ANOTHER DECADE MARKED

Do we all live our lives waiting for the next birthday? None of us knows what our bodies will have done to us in a year. The fact is, my body has been kind to me. I feel much better now than I did a decade ago.

My family doesn't know what to gift me with any more. There is no reasonable need that remains unfilled in my life. Statistics would have my family shopping here for me. However, our society fosters a 'one-size-fits-all' leaning, in which case it might be more useful to shop here.

A psychologist friend of mine told me many years ago that we go through life carrying the image of ourselves as we were as 15 years. She neglected to mention that as age loses youth, it also loses memory. I have no idea what I looked like as a 15 year old. Whatever it was is certainly not what my mirror reflects back at me. No, indeed, my mother has taken total control of my life and image. She shows herself every time I look in a mirror and keeps me well hidden behind her. Naturally, to confuse me, she has let her hair grow as long as mine and she wears the same frames on her glasses as I. Or so I thought until I figured out she couldn't get into anyone's digital camera. When I saw pictures of myself I realized it is the ultimate insult Nature has handed us, not my mother at all. Our bodies change at a different rate than our brains. Our brains started with wrinkles and get younger as we get older. Our bodies start young and grow old and wrinkled. The outer skin stretches and becomes what our mother's told us to fear. Stop making faces or your face will stick that way. Yes, that has happened...all those years of girdles, bras, weight gains and losses...bodies have formed a revolution and will put up with that abuse no longer. In their revolt, they become like the picture of Dorian Gray only not out of your body...for real. We wear everything we have eaten, all the hours of sun we soaked up, the second-hand smoke before we knew better, and all the toxins our world could provide.

However, if we ignore the mirror and pictures, and just let ourselves feel as we wish to be, age becomes totally irrelevant. It is, after all, just a number that says how long we have been having fun.

BIRTHDAYS

As long as birthdays arrive, you know you are alive. That is the best part as you enter the ‘golden years’. They should be named the diamond years because, by then, you are very hard and brittle, not at all as soft and malleable as gold, when heated.

When I was little, a birthday meant acknowledgment by my mother, who clearly had a different experience of my birth than I. The day meant special considerations and presents. As many birthdays passed, the important landmarks of 16, 18, 21, 30, 40 (note the increment in decades now) there was a change. My mother was no longer around to share the day. In those days fathers did not attend births and seemed only to follow mother’s lead when a day or occasion was to be noted since he never retained a clue.

The experience of having a birthday is now totally changed. It is no longer how many years have I lived but, rather, how many more years might I live! Whereas once the body was searched for signs of budding boobs or hair, now the task of finding bras to lift those pendulous hunks of useless flesh is a new goal. Hair that importantly once appeared is now disappearing with the bonus less shaving necessary. The hair making apparatus is now located above my lips and on my chin. My mind boggles to figure what Nature intended there.

The happiest part, however, of these late birthdays, is the many calls, notes, or cards received. That makes all the years of living that preceded worth while, through whatever in life one slogs (and slogging through describes a major portion of my living). To me, there is no greater pleasure in life than to know how many people I care for who return the feelings.