Aging into Beauty

My teenage 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 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 shrugged, and we finished our sushi. 

Looking back, I see how I missed the bigger picture and how my question to Jon held barely-concealed stereotypes and outmoded thinking. One can be male and beautiful. One can be 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 bounced a salmon roll off his mother's head. 

I'm not talking about sixty-something celebs with stables full of plastic surgeons being beautiful; I'm talking about beauty in everyday people, people who are older, male, female, LGBTQ+, use wheelchairs, are neurodiverse — anyone, everyone. 

All of us.

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 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 of my aunts, dying and deeply religious, smiling at the bustling family tending to her every need 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. The song is a lament for a woman who left him, and it goes into excruciating detail about what he'd do to win her back if only begging worked. Howling "like a dog in heat" is probably my favorite. 

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

And I've read that the lover he refers to in the haunting, lilting Chelsea Hotel #2 may have been Janis Joplin. Near the end of the song, she pronounces the two of them ugly, then dismisses conventional attractiveness, suggesting that what matters is the music they share.

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

Sometimes beauty is covered in crosshatches and marked up with scribbled arrows pointing every which way. Eventually you learn that youth plus looks don't always equal beauty. What counts is character, experience, a grasp of what's sensual, and who has the music.