Category Archives: getting older

going gray

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Soon after every birthday, I take a photo of myself. My 68th birthday was last Tuesday, and here I am, way past the time when I would normally touch up my hair color. I’ve begun to go gray:
68.jpg
I took this photo with a new webcam that I just hooked up so that I can video conference with my grandson, who will soon get, from me, one of those indestructible XO laptops that are no longer available for private purchase. It comes equipped with a webcam. In order to buy one for him, I had to buy one for a child in a 3rd world country.
I went to visit my kindergartener grandson and family last Sunday, and I’m sure that, as a result, I have a few more gray hairs. By the time I left on Tuesday, both my daughter and grandson were seriously sick with sinus infections and the construction of a second floor had begun on their home. After I left, the workers had accidentally put two sizable holes in their first floor ceiling, letting the cold in and further endangering their health. You can read about the fiasco on my daughter’s blog.
I wish I could have stayed to help out. My son-in-law has his hands full. He even had to take time off from work because my daughter now has laryngitis and can’t talk at all. Just imagine how that works out with a chatty 5-year old.
Ah, if only there were such a thing as a Star Trek Transporter.

Hillary be damned

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I think that Hillary Clinton would be damned by public opinion no matter how she ran her campaign. If she had Barack’s eloquence, charm, and public persona, she would have been damned for being to theatrical, too smooth, not tough enough etc. etc. Oh yes, she’s made too many mistakes in her campaign, but I don’t think that’s the reason there’s so much animosity toward her.
Many American’s love the idea of good vs. evil, the bad vs. the good, and they’ve been handed a perfect opportunity to set up a METAPHORICAL (not racial) black vs. white battle. No grays here (except creeping in on Hillary’s battered head.)
And, despite all of the backlash against Ferraro, I believe that if a white male with Barack’s change agenda AND LACK OF EXPERIENCE were running, he wouldn’t have made it this far.
Oh, wait a minute. A white male with Barack’s change agenda AND CONSIDERABLE EXPERIENCE was running and didn’t make it.
Perhaps what it all just means is the time is right for someone like Barack — a moving, persuasive orator, a symbol of radical change from the status quo (symbolized by his bi-racial ethnicity), someone from a new generation who appeals to the new generation. If he could be canonized by us liberals, he would be called Saint Barack, patron saint of idealists.
So often, timing is everything. And, as we saw on Ellen, Barack’s got the timing down pat.
And late middle-aged, thick waisted, experienced, tough broad Hillary be damned.
But not by me.

signs

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When she flutters her hands in front of her nose, I know that she needs a Kleenex (well, we use Puffs because they’re softer on her nose). When she taps her teeth, I know that she wants her flosser. When she reaches out with her right hand and opens and closes her fist, I know that she wants her cane.
She doesn’t always use her self-devised sign language, but she’s tending to do it more often — especially when she’s tired. And she seems to be tired more and more. The signs are often there. The words are often not.
On a sunny day last week, when I got into my car to go to the drug store, I flipped down the visor mirror to check for any stray chin hairs that my Tweeze might have missed. No chin hair — but what’s that??? Long white hairs in my eyebrows??? Now there’s a sign. Definitely a sign.
I’m not sleeping well, my reflux is acting up, and that contact dermatitis I get on my elbow every once in a while is itching like crazy. I can’t ignore the signs.
Signs that I need a break. I need a couple of days away from here. And so I’m going to my daughter’s from Sunday to Tuesday. It’s my birthday present to myself.
In two years I’ll be 70. It just doesn’t seem real to me.
Maybe it will seem real when my natural hair color finally grows in. Then I will see the most obvious of all signs — the gray signs of being where I am in life.
Each year, on my birthday, I take a photo of myself. Each year, the signs are more obvious — the drooping jaw, the sagging chin. There won’t be much of the gray hair visible when I take this year’s photo. But next year, there will be no denying that sign of this life fading to pale.
If I were able to live my life at the age I am today in the way I would prefer, I wouldn’t be obsessing so much on my age and what I am losing with each day that passes.
But here I am, watching for signs and missing those times when the only sign I looked for was the one that said “dancing until 2 a.m.”

sound familiar?

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Got the following in an email. Hormones combined with stresses were always a disaster for me. I no longer have the hormones, but I sure do have the stress. And I do remember those old PMS and menopausal hormone horrors..
Q: How many women going through MENOPAUSE does it take to change a light bulb?
Woman’s Answer:
One!
ONLY ONE!!!! And do you know WHY? Because no one else in this house knows HOW to change a light bulb! They don’t even know that the bulb is BURNED OUT!! They would sit in the dark for THREE DAYS before they figured it out.
And, once they figured it out, they wouldn’t be able to find the #&%!* light bulbs despite the fact that they’ve been in the SAME CABINET for the past 17 YEARS! But if they did, by some miracle of God, actually find them, 2 DAYS LATER, the chair they dragged to stand on to change the STUPID light bulb would STILL BE IN THE SAME SPOT!!!!! AND UNDERNEATH IT WOULD BE THE WRAPPER THE FREAKING LIGHT BULBS CAME IN!!! BECAUSE NO ONE EVER PICKS UP OR CARRIES OUT THE GARBAGE!!!! IT’S A WONDER WE HAVEN’T ALL SUFFOCATED FROM
THE PILES OF GARBAGE THAT ARE A FOOT DEEP THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE HOUSE!! IT WOULD TAKE AN ARMY TO CLEAN THIS PLACE!
AND DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON WHO CHANGES THE TOILET PAPER ROLL !!
I’m sorry. What was the question?

Reunited

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It was 1957, and I was on my way to college because
1. I wanted to get away from home.
2. I wanted to avoid adult responsibilities as long as possible.
3. I wanted some new fun experiences.
4. I wanted to learn about the world and myself.
5. I eventually needed to work and teaching seemed like a good idea.

Actually, it was all a good idea and I did get all of the things I wanted. I also got into a sorority — which was not something I ever even thought about. It just seemed like another one of those good ideas.

Actually, it was a good idea, and those “girls” became my good friends. We lived together both in the sorority house and in apartments. We TGIF-ed together, drank together, cried together over boyfriends gained and lost. We wore bermuda shorts and maroon and grey sweatshirts. Not only did I go through one of those traditional “hell nights,” but I and my best friend/roommate wound up being “Hell Captains” the next year.

I’m sure that I remember things about them that they’ve long forgotten. I wonder if my housemates still remember how, once a week, they would gather up all of the clothes I left around our room, bundle them in my quilt, and throw it all in the closet — forcing me to do the picking up I never bothered to do until I had nothing clean to wear. There were four of is in that room in the sorority house. I’ve seen two of them several times since we all graduated; the fourth I haven’t seen since she graduated, a year ahead of me.

More than forty years have gone by, and we’ve all moved away, moved on.
Tomorrow night, fifteen of us will be together again. Most of us haven’t seen each other in all that time, and we wouldn’t even be getting together now if it weren’t for the persistence of one of us who lives in Massachusetts. She’s another one I haven’t seen in forty years.

I can’t help wonder if we’ll even recognize each other. We’re going to meet by the hotel bar. Fifteen women in their 60s singing “Beta Zeta hats off to thee…”
I’m definitely bringing my camera. Who knows if we’ll ever do this again.