Making arrangement to meet a former boyfriend
I hadn't seen for forty years, I felt the need to be more realistic about what he would see. This would not
be a romantic encounter; I have a meque--mejor que un esposo--and I want to be monogamous. (Not to mention the self-consciousness that would come with being with a man who hadn't watched me age grad-u-al-ly!) Of course, I'd sent photos, but I'd always chosen the most flattering pictures of me. Now he'd be seeing the me outside the frame of the carefully chosen photos.
I can face myself in the mirror every morning without
a problem. I have a healthy, un-neurotic
acceptance of age and aging. I am not an ageist or a lookist. But when I
catch my reflection by accident in my iPhone, that un-neurotic acceptance makes
an abrupt exit and I'm left with a look of horror having seen that horrific
image that is NOT the one in my bathroom mirror and certainly not the one in the carefully chosen photos.
I was writing in
French, and I wanted the vocabulary to describe the new old me. I Googled "description d'une vielle
femme" (description of an old woman) and got a description of a woman of
87 who was méchante, arrogante, toujours énervée et ne parle a
personne." Mean, arrogant, always
upset and never speaking to anyone."
The passage went on to say that she had lived alone since the death of
her husband and seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had a skinny frame, a rounded back, and
she hobbled along the streets of the town bent over her
cane. He face gave proof of the
difficulties she'd faced in life. It was
lined, wrinkled like a dried apple.
Her color was like dried sheepskin, which made her wrinkles and lines
stand out.
Well, maybe that didn't quite describe me at 17 years
younger, but it certainly gave me something to look forward to.
So...I Googled the French for
"description of a woman of 70 years" and got news about the
disappearance of a woman of 70 in the Haute-Vienne area of France whose husband had
reported her unexplained disappearance, leaving home in her pajama bottoms (not
top?) without her bag or her cell phone.
That didn't help me with my description since it's not my pajama bottoms
that have aged.
So I kept looking and
saw that in Japan they'd found the corpse of a 70-year old woman in a suitcase
left in a train station in Tokyo.
Then
I found the news report on a 70-year-old woman whose leg had gotten caught
between the train and the platform.
(This ended happily; 12 people on the train used their weight together
to dislodge her leg and save her!)
Finally I gave up trying to describe myself, but I told
him that I now wear glasses.
A couple of years ago I wrote a poem about glasses:
He took off his glasses, I thought, to appear
More handsome to me.
But now I fear
He took off his glasses to see me less clear.
Another friend, Beth, and I took our friend Shehla to tea on her birthday at a place called The Secret Garden, right across from Golden Gate Park.
I suggested that they pose behind the three-tiered tea tray, which they
did, resulting in these adorable pictures, giving them hats of sweet cakes and fruit and collars of tea sandwiches:
When it was my turn, I couldn't stand
what I saw there in my digital camera play back! In addition to the wear and
tear that comes with age, I had a sty, and I knew that my eye looked
awful. But Shehla and Beth said they
couldn't tell the difference between one eye and another, so I guess both eyes
look sick or...they didn't want to put on their glasses!
No comments:
Post a Comment