A Trip to the Body Shop

As my sister Ethel (I wish I could say her name has been changed here to protect the innocent, but it hasn’t) lay awake during the night a while back, unable to sleep, she asked herself what she would like to change about her body. She has hit that age, you know, where it feels like she has to accept that all of us eventually become victims of Father Time, especially when we don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars squirreled away for the entry fee into the Youngest Looking Old Person In The Coffin Sweepstakes. (Relax, sis, you have a lot of years before you reach this point – although not as many as I have J )

Being the always-supportive little sister that I am – okay, younger sister that I am, I decided to help her with her list. It’s more fun than counting sheep, and requires fewer grey cells than the old Twenty Questions required. With this in mind, let’s take a trip to the body shop, dream of that new you, and pick the one thing you would want most.

Let’s start at the top. She said she wanted her old hair back – the thick, lush chestnut-colored stuff that cascaded over her shoulder and curled just a bit at the end. That would be awesome, although in my case it would be problematic because I am not sure what color my hair used to be. Thanks to that wonderful twisted generic rhizome I was blessed with from my father’s side, it has been grey longer than it was any other color. That said, any color might be better, as long as it didn’t have the texture and thickness of armpit hair.

If she had that wonderful hair back, though, it would be nice to have the unwrinkled face and unbaggy eyelids to go with it. Of course, that hair hanging down around your ears might now mess up your limited hearing, so you would need your hear-a-pin-drop hearing back, and if you are doing that, you might want to ditch the glasses and restore your better than 20/20 vision you once had. Since we’re in the neighborhood, maybe we can work out a deal – trade in a chin or two for perhaps new earlobes that don’t shake when you move your head.

My sister, it pains me to say, has been blessed with perfect teeth. No matter how old the rest of her gets, she has worked like a trooper to keep those pearlies in perfect shape. She is a dentist’s nightmare, because when he looks in her mouth, there is no new pool liner there, no new Bimmer for the garage, no winter on the Riviera. I am not so lucky, so we should probably throw a whole new set on my tab. If we’re dreaming, let’s dream in Technicolor – make em so that they are the impervious, untouchable, low maintenance ones that I never have to worry about again.

Back to the hair, though – to do those new old locks justice, we would then need the arms to be more toned, more durable, able to spend hours up, working on the hair to keep it looking incredible. Hair is work. Beautiful hair is more work. With that amazing hair back, though, it would be wonderful if it draped over shoulders that weren’t so hunched or flabby. The tips of that wonderful hair curled above those wonderful perky breasts – gravity really is a heartless bitch. Sis, remember when I teased you about how you could save money by buying bandaids for those puppies, instead of shelling out for a bra? Well, I do apologize, and ruefully acknowledge that membership in the ginormous-boob club comes with a price. Like gravity, karma is also a bitch; together, they are merciless. Your list won’t require scaffolding and miles of duct tape to pull those puppies back up where they belong. For that, I am jealous. I should point out though, that the way mine are going, in a year or two, I won’t have to worry about polishing the toes of my shoes... the boobs will take care of it for me (if I can just keep them out of the gravy when I’m making dinner).

We all wish for the tight butt and the toned tummies of our youth. Even skinny people have saggy skin on those areas as they get older. We also should consider some digestive parts. Can you imagine what it would be like to again eat without having to run through the list of things that would cause heartburn, gas or our gallbladders to revolt? There was also a time when our knees, or in my case, ankle, didn’t creak with every movement. If someone had told me when I was twenty that, at the age of fifty playing tug-of-war with my ankle to unlock it would be routine, I would have laughed in their faces. Do not worry though about that harbinger of quintessential old-age – the bowel discussions. It won’t happen here. On this blog, bowels are totally off limits. That’s my gift to those of us sharing this journey.

There is a curse, and maybe even a lesson, in this exercise, I suppose. The curse is that we can’t turn the clock back, no matter how much we want to. We can slow some of the process down, we can do our damnedest to maintain what we have, but we really can’t stop it from happening. The lesson is that, it seems despite our reluctance, our bodies work as a magnificent symphony, parts in concert, aging together, to make us what we are supposed to be when we are supposed to be it. There is undeniable beauty in that.  

The Great Hair Migration...

… and other self-realizations as we grow older.

Two days before my mother’s 88th birthday, I was with her in the hospital. She was weak, she was tired, and she had been terribly alone since my father had passed some years earlier. In the midst of her surrendering to machines and strangers to help her do the things that we all take for granted – those things we all assume we will do for ourselves forever, things which makes us completely human and vulnerable -- she started to laugh. It was the first ‘real’ laugh I had heard from her in a while, especially since she had gotten so sick. In the middle of what we would normally consider an earth-shattering, mortifying personal hygiene crisis, my mother laughed and said ‘God sure has his ways of keeping us humble’. Her laugh was contagious, and her words lingered. Two days after her 88th birthday, she went to meet The Big Guy herself.

Since then, I have held her words dear to my heart, and I find strength in them, especially as I start this ‘aging’ thing myself. While pondering this, I realized that each age we reach has its own perspective of time and age. Once I was potty trained, I really didn’t give any thought to bathroom issues anymore. At that point, milestones were being able to walk to school alone and being old enough to play with Barbie dolls. Daylight savings time was a cruel trick. Christmas seemed to always take forever to arrive. In my teens, high school graduation was the holy grail. We focused on leaving home, getting a drivers license, that first kiss and our biggest hygiene concern was the latest hairstyle and hiding a new zit that erupted on Friday morning. In my twenties, it was pretty much about me. I was on top of the world, with tight boobs, flat tummy, gorgeous thick hair, a killer smile. At the end of those years, kids entered the scene and toilet issues jumped back on the front burner, but aging was something that was not even on the radar. Fifty was as good as dead. Thirties and forties? We had a better idea of what old age was, but we were NOT anywhere near it. We couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible.

Then we hit fifty. Once again, a shitty day becomes more than just a metaphor. We see our friends aging, have lost some along the way, and by some magical twist of God’s wrist, we swap roles with our parents. They become our concern. We watch their aging, we see their challenges, and we wonder what age will hold in store for us, and if some amazingly brilliant scientist will come up with a way to prevent it. So far, that hasn’t happened, and thus begins…


THE GREAT HAIR MIGRATION

Hair: For many, there is that first lock from that first haircut, safely and lovingly stored away between the pages of a book. Used bookstores probably throw out bushels of precious locks, long forgotten in books that, for years, served no purpose other than to help boost up that duff leg on the table. As parents, we long for that first haircut, that first milestone in the life of a baby. We laugh as their hair grows, the more unruly, the better. Then those precious darlings hit their teen years, and we pray for them to do something about that damned greasy mop on their heads. Hair becomes a symbol of independence, a source of pride and power, our first means of defiance.

Many years ago, while at the home of a new acquaintance, I was looking at a stack of old pictures taken from the weddings of people I had not yet met. In the course of looking, I set them out on the table in proper chronological order. It wasn’t magic, or the gift of some inner vision. I didn’t look at the leaves on the trees, the color of the sky or the girth of any one waist, because those weren’t true indicators. The one undeniable tell-tale of the passing years was in the hairlines of the men as they inched further and further back.

Here’s the great lesson for the day: natural hair never lies. With it, we can look at someone and determine their age, health, social class, living conditions, diet and lifestyle. Someone undergoing chemo may have none. Movie stars have long full thick flowing locks that are always perfectly done. For a soldier, the telltale hair means business and dedication, nothing to hide at all, because from the moment he steps into boot camp and hears those buzzers, his life is not really his own anymore – defiance and rebellion fully contained. For a politician, millions will be spent on hiding the truth behind a good head of hair; it’s the price of power.

Men’s hair never really just ‘falls out’. It moves. Some of it slips down into their eyebrows, even to the point of requiring hedge trimmers to keep them under control. Some sneaks off and hides in their ears, or up their noses. I defy you to find me a twenty-year-old boy checking his ears for hair to pluck. The hair on a man’s chest starts the great trek north, over the shoulders and down the back. I have no idea if men obsess the way women do. On them, it’s a sign of wisdom, maturity, like a fine blend of herbs now allowed to infuse the whole dish.

As I stood in the shower this morning, undertaking the usual routine, I contemplated this issue of age. I checked to see how much of my hair is falling out. Does it feel more limp? Thinner? I would love for every other aspect of me to be thinner, but not my hair. It’s not fair that it always volunteers first for that duty. My hair has been braided, styled, curled, permed, straightened, conditioned and colored… but now I am just glad it’s still on my damned head. With age, however, I realize that men are not the only victims of the great hair migration. Twenty years ago, it never entered my mind that I might have to wake up early in the morning because I want to wear sandals that day – so I better shave my toes. Before, I used to spend time trying to find the ultimate way to keep the hair off my legs. Well, it tends to not be such an issue there… because it seems it too has migrated north -- to my face. Now I spend time in the store searching the shelves for a way to color it, remove it or at the very least style it, since it’s right there on my mug, for all the world to see. I think of the old milk ‘wear a moustache’ campaign and thank God it’s no longer on the television – because it might just mean I would have to kill someone.

We’re talking hair here. Does it never stop becoming an obsession for us? Then I think of Mom, in that hospital bed. She would wake up and ask me to comb her hair for her, so it was ‘presentable’. Never once did she concern herself with the sparse hair on her legs – her back was too painful to allow her to bend over to see it anyways. Hair on her toes? Who could tell when they were tucked in slippers, on feet that had seen 88years of hard labor and now showed that undeniable wear and tear. Armpits? She never lifted her arms anymore, so who would care. She was neat, clean, presentable, and she was Mom. She had more important things to worry about… chewing her food with store-bought teeth, trying to hear what you were saying because she couldn’t afford the hearing aid she needed. Her concern for the day: wondering what her kids, and their kids, were doing, what challenges they were facing that day, and how they would overcome those challenges to go on and face the next. Hair on her toes? That was for amateurs.

Baby Boomers, Unite! We shall overcome... or not, but we should at least have some fun in the process. Look at yourself, at the events of your day, and share with us your realizations and perspectives. Seriously, it will make this old age thing maybe not so unbearable after all.