Aging into Beauty

My son, Jon and I were at a mall food court eating sushi one day. A man at the next table, a roughened, Sam Elliott type, said to Jon, "You look an awful lot like your mother, son."

My parents, young and old - and me, top left and middle right.
Image copyright, Teece Aronin. 

I thanked the man, Jon smiled at him, and then the man said, "Someday you'll age into her beauty." Seconds later, the man was gone, leaving Jon and me baffled and staring at each other. 

"So, which of us should feel more insulted?" I asked. Jon wasn't sure so we finished our sushi and went home.

Looking back, I see how I missed the point in a huge way. Worse, my question to Jon fueled all kinds of stereotypes and outmoded thinking. One can be male and beautiful, and older and beautiful. 

As the mother of an adolescent son, I want his ideas of beauty, aging, and gender to be as inclusive as possible, but is that how I acted? No. Jon should have thrown a salmon roll at his mother's head. 

I'm not talking about sixty-something celebs with stables full of plastic surgeons being beautiful; I'm talking about the beauty in real people - older, male, female, LGBTQIA - anyone, everyone.

While we're at it, why not push the envelope and assert that one can be flat out old and beautiful? The older I get, the more convinced I am that it's true. Then again, I have a dog in this race - an old dog - a beautiful, old dog.

And when are we going to stop using the word old as an insult? 

Here's my list of the old and immensely beautiful:

• The translucent skin of my mother's 91-year-old hands
• My father's face lighting up when I'd visit him in hospice
• My aunt, sick and weak in a nursing home, laughing herself to tears when Jon accidentally ran over my foot with her wheelchair
• Another aunt, dying and deeply religious, smiling at the nieces and nephews bustling around her room and proclaiming, "Oh, I'm having the most wonderful death!"
• Canadian singer, songwriter and poet, Leonard Cohen, who stayed sexy as all get-out until his death at age 82

When Cohen was in his fifties, he wrote a very funny, very sexy song titled, "I'm Your Man." A snippet of the lyrics goes like this:

Ah, but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I'd crawl to you baby, and I'd fall at your feet
And I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
And I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please
I'm your man

To my mind, the older Cohen got, the sexier he became. 

I once read that the lover Cohen references in Chelsea Hotel was Janice Joplin. With that in mind, consider these lyrics from that haunting, lilting, groundbreaking song:

You told me again, you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception,
And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind; We are ugly but we have the music."

Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, "Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art."

True beauty is covered in crosshatch designs and marked up with scribbled arrows pointing every which way, and you learn eventually that looks, age, and attraction don't have much to do with each other. What counts is character, experience, a grasp of what's sensual, and who has the music.

Maybe Baby - Hope in the Current Political Climate

This past week, I felt sadder than I have in a long time. 

Image by Teece Aronin

I felt sad because so many of the people who share the U.S. with me are coming undone. Too many hate each other. Too many are afraid. Too many had great expectations and now are caught like cattle in the crossfire. 

And when it comes to politics, everyone is cattle, either all the time or part of the time; we just don't all know it. 

Cattle, for our purposes, are the innocents, the voiceless, the held back, the poor, the easy to manipulate, the under-educated, and the powerful. The word is not necessarily a slam. 

This kind of cattle has little to do with gender. A steer or a bull could be a woman, and a cow could be a man. The key difference between a bull and a steer is that the steer has been castrated. Hang in there; it'll make sense in a minute.  
Some cattle are calves: At the start of the Obama administration, calves stepped into the light, cautious and blinking, hopeful that their world was now safer. They are the undocumented, fleeing treacherous homelands. They are the LGBTQIA-plus community, victimized in disproportionate levels of gender-based or homophobic violence. They are the working poor, scrambling to live on less than livable wages. They are a lot of other people. Calves are anyone who is unfairly vulnerable. 

But back to the steers: Steers can be naive or easily led, and while most don't fully understand their part in the current political climate, many are convinced they know it all. Steers can hail from any party. When they are castrated, they lose their voices and the critical thinking skills they might otherwise have developed. They can bellow but not articulate. Steers have only wet coal in their bellies where there could have been fire. 

Next come the bulls. Bulls are anyone with power - educational, financial, political - anything that can get or keep them ahead. 

Cows are underrepresented, underestimated, marginalized, and economically disadvantaged people, many of them women, and sometimes they overlap with the calves. The over-simplified reason most cows are held back is because that's what happens when unscrupulous bulls are in charge. People of color, indigenous people, people who lack access to the internet, college educations, and quality healthcare free of bias, are pushed down, trampled, and left behind. 

Since the election, Donald Trump has expressed a willingness to use Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a framework for a restructured healthcare system, but many of the cows and calves haven't heard this news that might have given them a sliver of hope. 

That slow news drip down to the cows and calves is what makes developments such as Trump's seemingly softer stance on the ACA something like trickle-down economics. It doesn't matter if the news is good or bad or vitally important - because the cows and calves scrambling for survival can't hear it. They don't sit down to read The Wall Street Journal on smart phones over a sushi lunch because they can't afford a smart phone, can't afford sushi, or can't afford lunch.  

Singer, songwriter, and poet Leonard Cohen died Thursday at age 82, right smack in the midst of all this hoohah. His song, Everybody Knows summed up the bitterness many people feel about sinking systems such as ours. It would fit no matter which candidate won last week. 

Everybody knows the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

How dare Cohen die, leaving us in this mess when he was clearly so savvy about what caused it? The answer, I think, was to pursue his muse, Marianne, who died just three months prior. But that's a sad story for a sad essay and a sad day. 

Today, I am focused on hope.

To those of you who say of Trump, "My God, why all the stress? He hasn't even done anything yet," please understand that you probably support Trump and wait with anticipation to see what he does next. You can't imagine the fears of every cow and calf. 

Speaking as a cow, even I can't.  

If you are LGBTQIA-plus, undocumented, have a green card but don't know in which country you'll feel safe in a couple of years, are a working poor person, or one of any number of upended calves, your tender legs quivering in the air, take heart: 

We really don't know exactly what a Trump presidency will look like. Try not to worry. Instead, think constructively. Learn which rights you do have. Look for legal loopholes. Take strength from the like-minded, and respect those who oppose you with respect. Be a helper. Do everything you can to help yourself and others.  

No president delivers on every promise or threat made during a campaign. Trump might prove himself more even keeled than the persona he invoked to win the White House.

Maybe his beltway outsider status and business experience will give him an edge in fixing what politicians haven't. 

If you give him a chance and he still performs poorly, hope for minimal collateral damage and help to repair it.

If like Bill, you're still married to Hillary, maybe she'll get another shot. 

Maybe Michelle Obama will run for President. Thanks to the ground Clinton paved, she wouldn't be the first former First Lady to seek the Oval Office. 

Trump is rolling back much of the angry rhetoric. Besides claiming he will use the ACA as a framework for remodeling our healthcare system, Trump met with President Obama for what was expected to be 10 minutes but lasted for about 90. Unless one of them tied the other to a chair, it's likely there was a meaningful dialog. And when Trump promised to call on President Obama for future counsel, my heart soared. Will it happen? I don't know, but the fact that Trump said it at all gives me hope. 

The fact that we're all cattle isn't as bad as it sounds since cattle are among the finest of creatures. We should combine the bovine qualities we seek to keep with the higher intelligence, gumption, and purposeful kindness that come with our humanity. 

In the meantime, let's try to not kill each other.