Last week, a button popped off the waistband of my pants. Thankfully, it wasn’t because of undue strain due to Christmas binging or two years of Covid (over)eating. No, this favorite pair of pants have just started getting old: first the sporty emblem began to rub off, then one of the zippers on a side pocket went kaput, and now, the threads holding my button in place gave up their ghost.
Rather than change out of said pants into another, nearly identical pair for comfort and fifty-something style, I just grabbed a large safety pin and used that to fasten my pants and prevent them from sliding down every time I stood up. And I thought to myself, I guess this is what I’ll be like when I’m old and don’t want to go out and buy new clothes anymore.
But then it hit me: Who am I kidding? Apparently, that time has already arrived.
Actually, I’m not really sure if my swift employment of safety pins is about my age , my laziness to sewing on the button or my aversion to buying new clothes. I think I’ve always been one to resort to a quick fix when I’ve got better things to do. And for the most part, I work from my chair, drink lots of coffee and water, and only get up for hourly bathroom breaks so maybe the pin wasn’t even that necessary. I mean, I could hold my pants up for the ten seconds it takes to traverse the hallway to my urgent destination. Plus, there is the added efficiency to getting the job done: no button in the way. And who am I kidding? Most of the time, sitting in my chair, with my Christmas/Covid indulgences pressing the matter, I often undo the button and relax into a (girlish) Al Bundy posture in front of my laptop.
But there is a certain decency to wearing clothes that are in good repair. Granted, these particular pants have crossed over to the designation of “Home Pants”. They’re too shabby to wear to the grocery store (unless I’m wearing my uber-long winter coat, shhhhhh!) but they will do if I need to answer the door for a signed delivery or a surprise bottle-driver. (I will quickly run to change before I answer the door if I am caught still in my pajama pants because, I need to at least provide the illusion that I’m working, both to myself and to strangers. Covid dress-code, be damned. For me, anyway. You do you.)
Those pants have lasted me a very long time – I’m guessing about seven years. The replacement cost would be about $70 meaning the originals only cost me about $10 per year. By my Starbucks reckoning, that’s only two fancy-schmancy drinks. A year. So yes, I think I do need to go shopping, whether I like it or not.
I don’t know what the kids are doing these days, but when I was going to school, dressing for winter wasn’t about being warm. It was totally about being cool.
For some reason, the wearing of winter coats, hats and – heaven forbid! – BOOTS was absolute malarkey when I was a teenager. Of course, my mother in her eminent sense, never let me leave the house without looking like I was warm enough to stand at the end of the driveway in freezing weather to wait for the school bus. But that didn’t mean I didn’t doff my toque as soon as the bus came into sight. I mean, who wants to spend a single minute in junior high with hat hair? Not Thirteen-Year-Old Me!
The coolest kids (and some of the cutest – I’m not saying the smartest) managed to look like they weren’t freezing their arses off while still wearing their summer jean jackets and hightop runners, hands shoved down into their jeans pockets like they were auditioning for an S. E. Hinton movie. I don’t think I ever managed to achieved Total Cool Status – I wore a scarf and mitts everyday – but I do remember sneaking out of the house in sneakers, not boots. And winding up with wet socks and cold feet – how dumb is that?
I’m a lot older now and – it goes without saying – MUCH COOLER. Or is it warmer? I start wearing my toque in early fall and my boots with the first snowflake. I have even been known to turn on the seat heater in my car on a chilly day in summer because I am OVER with being cold. I do think dressing for the weather isn’t such a faux pas anymore. Then again, I don’t really know what’s in style anymore. It’s too hard to keep up with the Jones, or the teenagers, or whoever rules the fashion roost.
In anticipation of the winter season, my personal shopper (that would be my husband, Rick) picked out a SUPER WARM, EXTRA LONG new coat for me. I have never had such a warm coat before and apparently being warm means spending a little bit of money – this coat is what they call an “investment purchase”. When the temperature dipped recently, I wore it for the first time and realized that it not only takes a bit of money to stay warm, but also time. It took me about five minutes to zip myself in! But when it was on, I was warm as toast. Hot toast, fresh out of the toaster, that is.
Of course, it matters to me that my new coat looks nice as well – I did try on a few the day that I bought it, until we found “The One”. But if it’s minus 20 and I’m feeling toasty, I completely forget what I look like anyways. But I do know that this coat would look ridiculous with running shoes. And that’s a good thing.
I’m re-reading Tuesdays with Morrie right now. I have a few more pages to go but I feel I can write about it because a) I’ve read it before; and b) anybody can figure out how it ends. So no spoilers here: Morrie dies in the end.
Death is not really a subject I shy away from. Just yesterday, I went for coffee with an older friend and we talked about how we both aren’t drinking as much coffee anymore but choosing to really enjoy the ones we have left in our lifetime caffeine budget. I fully embrace the concept that Neil Pasricha explores on his 3 Books podcast: we only live for about 1000 months, so let’s read the best 1000 books out there. And my husband and I religiously watch and read murder mysteries together: right now it’s Criminal Minds at supper and Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Series before bed.
It was on this very day that I’m publishing this blog post 37 years ago that I was first confronted with the complete unreasonableness of death when an 18-year old friend – the most popular girl in school with all of her unlived life ahead of her – was killed in a car accident. Everything stopped. Every moment I had had with her, I tried desperately to remember. Every waking moment was pain and fear at the thought of death cutting short such a vibrant living person. I was acutely aware that It Could Have Been Me.
It’s that imminence that Morrie wanted his audience to whom Mitch Albom was writing to keep in mind. Morrie had learned the lesson early – by nature of just being a very thoughtful person – that money and ambition aren’t the things that matter in the end. Although I chuckle at the Joan Rivers’ line, “People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made,” – I suspect that Morrie is the one who is right and that even Joan knew it, too. Everyone knows that money can buy you a nice car, a big house and a lot of pizza, but in the end, Morrie could no longer drive, he lived in his wheelchair and he could no longer eat solid food. It’s not a great advertisement for a book, but the gold is there, demonstrated firsthand between the author Mitch and his old professor, Morrie, who meet on Tuesdays so Morrie could teach his last class. His thesis? That the real riches in life is relationship, for however long that might be. And Morrie lived that way, long before Life had sent him an eviction notice.
Don’t wait till you’re old to stop caring about the things that don’t matter and to start caring about the things that do.
At the end of Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, the author lists a number of things that are “saving her life right now” – intuitive, instrumental and illuminating things that are life-giving in organic and maybe unorthodox ways – a little different to what she conventionally taught from the pulpit for years as an Episcopalian minister. Things like: teaching at a college, living in relationship with creation, and encountering God in other people.
At the end of every one of her podcasts, Jen Hatmaker borrows this same question to ask her guests – What is saving your life right now? – and the answers are not usually spiritual or abstract. More often what is saving someone’s life right now are ordinary things like reading a poem a day, eating ripe in-season strawberries or watching the latest Brian Regan special on Netflix.
I thought about this last night when I donned my eye mask before going to sleep. It’s usually still light outside when we hit the hay in this house and all the sleep-gurus strongly suggest that when it comes to sleeping better, darkness is your friend. I’m not that great of a sleeper these days – at least not during the second half of the night when my water habit wakes me up. It took me awhile to get used to it, but I think my eye mask is saving my life right now, helping me to get back to sleep a little quicker than usual.
But then, when I wake up in the morning, coffee is saving my life right now. Well, really, coffee has been saving my life for a long time, since I starting making cups of milky instant Nescafe to help me study for final exams in grade twelve. However, I sometimes get a little overzealous in my coffee habit and it becomes more of a havoc-maker than a life-saver. A visit to a doctor a few months ago instigated a stint on a very strict hypoallergenic diet to identify any foods which were causing my post-menopausal body more grief than they were worth. Happily – and maybe the reason I was able to sign on to such austerity – was that I could still drink my beloved coffee. But only two cups a day. It turned out to be such a good thing, because I’ve returned to the delight of really relishing those two cups, so much more so than the 4 or 5 I was glugging down.
Walking in the morning is saving my life right now. I love walking year-round but in the summer, there’s nothing so wonderful as being able to walk out the door in the early morning, knowing I’ll be greeted in sound and scene by all the friendly flora and fauna that love the early mornings, too. (Of course, there are some enemies as well: swooping gulls and rumors of bears in the park – but I’ve learned to avoid their usual hangouts.) And during our record-breaking “heat-snap” last week, morning was the only time that a long walk was tolerable.
Intermittent fasting is saving my life right now. Or I.F. to those in the club. For those of you not yet inducted, it simply means waiting a little longer than usual before you eat your first meal of the day. For me that is anywhere from 10 to noon for a total of 14 to 16 hours without food. (I do get to have my first cup of coffee because I drink it black during this window.) It cuts down my calorie intake for the day a little, which is good since Mother Nature decided that older women need to burn less. This doesn’t help when you’re used to eating three squares a day. Plus snacks. Plus dessert. Plus plus. I.F. has given me some reins to pull on the horse I call my appetite and by the time I do eat “break-fast”, I feel hungry and a good-emptiness in my tummy.
And, of course, reading (as always) is saving my life right now, but more specifically: reading other writer’s journals. So far I’ve read May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude and I’m over halfway through Madeleine L’Engle’s four-book Crosswicks Journals. Both women were writing from “about my age” in these journals, contending with everything from a raccoon who regularly breaks into the house every night (Sarton) to a mother’s last visit and then death at Crosswicks (L’Engle). And all the while, they were trying to keep up with the business of writing and managing a household, while also not getting as much sleep as they would have liked because of raucous raccoons and aged mothers. It’s a good reminder of the quote that “everyone is fighting a hard battle.” But in the midst of the battles are loveable grandchildren and velvety donkeys, burgeoning gardens and restful walks to the stream: things that were saving their lives right then.
It’s also a good reminder that it’s the little things that really make that difference. What’s saving your life right now?
Sometime last year, I bought myself a Fitbit. My motivation was mostly to keep myself honest about how much movement I was engaging in each day, especially since most of my work has me sitting at my desk and not moving my feet except to readjust them on my foot cushion. I downloaded the Fitbit app to my iPhone and fiddled around with it a little, but I did not change the default suggestion to try and meet the goal of 10,000 steps each day.
Guess what I found out? It’s kinda hard to get 10,000 steps every single day. Unless you’re a waitress or dog walker or a construction worker or elementary school teacher. But for me, meeting this goal is a decision I need to make very consciously. Even one turn around my beloved pond racks up only about 1000 steps. Maybe I need to take smaller strides?
Walking is kind of non-negotiable, though, isn’t it? It’s something that nearly everyone can do, the low-tide mark of basic movement and fitness. My denturist husband sees a number of older patients and whenever he meets someone who is still strong and spry after all their years, he casually interviews them: How do you stay so healthy? What’s your secret? And inevitably they report back to him that theywalk. They are literally a ambling advertisement for good health.
So what’s the magic of 10,000? That number roughly equals 4 miles and the daily equivalent of meeting that can help you lose weight or at least maintain the status quo (as long as you’re not walking to the Ice Cream and Beer Store). And it can help regulate your blood pressure and blood sugar. All really good things.
So, every day I need to walk at least 10,000 steps and a couple times of week I also need to add in some strength training – because, hello? we lose muscle mass every second over 50. But 10,000 steps at one shot – for me – takes somewhere around 60 to 90 minutes. I don’t always have that kind of time.
Or do I? The alternative is…what, exactly? To spend more time watching television or scrolling through Instagram or reading – all of which are tempting in their own insipid way. After all, a body at rest tends to stay that way – it’s a Newtonian Law. If I don’t make the conscious decision every day to move then I’m making the opposite to stay on my butt. It’s not like I have to chase little people like I did when I was a young mama – and when it was probably harder to try limit myself to only 10,000 steps a day.
Of course, much of my sitting time is Working Time. But taking a time out for a walk – even around the house for a couple minutes as my Fitbit reminds me at 10 minutes to every hour – can be so rejuvenating. Just like when I was a young mama and Rick had to get me Out of the House and Away from the Kids in order to refocus, a step outside the house can be transforming. In other words, a hour a day is a small investment in my future.
The whole premise of this blog when I started it two years ago(-ish) was that – even though I had crested the hill and had moved past the “50” milestone – I wanted to assert that I am not done yet. Though my tagline is that this is a chronicle of a journey through a century, I don’t really know when I got to the apex of my personal journey or if 50 is that magical number. If stats have anything to do with it, chances are it’s more like it happened in my forties. But if I follow in the footsteps of my 100+ grandmother and her father, then I’m at the top of that mountain right now.
All this preamble is to say: I think about aging a lot. Am I doing it well? Are my expectations of my body, my brain, my energy realistic? What can I do better? And to what do I need to say, “Fugget about it!” ?
It’s not like all of this messaging is coming from within, either. If I flip through any magazine targeting women or sit through the commercials on television, I find that I am regularly assaulted with admonitions to, “Look younger! Feel younger! BE YOUNGER!” My search through Instagram for #fabulousafterfifty and the like, relentlessly turns up accounts of women who focus on their looks, their clothes and – especially – their not-looking-fifty-ish. Sigh.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Body positivity is a good thing, but while the actually-younger-peoples have IG accounts that celebrate all sizes and shapes, I have yet to find an older woman who’s flaunting her rolls and her wrinkles. I’m sure they’re out there, it’s just harder to find. And why do I even care? At this point in my life, you would think that I had built up some sort of resilience to this emphasis on the preferred physical expression of a person. But, instead, years of being a girl, a woman, a human being have stockpiled a garbage dump of uncertainty, reticence and even surrender to the messaging. After all, I’m still coloring my hair and trying not to dress “older” than I am. And I still like to hear compliments on my looks or expressions of “You don’t look like you’re fifty(three)!” (Although, admittedly, I haven’t heard that for awhile.)
It’s into this milieu that Mary Pipher’s book Women Rowing Northcomes like a drink of fresh water. Pipher, a therapist and writer who previously made her mark with Reviving Ophelia, a book that helped the adults navigate the landscape of adolescent girls, has turned her attention to women in the last third of life. I fall in the first third of that third, but Women Rowing North, like her title suggests, reads like a traveler’s guidebook, letting you know what to expect and how to make the most of your journey. And unlike my searches on Instagram, Pipher includes the wide swathe of women who fall in this age bracket, addressing different socioeconomic and health realities for the women she case studies throughout. Although reviews on Goodreads suggest it may be a bit premature for the 50-something to “enjoy” this book, older women say that they wish they’d read it sooner. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing what to (maybe) expect and wishing you knew then what you know now.
What I love about Pipher is that she doesn’t see aging as a problem that needs to be solved, ignored or reversed with the usual admonitions of exercise, healthy food and a miracle wrinkle cream – although she doesn’t say that such balance isn’t important either. Mostly, Pipher – in the time-honored tradition of therapists – focuses on attitude, which she says in her introduction, “…isn’t everything, but it is almost everything.” Which means that it’s within all of our grasps to do better and for each of us to decide exactly what that “better” is.
Age always has been a relative thing. Ten is young to twelve, fifteen is ridiculous to twenty, the thirty-somethings are just babies to forty-somethings and my fifty-ISH is a cakewalk to the octogenarian set. But that doesn’t change how I feel about it. And some days, I just feel kind of like a T-Rex: my skin is scaly, I can’t reach all my itches and I’m gonna be extinct – soon.
Well, not really. But, sort of. The tagline of my blog is The Journey of a Century because of my declaration at age fifty that I was only “halfway there”. But like Bon Jovi’s subsequent lyric, some days more than others I am acutely aware that I am “livin’ on a prayer.”
Let’s talk about my dinosaur skin to start. I seem to be itchy all the time now. I remember In My Youth being puzzled about television commercials featuring senior citizens finding great relief by using a certain anti-itching cream. I understand what that’s all about now. And while many trips to the dermatologist seems to be paying off some for my rosacea (an over-fifty affliction with no rhyme or reason), I have come to the realization that no amount of miracle serum is going to get my face back to its previous Photoshop evenness of coloring. And conversely, no amount of aging seems to be able to put any distance between me and “adult acne”. Let’s not forget to mention undereye circles and (gasp!) WRINKLES. My first trip to the bathroom of the day can be quite unnerving.
Well, that’s not true. The FIRST visit to the bathroom of each day is usually done under cover of night because my over-fifty bladder rarely allows me an unbroken night of slumber. Some nights, I need to stumble there more than once and it doesn’t seem to matter how little liquid I consumed the night before. The really weird thing about going to the bathroom when you are over the proverbial hill: if you sit on the toilet long enough, you can pee twice. And by long enough, I mean a minute.
There are other indications that I’m not the spry bunny I once was: my knees refuse to help me up off the floor – I need the help of a nearby counter to pull me up. Or I just go into a reverse down dog to get back on my feet. Either way, I am thankful for strong arms. And my neck – I am resigned to it never working the way it used to, back when I could shoulder check and not give myself a headache and/or a neck cramp.
But I’m not Complaining. I’m just…Noticing. Out loud.
Maybe what I really want is for someone to tell me that this is all normal(ish), that I’m hitting all the benchmarks at the appropriate times, that I’m above the fiftieth percentile. Because it’s alarming to still feel young in my heart and have the rest of my body mutiny in such a way that tells me otherwise. Or to look at old(ish) photos of myself and then be confused when I look in the mirror and think: umm, that’s not what I remember.
In the spirit of camaraderie, or maybe commiseration, I recently took to the Interwebs to find out how other fifty-somethings were dealing with This Whole Thing. Plug in the hashtags OverFifty or FiftyPlus or SexyAndSilver and you get all the same thing: a bunch of unreasonably good-looking people for their age telling you that It’s All Good, the getting older thing.
Well, I mean really, who’s gonna get anywhere on Instagram advertising bad knees and double chins?
The thing is though…I actually like getting older. Except for the whole imminent death thing, accruing miles (or kilometers) on the human odometer does have its perks. I’m more mellow now, even when I look in the mirror or step on the scale, than I was in my thirties and forties, because like an (actually dying) friend of Anne Lamott once quipped when Anne was worried that a certain dress made her look fat: Honey, you just don’t have that kind of time. I can answer more questions on Jeopardy now- maybe because I’ve lived through more categories. I have more time to go for long walks and write stories and cook healthy-ish meals. I break a lot more rules in writing than I did in English class and I just don’t careanymore. Ish.
I can’t change the marching on of time, so I might as well learn to like the getting older part. The itches – well, maybe I need to get some of that special lotion reserved for the SexySilverSet. Or a backscratcher. I’ll probably get a discount. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I fell down in the shower last week. I didn’t break any bones and I sustained no head injuries. But I did get a nasty welt down my back where I landed hard against the rail that the shower door slides into. And my pride wasdefinitely bruised.
All in all, I was lucky. When I Googled “falls in the bathroom”, the search engine responded with this ominous headline: Bathrooms Can Be the Most Dangerous Place in the House. Then I asked: Okay, So Who Died in the Bathroom?
Well, for starters, we all know that’s where The King, Elvis, met his maker. So did actress Judy Garland and author Evelyn Waugh. And several royal personages over the centuries also had their demise on the toilet, including an ancient Chinese ruler Duke Jing of Jin who fell into the toilet pit and drowned.
What a way to go.
But I digress. None of those people died from falling – well except for Duke Jin – but that wasn’t in the shower. Slipping in the shower is the second most dangerous activity that causes injury in the bathroom. The first: BATHING. Bathing, I guess, is dangerous. (Especially for Duke Jing who took a bath in…well, never mind.)
But yeah. I guess it all comes of having to be Too Clean. Bathing can be dangerous and so can cleaning the shower because all that soapy stuff also makes things dang slippery. That’s what I was doing. I was cleaning the shower and shortly after I polished off all the goo that built up on the floor of our shower, I stepped inside to finish rinsing the doors and Whoops!
I just need to be more careful. I’m not getting any senior’s discounts just yet, but it’s never too early to start practicing Safe Stepping. With this resolution comes the evaluation of all my activities. What about walking – is that safe? That all depends on the terrain. If you move off the beaten path around here, you could very well break an ankle tripping into a gopher hole. And it depends on the season: winter lends its own hazards of snow and ice and frozen dog poop. That stuff could kill you.
So, does being safe also mean I shouldn’t go hiking or skating or skiing in the winter anymore? I’m not sure I care anymore about skiing anyways – the last time I tried, I cried all the way down the mountain, moving at the at the speed of a glacier as I tried to relive my old daredevil self of ten years prior. But at least I didn’t get hurt.
Which one is it going to be: Safe or Sorry? To some degree, always being safe and calculated is a little boring. And to be daring and spontaneous, the opposite of boring, could lead to deadly falls into toilet pits, so to speak.
There is a measure of sorry to being safe, isn’t there? I still want to be my old self and do all the things I used to. But my body can’t keep up in quite the same way. On days that I work-out hard or go for a big walk, I need to convince my knees that it’s okay to do the standing-up thing. Fifty-three is not old, but it’s not twenty-three, either. After I fell last week, it took me a good minute or two before I could figure out how to stand up again. For one, I didn’t want to fall again. And two, my body just didn’t want to move that fast. I lay there doing inventory on where I hurt and how serious it felt and then made a plan for how to get up.
So, The Plan is now to quit cleaning the shower. Or maybe just to quit showering. Neither of those options can be as bad as falling into a toilet pit, right?
When I was a wee young lass, a show that was regularly on one of the two channels that we got through our television aerial (this is pre-WIFI and pre-cable and pre-satellite dish, all you babies out there) was Gunsmoke. Set in Dodge City, Kansas during the settlement of the American West, Gunsmoke was a western drama series that had been around forever. I remember no real plot lines, but I do remember Marshall Matt Dillon and his deputy Festus and, for some strange reason, the sound of their voices: the deep tenor of Marshall Dillon and the squeaky drawl of Festus.
Oh and, of course, I remember Miss Kitty.
In my memory much of the action took place in the local saloon, where Miss Kitty served up refreshments and, ahem, “entertained” the patrons. I had been to Edmonton’s Klondike Days in the seventies: girls that dressed like Miss Kitty were good can-can dancers and they looked mighty fine in a bustle. End of story. I was five.
I was, however, in my five-year-old cognizance, aware of the urst (unresolved sexual tension) that existed between Marshall Dillon and Kitty. Except it wasn’t called that back then – all I really remember is that they seemed to like each other, but they never kissed on screen. Wikipedia says that “Kitty is just someone Matt has to visit every once in a while”.
Like every other self-respecting five-year-old girl, I just saw the romance in it. I adored Miss Kitty for the television-star that she was: glamorous and feminine and entrepreneurial. (Hey! She was part-owner of the saloon!) But business owner aside, I saw Miss Kitty as a girl. And when I was five, in my pre-women’s-liberation mindset, there were just certain things that you did not do to girls.
Namely, shoot them. It would seem that in the course of a long-running television series that featured gunslingers in the American West that every single cast member had to get shot at least once. But I don’t think anyone important ever died. I’m sure back then, as they do now, they just write in some superfluous character (for one show and one show only!) that will take the fatal bullet that saves the rest of the top billing cast. (“Who is that guy? Oh, wait, they’re gonna go ambush the Mob in an abandoned factory. Never mind.”)
The thing was, though, I didn’t know about movie magic when I was five. I thought that if someone got shot on the show, they really got shot. Like, with a real gun and real bullets. Doctors were standing by to perform life-saving surgery and it usually worked. This was just a part of the gig, apparently, and that was why actors got paid the big bucks.
And, apparently, one day Miss Kitty drew the short straw.
But she survived! Whew!
Okay, I’m older (than five) now and I know that this is not how it works (anymore. I mean, maybe it did work like that back then?) I did have some nightmares. I mean, they shot Miss Kitty, ergo NO ONE is safe.
I must have got over it at some point. Blood and guts didn’t bother me – maybe that’s why I opted for a stint (one year and one year only!) in nursing school. I also didn’t mind needles – my whole class practiced saline hip shots on me – less fun than Jell-O shots, but I was a martyr for the cause.
Fast forward to now: I still don’t mind needles (go donate blood, y’all) but I am starting to lose my stomach for shoot-em-up shows that pass for entertainment. The other night Rick and I unknowingly picked out such a flick for a Sunday evening. I was interested in the plot so we watched till the end, but seriously? These people were enjoying killing each other. Ain’t no doctor that could fix that, if it was real.
I’m still a little naive, like five-year-old Bonnie, but I’m also adamant in believing that Real People Out There are Mostly Nice. Real People don’t shoot girls OR boys for fun.
Maybe what I need to do is get back to the sweet and romantic stories. Maybe that’s why some people that I love as they get older have fallen in love with those predictable-and-maybe-a-little-badly-acted Hallmark movies that I make fun of. Maybe this is my future. Maybe this is what getting older is about: deciding what nonsense I’m gonna put up with.
I’m gonna vote for Nice, for Kind, for Sweet, even for a little Naive. I know what Miss Kitty’s profession was now, but like all good stories, Gunsmoke knew that they didn’t have to tell you everything in order to spin a good yarn. And they didn’t shoot everyone in the same episode, so there’s that, too.
And I mean, let’s be real: that would have been too stressful for the surgeon on call.
Just in time for spring and peek-a-boo sandals, my toenails are about to fall off.
Notall of them. Just two. And those would be the ones on my “pointer toes” – the abnormally tall next-to-big-toes. You know, the weird looking toes. Come to think of it, toes in general are weird looking. They’re all different from each other, thoughtfully fashioned to each have their own piggy personality.
So back to my imminent toenail departure. At the very beginning of COVID-19, just before that last memorable snowstorm swooped in, we went for our obligatory daily walk. (And by daily, I mean, four times a week if we’re not too lazy or…ahem, busy.) It was a beautiful March Sunday afternoon and we took the long way around town. We were probably a couple of miles in before I started to question the error of my footwear choice. The garage was still in a state of disarray from moving and rather than upend that Jenga tower, I had opted for a crappy pair of convenient old loafers with which to plow through the puddles.
Cue the blisters and the repeated battering of my extra-long toes. The result a couple of days later, besides the impressive sore-toe-ness, was that my two toenails had turned a royal shade of purple. And now a month later, they are loosening and threatening their exodus. Jeez.
I have heard about marathon runners losing toenails after their big race and for some reason I thought that they just peeled off along with their socks immediately after they had crossed the finish line. Duh. This makes more sense: they hurt like the dickens and they color up pretty and a month later, they take their leave.
So basically, I’m in the same boat as a marathon runner. Except I’m about 22 miles short. And I didn’t run.
I am the best of walkers, sometimes I’m even a tremendous hiker. I love pumping up and down the hills in the Provincial Park out my back door – at a reasonable pace. But running – I suck at running. I have no gumption for it at all.
Nowadays, I blame my knees, having inherited my mother’s arthritic joints. However, my mom never let a creaky knee or elbow keep her from jogging to the chicken coop or running up from the basement with a quart jar of pickles tucked under her arm, like a Heisman winner. And so, I take a page from her book and insist I will not give in either. I will jog a little on the treadmill now and then. I will do squats and lunges and take this kind of medicine to keep me strong and limber (because I don’t have chickens and I don’t make pickles.)
We’ve all heard of people who lace up and discover a whole new kind of freedom when they start to run. (Watch Brittany Runs a Marathon for a great example of this.) I listen to (and watch) these stories with envy. Because that has never been me.
Way back when I was in grade nine, I had some fancy ideas about becoming a runner. Running would keep me fit and maybe slim me down, but best of all, I could call myself: A Runner. It went totally against my nerdy, bookish persona and just like every junior-high-schooler, I desperately wanted to be something different from Who I Was. And so, when the Annual-All-Schools-in-the-County-Track-and-Field Day came along, I signed up. For the Long-Distance Event. (Oy-yoy-yoy. I’m pretty sure that’s what was in the thought bubble above my Mom’s head when I confessed this to her.)
Let me be clear: I went to a very small school. There were about fifteen of us in grade nine. And only one other girl from my school had signed up for my Event. Additionally, there was no training – not in gym class, not after school, not even a hint of a suggestion that: perhaps to avoid humiliation, one should practice a little for this Event.
Well, not that I remember.
I took it upon myself one lovely day in May to lace up my knock-off Converse runners (ahem: NOT a RUNNING shoe) and try running around my town. And if you know how big Derwent is, that’s not really saying that much. But I got about a block away from home and I was winded. Whew! I decided that that was probably good enough for one day and I walked back home. With good intentions, I thought I would go out the next day and “train” some more.
Well. Time flies when you’re in high school and I woke up one day and Surprise! It was Track and Field Day. Thankfully, my mom had sewed me a cute outfit, so I wasn’t going to look like a complete idiot. And I was sure that on that day, I would somehow be able to complete the race by sheer fortitude, a quality that I had never displayed in gym class before.
When the time came for my Event, I lined up with all the other two entrants in my race. The fake gun went off and I ran. The other girl from my school was pretty much in the same boat as me and when we saw our competition pull ahead, we unanimously decided not to deprive her of victory. So, about a block in, we both dropped out.
This is not the end of the story. Apparently, I did moderately better than my home-town compadre and for this mere effort – like the milliseconds between Olympian medalists – I was awarded a Second-Place Blue Ribbon.
Pretty great, huh? (And this was before participation medals.)
There is no moral in this story – well, not one that I want to explore, anyways. There are a couple of points however: I never was a runner and unless I get me some new knees – AND SOME FORTITUDE – I never will be one.
And: I may not be a runner, but I AM a (second-place) winner. I have the blue ribbon to prove it.
