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!  

Is Time Running Out for the Beautiful People?

Here’s the beginning of our ignominious end - NBC News anchor Brian Williams teased viewers this week with the headline of an ominous lead story coming up on the nightly news:  certain hip replacements are failing and will have to come out. 

Easy for him to say.  Seems thousands of bionic men and women now face the daunting prospect of enduring a double surgical procedure to remove and replace their…replacements. 

So what’s next for Jane Fonda and all the rest of us boomers who’ve succumbed to deteriorating joints and metal-on-metal replacements for our ailing bones?  Jane’s a perfect representative of the post-boom phenomenon.  She’s had knee and hip replacement along with back surgery.  She’s 72, healthy, and looking great.  But that may be more aptly attributed to her cosmetic surgery.  She’s owned up to having the bags under her eyes deflated.  

What if all manner of high-tech enhancements developed and implanted over decades of the boomers’ era turn out to have a shelf life, as it were?  What if it’s not just Jane Fonda’s hip and knee replacements that will need recycling?  What about her baggy eyes? 

More than a few folks have had similar elective procedures.  Sure they’re non-essential and totally vain.  But are they susceptible to the ticking clock, too?  Are we approaching the Y2K of the self-conscious aging elite? 

If we don’t get this under control, we could wake up to the luddites’ nightmare:  All our technology turns on us, rebelling in the most unfortunate and unattractive ways. 

Remember Eddie Murphy in the remake of “The Nutty Professor”?  He had what we all want – a magic elixir – one sip and voila!  Thin!  Sexy!  Funny!  But of course, no Fountain of Fitness can exist in the real world. 

Murphy’s Professor Clump, as his newly svelte alter ego Buddy Love, seized the opportunity to pursue the girl of his dreams, the one his flabby, unfortunate self could not hope to impress.  But alas, in a crucial, public moment, just like Jane’s time-sensitive hip, Buddy’s potion breaks down.  Before our eyes, the professor bulges back to his prodigious former self, body part by gelatinous body part. 

Given the impending expiration of our man-made yet mortal appendages and restitutions, we could find ourselves in the same discomfiting circumstance. 

What if nose jobs expired, for example?  Right in the middle of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” Kim’s pretty proboscis might just revert to its original, lumpy form.  A whole new kind of reality could present itself if the Plastic Surgeons of America sent a recall notice for the scaffolding underpinning Bruce Jenner's face work.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Imagine all the serene conversations in Hollywood bistros and suburban country clubs when, out of nowhere, a timer goes off and dozens of lifted foreheads advance to their rightful, age-appropriate positions, coming to rest somewhere in the neighborhood of one’s delicately plucked eyebrows.  In Washington, Nancy Pelosi would blink, giving Republicans in Congress false hope of victory. 

Why, those eyebrows themselves would travel into real estate appropriated by tacked-wide-open eyes, creating uninvited squints even in the shade of Carrera sunglasses. 

What if Botox … oh, never mind.  It does expire.  We know already that.  The wax melts and you’ve gotta keep getting shot up if you want to maintain that expressionless guise of indifference. 

Otherwise, Joan Rivers might disappear altogether. 

Hair transplants!  That would be hilarious!  What if those perfect plugs just unplugged, on cue, like so many spontaneous champagne corks, no matter where the “plug-ee” might find himself?  Like an electrified porcupine coming undone on the fairway, or the boardroom!   

In an apocalyptic scenario, voluptuous lips would shrink back to their original, severe Frau Bluchers.  Silicon breasts would collapse leaving folds of skin and yards of unfilled fabric limp in their wake.  All those pinned-back ears would once again flap free. 

Reminiscent of the cages being flung open at the zoo, all God’s creatures would run in gleeful abandon, returning to their natural states. OK, maybe not gleeful. 

I decline to reveal where I might wind up in such a scenario.  Parts of me could be susceptible to the fall of the empire, shall we say?  But which parts and where they’ll land remains a confidential, eyes only, need-to-know Top Secret.   

Suffice it to say that I keep the joints greased with glucosamine and the clocks wound tight.  Vigilant.  Ever vigilant.