  At the very least, I foresee a call for human volunteers in the near future. 

See, the journal “Oecologia” is reporting that the forests around Chernobyl remain heavily contaminated with radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster; and the unexpected benefit is that they still look good.

Yeah. 

In the journal, Tim Mousseau, co-director of the Chernobyl and Fukushima Research Initiatives at the University of South Carolina, states that 28 years after that explosion in the Ukraine, the tree trunks there have not decomposed at a normal rate.

I’m not sure I can say the same thing about myself after a quarter century with Mr. Plath.  I don’t mean to suggest he’s radioactive.  I’m just saying that I have to utilize mirrors and smoke; practice selective perception and reverse anorexia for the sake of my own self-esteem.  Happy thoughts.  La la la la la!  Myopia is my friend.

Mousseau goes on to say that "apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed…[they] seem unchanged” even decades after the catastrophe.

Hmmm…so radiated tree trunks were, in effect, preserved.  Unaffected by what we often call the ravages of time…  Typically, a fallen tree disintegrates in about 10 years…but these trees were protected from normal deterioration.

Um hmmm…

And I love nature!  It appears I could have been hanging out in the Ukrainian woods to retain my youthful self.

And there’s this:  How do you suppose those researchers came to verify their observations?  A double-blind survey using pantyhose, of course.

To find out what was happening — or, more accurately, what wasn't happening — the research team collected hundreds of samples of leaf litter from forest floors that were not contaminated by radiation.  And they stuffed those leaves into bags lined with panty hose!

Why jam the uncontaminated leaves into pantyhose, you ask?  To keep out the insects!  Duh!  Everyone knows pantyhose keep the bugs away!  

Of course, that’s not why we originally crammed ourselves into pantyhose.  We sucked it up and forced ourselves, like so much Jimmy Dean sausage, into that run-resistant, reinforced toe, active support, control top torturous “legwear” to, to…why did we wear pantyhose? 

Like Trappist Monks we punished ourselves Monday through Friday with those heat-producing, skin-pattern-inducing implements of self-flagellation.  Was it vanity?  Peer pressure?  Selfless devotion to scientific research?

Anyway, back in the Ukraine, the researchers distributed those nylon-lined bags of leaves around the Chernobyl area and waited nine months.  Just because. 

And according to the study, samples of leaf litter that were placed in the highly contaminated areas showed 40 percent less decomposition than samples that were placed in uncontaminated sites. 

That’s right; it’s an unexpected outcome of radiation poisoning.  The degree of decay was inversely proportional to the degree of radioactive contamination!  Or, as we might put it in Oklahoma, the more things get toxified, the better they look!

Kind of makes you want to sleep with your microwave, doesn’t it?

If I had known all those years, that by squeezing pine needles and deciduous debris into my Hanes Silk Reflections I could have preserved my formerly youthful and svelte self…  Oh, nostalgia!
 
Since I have slid past the threshold of youth, skittered right through middle age like a hockey puck on ice and now find myself clinging to the doorjamb of naturally decomposing organic material, I am ever on the lookout for anything, anything that will put me in league with a Ukrainian tree. 

Don’t click your tongue, Dear Reader.  I’m not so far out of the norm.  It wasn’t that long ago we were all feigning disbelief at the idea of sticking ourselves in the forehead with a syringe full of the botulinum toxin – AKA botulism, a lethal poison – AKA Botox.  Now a bunch of us Baby Boomers have “migraine headaches” and “need” the stuff for “medicinal purposes.”

So it’s not that far-fetched, this nuclear meltdown advantage.  You won’t laugh so loud when you wake up one day looking like the Portrait of Dorian Gray and I remain fixed in time at my current state of disintegration.  Ha!

At the very least, I’m going back to my L’eggs.  

Sleeping with one eye open!

When do freckles become age spots? 

These innocent points of pigment used to be cute.  Now, they’re just another element in the conspiracy.   

As best as I can determine – and I have studied the phenomenon – freckles convert to “dark spots,” – the current euphemism for what my grandma called “liver spots,” –
Ew! – at roughly the point when a person looks away.  For an instant.   

That fleeting lapse in attention allows spider webs to convert into cob webs and freckles to go bad. 

It’s that pause between perfect teenage skin, with its concomitant arrogance, and old age.   

You know, that blink of the unsuspecting eye when you’re living your life, somewhere in between flagrantly sunning in a bikini in your backyard kiddie pool and frantically slathering sunscreen on your extremities before dashing from awning to awning if you should happen to find yourself outdoors in daylight. 

It’s that moment when a person wakes to find the Louisiana Purchase mapped out on her fanny. 

It’s that fateful flash when you glance at your reflection in the mirror and say, “Holy Lewis and Clark!”  And you vow not to look again tomorrow because it’s a sure bet that Western Expansion is on “the horizon,” if you know what I mean.  

Recently, a dermatologist, responding to my worries over what seemed to me to be an especially aggressive freckle, a freckle that woke in the wee hours of the night and annexed new territory at will, Attila the freckle, the freckle that ate Manhattan…   

I pointed this thing out to my dermatologist you see, with my head turned slightly away.   I thought she would don her welder’s mask and hazardous waste gear and scorch me with her freezing hot laser wand.   

Instead, she brushed her forefinger across it casually and said with a sinister smile, “Oh, no!  These ‘wisdom spots’ are nothing.  We all get them – eventually.” 

OK.  Two components of that dismissal require attention.   

First, let me just say that the startling transformation from a charming splash of speckles like a reverse image of stars in the night sky to a map of Texas on the back of my leg isn’t nothing!     

My heretofore darling flecks of color, my trademarks, my Opies are turning against me I tell you!  They’re organizing!  They’re forming ranks!  That is not nothing.  It’s something. 

And “wisdom spots”?  Puh - lease.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  I haven’t seen that much blatant condescension since our son was a teenager. 

And that’s right Sweetie.  That’s right.  We all get them and your eventuality is closer than you think!  You’re looking the other way right now, I’ll bet.  You’re living your life with your flawless skin and your medical degree and your… 

Oh all right.  She made me mad.  When did my innate good humor morph into to cantankerousness?  Why I’m known for my sunny disposition!   

I used to get compliments on my smile until I discovered that all these years I’ve been YELLOWING! 

What’s next?  Enlarged ears?  Unruly nose hairs??!   

Note to self:  Never ask what’s next.  There’s always something next.  We’re all in line in a vast deli whose menu includes cataracts and four-footed walking canes.   

And our numbers are coming up. 

And so what?  What’s a person to do with this new evidence of treachery?  Just add it to the list! 

Check it off the roster of insults advancing in the night:  You go to sleep a young person and wake up with a crow’s foot.  Then it’s a laugh line.  And suddenly you look like some nut who’s been seized with fits of hilarity over a lifetime spent in a padded room. 

Maybe you’re one of those philosophical types who waves it all off as signs of character.  Life’s lessons.  Sagacity.  Indeed. 

But not me!  I’m not going to chuckle and pat Old Age on the back like an eccentric aunt who made a faux pas at the dinner table.   

No.  I’m bleaching my teeth until I look like Bob Barker.  I’m buying a vat of vanishing cream and I’ll sit in it ‘til I’m all pruned up.   

Oh. 

I see how it is.  Coming and going.  Chinese finger trap.   

I feel so much better now.  Thank you.

Fireworks are for Old Folks

I used to tell my friends I’d be the oldest living person at America’s Tri-Centennial Celebration. That would put me at 127 years old. Turns out I’m not as far off as it might have seemed back then.

At the recommendation of the Wall Street Journal, I completed a longevity calculator - four different ones, in fact; and they’re telling me I could live well into my 90’s. All of them.

I guess that’s good news.

What I’d really like to do is get my friends and family to run the numbers on themselves. See, I’m unsure how much fun it will be to reach 99.8 years, as one of the calculators predicts, if I am to be alone with my oatmeal.

Susan, my cat, is 21 years old. I think that’s about 300 in cat years. She moves in slo-mo now, carefully securing solid placement for one paw before lifting the next. Like a sloth.

Her life doesn’t seem so bad though. It’s just that her world has shrunk.

Gone are the days when she roamed our lot stalking squirrels and birds and bugs, tormenting our passive yellow lab, Ted, (whom she’s outlived by nine years), and romping through the house with her favorite leopard skin catnip mouse.

Now she has a meal, a poop, (in one of the multiple boxes strategically placed for her echolocation), and a day sunning on the deck, or napping on a heating pad. We can dream of such an existence.

And she’s virtually weightless.

OMG! Just the thought of becoming so tiny. Especially after being so…not tiny.

I want to be one of those surprising old women. The one who’s still writing, who college kids think is a kick. I don’t just want to say what I think; I want to think funny, incisive, no, piercing thoughts.

Yes, when folks are at their wits’ ends, casting about, wondering “what the heck?” suddenly, something I’ve said will pop into their heads and they’ll feel better. Lately, it’s been: When you’re going through hell, keep going.

I stole that of course. But I’m going to start recording all my clever insights, so by the time I’m 80, let’s say, or 85, I’ll have amassed a veritable panoply of pithy sayings.

The Anderson Cooper of the era, no, the Jon Stewart, will call me up for on-air interviews. Like when David Letterman calls his mom. You won’t see me; you’ll only hear my voice, bright and tinny. I’ll lampoon the newest president, poke fun at democrats and republicans, and make you laugh with my snappy wit. If you’re still alive, that is.

Of course I’ll be a dancer. I’ll be one of those tiny curved women who wear a leotard in front of a mirror, waving her spindly arms in the air, glorious. Feeling as if she looks good. Just like now when, on a rainy day, I play my “Just Dance” CD on the Wii and pretend I can keep up, pretend I rock. I still have the moves.

If I have to go to an old folks home, I’ll be the spark, the one the nurses won’t mind feeding. Maybe a high school girl will volunteer her time as a part of her senior project. She’ll sit with me and tell me about her boyfriend. I’ll make her blush, just as my grandma did me.

But in the short term I have to go to my husband, the man who helped me retire a year ago, and tell him I might live a long, long time --- longer than we expected. He’s already a little suspect of my earnings-free existence. I don’t know if we have 99.8 years’ worth of rent and Top Ramen. I might have to mow lawns to justify the added years.

He’s younger than I am - my husband. And since women typically outlive men, I’ve always thought it would average out and we would die more or less on the same day. I like the concept since it involves no sorrow. I’m already steeped in sorrow for those who’ve gone ahead. Not sure I could bear it if he up and decided to go before me.

He has better genes than I do, so the calculators are probably on his side. But I don’t want to go first.

I want to light a Roman candle at the Tri-Centennial.

Grandma Wanted: Discerning Eye Required

No doubt motivated by people watching at the mall, an organization called Diet Life polled 2000 women asking the appropriate ages to quit wearing certain fashions.

Here’s a sample of their findings:

Quit wearing your miniskirts at 35, your bikini at 47 and your stilettos at 57.

OK. This isn’t a problem for me since I gave that stuff up long ago. All of it. Probably at 35, even though I still looked good, if I do say so myself. Thirty-five was a peak year for me. Gosh that was a long time ago! Darn it!

Editors from US fashion magazines Allure and More (geared to women over 40) stepped up immediately to voice their opinions on the subject. They say that these decisions are not about age, but about judgment. “Just look in the mirror,” they say. If you look good, wear it!

They point to Helen Mirren as an example, saying in her sixties she still rocks a plunging neckline and a bikini. Couldn’t agree more.

However, they gloss right over pronounced examples at the other end of the fashion faux pas spectrum. To wit: Cher, who used to rock it, but now dwells in the realm of caricature. And I’ll bet she has many mirrors in her many mansions. Susan Sarandon’s tired cleavage must be reflected somewhere; but she’s not looking.

While many celebs continue to look great well past the magic ages of 35, 40, 50, and even 60, we cannot let them be our rules of thumb. They and their plastic surgeons are not trustworthy.

And frankly, we can’t trust ourselves! Some of us just can’t accept what the mirror tells us. The human brain is a magnificent mechanism of mendacity. It can blot out trauma, even the trauma of sagging, bagging, bulging, and crinkling.

As you know, anorexics continue to see themselves as fat even as they waste away before their own eyes. Some of the rest of us manifest reverse anorexia: We continue to think we look slim even when the mirror says, “Not so much.”

I remember the first time I went to Weight Watchers (to be supportive of my friend who needed to go --- she invited me! Go figure.). When I weighed in, I blurted, “Are these scales correct?!” I didn’t believe the scales at Weight Watchers! That’s how far denial can go in the so-needing-it-not-to-be-true mind.

And so, if we’re not going to pick an arbitrary age to make the crucial determination as to whether it’s appropriate for us to wear a ponytail (cutoff age – 51!), and we can’t trust Hollywood or our own judgment; what about fashion designers themselves? They’ll look out for us, right?

Oops. Look no further than Princess Beatrice’s chapeau at the Royal Wedding. Designer Phillip Tracey said beauty and elegance inspired him when he made it.

Oh well.

We’re going to need a blunt and honest “friend.” We need someone who will look at our reflection for us and tell it like it is.

I remember years ago when Tina Turner appeared on the Oprah show. Tina looked good. She might have been 60 already, but hard body and wild hair --- we all wanted to go there. And Oprah did. She bought a Tina Turner wig and began to wear it on the show and around town in Chicago. I thought she looked great.

But soon Oprah returned to her show sporting her familiar coif. She confessed to a conversation she had about the wig with Stedman in which he asked, “Doesn’t anyone tell you the truth?”

So where can we find our own personal Stedman? I’ll have to hire one. My husband loves me just the way I am. Either that or he’s too smart to tell me what he really thinks.
Too bad my grandma’s gone. She would do it. And from her, I could take it.

I can see her now, filtered cigarette between manicured fingers, right eye squinting as she inhales, sizing me up in my new summer dress.

“That dress isn’t doing you any favors, Honey.”

That’s all it would take. I don’t need the details. Or Allure magazine, or Diet Life, or Entertainment Tonight.

I just need my grandma to state the facts without the varnish to keep me on the real side of “young at heart.”

There’s an opportunity here for grandmas with entrepreneurial spirit. Lots of us Baby Boomers need help with our reflections.

Come on Grannies! Step up! Get paid to save us from ourselves!

Getting Over It --- Whatever "It" Is

I've just been reading Deepak Chopra on happiness.  You know what that means.  I've gotta get over something.

I might be getting a little hypochondriac-ish.  Gotta get over that.  But I have a lot of stuff going wrong with me.  I was playing on my Wii and stretched a tendon in the arch of my foot past the point of no return.  That's a kick in the pants.

What if I'm on my way to dowager-ville?  Some people gain weight in their hips or thighs.  I might gain weight on my back!  Up high.  Oh no!Quasimoto!  With hips and thighs.

I've got a a floater in my left eye.  It does as its moniker suggests, drifting in and out of my field of vision just when the six pack abs commercial comes on.

My mood - mostly okay.  I quit saying, "Fine," when people ask how I'm doing.  Partly because George Carlin said it's inane to say "fine," and partly because I've realigned my responses to more nearly match reality.  "Fine" could be overstating it.  Sometimes I say "groovy."  I haven't been truly groovy in many years, but I enjoy the reaction.

But am I happy?  Sure.  Except, the more I know the less lee-way there is.  Smaller margin of error.

I remember in The Big Chill, Mary Kay Place is talking to JoBeth Williams about the men she meets.  She says with her experiences she can size men up in the first 10 seconds after she meets them and know whether they're worth any effort.  JoBeth says, "Well, at least you give them a fair shot."

That's me.  I can zero in on the salient pretty quickly now.  With age and experience comes insight, sometimes mistaken for wisdom.  It just doesn't take that long to size up the newest ride and figure out if it's worth buying a ticket.

But often enough I'm wrong, and I love a surprise.  For example, I can cook!  I'm pretty good at it.  Who knew?  Check out The Flavor Bible. 

I still hang out with kids for the wonder.  Dogs and cats rock.  Simple and deep all at once. 

Often joy comes in the familiar:  Seeing my husband peek around the living room corner again this evening.  Returning to Yellowstone.  Watching The Sixth Sense the sixth time.  Replaying Achmed the Dead Terrorist and laughing like an Alzheimer's patient.  "Silence! I keel you!"

Can you hear me Deepak?  I'm happy I tell you.  I'm over it, whatever it was.

Emergency Room

I didn't exactly cry in the Emergency Room. I was a visitor after all, not a patient.

Still, sitting on a rolling stool in the ER while the doctor set up to perform an ultrasound on my neighbor, I was overcome...by fear.

I can feel my chin soften, my lower face sag. My eyes fill with tears. I look down to hide my struggle. I remind myself that I am not the first fearful person to cry in an ER.

But I'm not afraid for my neighbor. I'm afraid for myself.

My neighbor is 75, widowed, alone, belly full of radiating pain. Only a step-son on her list of contacts.

I am not even 60, married, happy, in a rewarding career. I live in a warm house with a caring husband, a dog and a cat. (His son, my step-son, is 24 and living with his mother---another story.)

What have I got to be afraid of?

Doctors and nurses and orderlies (Do they still exist?) pass me in an array of pastel with business on their minds. A Candy Striper (Okay, a Comfort Service Volunteer) asks if I'd like some water. Yes! She brings water with that wonderful hospital crushed ice and a cellophane-wrapped packet of graham crackers. Pathetically, I drink, peel back the cellophane and eat on the stool, distracted, feeling a little better. Another patient rolls through the sliding glass doors, morose, an EMT pushing his wheelchair.

The doctor draws the curtain back and smiles at me. I can return to my neighbor's side. She smiles at me too. "They've ruled out gall bladder," she says waving the arm with the blood pressure cuff, not the bruised one with the IV drip and the shunt.

When she speaks she lifts her head off the pillowless bed and the monitor behind her shows a fluctuation in her pulse. I watch her blood pressure rise on the screen from moderately high (in my estimation) to high...what number will finally trigger an alarm?

I go out again when technicians come with a portable x-ray machine, set up, step away, tell my neighbor not to breathe, and to breathe.

One of my neighbor's friends arrives. Seventy-five, creased pants and a cashmere V-neck over starched white shirt, YSL glasses. The three of us chat. Movies, shopping, home maintenance. Care in this hospital. "Oh, they're very attentive," says my neighbor. "They're very thorough."

"I remember sitting in this Emergency Room with Ed before he died," says her friend. "We were here 12 hours before they put him in a room. Twelve hours and I became quite a bitch," she says with a rueful smile. "Then they moved him."

It grows dark outside the double sliding glass doors. Drizzle falls on the EMTs readying their van for the next outing.

I decide to hand my neighbor off to her friend. "I think I'll go," I say. "I've got to go to the store and fix dinner."

"Oh, thank you so much! Thank you for coming. Thank you. You have my keys? Would you turn a light on in the house tonight? Oh thank you!"

As I walk toward the double doors I keep my head down. Sooner than I expect they hiss open and I fairly run to my car.