Wait, I'm....OLD?

Something is happening to me now. Everything I do I'm slower doing (and they used to call me 'the Turtle' way back in junior high!)

It’s been happening for a while now but I think writing as I did yesterday that I don’t always know how old I am on waking up mornings made me realize it. I said I generally feel as if I’m about 32 but I am SO not 32. This next month I’ll be…. 63. 63!

So how can I keep forgetting that? Is it my colorist’s fault for keeping my hair brown?

Fashion’s fault for making it seems normal that women in their 60s are pawing through racks of the same gracefully drooping sweaters as the 20-somethings wear? And by the way a shout-out to the fashion industry for inventing those awesome sweaters which can hide even a figure like Homer Simpson’s, so nicely displayed above.

You forget you’re old maybe because when YOU were a kid old people wore black tie shoes with little heels – kind of like what Al Pacino wore in Scarface ha ha. Sneakers were unheard of past about the age of 12 for a girl unless she played sports in high school but oops there were no sports in high school when you were young, Title IX having not come along ‘til the 70s.

Anyway what’s been happening is, I feel my age now. I see it in the mirror, sure – the sun damage alone – but I feel it too.

I can hop up and down for an hour at these various cardio classes but not as high as the young mothers. Not as high at all. I used to do yoga but now changing rapidly from position to position? Forget it. I get up the way a card table gets up, painstakingly, limb by limb. It's ok; I kind of hated yoga anyway. The mindful part I liked; the breathing I liked but backbends? The pigeon? Please.

I feel my age because I am slow to wake mornings. I used to be always grabbin' the moral high ground by being out of the bed literally hours before Old Dave. Now I find nothing nicer than to wake up and see him over there on his side and go back to sleep thinking “He’s still here! After all these years!"

“Hey!” I say to him when I open my eyes. And he reaches over and pinches my nostrils shut. (Maybe you’d have to know him to see how that’s a gesture of affection.)

So I get up later. I also go to bed earlier. AND I can’t drink like I used to. Sometimes I pour that three ounce glass of wine I can afford on my Weight Watcher Points, take one sip and toss it in the sink . Why doesn’t it taste good anymore? I never drank to get fuzzy; drink doesn’t’ make me fuzzy, it only makes me anxious and depressed. I drank because it tasted good. But now, “I need this?” I’m beginning to say to myself, and yet having a glass of wine with friends is such a symbol of conviviality, how will I put it aside entirely? It’s like tobacco was to every smoker you ever knew: did you ever see anyone happier than smokers when they smoke. Nirvana!

Mostly I feel old because now when I take our 91-year-old uncle to his favorite city pond as I do two days a week I no longer feel antsy and bored when he says for the 900^th time "How many shades of blue do you think is in that water?” while gazing hungrily out over it. Now I’m right there gazing too.

We went there today and the wind was up and all of the last fortnight’s ice was gone; just melted away in this eerie warm winter. Look at the chunks of it riding on the waves.

"It looks like ice in your drink," said Uncle Ed.

"Exactly!" I said back and we both smiled.

See if you don’t think this is pretty nice too, however old you happen to be:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC1d7ZoZ-ps&feature=youtu.be]

Look at It This Way

I’m looking back at what I’ve written here in the last week and thinking Yikes! A lot of silly talk about ladies’ underwear? An account of setting fire to the evening meal once again? A video showing dogs with human hands eating with knives and forks? It must’ve been an off week for me, though it did bring me one nice thing: a brand-new friend who found me at Columnists.com. We had some back-and-forth about the scribbling trade and the next day he had this to say:

So you told me I should write in my blog every day, and if you read my post today you will see that can lead to a bit of a stretch. Then I read your post this morning and I say, “Geez she’s writing about her crooked frickin’ spine!?” And I am somehow strangely entertained by this. My initial response was genuine concern for your well-being, which is odd since up until Saturday I didn’t even know you existed. But then my concern lessened, and turned to ease and chuckles when you described the state of your pants. 

He was referring to the post where I talked about how I’m trying to ‘treat’ my recently-emerged case of scoliosis by going to the Y every day.

Someone said, not sure who, maybe me that  life has a way of putting us exactly where we need to be, when we need to be there.

“Wow!” was all I could think. “Maybe that’s true!” I mean I HATED to exercise when I was young; hated to do much of anything that didn’t involve either reading or talking my face off. And now here I am, thrilled every day to be hurrying into the Y to do the treadmill, and the  funny machine that makes you feel like you’re roller blading, and then the Pilates or the Yoga or the lifting of weights while balancing on a therapy ball, depending on what day it is.  This new friend has thanked me like six times in five days for the few tips I gave him about getting your writing out there. The the truth is I should be thanking HIM for having pulled me away from self-mockery AND self-pity and made me see that Old Alfred Lord Tennyson was right: "Though much is taken,” in the course of our living, “much abides. “And” - shall I finish it? I have it memorized. It’s Ulysses, aged now, at the end of his long, long voyage: "Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will - to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."   Yeah!Now here's me at the Y on the Technogym Wave Runner, which is the real name of that  thigh-and-glute building skatey machine. I look pretty good for my age don't I? ;-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0KvopwtTB8&feature=related]  

Rainy and Cold With a Chance of Sunburn

I was heading for Swarthmore PA to see my friend Bobbie who tried to tell me it was going to be 49 and raining in that leafy little town but I guess I didn’t believe her. I showed up in sandals and a couple of flouncy, Cher-style angel-sleeved tops - only to be greeted by a day that was 46 degrees and raining so hard the goldfish in her Koi pond out back were seeking cover - and fish are already wet, you know? Lucky for me she lent me sneakers, some fat wool socks and a heavy sweatshirt which I wore the whole two days I was there, over not one pair but both pairs of the pants I had packed.

to lift our spirits We thought we’d go to Yoga and when it was over this nervy young class member came up to me and said she could see I’d been having trouble with this one pose where, with your legs wide open and knees locked you bend from the waist and yes, rest your head on the floor. She said she thought we should take a minute while she helped me get it right. Now the teacher had just told us when we started that she never lets people face toward the mirror since in Yoga the journey is supposed to be inner. She didn’t want us looking at ourselves, never mind having other people look at us.

I didn’t know WHAT to say to this young woman.

“Come, shall we try it?’ she said like some camp counselor. “Oh but look I'm not barefoot now," I said lamely pointing to the fat wooly socks Bobbie had given me and which I had just donned for everybody’s favorite part of Yoga when, right at the end of the class, you get to do Corpse Pose and pretend you’re dead for six or seven minutes.

“I’ll brace your left foot with my foot so it doesn’t slide,” she said brightly, and, dope that I am, I let her and I tried to DO the pose, and in that totally unbraced RIGHT foot starting slowly sliding so far from the midline I thought I’d break right in two like a wishbone. Instead - boom! – I fell clean over and saw my little skeleton clatter onto that hard wood floor like a stack of tipsy teacups, which caused the young woman to apologize quickly and and hightail it on out of there.

Bobbie was fuming. “Who did she think she was? We should report her!” she sputtered. Instead though, we went back out into the deluge, ran a couple of errands and went home to her house which was as dark and cold as crypt in that the 8^th hour of rain.

Then – sigh - I couldn’t get manage to get online and do the whole column writing thing that I’m paid to do and when I finally DID get on and wrote for a while and came here it was to discover that all my nice photos had one by one erased themselves. Then I called my spouse back home who said, “Nobody misses you, the cats haven’t even asked," which I know I’m supposed to know by now is code for " I miss you and the cats are suicidal" but still… Plus I spilled coffee all over my sweatshirt and had only my Gidget Goes Hawaiian get-ups and so was getting really really cold and also now my bones all hurt.

But Bobbie drew me a bath and she and her husband built us a fire. She made this amazing homemade food, lentil soup and rice pudding and a salad with many lettuces fresh from the garden, which we washed down with some fine wine except I decided to pretend I was in a Hemingway novel and so drank whiskey with lemon juice, and we were all in our beds by half past nine.

All this was on Tuesday. When we woke yesterday morning the sun was shining and some total SAINT out there in Internet World had read my plaintive query about why my pictures were disappearing and gave me some tips for fixing the problem, and I had a bunch of nice emails about this week’s column which I wrote in honor of a favorite teacher of mine, just deceased at 102 and Bobbie and I took a walk on campus and by 4 o’clock yesterday I was home again in Boston and sure the cats are a little sore but I think they’ll get past it and Bobbie has just now emailed me a photo she took that morning showing the Koi pool where the fish were so happy in yesterday’s bright sunshine I bet they were just about swimming tummy-up.

(This is the pool. Goldfish not available for comment.)