Didn't My Skin Used to Fit? (7 page)

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
—Winston Churchill

19
The Gravity of the Situation

I doubt if I’ll ever forget it. It was one of those images that burn in your memory like a scene from a low-budget horror film. I couldn’t sleep for days, and if I’ve ever been certain of anything, I’m certain of this: I never want to see it again.

It was early in the morning, an ordinary day—nothing much planned except a business meeting I had to attend in about an hour.

I curled my hair with my curling iron just as I do every morning, then began to brush it out. Having read somewhere that brushing your hair upside down gives it more body, I decided to give it a try. Fat hair should be everyone’s goal in life, right? So I bent over and brushed . . . and brushed . . . and brushed. I could feel my hair thickening with each stroke. Not being able to resist the temptation, I turned my head to the side and peeked at the mirror. I caught a glimpse of my hefty hair in all of its glory all right, but I also saw something else. I hadn’t bargained for this. It was a complete shock. To this day it sends shivers up and down my spine.

What the ‘‘Ambassador of Obese Hair’’ forgot to mention about upside-down brushing was the fact that a woman over the age of forty should never look at herself in the mirror with her head down. If you’re over forty and you bend over, all forty years bend with you, believe me. Gravity kicks in, and every fold of skin that has ever thought about becoming a wrinkle suddenly gets its wish. Your hair may look great, but your face looks like Methuselah’s mother on her second week without sleep—during allergy season.

This is why when an older movie star is interviewed she tilts her head back in an unnatural position. Notice this the next time you see one on a talk show. Her head is tipped back so far you could give her a sinus exam. No doubt she’s had the experience I had the day I bent over and then looked in the mirror. Stephen King may have gotten his inspiration for his last three novels after doing this himself.

I don’t recall this phenomenon occurring when I was younger. I could bend over and tie a shoe, bend over and scratch my leg, bend over and take the dishes out of the dishwasher, and my skin stayed pretty much in place. I’m sure I could look at myself in the mirror upside down or right side up and know beyond a shadow of a doubt who I was.

But the person I saw that day was someone else entirely. Someone who looked about fifty years older and a lot scarier than the right-side-up version. Thus, I’ve decided to stick with my anorexic hair.

I suppose it has something to do with the law of gravity. Gravity affects our whole body, skin included, and there’s not much we can do about it. Areas that used to hold their own now seem to be falling faster than the stock market after an interest hike. Gravity affects men and women alike. It strikes people of every race, creed, and regional setting. You may be a northerner, but by the time you hit middle age, your body will be heading south.

For all its negative effects on the body, though, gravity does have its advantages. For one thing, it’s what keeps us from floating off into outer space. And since there aren’t any outlet stores on Mars, that’s a good thing.

I can’t retire. Who’d support my mom and dad?
—George Burns

20
All Grown Up

I distinctly remember the last Christmas my mother gave me a doll. Being a junior-higher, I considered myself much too grown up for dolls. Dolls were for little girls, not young adults. I tried to act pleased but I was more embarrassed than pleased. Couldn’t Mom have given me something more appropriate to my age? Something more mature? Something like a nice sweater, a daily planner, or maybe even a pair of high heels?

After all, I had just turned thirteen.
Thirteen
. How much more grown up could I get? It was time for me to put away childish things, to move from Barbie to Bach, or at least to rock. I was growing up and needed grown-up gifts. I didn’t play with dolls anymore. I hadn’t played with dolls in several weeks, at least. Hadn’t Mom noticed that?

I was a young adult. I wanted to be included in adult conversations about news events. I knew who the president of our country was, and I was part of the working class—I had a job babysitting twice a month. I was certain I could hold my own on any adult topic. I had even been watching TV like an adult. No more cartoons except on Saturdays and after school three or four times a week. Instead, I was tuning in to shows like
Meet
the Press
and
60 Minutes
. You won’t hear a single ‘‘Yabba-dabba-do’’ or ‘‘Th-th-that’s all, folks!’’ on either of these award-winning programs. (OK, maybe between takes, but that’s different.)

I was dressing like an adult, too. Instead of cut-off jeans and a T-shirt, I was wearing more sophisticated attire—skirts, blouses, and formal T-shirts. I was changing right before Mom’s eyes, yet had she picked up on even one of the signals? Apparently not.

So there I was—holding the newly unwrapped doll in my lap and trying desperately to release the words ‘‘Thank you’’ from my lips. When I finally did, it wasn’t very convincing.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize many perfectly well adjusted adults still have dolls, and that’s fine—for them. I have a lot of my dolls on display in my home, too. But at this particular point in my life I was trying desperately to be accepted into the adult world, and Mom’s gift set all my efforts back an eternity, or at least a couple of years. All I wanted was to be treated as the intellectual, deep-thinking thirteen-year-old I was so certain I had become.

Mom, on the other hand, was trying her best to hang on to the child in me. I was the youngest of her five children, her last baby, and the fact that I was growing up meant she was getting older, too. It was a truth she may not have wanted to face—not yet anyway.

None of us can control our own aging process, so we sometimes do what we can to delay the aging process of others. We think if we can just slow the clock for them, our own clock might slow down, too. We do this with TV and movie stars. We don’t want to admit they’re aging at all. It threatens our own youth. So through the miracle of film and videotape, we trap them in their younger days, before gray hair and gravity set in. And we make them stay there. We place an unfair burden on them to always look young, act young, and sound young, while our own aging process continues unabated.

The simple truth is we’re all growing older, even those we so desperately wish wouldn’t. So, yes, I forced a smile, said thank you once again, and went to my room. If she didn’t want me to grow up, who was I to take that away from her?

Later that evening, after I had sufficiently displayed my dissatisfaction with the doll, at least in the privacy of my room—I took it out of its package and started playing with it. I even had fun.

I guess I didn’t really want to grow up so fast, either.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE
GETTING OLD WHEN . . .

you find yourself wishing recliners had ejection seats.

21
A Hairy Experience

I don’t know why, but for some reason, as we grow older we start growing hair in places where hair never grew before. I’m not sure what the medical term for this is, but I’d hazard a guess that the words ‘‘Big Foot’’ are in there somewhere.

I have a hair on my cheek that can grow two inches long if I let it. It’s blond, so I can’t always see it when I look in the mirror. Most of the time my husband will notice it first.

‘‘If you’re going to keep that,’’ he’ll say, pointing at the stray hair, ‘‘don’t you think you oughta perm it?’’

He’s such a romantic.

There’s a hair on my chin that can take a growing spurt, too. I usually don’t notice that one until it’s curling itself into my bowl of cereal.

I’m not sure why aging makes previously well mannered hair start doing these kinds of strange things, but it does. Maybe it’s a hormone thing. Hormones like to act up at this particular time in our lives, so if our ankles start growing sideburns, we shouldn’t panic. It might just be a side effect of perfectly normal hormonal changes.

I am actually having the opposite problem now. For some reason, when I hit thirty-five the hairs on my legs stopped growing altogether. I don’t mind, of course. Shaving was always a high-risk ordeal for me. I’d end up with more cuts and slashes than a Republican budget. So who knows, not having to shave my legs may have increased my life expectancy by ten years.

The hair on my head is getting thinner, too. I first noticed something was happening when I was able to fit all of it onto one large curler. And brushing my hair out each morning was taking less and less time. Even my bangs are thinning out. They look like a little blond picket fence that’s missing more posts than it started with.

Not only does the volume of our hair change as we get older but also the color. My husband’s hair is almost all gray. I’ve been trying to get him to use a permanent hair color for men, but so far he’s holding out. He thinks leaving work on Friday with gray hair and returning on Monday with black hair might not be as undetectable as the TV ads imply. He feels he can’t explain the younger look as having simply caught up on his sleep.

Another thing that hair starts to do, especially on men, is back up, turn inward, and start to grow out of their ears. Most men don’t mind. To them, hair is hair no matter where it grows. Some men even go so far as to grow out their ear hairs and comb them up over their bald spot. I think that’s carrying things a bit too far. If it gets that bad, maybe they should just go ahead and shave their whole head. It didn’t hurt the careers of Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, or Michael Jordan.

My father was able to keep a full head of hair into his seventies. The hair on his head stayed put, but he developed a receding eyebrow, forcing him to color it in with an eyebrow pencil. He wasn’t happy about it, but he did what he had to do. Well, guess who inherited his unnatural hair loss? I started losing my left eyebrow about a decade ago. Of all the things I could lose, I suppose an eyebrow isn’t so bad. At least I can color it in. It’s harder to color in a gall bladder.

No matter what color our hair is, whatever unnatural place it’s started to grow, or how much of it we have left, the most important thing to remember is this: it doesn’t work that well as dental floss, so try to keep it out of your cereal.

He is so old that his blood type was discontinued.
—Bill Dana

22
A Cut Above

After grocery shopping today, I walked to my car and found an ad for the services of a plastic surgeon tucked under the left windshield wiper. I didn’t take it personally. I really doubt that a plastic surgeon was lurking in the bushes waiting for a good candidate to happen along. Yet there it was in black and white—telling me how I could take five, ten, twenty years off my appearance with the mere snip of some surgical scissors.

Now, as tempting as a more youthful look sounded, the word ‘‘snip’’ gave me pause. I don’t like that word used in conjunction with one of my body parts. Snip and clip is what we do to hedges, tree limbs, and chicken parts. We even snip and clip our hair, but it doesn’t involve anesthesia, bruising, or a four-week recovery period (unless, of course, it’s a really bad haircut).