>Hot As A Firecracker

I collect aphorisms.  A really clever one will stick the first time I hear it.  Others take more time but are used just as often.  My sofa is “heavy as a dead minister”.  My son’s friend is ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer”, and “time flies, whether you’re having fun or not”.  I really love “…tight as Dick’s hatband”, but rarely have occasion to use it.  

My Dad has a favorite I’ve only recently embraced.

“Old age isn’t for sissies.”

I just have gotten used to being fifty, which I suppose is a good thing since I’ll be fifty-one next week.  Better late than never.

As an admitted late-bloomer, I find the gravitational pull of advancing years especially cruel.  I only just arrived, and already I’m melting into my shoes…

If I could return, for a full refund, all the moisturizers, and eye creams, and facial serums, and Porecelana I have purchased since the age of thirty-five, I could easily afford the plastic surgery required to erase what time has wrought. 

“Porcelana?”, you ask.  If you’re my age, you remember the commercials featuring a frightening, liver-spotted hand.  You remember thinking you would NEVER buy that stuff.  If you’re younger, you have no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s just as well.  I bought one jar, and for the record ladies, it doesn’t work.  A Q-tip soaked in lemon juice is just as effective and probably much less carcinogenic.

It’s the baggy eyes, and the laugh lines, and the crow’s feet, and the lackluster teeth, and the nebulous chin.  It’s in knowing that laying on your back takes years off your face, until anxiety sets in as you wonder where your breasts are.  It’s that pair of Calvin Klein skinny jeans, the one in the back of your closet, the one with the permanent dust-line where your knee used to be.  It’s all of it…

A couple of days ago, I was summoned by HR.  This is never good.  The man behind the desk is a scant four years younger than me.

“Did you change something with your insurance?”  His chair turned side to side, and he with it.

Struck by the absurdity of his question, I hesitated before reminding him that he was the company insurance administrator.

Unembarrassed, he chuckled. 

“I know!”, his voice, and his arms, became expansive.  “That’s what I said!  But my wife wondered if maybe you were having an important birthday.”  The last two words squeezed out of the right side of his mouth while the left crept upward.

“No…”, I began.  “You know my birth date.  If anything, “big” would have been last year.”, the absurdity continued.

“Yeah, well…”  He stopped spinning, and waving, and grinning, and gripped his desk instead.  “But you are getting older…”  The last word played like scales on a piano.

I’m thinking that’s what did it.  That, and a comment made by a fellow blogger.  Using wise words, she advised against comparing ourselves to young girls.  She suggested, instead, that we embrace reality and try to be the best we can be…now. 

The other day as I approached my car in the breezy way I do when feeling particularly light, I caught my reflection in the driver’s side window.

“Well!  Look at you!”  The words played, as though spoken, inside my head.

I slid into the driver’s seat with a smile. 

I’ve “traveled the world and the seven seas”.

I’ve “been ridden hard and put up wet, more than once.”

Some days I feel “old as Methuselah”, but more often I’m “hot as a firecracker”!

Bring it on!