all of the selves we Have ever been
I stood in the check-out line behind a young woman dressed in rainbow-colored leggings. The leggings were so tight that I’m pretty sure the woman had a beauty mark on her right butt cheek. I felt a little awkward with this view of the woman, so I tried to avert my gaze. The outfit seemed to say, “Look!” but it felt wrong to see so much. Shifting my eyes to the phone charger display, I wondered, what is the correct reaction to this new wardrobe phenomenon? Envy? Acceptance? Disdain? I decided to go with discomfort. Even my own skin doesn’t fit that tight. If I were I to try to stuff myself into a pair of those leggings, it would be like trying to get rising dough to stay in a teacup or a helium balloon to stay in a paper bag. There would be a lot of fruitless pushing and punching going on. Regardless of the self-flagellation, something would be left hanging out, and it would be a lot more than a beauty mark. I have to accept that I am of an age when the term “skin-tight” no longer applies to me. I have been voted off that island and sent to the place where what is baggy is me. Any clothes that fit like my skin need to sag and be permanently wrinkled. The only starring role appropriate for my look is that of a Shar Pei. I have a very beautiful and dear friend who hates shopping. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t even call her pursuit of new clothing shopping. She will report in her discouraged way: “I went out to try to buy something.” My friend is a slender, fit, and active woman who prefers soft sweatpants and loose flannel shirts. She, like so many of us gals, survived girdles, garter belts, underwire, mini-skirts, hip-huggers, and platform shoes. We were the generation that grew to womanhood watching older women burn their bras. Perhaps it was all of that Lycra on fire that led to the deterioration of the ozone layer and our minds, but we got the message. We’re all about comfort now. Bring back the moo moo! But style shifts aren’t the issue. No, the real culprit in this fashion evolution is spandex. It has turned underwear into outwear. Spandex has spread faster than the coronavirus and infected everything we wear. It is like the COVID of cloth. We are being embalmed in our active wear. Please! Give me some distance, some breathing room. I am amazed that some people who object to wearing a mask will stuff themselves into clothing made of 98% spandex. Folks who won’t take a life-saving vaccine consider better living through chemistry to be the laboratory-created fibers that stretch up to five times their original length. DuPont started cooking this stuff up back in the 1950s along with a stockpile of forever chemicals. Does that mean leggings are here to stay? Maybe not. Things do change. After all, spandex was the replacement for rubber in girdles. A friend who was a flight attendant back in the 1960s tells me that even a stick-thin stewardess was required to wear a rubber girdle as part of the uniform. The only upside was that it protected her backside from being pinched by inappropriate male passengers. Today, if a man were to grab a woman’s spandexed bottom and release quickly, the woman would be rocketed into space without the wings. But as the commercials promise, spandex will hold its shape even when we don’t. From my point of view, it’s not the leggings; it’s the spandex that is the real enemy of the people. No wonder folks are so miserable and full of complaint. We’re all clothed in fabric stretched too thin. Life has enough pressure, now our clothes are squeezing us too. I say, “Loosen up!” You don’t find the peace and love crowd wearing spandex. Jesus and his followers wore loose, flowing robes and comfortable sandals. Other holy men and women have followed suit. The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has said, “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat,” a sign that you’ve lost control of your life. Sure, Karl, nothing says “I’m in control” like being bound with elastic and scheduled for labiaplasty. Going forward, I think I will take my fashion advice from the grand designer. I’m going with the Jesus-look. Fortunately, the one item of clothing I own that contains absolutely no spandex is my bathrobe. Depending on the wind speed, you may be seeing more of me.
0 Comments
I’ve got gas! And I’m not embarrassed to admit it. In fact, I am celebrating. Living without gas proved to be much harder than living with it. On a recent Friday morning, I stopped at a local gas station to fill my tank only to discover that my car’s fuel door would not open. I pulled the lever, but I did not hear the affirming pop. I tried again. And again. But no matter how many times I tried, the little round door would not open. I squeezed my fingertip into the narrow space surrounding the door and pulled, but I could not get the fuel door to budge. I resorted to reading the owner’s manual, confident there was a back-up system. Eight chapters later, and with no alternative, I returned to the cashier to secure a refund, and then I headed straight for home. I called my regular auto repair shop to make an appointment: “We can get you in on Wednesday,” the manager said. It was going to be a long five-day weekend. Feeling vulnerable without my wheels, I realized that I needed to preserve the remaining gas to get to the repair shop on Wednesday. Immediately, my mind began a thorough exploration of all of the emergencies that could arise between Friday morning and Wednesday evening, crises that would require a full tank of gas. Topping the list was something awful happening to one of my children. I mentally lived the horror and the shame of not being able to get to one of them on some dark and lonely road or in a busy emergency room, and what if one of them was abducted and I needed to join the search? Shaken and grief stricken from all of my vivid catastrophizing, I reminded myself that I was a trained therapist. I took some deep breaths and began the process of cognitive restructuring. I made a conscious decision to be positive. I would use the time to catch up on chores around the apartment, do some deep cleaning, and get in a lot more walking. By the time I fully committed to positive thinking, I was exhausted, and it was time for bed. I awoke Saturday morning to the sounds of heavy equipment in the parking lot just outside my window. A crew from the electric company was busy replacing some tall light poles. I went about my morning business until I noticed the faint smell of natural gas. The electric workers had hit a gas line. A gas company representative arrived promptly to shut off the gas to the entire building. They would be back to deal with the issue sometime on MONDAY. Now, with no gas in my car, no gas for cooking, and no gas to heat water for bathing, not only would I be helpless in an emergency, but I would starve and be stinking when the authorities came to recover my body. They would look at my fetid condition and my empty refrigerator and charge my children with neglect of a senior. All of the evidence would point to the conclusion that I should never have been left alone. Despite my resolve to accept my circumstances and look for the positive by spending this very long weekend on self-care, chanting words of peace and love, and sniffing essential oils, I continued to wander out to my car to try to open the fuel door. It’s hard to say how many times I tried, but I am sure it was enough to arouse suspicion, and all of my comings and goings were caught on camera by my neighbor’s RING doorbell. The authorities would have more physical evidence to prove their case. I was torn apart by what this behavior might do to my children’s future, but I just couldn’t help myself. I really did try to stay focused on the cognitive restructuring plan, but let’s face it--peace and love will only get you so far, and then you need gas. After innumerable trips to my car, it finally happened--the fuel door opened! Was it a miracle? The fruit of obsession? A never-say-die attitude? Who knows? In any case, I immediately got gas. The peace and love came much easier after that. I love a cliché. Especially an old one. I know. I know. Not a good thing. Overused. Poor style. Puts the reader’s brain to sleep… But I can’t help myself. It’s an acquired taste. Clichés are like junk food. Nobody can eat just one. I fear my affection for them may be a sign of dementia. But at least I understand what people are saying when they use them. Every year new words enter the lexicon and old words take on new meanings. As they do, I find that I have no idea what people are talking about. I have come to believe that gibberish and not English is my native tongue. The digital age has added new expressions and hundreds of acronyms and emojis. I am constantly in need of a translator. And the political jargon seems downright dangerous: liberal, left, right, elites, woke, cancel culture, gaslighting, Karen… These seem like loaded words spoken by people carrying actual guns. There is no live and let live in this crowd. As opposed to the old clichés that reflect our common understandings, this new terminology seems filled with accusations meant to demean, humiliate, and sow division. There are people who really will throw you under the bus if you misspeak or suggest even minor disagreement. They are so high on hate, I’m not sure they really know what they are talking about either. All is not groovy. More personally, I am feeling really bad for my lovely friend whose name is Karen. Sure, I may be boring and unoriginal. I confess to being worn out and losing my edge. Perhaps I seem lazy, and weak brained, but at the end of the day, no harm done. I can live with that. I may no longer be as sharp as a tack, but I am sticking to my guns and circling the wagons. When I get to heaven I expect to be dead on arrival, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the meantime, I like being on common ground with my neighbors and taking the path of least resistance. You know what I mean. The restaurant filled up and bubbled with life much like the champagne glasses on the next table. It was the first week in which the world began waking from the long COVID winter. My friend arrived, and we greeted for the first time since it all began. We were each in a contemplative mood, a condition of both our ages and the universal outcome of a pandemic in which there was little else to do but think and worry. Near the end of the evening, as we pondered our futures in retirement and our need for a new sense of purpose, I shared my mounting regret that I had not had the wisdom to ask my aging relatives what it was like to grow older, to ask what their own lives had been like when they were young, to study the path between youth and older age. They had always seemed old to me. Youth was never a condition I imagined in them. Now it was too late. My friend nodded in agreement and shared her own sorrow about the time she spent caring for her beloved and now deceased mother: “I wish I had spent less time managing her, and more time just being with her.” That arrow plucked from her heart pierced mine too. We sat quietly, each bleeding a little on the inside. Both of us baby-boomers, we grew up in a mechanical age of industry and assembly lines. Efficiency experts had been elevated to the stature of gods. We reached young adulthood with business management principles overflowing the factory floor onto our personal lives. Sewn into us was a long, sturdy thread of advice on how to efficiently manage our time, money, children, aging parents, health, weight, and all of our affairs. Self-help gurus were everywhere to remind us that it was up to us; we were on our own. The message came through loud and clear: successful people are competent; competent people are good managers. Both bright gals, we studied the literature. This societal message became the inheritance of our children, too. From the time they entered pre-school, our kids were walloped with advice about how to “build a resume for college”--that ferocious mix of the right schools, academic rigor, homework, arts, sport, and community service. Aspiring to become competent parents, we tried to keep up. Not to keep up was to become a failure and the subject of gossip and criticism. Any life troubles were assumed to reflect our botched management: a failure to manage the retirement portfolio, a failure to manage the child’s education, a failure to manage the care of aging parents, a failure to manage health care screenings, a failure to manage the social media presence, the in-boxes, the on-line images, the professional brand… We knew what the neighbors were saying: “if only they had been better managers.” In mid-life, we entered the digital age. A host of new tools fooled us about time savings and the actual distance between people. Our tools became another distraction in the service of helping us to manage. But much got lost while we were busy managing no matter how fancy the tools or how many bytes in the memory. Time ran out. Parents died. The children grew up. Friends moved away. While the forms were getting signed, the tuition paid, the countless appointments kept, we forgot to drink up the moments and the company. Blinded by the demands of life and the counsel of experts, we believed the successful completion of tasks was the relationship. We forgot to be present. Oh, what I would give to go back in time for one more day, to snuggle up with my children in our big comfy chair with nothing else on my mind save for their sweetness and warmth! Or a quiet Sunday gathered around my grandparents’ kitchen table to talk about their youth and their dreams. Were their dreams realized? Did it matter? The grandparents are gone now, the parents, aunts, and uncles, too. The children are grown and busy. They are managing their own lives. And this generation that grew up building their resumes for college is not giving us grandchildren. There is already too much for our kids to manage. As I move toward the age when I will become the managed and not the manager, I am aware that the issue is not unique to my friend and me, a couple of women with a few regrets. The pandemic awakened a realization in all of us that managing our lives is not enough. We isolated, masked, sanitized, and sacrificed and still could not hold a tiny germ at bay. We learned that life can be fleeting, surprising, and sometimes tragic no matter hard we work to manage it. Perhaps the post-COVID labor contractions reflect the birthing of a new way of living in which we will care for ourselves and each other at all stages of the life cycle, not with our clocks and our calendars, but with our time and our presence. When my own life ends and the children come to clean out the closets, I hope they will find important dates still circled on my calendar, a reminder of happiness to come, a few cherished mementoes stashed in the attic that link them to their past and to me, some presents tucked away for their future holidays, and a cup of joy upon the stove to sip and to share as they sort through all of the pieces of a long life. When the cupboards are empty and their trunks are full, I hope they find that they had plenty of love and no regrets. It is the first snowfall of the season. Through my window it is a wonderland of undisturbed white powder and winter quiet. This beautiful landscape portrait conceals the blistering wind that strikes my cheeks and the thick, crunchy ice that causes my feet to slip and slide as I step outside to warm up the car. When I was young, I wondered why older adults went to Florida for the winter. It seemed to me that the heat, humidity, and bugs would be a deterrent to anyone still in her right mind. Perhaps my mind is no longer right. Sunny locations with clear, dry roads sound lovely. Cruising around tropical islands and sipping sweet drinks from a pineapple don’t sound too bad either. Cruises can be expensive, and with COVID and its many variants circulating, they are also a bad idea. While my mind may no longer be right, I do seem to recall a certain inexpensive cruise line that promises restoration of the spirit. That would kill two birds with one stone—help me to succeed with my New Year’s resolution and get me away from it all. Did I mention that it is also affordable? There is no need to contact a travel agent. How does it work? You climb into your bathtub, say the magic words: Calgon, take me away! And you have set sail. I remember the ads and the foil covered cardboard boxes that sometimes sat on the edge of our bathtub at home. I’m not sure if my mom got to sail away that often. A military wife and working woman with four children didn’t have much time to sit down. The box may have offered some hope or a chance to dream, but it was we children who poured far too much of the magic powder into the tub and used up all of the fragrant journeys. I rarely take a bath any more. I am strictly a shower person unless I am nursing some pain. Even then, I am reluctant to sit down in the tub. Seems like too much trouble, the getting in and the getting out, and the cleaning up. Takes too much time, too. That’s way too long to be naked at my age, not to mention my general sagging condition. What if something sticks to the porcelain? As I grow older, I am hounded by doctors, nurses, and ads reminding me that I could slip and fall. The bathtub is certainly a new danger zone. No wonder my divine spark is dying. I guess we grow old by exchanging adventure for safety. We no longer sail away, we slip away. I think about these things as I shovel a foot of snow from around my car. Twenty-five mile per hour winds blast my face with an icy mist. I realize that I am a much braver woman when I am dressed in multiple layers from head to toe and have something I can throw. With this new insight and a tablespoon of resolve, I go inside and search the internet. OMG! Calgon still makes the magical powdery elixir. On their website, I find this reassuring description: For over 70 years, Calgon™ has been dedicated to creating uniquely exhilarating bath and body experiences that stimulate the senses, restore the spirit and take you on a special, fragrant journey to the place you want to be. Yep, that’s the stuff, and it’s been around longer than me. Must be true or else hope dies hard. I wait for the trucks to come by with the road salt so that I can get to the bath salts. I vow to be brave: I will trade a thimble of safety for a tub of adventure. I book my passage. I am setting sail. In the midst of a pandemic that feels endless, already there is talk of the next crisis--water. Knowledgeable people are banking on it, trading water on the commodities exchange. News footage validates the forecast with images of dry river beds, massive wildfires, and places where critical ground water has been pumped beyond its limits to replenish. Waterways are polluted by industrial toxins, discarded plastics, and human waste. Around the world, people are on the move leaving behind land that is turning to dust. I sit here in my uneasy chair for some self-examination. I have taken the supply of water for granted my entire life. I turn on the tap and out flows cool, clean water. As a teenager living in the growing suburbs of Pittsburgh, I became familiar with families living outside the city limits whose homes had wells. Sometimes I visited them in the summer when the water was low and laundry had to be hauled to the laundromat, and the grass turned brown, and showers were limited to keep the wells from running dry. It all seemed so primitive to me from my perch in the privileged suburbs where the sprinkler ran for hours. In my mind’s eye, wells belonged in the old American west, to a world of gunslingers and dusty cattle drives, in barren places depicted on shows like Rawhide and Gunsmoke, a world of black and white, certainly not living color. Earlier experience had led me to this faulty conclusion. There were two giant concrete discs in my grandmother’s grassy backyard. It was only in fleeting moments of bravery that I dared to run across one of the discs. More often, I walked around them fearing that something dangerous lurked beneath and was just waiting to grab me by the ankles. Perhaps it was our happy lives above ground that skirted trouble from below. Above the ground life was vibrant. Children laughed while grabbing juicy pears from the tree overhanging the porch. Aproned women snipped dewy roses from thorny bushes that climbed white trellises along the back wall. Damp clothes hung shoulder-to-shoulder on the clotheslines, shooing away danger as they blew and snapped in the swift summer breeze. Screen doors slammed as we ran in and out of the house. Familiar voices filled the air like music. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the concrete discs in my grandmother’s yard were lids. They covered the cisterns that once upon a time collected rainwater to support life and clean laundry inside my grandmother’s house. I was dumbfounded. I never imagined that the ultra-modern home of my grandmother had a frontier history. How could that be when every modern innovation in the world was introduced to me there: wall-to-wall carpeting, automatic dishwashers, recliner chairs, color TV, and air conditioning? Clearly, gathering rain water was ancient history. Problem solved. We were modern taps and pipes people who relied upon the city water department to do the heavy lifting and keep the river of water flowing into our home. The magical innovations that appeared inside my grandmother’s house were not only evidence of a changing infrastructure, but evidence of a changing thirst, and we, like many Americans, became insatiable. We wanted more of the new, the time-saving, and the convenient. The economy was booming in the post-war era and so were the number of babies. Life had been hard. Now it was good. It was easy to believe that the frontier days of wells and cisterns were a thing of the past. We never imagined that water itself would disappear in our quest to make life not just easier, but effortless. We grew up as descendants of the American frontier and were fortunate to bring our children into a world of abundance and convenience, but our children face life on a new frontier, the frontier of climate change. Will their lives be better or more difficult than ours? As I downsize, focusing on what to keep and what to leave behind for my children, I look at my stuff and realize that I have never owned anything more precious than water. If I could do it all again, I would trade automatic dishwashers and color TVs for the life that existed in my grandmother’s backyard. I would buy insurance so that my children would be sure to know the cool, soft pleasure of moist green grass between their toes, the sweet flavor of pear juice trickling down their chins, the musky fragrance of velvety roses tickling their noses, and the sound of damp, clean clothes snapping in the breeze shooing away danger. I would have lifted those lids and saved for my children an inheritance that is the birthright of all children, the life-giving, thirst-quenching miracle that is water. If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. – African Proverb ******************************** Speed is the thing. It is the only thing. We want express lanes and speedy deliveries, fast food and speed dating, prompt responses and high-speed internet. We prefer snap judgments and quick reads, fast-acting elixirs and rapid relief. Forethought and careful attention to detail are as extinct as dinosaurs. Demand either today and your age is showing. And your new name is Karen. You will be tossed into the category of emotional extremist faster than you can swallow your dignity. Accuracy is not to be factored into the results so long as we are going as fast as we can. Destination is superfluous. In the prescient words of Yogi Berra, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.” Here is the latest example. My friend Angie placed an Amazon order. Within the promised hours, Angie’s phone pinged an alert. The delivery driver was eight doors away. Angie waited a few minutes and then opened her front door. Ta-da! Prime magic. A package had appeared on her porch. Puzzled by the size of the box, Angie picked it up and studied the shipping label. The name and address belonged to a neighbor. Suspecting a mix-up by a harried delivery driver with a full bladder, Angie carried the package to the neighbor’s house. Sure enough, the package intended for Angie was on the neighbor’s porch. Fearful of being mistaken for a porch pirate, Angie knocked and traded parcels with her neighbor. Back home, Angie opened the box and removed the paper, the bubble wrap, and the plastic shrink wrap. Through some sleight of hand, the item in the box was not what Angie had ordered: wrong address, wrong item, but “on time.” There is some black magic that I can’t comprehend. Speed has been separated from time and results. Age may be a factor in my befuddlement, but age seems like a convenient stereotype to explain away this turn of events. I find myself looking for speed bumps, something to calm the traffic and prevent accidents. Many of us are just not fast lane people. We never were. We obey the speed limit, brake for squirrels, read the road signs, slow down and let others merge. We study the billboards and mentally correct the grammar, memorize the faces of missing children, ponder the Bible verses, and take note of the new businesses. If a caution sign says work area ahead, speed limit 50 mph, we’re willing to risk our lives for the sake of others. We…slow…down. Growing up in a different era reinforced my already unshakeable predisposition to travel in the slow lane. “Pay attention” was the theme song of my youth. We painstakingly practiced penmanship and served time in detention for running in the hallways at school. Adults were there to borrow from John Wooden and remind us: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” We lived a life of lazy Saturday mornings lounging in our PJs until noon. We spent Sunday afternoons our grandmother’s house when all the shops were closed and a family dinner took all day. We were encouraged to slow down, take our time, do things right. The only thing we were in a hurry to do was grow up, and my mother warned us about that, too: “Don’t wish your life away.” Perhaps she was influenced by Shakespeare’s Macbeth who warned us of the “brief candle” that is our lives. Now, after a lifetime of temperament and conditioning, I find myself pressed to choose speed over satisfaction, action over forethought, frantic energy over peace of mind. Shoot me an acronym-filled text message, there’s no time to talk. Or listen. Life is zipping away. I can’t help but wonder, are we really saving time with all of this speed? If so, what is everyone doing with all of the extra time? Collapsing from exhaustion? When our loved ones travel or begin a new adventure, we wish them God speed. God speed is a blessing, not a curse. It is a prayer that the traveler will arrive, not swiftly, but safely and well. God speed implies fidelity, an old word meaning faithful and true. The right package reaching the right house at the right time in the right condition for the right reasons to serve the right purpose. I wasn’t built for life in the fast lane, and I don’t like going it alone. I find the journey safer and more enjoyable when I share the road with others. I am older now, but I still have far to go. I want the journey to be for the rights reasons and serving the right purpose. Will you come with me? We’ll go together. At God speed. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|