Spots before someone else's eyes

A few weeks ago, I attended a funeral for a high school classmate. Beautiful inside and out, she died accidentally. It's a jolt to one's sensibilities and awareness of human fragility.

 

I sat with my classmates as part of a group. It was very cold outside. I had not bleached my graying spotted head the night before, so I wore a woolen hat that my daughter bought for me in a shop in Woodstock, N.Y., for my birthday several years ago when she was in college nearby.

 

A few days later, my husband, who had been wrestling on the computer, rushed downstairs. "This email just came for you!" he said with alarm. The message read something like this, "I was sitting behind you at the funeral and noticed a suspicious dark spot behind your left ear. I'm one of those German-Irish girls who suntanned on the beaches of Broadkill, Lewes and Rehoboth. Now I am paying for my fun with visits to the doctor. You should check this out. Maybe it's one of those aging spots we all get. Best wishes from a classmate. By the way, you were wearing a stocking hat."

 

Jeff rushed me out into the winter sunshine. He could find nothing but a shadow, maybe caused by a crease in my ear. Or it could have been a piece of dark-colored wool hanging off my hippie hat. Or was it a spot of dark paint that was on my finger as I pulled on the hat, since I polished off a painting before I left? I often have paint on my person, unlike most others, since I am probably more girl than woman.

 

Let me explain this. I don't act my age. I stay up half the night painting and now writing. I'm both a night person and a day person. Old people are supposed to take advantage of the Early Bird Special like Jerry Seinfeld's parents. Telemarketers wake me up early in the morning. They must somehow have guessed my age and think that I go to bed at sundown and wake at sunrise.

 

My husband Jeff says I am ageless, not because of the way I wish I looked, but I exude something girlishly youthful. I once read an article called Women or Girls? Women are responsible, meet for lunch to exchange photos of grandbabies, clean house, etc. They exhibit a kind of maturity and steadfastness.

 

Girls, even if they are 73, are not that neat. They care little for the latest granite countertops. They live for the day! They have a kind of youthfulness, and women think they are too irresponsible and carefree. Neither women nor girls are better or prettier than the other. It is not about chronological age; they each have their own attributes.

 

To get back to the "aging spots" comments. I like to think I'm a girl. I have baked in the sun, although I slather myself with sunscreen now. I'm from a hot planet. There used to be a concoction of baby oil and iodine that girls tanned with in the 1960s that was most probably a bad thing. They then splashed on Jean Naté freshener like Brigitte Bardot in San Tropez. She is still probably a girl at 87.  

 

In the 1970s I had this black soap, housed in a faux marble soapbox, by Erno Laszlo, a Hungarian dermatologist to European royalty. It was not something you bought at the local drugstore. You had to go to Benjamin's flagship store in Salisbury, Md., to buy it. The soap was mentioned  in Woody Allen's movie, “Annie Hall.” Woody said that Annie Hall used it as well as Howard Hughes, who carried it with him in a silver soapbox. I used this soap along with a plethora of various face creams I loved. These, perhaps, were not enough to stave off aging spots 40 years later. I'm so myopic now, I can't see them that well, anyhow.

 

I remember once on the old TV sitcom, "All in the Family," Edith told Archie, "I once had to learn how to be a young woman, and now I have to learn how to be an old lady." I think the most beautiful old lady was Georgia O'Keeffe, the famous New Mexico painter. She was not a facelift aficionado, but looked regal and stark against the desert landscape. Gray hair scraped back in a long plait, proudly weathered, age-wizened face, wearing a black dress held together with a sculptural silver buckle, shielding her eyes with fingers laden with turquoise rings.

 

My concerned classmate was right, however. Women and girls should all have our skin checked by a doctor. She had probably seen on TV that a woman noticed a vendor at a ballgame who had spots on his neck, and she alerted him and saved his life. 

 

I'll sit at the massive, womanly dressing table that my mother left me and look in the mirror. She used drugstore Oil of Olay and Avon. But my tabletop has a myriad of perfume bottles and creams that I hope will fight aging spots. Rows of jars filled with creams rich enough for elves to feed upon stand ready to help. Aging spots are not scared off, I am sad to say!