It’s a rainy Friday morning here in the lower Hudson Valley and I’ve been up since 3:00a (the old mind chatter keeping me going) listening to the night music and tunes on my little iPod. So why don’t you join me in a cup of tea at the old kitchen table and listen to this ditty. Enjoy.
Do you ever wonder why you get deliberately snubbed by someone? Odd isn’t that someone who wouldn’t give you the time of day thirty plus years ago still won’t acknowledge your presence. I’m hard to miss.
After another futile job interview, I stopped to treat myself to a cup of over-priced trendy coffee. As I waited for my grande mocha latte, (which is definitely not in my budget and would have Suze Orman yelling at me) I stood next to a woman I went to high school with. I said hello to her by name, saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes and chuckled loudly as she turned her back on me.
Funny how some folks never change.
Every weekend I have a marathon phone conversation with a dear friend on the West Coast. I consider her part of my family and we often confide, gripe, seek out solace and advice from one another. These conversations usually entail topics on art, jewelry design, creativity, family, our dire need for money, health and often times digress into locker room humor.
During our recent conversation we both agreed that fifty is not the new forty no matter what Oprah says. We also decided, since we are both fifty-something, that whenever we hear someone make that ridiculous statement, that we would be entitled to take a rolled up newspaper and unceremoniously whack the individual spouting this propaganda on the back of the head! Of course this would be done without any remorse and we would run like hell after we committed this deed. If caught, which would be likely, we would plead insanity or in my case…menopausal rage.
Our fifty-something bodies are doing things now that our forty-year old bodies never did and it’s not pretty! We both agreed that age is just a number and that mentally we are still somewhere in our late thirties and our humor which has always been wicked is still intact. But we also agreed vehemently that our bodies have betrayed us.
Neither of us have the finances that would allow us the luxury to join gyms, yoga classes, palates, have a personal trainer, seek out dermatologists, plastic surgeons, a masseuse that would knead our bodies like precious Kobi beef. We are ladies who have to live the daily grind on a crappy income even before the economy fell into its current dark abyss. I’m not saying that we don’t pursue a healthy lifestyle. We both walk daily, in my case shuffle since a back injury and try to eat a healthy diet (she of course is better at this than I…damn my sweet tooth) and imbibe in all kinds of supplements. But even following this kind of regime the march of time has still reared its ugly head.
We embarked on this topic of our bodies encroaching decrepitude because of a previous conversation regarding wrinkles. Specifically the ones that are showing on our faces. She had mentioned that she is noticing wrinkles above her upper lip, I of course am thinned-lip so no wrinkles there just this oddly unsymmetrical smile which has become more crooked with age. Now I am not one to spend an inordinate amount of time gazing upon my visage in the mirror, but after this conversation it caused me to take stock and was I shocked at what I saw.
I use products, mostly those purchased in the drugstore. I stay out of the sun (cursed with Celtic fair skin) and of course have been best friends with Lady Clairol since my early twenties (I have been going gray since I was a teenager). I put on the war paint when leaving the house and going to the office and wear sunglasses even when it’s overcast outside. But there they were…those cursed wrinkles. They are at the corner of my eyes, under my eyes, on the sides of my nose and mouth and horror of horror when did my neck become like crepe paper!
Of course now I’m having a bit of an emotional moment and strip down to my birthday suit. That in itself was worse than the night terrors I had the other night after reading a Stephen King collection of short stories! When did this happen.
I discussed these horrific finds with my BFF on our recent call and as we went through the list of carnage that has occurred to our bodies with age, this of course turns into hysterical laughter and eventually twisted potty-humor which leaves us both gasping for air and trying not to wet our pants, but in the end we both concurred… Oprah is wrong, fifty is not the new forty.
Thirty years ago this month he died. He was fifty years old, I was twenty-one. I remember the details of his dying as if it happened yesterday, yet I can’t remember the sound of his voice. How that makes my heart ache.
He was handed his death sentence a year prior, but he kept it to himself; protecting us. That burden he carried for a year before his heart failed him for the last time. We didn’t know this until after he was gone. Some would say that was a selfish act on his part, that if he had told us we could have made that year incredible, but you see we were and still are a family of secrets, a fractured family of secrets.
Was I angry when I found this out? No, I was profoundly saddened by this fact. I thought how frightened he must have been, how brave he had to be, how alone he was in this final journey, waking each morning wondering if this was to be his last.
In the end he fought a valiant fight to stay with us, but even he knew it was not to be. I spoke with him privately the afternoon before he died and he told me he would not be coming home. I didn’t want to believe him. I told him I loved him and he said he loved me. This was our good-bye.
He died the next morning just as the sun was starting to rise. We were all with him, each of us telling him in our own way he could rest, that it was all right for him to go. His going was devastating. The sorrow is still with me as I’m sure it is with my siblings, my mother.
I can remember his face, although I have no pictures of him; his laugh which was a giggle, not a hearty belly laugh, but a giggle. But the actual sound of his voice, the tone, pitch, timber…I can’t recall at all.
I think of him often.
Oh boy did I have a nightmare last night and consequently have been up since 2:45a.
I have the flu, with an on again off again fever and because of this I couldn’t sleep last night. Yeah, I did get the flu shots, both of them, regular and swine. Apparently they didn’t work. I wonder if I can get a refund on that. But anyway, I couldn’t get to sleep last night and didn’t want to sit staring at the television so I decided I would read. My theory being, my eyes would get heavy and I would be lulled into sleep. It’s a reasonable assumption.
I love to read. I love to read everything and anything. I read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, history, children’s books, mysteries, ghost stories, sci-fi, blood, guts and gore stories, newspapers, soup cans, cereal boxes, anything I can get my hands on. My library has titles by Dickens, Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austin, Proust, Camus, Poe, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, T.S. Elliott, Dostoyevsky, Stephen King, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Koontz, Ann Rice before she found Catholicism again, it goes on and on! I have all kinds of books.
So I went to my bookcase and perused the titles and came across a dusty paperback by Stephen King, “Skeleton Crew”. I thought this would be an easy read, collection of short scary stories. I can do this. They were just as I remembered them, real page turners and true to form my eyes got heavy and I fell asleep. All’s well that ends well, right?
Well, one of the stories apparently made its impact on me, again…”The Raft”.
I remember the first time I read this story and it’s because of this story I don’t swim in anything that’s not chlorinated, ergo a pool! My reasoning being if something was going to get me, eat me, tear me to shreds, swallow me whole, I would be able to see it and perhaps save myself. I know it’s sick, but that’s my belief and I strictly adhere to this theory.
So what did I dream about last night that scared the bejesus out of me: A big, black, floating, blob-like scum thing following me through the water, sucking me through the cracks of a wooden raft, on a lake, as my friends stood watching!!! “The Raft” verbatim, in Technicolor no less!
Not only did I not sleep last night, having turned on all the lights, checked under the bed and in the closets, I ended up on the couch with my fat cat for protection watching infomercials on the television until the sun came up!
Thank you Mr. Stephen King.
