Tales of the Unexpected

Sometimes a snappy retort is welcomed and sometimes, not so much. Sometimes what comes from a loved one's mouth in our time of need is not what we expected to hear, and sometimes what comes out of our mouths is not what our loved ones expect either. 

Syd and Jon at that retort-ish stage.
Photo by Teece Aronin, all rights reserved. 

A few winters ago, during one of the worst winters on record, as huge swaths of the U.S. suffered through a polar vortex, I left work at 4 p.m. to take my son, Jon for an allergy shot. Then we hit the post office, tried to find our way back to an ice cream shop we like (I have no sane reason for that in the midst of a polar vortex), got lost, gave up on the ice cream shop, picked up my daughter, Syd, went to the store, then pulled into our apartment house parking lot four hours later. Everyone was a little on edge because the weather was truly awful. We sat in the car, dreaded getting out, and then I snapped.

"Great! We've been driving around for hours and now the whole evening is shot!" Jon looked over and said, "Mom, it's just one night out of thousands in your life. It's okay." I complimented Jon on being so wise. When we got out of the car, the wind hit us smack in the face. It felt like fistfuls of razor blades hurled by an unseen sadist.

"Oh, maaan!" Jon wailed. "I forgot I have to walk the stupid dog!" Watching him hustle up the walk, miserable from the cold, I called after him, "Jon! It’s just one night out of thousands in your life!" He flat-out ignored me and kept walking. I apologized later because using a child’s words of comfort against him is a low thing to do, but I was exhausted, cranky, and after all, it was a polar vortex.

One day, after I got rear-ended and my back was killing me, I asked Syd to bring me a glass of ice water and some ibuprofen. I was still a little loopy from a pain pill I'd had earlier, so as she handed the pills to me, I said, "Oh, thank you. Having you was such a good idea. Now I'm extra glad I did."

Syd smiled placidly and replied, "I'm not sure if you getting high on pain meds is a good idea. Kind of scared of what you'll say next.”

If I had thought she would say, "Aw, Mom, I love you," I was mistaken. 

This same kid sat in a high school classroom one first day of school as a girl came in, crying. Syd didn't know her, but she got up from her desk, walked to the girl and asked what happened. The girl explained that she'd just been bullied. "Do you need a hug?" Syd asked. The girl said she did, so Syd hugged her then stepped back and quipped, "Who do you want me to beat up?" I expect that show of support to her classmate will get her off the hook with the Universe for what she said when she handed me my pain pill.

Being a later life parent has its challenges but rarely do you expect them to come in the form of age-related sarcasm from your own kids. I was crossing the room one day when Jon, lying on the floor watching TV, reached out and wrapped his arms around my ankles. I smiled down at him, expecting an affectionate remark. What I didn't expect was, "I got your legs! Well, not exactly - maybe in another 40 years!"

Jon was an experienced quipster by that time, having tried out his early material on his grandmother when he was three. He was sick and I left him in the car with my mother while I ran into the pharmacy to pick up his prescription.

"Grandma," he said, "I'm gonna throw up."

"Just a minute, Jon," my mother said, scrambling around and searching for something he could vomit into. It took a minute, but she came up with an empty fast food bag, got out of the car using her cane, opened his door, leaned in and heard, "But not today."

Could there ever come a time when thinking of those moments with my kids won't make me smile? Maybe.

"But not today."

Certainly not today.

Lasts

When my Aunt Izzy was very old, she and my Uncle Mel had to replace their refrigerator. They were people of deep religious faith, and in Aunt Izzy's case, that faith was coupled with a wide stripe of pragmatism.

Image, copyright Teece Aronin

"Mel, just think," she announced, clapping tiny, arthritic hands together, "this should be the last refrigerator we'll ever buy." I never heard whether my uncle embraced her realization as enthusiastically since she might as well have told him that the grim reaper was holding the refrigerator warranty and an extended warranty was not available. 

No doubt her enthusiasm had a lot to do with a conviction that something more rewarding than major appliance-shopping awaited her after death. Years later she put her faith where her mouth was by proving herself fearless of death. As she lay dying, she looked around her room at all the family bustling in and out, sobbing and waiting on her and sighed, "Oh, I'm having the most wonderful death!"

In 2014, four years before he died, Philip Roth, the last of a human chain of brilliant American writers which included John Updike, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard Malamud and a doll's handful of others, made this pronouncement: "I can guarantee you that this is my last appearance ever on television . . . absolutely my last appearance on any stage anywhere."

He got around that by granting interviews via email and in his home. But still, that appearance may well have been the last - of a kind. Being one of your country's most treasured novelists, can make it hard to sever all ties to the limelight. 

I say all that to say this: Lasts are interesting things. Whether it's your last refrigerator or your last television appearance, the last anything is a small death. 

A String of Saliva and a Nose Full of Nickels

Since the departure of Sweet John, a man I met online and dated for almost a year, I've been wondering: Am I willing, much less ready, to return to online dating, to pull on the wet swimsuit of ridiculous usernames and perfunctory communications with men who for all I know are 20-year-old women calling themselves Roger and plotting to swindle me? Or worse, 40-something men actually named Roger and plotting to kill me?

I have always had mixed feelings about online dating, part of it stemming from being born toward the end of the Baby Boom. It set me up to embrace much of what the Information Age has brought but be baffled by the rest. And I'm ambivalent about online dating. Through it, I have crossed paths with some very weird people and credit gut instinct, a modicum of smarts, and an army of angels for the fact that nothing seriously harmful has happened to me. Then again, online dating is the reason I have some of my closest male friends, because that's what becomes of love interests when you don't become a couple but the next best thing happens.   

I had a knee-jerk reaction after Sweet John, resulting in a message to some man on Match.com whose hobbies included trumpet-playing. What he'd written about himself was neither intriguing to me nor off-putting. Judging from his picture, he wasn't handsome but seemed likable.

Oh, why not?  I thought, and typed:

Hello, TootingMan:

I enjoyed reading your profile. If you'd like to communicate further, please let me know. 

Hoping to hear from you -

SickOfThis

The next day there was a message from TootingMan saying that sure, he’d be happy to become better acquainted. He included his name (real, I assume) and a phone number in case I’d like to chat, which at that point I would not. I messaged back, ignoring the chat part, and we shared a brief, dull exchange of about four messages ending, by some weirdo miracle, in a date for coffee that next Wednesday. 

Wednesday found me pondering what business I had using an online dating site. I really should take a break from it until I've adjusted to the new me. You see, life has just plopped me at a scary and confusing crossroads. About to turn sixty, I have changed so radically and so recently that my head spins from it. Not long ago, I let my gray hair grow in, a decision for which I have no regrets. But to borrow from Leonard Cohen, suddenly "I ache in the places where I used to play." I'm finding that weight gain lurks in the bushes ready to jump me if I eat so much as a candy bar, and will cling to my wobbling frame unless I work out for five hours a day over the course of the next three weeks while eating only kale. Overnight my feet became drier than the BBC News Hour. 

That, of course, is not true; nothing could be drier than the BBC News Hour. 

As the date loomed, I found myself willing to go, but lacking the happy little jump in my stomach I've often felt when meeting someone new. I checked my messages at noon, saw that he was canceling because a trumpet gig had come along and was surprised by how relieved I felt.  

Then I looked at his picture again. In it he was laughing, and a string of saliva stretched from the roof of his mouth to his tongue. The string was obvious, so why didn't I notice it before? And his nose was huge; it was splayed across his face, resembling the underside of a shovel. 

I thought of the W.C. Fields movie The Bank Dick where a little boy looks at Fields then asks his mother, "Mommy, doesn't that man have a funny nose?" The mother replies, "You mustn't make fun of the gentleman, Clifford. You'd like to have a nose like that full of nickels, wouldn't you?" 

Please understand, I don't put a lot of stock in "attractiveness," whatever that is. But what made me look at that picture, read a profile that wasn't interesting to me, share four messages that did nothing to spark my interest, and arrive at the conclusion that I should reach out? 

Maybe subconsciously I wanted someplace warm to keep my nickels.

Swimming Toward the Christmas Lights

I'm writing this on Christmas Eve at the end of one of the most challenging years I can remember. 

My mother passed away in February, a friend died by suicide in September, another died the night before Thanksgiving, an old schoolmate lost her baby granddaughter to a rare genetic disorder, and another friend lost one sister only to have another nearly die in a car accident just weeks later.

And that wasn't all of it. There were other serious illnesses and even deaths among those close to me this year. 

Then, like wolves, arthritis took me down, and these days I use a cane on bad days.

Christmas has a way of stroking our cheeks with the faux fur of holiday stockings, then snapping our bare backsides with Santa's big belt. We find joy in how children wonder over Christmas and then grieve over our own memories of it and just about everything else - the sad, the sweet, the bittersweet. Those memories crystallize into something needle-like and pierce straight into us like thorns on mistletoe. 

A very wise woman once told me that something positive comes from everything that happens to us, no matter how tragic. After some introspection, I'm thinking she's right.

I challenge you to find at least one good thing to come from any memory haunting you this Christmas. Whether it's a lesson learned, a more compassionate self, a ripple effect that's touched others in positive ways, I believe you can find at least that one good thing and maybe more. 

Take me and my arthritis. I don't know how this'll all go down in the long run, but for now, I'm taking it as a scary, painful wake-up call to lose weight, eat better, and move more. I've joined my local Y and am reaping the benefits of swimming, including less pain, more flexibility and a bit more muscle definition in my back. And I'm learning that there are lots of treatment options available to me and that remission is a real possibility. 

I'm also looking at my cane with new eyes and finding that it almost cozies up the entryway. It leans against a table that holds candles and family photos. I think of my Aunt Izzy who lived not only with arthritis but a severe hand tremor. But those things didn't stop her from cooking and baking and lighting our lives with laughter and wit and fun well into her nineties. She's the one who smiled at her nieces and nephews just before she passed, telling them that she was having "such a wonderful death."

I'm choosing - and some days it's hard - to believe that having arthritis might ultimately boost my quality of life as well as my longevity because it's forcing me to make better choices about my health. 

And you? What light has come to you because of the dark? 

Whatever it is, may it guide you to a better Christmas - this year and for all the years to come. 

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.

As I Lay Ploozing

I used to have a thing about death and a plan to dodge it for as long as possible, even if it killed me. Now, not so much. Since my mother's death, I've had more than one experience that left me feeling she's not only with me, but that she's happy. So I don't much fear death anymore. Dying, however, can be scary, I know. 

Image: Teece Aronin

When it's my time to go, I'll go gracefully because if there is a heaven, I don't want people there to get the impression I'm not a team player.

A friend of mine once suggested that his elderly, demanding father was refusing to die just so he could stick around and be a burden to his kids. 

"My father," my friend said, "may never die. He isn't going gently into that good night, nor is he raging. He simply ignores death."

Ignoring death. Who's to say it's not possible? Generation after generation and so far not a soul over the age of 120, that's who. But still.

As to an afterlife, I have nothing to worry about, so I don't know why I used to feel strung up over death. Here are a few reasons I now refuse to be concerned:

1. Either I go to heaven or I don't. What I mean is, if there's a heaven, I'm covered because I think I've lived the kind of life likely to get me in. If there's not a heaven, I won't know the difference - unless, by some oversight in the record-keeping, I go to the other place. 

And I doubt the other place exists if heaven doesn't; same with purgatory. Then again, I suppose there could be an afterlife that's not heaven or hell or purgatory. If it's not hell or purgatory, that would be great, but if it's not heaven, that could be bad, especially since we're talking about an eternity of something other than heaven. And if by some chance, there's an afterlife that isn't eternal, I might have to die all over again which seems totally unfair. Then where the hell am I?

Wait - these are supposed to be reasons I shouldn't be concerned, so let me back up. 

2. If there is no afterlife, as I mentioned before, I won't know that. My awareness will be the same as before I was conceived - in a word: zilch. Before I came to be, I wasn't running around heaven, tugging on God's sleeve, yelling, "Get on with it already! I want to live!" My fear of death was predicated on the notion that I would have some kind of awareness of my lack of life, and if that were the case, I would have to be conscious and existing in an afterlife. Then again, I could be in purgatory or hell. Ugh. 

3. In the county where I live, the cemeteries are beautifully maintained. I have my eye on a lovely plot in one that's so shady, I won't have to worry if I forget to bring sunscreen.

4. I'll get to play the harp. I like harps. And when presented with the possibility of acquiring a new skill such as harp-playing, I choose to not sweat little details like how I will suddenly know how to play a harp?

5. After I die, I get access to the vault where they store the answers to all the unsolved mysteries; questions such as, why John Lennon ever let Yoko Ono sing. 

One thing that still bothers me is that the words we use to describe the state or process of no longer living all sound so death-y.

Rather than die, I'd prefer to plooze, and I think we should replace the word death with plooze, and dying with ploozing. The Rapture has some pleasant connotations which means not having to replace it with Plooze-a-Thon.

Let's test plooze out by using it in a sentence:

"Did you hear about Frank? He ploozed last year after a fall."

Doesn't that sound better? Like Frank slipped and took an unexpected trip down a slide at a water park. 

I can joke all I want, but about a month after my mother died, I laid down on my bed and closed my eyes. Mind drifting, but fully awake, I wasn't consciously thinking about her, but suddenly, I heard her voice, blossoming with delight, the state of being in which she spent so much of her earthly life. 

"It is so wonderful."

White Caps on Lake Mousey

I started graying in my early thirties, and instead of just accepting it as one of nature's quirks, I made a beeline for the beauty aisle at my local grocery store and bought my first box of hair color.

Image by Teece Aronin. 

We're allowed our own choices about these kinds of things, but to anyone out there still dying (their hair), I will say that I shudder to think how many charitable donations could have been made, how many cruises could have been taken and how many co-pays could have been paid with the money I spent on all that dye. 

And forget having it dyed professionally. I never paid someone to do that for me. I much preferred to spend less, do it myself, and then replace the shower curtain, the shower curtain liner, and the grout between the bathroom tiles after splattering up the bathroom.

And there are all kinds of valid ways to look at things like this. Our appearance is a crucial part of how we feel about ourselves, and like plastic surgery, diet, and clothing, there aren't many wrong choices assuming we have our mental balance when we make those decisions.

However, my mental and even my physical balance are a little toddleresque at times, and I kept dying my hair into my fifties because I cared too much about what others saw when they looked at my aging head. That seems silly to me now.

I have a friend about my age whose salt and pepper pageboy frames her face perfectly, and I can't imagine her looking quite herself any other way. She told me, "Yeah, I started graying in my thirties too, and I just went with it!" When she said, "went with it," the page boy took a little swing around as she merrily tossed her head. She might as well have said, "Yeah, I saw the yawning abyss of advancing age open right in front of me, and I just zip-lined right over it!"

I tried the zip-line thing, too, by dying my hair. In my case, the cord snapped, and I landed on my fanny in the treacherous part of the abyss, the part my friend zipped right over, a part where some women stay and dye until they die. Men too!

Yes, lots of men dye their hair - and their beards - and their mustaches - and since women typically don't do comb-overs, I think that gives women a leg up in the self-image/self-acceptance department - in the health and beauty aisle anyway. Actually, that's probably not true. 

Anyway, now that I've decided to let my hair gray, I'm finding that's not so simple either. If I'd been a blonde, it would have been easier since the gray roots wouldn't have been as noticeable. But I'd been a brunette with redhead tendencies from the get-go, so when I tried to dye my hair blonde so the gray could ease in, it turned out the color of an anemic carrot, and the gray roots glowed ominously. 

Lately, what's been working - kind of - is having my hair cut very short so that as the gray hair at the top grows in and the brown at the bottom gets snipped off, I'm looking more all of a color.

I saw my brother recently after several months apart, and he joked about my "little white cap." Seeing the expression on my face, he then spent the next ten minutes reassuring me that no, it really did just look like highlights.  

Highlights or not, it was time for me to stop clinging to something that's not only unnatural and expensive, but not that attractive on me anymore.

And it was time for me to stop fearing the "abyss," because most of it's not an abyss at all. It's a little like the Grand Canyon: natural, mysterious, beautiful - a little scary - and begging to be explored.

Moved to Tears

The kids and I had waited a long time for this day, the day we would finally move into a house of our own after five years of apartment-living. And everything was going so well until our dog, usually the lovable lunk type, shot out our new front door like something fired from a circus cannon to attack a neighbor's 11-year-old Basset hound.

Hope, waiting for
"her kids" to come home. 

Everyone had been distracted. Hope was corralled in the fenced-in back yard, but was staring through the window like we'd abandoned her on Pluto, so someone felt sorry for her and let her in. When the movers opened the front door, and Hope saw sweet little Selma trundling along across the street, it was all over but the sutures.

Giving Hope the benefit of the doubt, she was in a strange place with a lot of commotion, she likely felt a need to stake out her new territory and protect us, and she might have mistaken Selma for a housewarming present. 

Selma's owner, a tiny woman in her sixties, had been walking her dog and minding her own business when Hope skidded up, clamped down on Selma's elephantine ear and wouldn't let go. One of the movers sprinted over, grabbed Selma's leash, and tried to kick Hope off. My daughter Sydney screamed. I went running, grabbed Hope, then had it pointed out to me by the mover at the top of his lungs, that Selma's ear was still trapped between Hope's teeth; yanking on Hope wouldn't help Selma.

What felt like hours in slow-motion was probably about 30 seconds, and Hope somehow became detached. I hauled her up in my arms yelling, "Stupid dog! Stupid dog! Stupid dog!" all the way across the street, up the driveway and into the house until I could dump her in the bathroom and shut the door.

I ran back to where Selma's owner, understandably distraught, was standing with the mover who was also shaken up. 

"I'm so sorry!" I said. I was in tears for Selma who, unbelievably, nuzzled my hand, making me cry harder.

"I need to wash my hands," said Selma's owner. "I have blood on them."

"Of course," I said. "Come in the house with me. Do you live on this street?"

That, I admit, was a self-serving question. The only thing that could make everything worse was Selma's owner living two doors down with all that ammo with which to bash me to all the other neighbors before I'd had a chance to make my own bad impression.

"No," she said, and indicated another street up the road from mine.

Oh, thank God, I sighed inside my head.

I escorted Selma's owner into the house where she nervously glanced around like a guest of the Munsters. I took her to the kitchen sink and she rinsed her hands.

"I have to take Selma to the hospital now." Her eyes were huge and her voice flat with shock. 

"Would you like me to go with you?"

"No."

Now really, what had I thought she would say?

"May I ask your name?" I queried.

"Karen O'Brien," she answered as we went on to exchange phone numbers.

"Please know that whatever it costs, this is obviously my responsibility and I will pay for everything Selma needs." 

"Thank you. I'll be back later," Mrs. O'Brien said, and left.

When several hours passed with no word from Mrs. O'Brien, I took the kids out to eat but left a note on our door so she wouldn't think we'd blown her off. While we were out, Syd and I made a stop at a pet store to buy Selma some treats. When we got home, we saw that Mrs. O'Brien had left a note in place of ours. It read cryptically:
                             
                                Selma and I stopped by. Please call.
                               ~ Karen O'Brien 

I called Mrs. O'Brien immediately. She was calm, polite and direct while telling me that Selma had surgery and the bill was $753.85. My brain glazed over and this soothing image arose of Hope's head on a platter, garnished with chocolates and chicken bones, her mouth stuffed with one of her own kongs.

Syd felt she should go too, so we walked up to Mrs. O'Brien's neat as a pin little brick house and knocked on the door. It was a storm door and when we knocked, Selma waddled up, forgot about her cone, and bounced off the glass. 

Mrs. O'Brien gingerly sidestepped Selma and let us in. She wasn't exactly warm; tolerant is a better word, but who could blame her? She indicated two empty seats then sat down on her sofa. Sydney offered the treats to Mrs. O'Brien with the first of the visit's many apologies.

And then Mrs. O'Brien smiled. "Oh, wasn't that nice of you." She offered Selma the treats but the dog didn't show much interest. "Well, I'm sure Selma will love these once she's feeling better."

When Mrs. O'Brien offered me a copy of the bill, I saw that one of the items was an "Elizabethan collar." Why should I have to pay for a fancy new collar? I thought, feeling a little ticked off until I realized that the Elizabethan collar was that cone Selma would be stuck in 24/7 for at least a couple of weeks.

I handed Mrs. O'Brien a check then glanced around the room. Beside the fireplace was a small Kelly green leather wing-back chair with little steps leading to the seat. 

"I take it that's Selma's chair,” I said.

"Yes." Mrs. O'Brien smiled again, this time fondly in the direction of the chair. "I didn't buy it for Selma, but she claimed it as her own. As she got older, she couldn't get into it by herself so now she has a little help."

There was a back support pillow reading WOOF in a bentwood rocker opposite the wingback. Clearly Mrs. O'Brien, who was a widow, cherished this dog and just as clearly, she was a very nice person. Syd and I teared up again as the three of us discussed what happened. Then Mrs. O'Brien, proving herself a straight shooter said to me:

"Well, I admit for a while there, I was thinking about bombing your house, but I'm pretty much over that now. And I'm pleased to see how seriously you've taken this. The two of you can stop by and visit Selma and me whenever you like."

Later we learned that Mrs. O'Brien was to have shoulder surgery in a few days, so the day after her operation, Syd and I walked over to her house with a plant. The storm door was closed, but the front door was open and a coloring book and crayons were scattered on the floor. In the driveway was a car with Massachusetts plates.

"Oh, how nice; Mrs. O'Brien probably has family helping her after her operation," I said. I knocked softly and when no one answered, I hung the plant in its gift bag on the door knob.

A few hours later, I received a text from Mrs. O'Brien thanking me for the plant and explaining that her daughter and son-in-law drove up from Boston to help after the surgery, but the surgery was postponed because Mrs. O'Brien wouldn't be able to oversee Selma's recovery with one arm. How could things get any weirder? Surely, next up, Selma would somehow manage to explode. 

"But it's fine," the text continued. "Now we'll just have a nice visit instead." 

Since moving day, when Hope "helpfully" introduced us by mauling her dog, Mrs. O'Brien has continued to allow us to befriend her. We've exchanged more texts and the other day Syd walked over to her house with a slice of cake. While they chatted, Syd offered to walk Selma any time and Mrs. O'Brien said that she would be happy to pay Syd for her services.

Replied my daughter, of whom I am immensely proud: "Oh, I think that under the circumstances, walking her for free is the least I can do."

According to My Specs

Last week for the first time, I couldn't find my glasses - because I wasn't wearing them. 

I might keep a few extra 

pairs of glasses around the house - 

or around my face. 

I yelled for my daughter who searched while I trailed her, whining over and over that I couldn't find my glasses without my glasses.

When my daughter found my specs, I put them on with the nerve-racked, shaky-handed gratitude of someone handed nitroglycerin tablets in just the nick of time. I sat on the edge of my creaking old quilt-covered bed, and it hit me: 

- I'm a woman of a certain age. 

- I need my glasses to find my glasses. 

- The bed wasn't creaking, it was me!

Then I realized that glasses had been dangling my future dotage before my failing eyes for years. 

I didn't have children until I was in my forties. When I was forty-three and getting an eye exam, the optometrist broke the news that it was time for my first pair of bifocals. Hand to God, the words that flew from my mouth at that moment were: "I can't need bifocals - I have babies at home!" 

For years I'd thought that dual umbilical cords were carrying sustenance from my ovaries to my eyeballs and that having children that late in life, my eyeballs were returning the favor. But for that to be true, my inner workings would have to look like an Escher print. 

Then there was the adult movie with a scene that depressed me for years. This movie (which I might have heard about, not necessarily seen!) depicted women, age 50-plus, getting a lot of, shall we say, attention, from younger men. A woman in one of the vignettes was wearing reading glasses and never took them off despite them slipping ever closer to the end of her nose. Now I understand that she didn't take them off because she needed them to see what was happening.

Forgetting where I've left my glasses is bound to happen again. And blaming my glasses, as though they're at fault by forgetting where they put my face, won't help. It's time to accept the facts. I'm getting older. 

But that doesn't mean I can't still love who I am, and even who I see whenever I look in the mirror.  And it doesn't mean I can't see myself in the best light possible even if I need the best light possible to see myself. 

We crawl, then we walk, then we walk a little slower. All the better for seeing what's most important and what is truly beautiful.  









  

Heart Murmur

When my mother was 91, sick, weak, and giving up her life, I wanted to tell the healthcare workers the things I knew that they did not.  

That she once had a heart-shaped face, flawless skin, and was a redhead with freckled arms. 

That I had pictures of her, looking beautiful, like a starlet, playing badminton in her bathing suit and reclining in the sun. 

That she was so quick to laugh - but never at someone's expense, that she met people where they were, openminded, fully expecting to embrace them, and that, even in my teens, when I "should have been" rebelling, I would curl up with her at the end of the day and spill every drop of tea in the pot.   

Her caregivers could not have known that when I was seven and had a tonsillectomy, she spent the night by my hospital bed because the staff couldn't get her to go home - this, in the days when kids were kept overnight, and their parents booted out. 

Her nurses and techs knew none of that and were kind to her anyway. But one impatient word, one careless yank on her gown, one exasperated sigh in her direction, and I would defend my mother as she had defended me in the face of child-hating neighbors with perfect yards and the first-grade teacher who said I couldn't read - with all the conviction of an outraged mother bear. 

Because our days came and went like heartbeats, but then there was a murmur, and now I saw my mother as she had once seen me. 

Gloria Steinem is 81 and Still Cool

Gloria Steinem is 81!

Fish Without a Bicycle
Illustration, copyright Teece Aronin

And she doesn't look all that different from how she looked back in the day, back when we could expect something just a little cutting yet somehow elegant flying from her lips to the media's ear on an almost daily basis.

But I'm throwing water on one of the most fiery arguments Steinem ever made: that a woman's looks don't have to define her, nor should women be sexually objectified. I agree.

I mention Steinem's looks only in the context of her being 81, and how it seems the cosmic force that launched her into 1960s psyches now stirs something into Steinem's coffee with a magic spoon, making her close to ageless so she can continue to challenge and guide in the form with which the world became so enamored years ago.

While I can't embrace every Steinem message, I have a sense that she's closer to right than I am and that I often miss her point. Remember when she quipped, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle?" I take some exception to that, particularly since fish and bicycles would make pretty weird-looking offspring. But I probably should aspire to a more full-on embrace of Steinem's point of view.

Then again, perhaps I have. After all, I have reached the point where I don't see myself as needing a man, simply preferring to share life with one. And where Steinem artfully articulated contempt for the notion that women need men, sometimes I really do need a man because I've never ridden a bicycle that . . . well, once maybe.

And if a woman wants to get someplace on a bike while enjoying a man's company and not having to pedal, she needs a man. Just ask Katherine Ross. After Paul Newman rode her all around the barnyard in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Ross' beautiful bum no doubt ached for days, but at least her legs didn't get tired. And since that's always the trade off in that situation, I prefer to see the bike tire as half full.

I wonder if I'm now guilty of objectifying men. Ugh, liberation, equity and equality can be tricky. Let's just say that I have a great liking for men, for many of their perspectives, and for their hard work and companionship. And yes, I do see the genders as equals. 

But what really gets me, I say as I miss Steinem's point yet again, is that I'll never look as good as she when I'm 81. There are recent photos of her all over the Internet, promoting her memoir, still lean, still clad in tight-fitting jeans and body-hugging tops with a belt loosely draped around her slender hips.

Arriving home at the end of a long book tour, does Steinem groan as she eases onto the edge of the bed; does she whine as she pulls off her boots? Does she grimace while removing her jeans? Does she then step gingerly into her walk-in tub, "perfect for the senior with mobility issues?" And does she have this walk-in tub because she can't get out of an ordinary tub unassisted? I think not. Something tells me Steinem has a regular bathtub and that she gets in and out of it as easily as ever because Gloria Steinem is just that cool.

And because Steinem probably needs a walk-in tub like a fish needs a bicycle.