Skin
I earned an honorable mention in a local art contest when I was twelve. And it infuriated me.
I was in seventh grade, and one day in art class, I drew a picture of a Spanish senorita. It wasn’t original; I copied from a picture I saw in a magazine. It looked something like this: (I have a very good memory, but not the patience to recreate the original.)
I was delighted with my picture, and so was my teacher, Sister Maria. But my artwork mysteriously disappeared from the classroom.
Several months later, Sister Maria announced that she had entered my picture in the local student art show, and that I had won an honorable mention. I was thrilled.
Right after school I ran to the library to see my picture and my blue ribbon. But what was hanging on the library wall was this:
Do you see the change?
I was irate. As soon as I saw my teacher the next morning, I asked her to explain what happened to my senorita’s blouse.
“It wasn’t appropriate for a good catholic girl,” said Sister Maria. “So I filled it in before I entered your drawing in the contest.”
What the hell??? God gave us skin and skin is beautiful. I may have been twelve, but I knew it then, and I still believe it. There’s nothing quite as lovely as a women’s bare shoulder.
When the art show was over and my drawing was returned to me, I threw it away.
I went to a wedding this weekend. A happy pretty bride in a gorgeous grecian wedding gown. And I saw her beautiful bare shoulders. She had tattoos. The maid of honor had tattoos. The bridesmaids had tattoos.
The mother of the groom had tattoos. And the groom was forty-three!
I simply cannot fathom the current proliferation of tattoos. Does no one but me see the beauty of unadulterated skin? The beauty of being slightly and sensuously naked?
With tattoos, you’re always wearing something. It’s a lot like having sleeves on your bikini.
Jennifer Egan, in her novel A Visit From The Goon Squad, shows us a future where the saggy wrinkly tattoos on saggy wrinkly old people have caused the pendulum to swing around, and no young person wants a tattoo. I certainly hope that will happen soon.
In the meantime, here’s an idea for you to consider:
Let’s pass a law that for every dollar those stupid idiots creative free-spirits spend on tattoos, they have to donate another dollar to a national health care fund. Instant budget for universal coverage.
Isn’t It Romantic?
When I was a little girl, my mother had a ridiculous idea that she was delighted to share with me. Because I was such a princess, it was only fitting that I should marry a prince. Prince Charles, to be specific.
He was two years older than I, and a perfect match in her mind. Through my grammar school and high school years, she followed his every move to ensure that he was being a good boy, and in my college days, she cut out pictures of the Prince of Wales and sent them to me.
(This wasn’t her only fantasy: My mother and father took a dream vacation to Monaco when my brother was in college, and she sent him a postcard signed, “Love, your fiancee Caroline.” He had it on his bulletin board for years.)
The day that Charles became engaged to Diana Spencer, my mother called me at work. I had turned thirty a few weeks before, but apparently my mother hadn’t quite grown up.
“I don’t know why he couldn’t have married you!” she complained.
“He didn’t date too many of the girls from Eastern High,” I explained.
We all know what happened to Charles and his Princess. Not happily ever after.
The real-life fairytale changed, and we heard all the sordid details about Charles and the wicked witch. Or rather, Camilla.
Perhaps because of my many years of imaginary betrothal, I have always had a tender affection for the strange Prince. And I have wanted for many years now to defend his honor. So here goes:
Isn’t it romantic?
I mean, just think about it. Charles met Camilla more than ten years before he met Diana. He loved Camilla. But she was “unsuitable”. He gave her up and she married someone else. Charles married Britain’s choice – the lovely Diana. But Charles never stopped loving Camilla. After Diana died, she was not only England’s princess; she was its beloved saint. Camilla was despised. And Charles loved her anyway, and eventually married her anyway.
I cannot for the life of me understand why women don’t think it is the most romantic story of the century. He had beautiful Diana,
and he loved homely Camilla.
Isn’t it romantic?
No?
I guess it might have been the gross phone calls.
Oh, Dear. I’m June Cleaver.
This past weekend we had company. My husband’s cousin and his wife spent a few nights.
Folks don’t stay over much. We live out in the country,and most of our friends and relatives think we are somewhere north of Vladivostok. (actually, it’s Connecticut.)
But we had a family wedding. Our houseguests’ daughter was getting married out here in Siberia.
I had a busy week at work and hadn’t had much time to get the house ready for company. I had washed the sheets and hung clean towels in the bathroom. I figured, at worst, if I couldn’t get to anything else, at least they had fresh linens.
I raced home from work on Friday afternoon. My husband had done a pretty good job in the kitchen, but the fruit bowl held some pretty old and fragrant bananas. So I threw together a banana bread, and changed that smell into something much more pleasant.
Then I quickly changed out of my fancy office attire (meaning my ‘good’ jeans, cami, and silk sweater) and into old jeans and baggy tee. I set to vacuuming. With four kitties, it doesn’t take more than a day or two to be kicking up little hairy clouds as you walk.
I vacuumed like a demon, as time was running out before our guests would arrive.
All finished. I bent down to unplug the vacuum from the last outlet and saw what was still dangling from my neck. My lovely (and expensive) strand of pearls.
I have heard that the warmth of a woman’s body (i.e., perspiration) enhances the iridescence of pearls. That’s so nice. I wore them to the wedding. They glistened.
Sixty Is The New Thirty-Seven
This is my Great-Grandma’s (Meme’s) family. The photo was taken on Meme’s 80th birthday in 1951, the year I was born. There’s a photo somewhere of her in that same chair with me in her arms. But it’s this photo that fascinates me.
Standing around Meme are her children. That’s my Grandma on the far right. My father’s mother, a strong-featured woman, and beautiful in her own way. Her two younger sisters are on the left. Grandma’s brothers stand in the middle.
These sisters, Lavina (Grandma), Loretta, and Lillian were my favorite companions when I was a little girl. They were smart and funny, and full of love. They had huge soft bosoms that smelled liked roses. They liked parakeets and soap operas and “Queen For A Day”. They cooked things baked beans and clam chowder – stuff that would simmer all day. They wore aprons in the kitchen and big brooches when they dressed up. They always had a handkerchief tucked up a sleeve. They had permanents. They played cards. They laughed. They sang – “Let Me Call Your Sweetheart” was Grandma’s favorite. Aunt Lil played piano. Aunt Lora wished she could be Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke, running the whorehouse and drinking with the boys.
Now here’s what amazes me: These three sisters are younger in this photo than I am now. Take another look at these beautiful but decidedly old women.
Now here’s me:
I took this self-portrait on my sixtieth birthday. Older than Grandma.
It’s not photoshopped; it’s me. Although I admit I had the photographic advantage that my Grandma and her sisters did not have, in that I took quite a few shots to get this keeper. (let’s say more than one but less than two hundred.)
The much greater advantages I have had include an extremely cushy life and the freedom to be unabashedly self-absorbed. I’m sure I spend more on cosmetics in a year than my Grandma and her sisters spent combined in their entire lives.
And then there’s hair color, contact lenses, mousse, blow-dryers, teeth whiteners, skin creams, facials, designer clothes, shapewear, and yoga.
But I’m a natural beauty, down deep, because it’s in my genes. After all, I got those my genes from my Grandma and Aunties. How could I miss?
How To Be Old
I’m normally not much of a concert-goer. I don’t like crowds and I don’t like crowded parking lots, and I especially don’t like crowded ladies’ rooms. I put up with all of the above for the love of my life, James Taylor. Everyone else, not so much.
Recently, however, I went to two concerts in the same week, in the same theatre (shout-out here to beautiful little Infinity Hall in Norfolk CT).
The first concert was Judy Collins. My longtime friend was turning sixty, and we had attended a Judy Collins concert together forty years before. So it was a nostalgic outing for us, celebrating not only sixty years of living, but our forty-plus years of friendship.
Image via Wikipedia
Judy is now 72. She is still lovely. Tall, slim, long silver hair, aristocratic features. She is the perfect example of growing old gracefully. She wore a black pantsuit with a black sequined top – more the Fifth Avenue soiree hostess than the folksinger who inspired us with her voice, and inspired other hippies to write songs like “Judy Blue Eyes”.
She had aged beautifully, if imperfectly. Her voice was sometimes flawless, sometimes wavering. She spent long intervals tuning and re-tuning her guitar, rambling a bit. Worst of all, she forgot the words in several of her most famous songs. We loved her and forgave her, because we are with her in this aging ordeal.
Through a fortunate circumstance (a deal on the tickets), two days later I went back to Infinity Hall, this time with my husband, to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. If Judy Collins was my girlfriend’s favorite forty years ago, Buffy was mine. My husband was clueless, but willing.
Image by sidrguelph via Flickr
A Canadian Cree, forty years ago Buffy was raw and fierce and angry. And when she stepped out on stage in 2011, she still was. Dressed in jeans and leather and feathers, her songs were wild and furious. When she threw up her arms with delight or passion, her shirt rose up too, exposing a very attractive belly-button. She sang with a much-younger backup band of Native American men who were crazy and energetic, and Buffy, at seventy, out-rocked them all.
Whereas Judy showed us the sweet passage of time; Buffy made time stand still.
Judy and Buffy – two different approaches to aging. Graceful and Defiant. Sometimes I am one and sometimes I am the other. Mostly I am the other.
In My Genes
A quick self-confidence story:
A few weeks back, my husband and I were having a philosophical discussion in the car. Conversations in the car are difficult – my husband is slightly deaf, and if you don’t talk right into his face, the hearing aids don’t necessarily pick it up. So car talk is loud. Which makes philosophy just plain weird. But I digress. (I really digress – this has nothing to do with my story.)
My husband was regretting the fact that sometimes he lacks self-confidence.
“I really worry that I am not good enough, or that I’ll fail when I try something new,” he said. (This is crazy to me. He BUILT our house, which is a palace.)
“Self-confidence is not a problem for me,” I said. “I think I can do ANYTHING!”
“Yeah,” he said grudgingly. “That’s the FRENCH side of you!”
Glowing
Image via Wikipedia
Over the past several weeks, I have written and discarded several posts about hot flashes.
Like lots of women, I’ve got the hots, but it seems that everything I could say about these ‘special’ experiences has already been said. They’re annoying. They’re uncomfortable. They’re funny. They’re embarrassing. Yada yada yada. On the whole, I don’t have too much to complain about. I’m hot and sweaty for a minute or two. For years.
Boring.
Yesterday morning I had one of my usual post-shower ‘glows’. I take as cool a shower as I can tolerate, but as soon as I dry off, my body turns its furnace on, and I need another shower.
I opened the window. The master bath has lovely big windows; not those high lone rectangles that you could never squeeze out of if you were escaping from a slasher. Of course, it would be a long hard drop to the patio if you were trying to escape, but my windows are nice and big. I have to get into the bathtub to open two of the windows. But the crucial window (the one near my makeup mirror) is easy to open. The bottom half anyway.
The early morning air was cool and refreshing. I needed that breeze on my forehead.
So I knelt down and put my face to the window.
And I slipped. My chin hit the sill and my nose scraped the screen. But not hard. No damage.
Our bathroom floor isn’t normally slippery. It was slick because my knees were sweaty.
Sweaty knees.
Now there’s a menopausal symptom that’s not quite so boring.
Hang Up.
Image via Wikipedia
Just about everyone gets a bad boss sooner or later.
At my age, I’ve been through several. My motto has always been, “Just Outlast the Bastard.”
For the most part, that mantra has worked pretty well. Executives seem to either rise in the organization or leave. So I just hang on till the obnoxious boss is gone.
I’m lucky now to have one of the good ones. But a few years ago I had my most terrible boss ever. The sight of her car in the parking lot was enough to make my heart pound. I persisted for two years, waiting for her to move up or move on, but I began to realize that she expected to take care of me first.
If I made a decision on my own, I should have consulted her. If I consulted her, I didn’t have any initiative. If I worked late, I was slow. If I finished early, I was uncommitted. if I laughed, I must be ridiculing her. Okay, she had me on that one.
I’m sure down deep she was a wonderful person. She loved her kids sincerely, for example. I mean, why else would she have had three nannies in two years?
The day it became apparent that I wouldn’t outlast her was the day of my annual review. After more than a decade of reviews as glowing as the Versatile Blogger Award, I was suddenly substandard in every category. I had considerable management responsibilities myself, and Bad Boss said that I was a horrible manager.
“You have no management skills at all,” she said.
Which actually is true, but I’d manage to conceal that for lots of years, just by hiring smart people and leaving them alone.
So I was willing to suck that up, until she offered me this advice: “You need to be tougher. You need to be more like ME.”
Well, I had an overwhelming, uncontrollable urge, that at another time in my life (that is, non-menopausal), I would have been able to suppress. But I said it.
“I don’t want to be more like you.”
It was an unwise thing to say, not to mention very mean. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t say it. But since I can’t do it over, I might as well be glad I did say it. But that was pretty much the end of my career at that company.
Looking at it now, from a happier place, I can see that lasting two years under miserable conditions was a success in itself. And so I offer this little secret that helped me get through.
Just hang up.
On Voice Mail, that is.
When you get a voicemail from your Bad Boss, hang up. Slam the phone down. Right in mid-sentence. Cut the idiot off. Then play it again, and do it again. Sometimes I slammed the phone down several times before I ever made it through to the end of the message. It felt awesome.
Just make sure you don’t do it in real time.
The Field Trip
St. Maria Goretti (painting 1929) (Wikipedia image)
In her comment a few days ago, Tess remarked that I must have been a very observant child.
Oh yeah.
I am hardly ever serious now. But I was a serious kid. I sought logic in an illogical world.
Some of my questions were just kid stuff: Why do I have to do Arithmetic homework, when I already know Arithmetic? Why do I need a bath when I was just out in the rain?
And sometimes I questioned the rationality of the world: Why don’t rich people just buy stuff for poor people? Why aren’t there any colored girls in my class?
The adults around me may have thought that I was fresh, and maybe I was, but there’s more than one definition of ‘fresh’.
When I was around ten, my class went on a field trip. This was extraordinary. We never went anywhere.
There were five Catholic elementary schools in our town. Four of them were within walking distance to the local movie theatre. The theatre manager was no fool. Every year he booked at least one religious movie and offered discount group prices for the matinee.
In fourth grade, I was finally old enough for the pilgrimage to the theatre.
How I loved the movies. My mother would raid the couch cushions every Saturday. She could usually come up with fifty cents each for us three girls (my brother was too little). It was thirty-five cents for admission and fifteen cents for snacks. In the late fifties and early sixties, you could get a lot of candy for fifteen cents. I usually went for the Goobers for ten cents and two MaryJanes for a nickel. I could get popcorn for fifteen cents, but then I would be thirsty and I didn’t have any money left. Besides, if I had a soda I would need to go to the bathroom. And I would not miss any part of any movie. Not even the previews. Back then, once you paid your admission you could stay all day. I saw every movie twice. My mother encouraged this. She also loved movies and she loved when they ate up my whole afternoon.
The day of the movie outing, the Sister collected twenty-five cents from each of us – the discount rate – and lined us up for the walk to the theatre. We always marched two by two. I think the nuns had read too many Madeline books. But there were an odd number of boys and girls and I had to hold hands with Curtis. That was distressing. But he was very short and I pretended he was my little brother, and I was babysitting.
The movie we saw was about St. Maria Goretti. It was an Italian movie, dubbed in stilted English; I learned through the years that these annual religious movies were almost always Italian.
I googled recently to see if I could find the name of this movie. I found a film – actually considered quite a good one – called “Heaven Over The Marshes” about the death and canonization of young Maria Goretti, who was murdered rather than submit to rape. This film was made in 1949, and I saw it around 1961. So this movie could have been twelve years old. It might have been.
Rows and rows of children sat and watched this adult-themed movie with a bunch of nuns. I remember clearly the murder scene. The older boy and the young pretty girl. I didn’t know anything about rape. I didn’t even know anything about sex. And they wouldn’t let us have a snack. This was just as confusing, as I had a dime, and it wasn’t even Lent.
Then we marched back to the school. I think now that perhaps the nun was at a loss explaining this movie to a bunch of ten-year-olds, since we went right to work on Geography, finding Italy on the map.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to make sense of it. I raised my hand. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“What don’t you understand?” asked Sister (reluctantly, I’d guess).-
“What was that boy trying to do, that she kept saying no?”
There was a very long pause.
“He was trying to touch her legs,” Sister said.
I was a logical little girl.
“I would have let him,” I said.
I hope that Sister went back to the convent that night and had a little chuckle over my uncensored innocence. I really hope so. I don’t want to go to hell.
Steppin’ Out With My Baby (Toes)
(Note: About two months ago, I read a blog about feet, and ever since, I’ve been worried about mine. I looked for that blog again, but I can’t seem to find it. So if those were your original feet – this is dedicated to you.)
Some of my body parts have held up rather well for sixty years. My calves are pretty nice. I have beautiful wrists. And although my left eye has recently let me down, my right eye is keeping up its end.
These are my feet. They have not aged well.
My Feet. The left one is on the left. The right one is the other one. The toes are not naturally orchid, except when I am cold.
You may be distracted by the size of my ankles. I could say it’s the lighting or the angle or even water retention, but it’s just my ankles. They are really that thick. Always have been. Several years ago, when ankle bracelets were big, mine were BIG.
But I’m not complaining about my ankles. I’m used to them.
And try to ignore the strange tan lines. I have weirdly shaped flip-flops that I wear constantly in the summer. These $5.00 rubber drugstore sandals fit me better than any of the hundreds of shoes in my closet.
And if you’re guessing those developing bunion bumps are my problem. Nope. They’re annoying but manageable.
It’s my toes.
My pinky toes have decided to hide underneath their neighbors. Sure, I’m saving big money polishing only eight nails, but piggy shyness is damned uncomfortable. I’m steppin’ on my own toes.
So I bought toe straighteners.
I have a pair. The other one is similar.
You start with five minutes a day and gradually increase to straighten out your toes. As you can see, there seems to be a little discrepancy between the size of my foot and the size of the straightener. But with a little work, I can get my toes in there. (The straighteners are bendy, and thanks to yoga, so am I.)
I can wear them and multitask. I can watch TV or check my Blog. I can snack. I just can’t get up to answer the phone.
It’s working I think. But I woke up this morning with a new worry. Maybe I shouldn’t want them to work.
These are the shoes I am wearing to my nephew’s wedding.
But with my toe straighteners, maybe I’ll need a different shape.
notquiteold 