I've Got Me Under My Skin

My first Grown Adult Epiphany happened at age 18 in the übergigantic Metrocenter Mall in Phoenix.  I loved that place.  It was a 45-minute trip from Tempe and, though my VW could not resist blowing tires on the freeway, I made that drive most days after class - just to stand in the middle of more people than resided in the whole state of Wyoming.

Plus, it had an indoor ice skating rink.

The epiphany came to me courtesy of Brenda, another Manzanita Hall dorm dweller who accompanied me occasionally.  She was from Nebraska, so she shared the thrill of riding those escalators and staring at the cart that sold pretzels as big as our heads.

As we wandered by a shop offering free ear piercing with the purchase of really pointy earrings, I stopped suddenly and decided to do it.

Brenda was aghast.  "But ... your ears are already pierced!"

I knew this information.  I had kind of pierced them myself in sixth grade with "self-piercers."  Simple, right?  Position sharp metal hoops on each lobe and give a little squeeze every day for several weeks until they had no choice, but to pop through.  Except that I faked it and pretended to push.  Hey, those things hurt!

Mom's self-piercers worked like a dream, popping through in the first week.  But she'd already lived through more than one real labor and delivery scenario, so what's the big deal about nails in your ear lobes?  (No irony is lost on the fact that, years later, I also pretended to push during my only real labor and delivery scenario when I had Abi.  The nurse finally put a gun to my head.)

When my sixth-grade ears were FULLY infected, the wires came out so a professional with an earring cannon could finish the job.  In our little town, this unfortunately turned out to be the same doctor who delivered babies, removed gallbladders, and pronounced people dead at the Old Folk's Home.  I mean, nothing noteworthy ever got by this guy.

"I know that, Brenda," I offered nonchalantly, "I pierced them myself."

The look on her face gave me all the impetus I needed for the next line.

"I just think it's high time I got another set of studs."  I hoped my eyebrows hopping up and down might detract from the sweat dripping off my palms onto the shiny tile floor.

Brenda almost started to cry.  "But ... just think," she whined, "how will it look if you're ever a GRANDMOTHER?!"

Cue the epiphany.  It occurred, as epiphanies often do, with a *gasp*.  (I know, I know, there is a lot of *gasping* in this life.  Someday I'll write The Shocking History of the *Gasp*.)

"Brenda!" I shrieked *gaspily*, "Life is not a contest!  Exactly zero prizes are awarded for dying with intact ear skin!  If my grandchildren ever think they'd love me just a little more if I had shunned a second set of ear holes back in 1976, then I have let the whole human race down on several very important levels!"

I sprinted in to get the pointy earrings.

Brenda agreed with the high points of my rant; however, she did not get anything pierced that day.  But she may have had her own epiphany, because I overheard her tell one of the anorexic girls that showed up in the TV room on our floor every day at 2:00 pm to watch Days of Our Lives, "No, it's really good to have a little skin resting on your lap when you sit down - otherwise, you'll tear when you stand up."

Eighteen years is apparently plenty of time for some of us to get this whole thing figured out.

Olderlies know how easily soft skin yields to piercing, and it is our life's mission to rein in just enough danger to keep the independent Youngerlies alive.  (Sample bit of gentle guidance from a mom who works in ICU: "You are right that it's your decision, Sweetie, but you'll get your tongue pierced over my dead, four-holes-in-the-ears body!")  (Translation:  "Many infections above the neck head straight for the brain.")

I took care of enough trauma patients to know that even the most private piercings will out themselves on x-ray, making the ER a perfect place for 'real life' checks.  Eleven earrings in one ear?  Okay.  Hoops in both nipples joined by a chain?  No biggie.  Something sharp stuck through a soft spot anywhere else?  Those things are not important in a trauma bay.  When the radiologist determines that sharp thing was there before the gunshot or knife piercings started, he'll move on to the next image.

The reason behind the piercing is more important than the placement of said decoration.  I do not personally know many Olderlies getting pierced (their money is on the real skin changers, like face lifts), so life-theory-wise, we're looking at more evidence of youthful rebellion.

When my daughter Abi wanted her belly button pierced she did not need my permission, but I went with her anyway.  Pretending to be totally on board gave me the chance to check out the sterilization procedures at Freaks on Broadway Tattoo Parlor before they touched her.  (I took pictures to prove to myself I'd been there in case I accidentally tried suing later on.)

But the part of that day that has stayed with me was when a young customer with wooden bobbins the size of soup cans through her ear lobes said, "Wow.  Cool.  If my mom had come with me the first time I probably wouldn't have all of this." Then she revealed several interesting metal constellations between her forehead and shoulder blades.

I do not believe accompanying Youngerlies is as important as listening to their reasons for wanting the eyebrow dumbbell, or the tiny nostril star, or the new set of horns somehow imbedded in their skull.

Maybe if they explain their rationale out loud to one person who would gladly take a bullet for them, those new horns might seem like something that can wait.

(Not crazy about the names the next generation has for us?  Get over it, you Successful Ager, you!  Next week we'll use our ancient imaginations to figure out what we're supposed to call them back.)

Fluffy Rainbows from the Neck Up

The easiest way to talk smack about somebody is to make fun of their hair.  Yes, we often go on to deplore their choice of leg shape, along with their kid's choice of overbite, but our hair is apparently something the rest of us have completely under control.

We don't.

When we were kids, Mom constantly wrapped our strands of stick-straight hair around her fingers in an attempt to conjure up curls.  Luckily (for her), shredded wheat breaks at some point - even the really fat strands - so she never lost even one digit due to strangulation.

We became accustomed on Saturday nights to my father's gasps whenever the Beatles, with their 'little girl hairdos,' came on The Ed Sullivan Show.  Mom responded by coaxing our shredded wheat into pin curls, apparently believing we'd be stunners on the linoleum catwalk at church the next morning.

We weren't.

We woke up like voodoo dolls with half of the bobby pins scattered in our beds, and Mom removed the other half on the way into town while steering the red station wagon with one knee.  (The ranchers in our congregation chose pews behind ours in order to contemplate more avant garde ways of stacking straw bales for their cows.)

But there was still hope for America's future because the little-girl-boys from England were always introduced by a man whose hairstyle matched that of all sane men.  My grandpa, Lew.  My grandpa, Rex.  Harry S. Truman.  That guy who played the vampire grandpa on The Munsters.

Nobody criticized the Beatles' pointy shoes - obviously meant to scoop a million American girls clear across the pond, leaving a million heartbroken, Munster-haired boys littering our own shores.

THAT HAIR!  ALMOST DOWN TO THEIR COLLARS!

Do teenagers welcome a challenge?  Yes.  Especially when adults hate their hair.  (Watch this!  Hair down to my shoulders...down to my waist...down to whatever's next!)

After years of permed, ironed, lemon-juiced, dreadlocked, I-hate-my-curfew arguments, purple hair became more than inevitable.  It became necessary for the very survival of the teen species.

If purple hair had happened in the 70s, I would have been first in line.  That is, if I'd been disowned just before that, so I may have been, like 10th or 12th - but it just makes sense.

Soon after purple hair was invented, outraged voices shot out of the crowd demanding death to purple hair. But the shouters were my age - which means they had already been exposed to their own personal grandmothers' purple hair!

When I called them on this fact, they claimed their grandmothers used 'a rinse.'

"And," I said, "it turned their hair purple."

Blue and purple rinses on pure white hair are kind of fun, but I'm not sure of their purpose - except maybe to give a different color to the head.  Call me loopy.  Maybe some of that shredded wheat grew into my brain and took over the 'perception' dials behind my eyes.

I'm caught at an age where purple won't work without appearing that I'm trying to be younger (dye) or older (rinse, which in all actuality might cause graying stalks of dried wheat to disappear completely).  So I'm doing nothing and using the au naturale copout along the way.

"I'm letting nature streak my hair," I say when somebody tells me it looks like a small nest of gray worms has claimed the crown of my head.  (My Jewish friends never mention it.)

I worked with an ICU nurse who used to say, "Life is too short NOT to color your hair!"  Then she got breast cancer and all her hair fell out.  I was so confused.  She's fine now, and her hair is back.  But she refuses dye it, and it is still more gorgeous than mine.  I am still so confused.

Today's adults (lookin' at you, almost everybody) need to stop criticizing all kinds of things about teenagers - the very least of which is their hair.  We need to find more fascination in their choices and less condemnation.

Example:  "Wow.  I am amazed by that incredibly complicated design you've shaved right down to your scalp!"

Translation:  "Thank you for not setting fire to this park.  It'll grow out."

Example:  "Sheesh.  Did it hurt when those spikes were attached at the roots in order to give your skull that Forbidden Garden appearance?"

Translation:  "Your new baby daughter is adorable.  I love the way you smile at her.  It'll grow out."

Easy peasy, once you get the hang of it.  When unexpectedly faced with what can only be described as "Hair Intended to Shock," go with it.  Plaster a huge smile on your face and you can go either way.  Full Dumbstruck is what they're hoping for, so it can't hurt to remain mute, but you also have the option to notice what they are not doing wrong (i.e. robbing a business - if, indeed, a heist is not underway), or what they are doing right (i.e. hosing out cages at the Animal Rescue Palace).

Start with any combination of these words:  Wow...  What a...  That is so...  I just love... (and so on).  It will get easier with practice.  If said something-haired person shoots back with an ultra-derogatory remark, it is only because of the last 300 awful things they've heard before your nice one.

They'll think about your nice one later.

It may be much later; in fact, it may not be until the year 2050 when they encounter a group of teenage boys with little-girl hair almost down to their collars, resulting in the most insulting thing to anyone's eyes ever witnessed in the history of this whole, entire planet!

But maybe the 17-year-old person you were nice to in 2014 will find a way to smile at the little-girl-boys in 2050 and say, "Wow...  What a...song.  That is so...peppy.  I just love...your blinding smiles."

Lookin' at you, globe.

(Our ancestors had the right idea.  Earrings won't stay on?  Drill them into your ears.  Next time we'll talk about how the Youngerlies took this idea and ran completely away with it!)

Save it for the Season Finale

An entire movie industry sprang up around the concept of the death-bed confession.  I believe this phenomenon was at its peak when I was about nine, but I'm sure we've all seen at least one variation on a thread that has woven its way into the closing scenes of grand Epic Adventures, sit-com season-enders, and every single episode of every single soap opera ever made.

It goes something like this:  The ancient, dying person sits up suddenly to a chorus of, "Dad!  Dad!  Don't sit up, you're dying!"  But Dad simply must confess that he has hated the living room drapes since the moment "those zig-zaggity-striped abominations" went up five decades earlier.  He flops back down on the pillow and dies.

The children *gasp* in unison.

Naturally, Dad is forgiven for lying all those years about his wife's wretched taste in window dressings.  He's dead.  But the wife must pay for ruining his exit, and so the children tear those drapes into a zillion ziggity pieces to use as handkerchiefs for what will be a longer-than-usual mourning period, thanks to this new information.

Scenes are often very touching (like when that dying angel-saint, Melanie, somehow forgave that witch, Scarlett, for making googly eyes at her husband, even though his name was Ashley).  Other scenes are beyond shocking (dying people at the end of soap opera episodes sit up in caskets at their own funerals to make announcements).  (Sometimes twice.)

Thanks to celebrity trailblazers, we know we can say whatever we want on our way out, which guarantees that this 'special' episode in our lives is the best place to tell those stories that nobody else on the planet wants to hear.

Can't decide which story is the most 'special' offering in your collection?  Just choose one.  They're all the same anyway, and here's why:  THEY'RE ABOUT THE PAST.

It's time to rewrite the death-bed scene.  Yes, we can still pinch our cheeks to attain that feverish aura and arrange our hair just so on the pillow, but why not turn the spotlight around and make the spectators glad they came?  Ask when her baby is due, whether you can please have his shrimp scampi recipe, and find out if they like the living room drapes.

When I was little, I had those allergies that make grown-ups recoil in horror.  Even when I wasn't sneezing or trying to breathe - everyone grimaced because 'Puffs with Aloe' had not yet been invented, so the skin between my nose and mouth was perpetually aflame.

I was allergic to everything that bloomed during Wyoming's all-at-once growing season, and by first grade I was up to four allergy injections per week.  One in each arm on Tuesday, and one in each arm on Friday.

I memorized the days of the week.

I also became one of those rats in the famous 'learned helplessness' experiments, which meant if I had accidentally fallen into a bucket of mop water at the clinic, I would have just gone ahead and drowned.

My most vivid memories from 'shot days' include the nurse's words as she shuffled slowly toward me from the cabinet where glass cookie jars sat inexplicably crammed with tongue depressors.  She strained under the weight of both syringes (carrying one on each hip at my eye-level), until the 15-inch needles would reach my skinny deltoids.  On approach, she cheerfully fired off a variation on one of these questions (depending on the time of year):

"How is school?" or "What did you get for Christmas?"

I memorized seasons that way and became proficient at guessing individual months, thanks to her creative rearrangement of key words:  "When is your last day of school?"  "How do you like your new teacher?"  "What are you asking Santa for this year?"  And once in a while, she'd lob a real soft one with, "Do you have any candy left in your Easter basket?" or "What are you going to be for Halloween?"

So, even though I knew the day and month every time she opened her mouth, I quickly garnered that she never listened to my answer.  ("I'm planning be a serial killer of nurses when I grow up!")  And a follow-up question?  Did not happen.  She just stuck me with the needles and went to find my mom.

Sometimes a different nurse was there and I learned the only thing worse than not being heard was listening to somebody's stories about wishing she could have worn real shoes to school, or how her parents never let her dress up like a saloon girl, or the time her brother shot a real rabbit and stuck it in a basket of grass and told her it was You-Know-Who....

It's hard to be a six-year-old therapist for a deeply wounded person who's about to jab needles completely through the alleged fattiest parts of your arms.

Let's do something different.  Let's stop beginning each of our stories with, "I've probably already told you this, but ...," even if that technique does help separate those who love us from those who send Christmas cards with fake return addresses.  (Spoiler alert:  Anyone still living with you after more than three decades of stories loves you the most.)

Let's instead start our open-ended questions for the next generation (and each other) with, "What do you think of ..." and listen to the answer.  You'll know you've listened correctly when your next question asks about something the person you're staring at just now said back.  I know, I know.  I make it sound easy.

I've probably already told you this, but ... I'm still trying out most of my big ideas.

My thought here is that if we are interested in what the young people think, they may be more inclined to tell us the good stuff on their own.  We can finally find out where all that Easter candy went, which cool stuff Santa dropped off, and exactly what they think of their new teachers.

Better practice not looking shocked.

(What says "I have arrived!" before you even enter the room?  Purple hair, if it's long enough.  Next Friday we'll discuss strategies for chatting up a young person's head until the face shows up.)

FOLLOW ME!

I've spent more than half a century perfecting the Art of the Mistake.  Not to brag, but I have single-handedly redefined the concept of 'screwing up' in certain parts of Europe.  Outside one particularly complicated bank entryway in Toulouse, for example, and over a deli counter that for some insane reason sold fish-shaped cheese in Perpignan, my work is known as "L'Art de BooBoo Magnifique en Francaise."

Thanks to that old adage, "We learn from our mistakes," I can take comfort in being one of the smartest people on the planet.  But that realization dragged along with it great responsibility in the form of an urge to help others make fools of themselves less often.

How?

By teaching shortcuts to help avoid the mistake itself, as well as the pain that comes right after your bug-eyed friends scream, "Oh, man, we could NOT believe it when you..."  (Fill in the blank.  "...popped that clutch."  "...lost that ski."  "...married that guy.")

I am able to detect a mistake's approach from a mile away.  If ignored expertly enough, the little mistakes will get bored and wander off in search of a novice.  These mistakes include the 'tiny-ripple-effect-until-dinnertime' variety, such as joining in with my co-workers at lunch when the chorus of "Can you believe how fat our boss is?" begins.

But if a mistake is accompanied by one of its buddies from the Huge Problem family, I have learned to run the other way.  An example of this 'giant-ripple-effect-for-years' specimen would be the decision to quit my job after a margarita at that same lunch because, well, our boss just doesn't understand creative, sensitive types.

It has been a whole year since Sponge Brain Stretch Pants came to be, and six months since her last post.  I have spent five of those six months trying to figure out why I suspended my search for the perfect post-retirement hobby.  Some class notes still languish in cyberspace - I even skipped classes that I'd already registered and paid for.

What - no Raw Vegan Foods in my future?  Why not How to Be at Peace With Your Body, followed the very next day by Penny Pinching Pretty?  When did I decide I didn't need to Learn to Speak Hawai'ian, or master the art of The Rollicking Sea Chantey?

Could I tell beforehand that Dabbling With Finger Paints would not be a fulfilling post-career pastime?  That it would be a waste of time to Learn to Be a Librarian - or - Create a 48-Hour Film?  It seems freakishly obvious to me now that I really should have shown up for Strategic Thinking.  Then I might not have scheduled Kick Your Sugar Habit so close to Christmas.  (Um - the holiday where even the organic tofu is dipped in fudge?  That Christmas?)  The possibility of anything kicking my sugar habit was wrapped and stamped for the dog food factory before it even got out of the gate.

I think I've figured it out.

I believe I was mixed up about the right reasons for learning all those new things.  I made a brand new kind of mistake!

Those classes were not filled with young minds seeking Universal Truths.  Huh-uh!  They were populated with other post-half-centenarians, scrambling to find out what had happened during the precious hours we'd whittled away by talking about our supervisors at lunch.

Taking more classes would be like tossing partially inflated life rafts into an ocean of fully grown adults engaged in the same parallel play we practiced back in toddlerhood - outlining our lips with neon finger paints and singing only our favorite parts of the sea chantey (loud enough to drown out the 'stupid' singers).

Finding the perfect post-retirement hobby would only benefit me, and that is not how I plan to spend my next half-century.

No.

I want to pass on lessons learned by sifting through old mistakes instead of learning how to make a bunch of new ones.  I'm confident that I have at least a six-month supply of helpful hints for new mistake-makers.

So, then, that's it.  I shall pound pitons deep into the Sheer Granite Face of Life for all the young adventurers who are just starting to climb!

Maybe I'll be a drama teacher.

But even more important than pounding pitons (since the young climbers will undoubtedly figure out safer, faster routes after studying the placement of my own personal mistakes for approximately two seconds), will be blazing a trail down the other side of the mountain for my fellow Olderlings.

We'll abandon our parallel play and show those Youngerlings what real cooperation looks like!

(Sample exclamations overheard on said blazed trail:  "Lordy, you missed a bunion with the sunblock!"  "Let's all help fish the flailing boss out of that waterfall!" and "Who wants Metamucicles?")

I've been keeping pretty good notes so far, and feel well-equipped to point out possible danger spots.  We'll need to stick together during those rough places on the trail where it's tempting to veer into a 'super-negative-we're-all-doomed' campsite.  That's where we refuse to budge until the younger ones send helicopters and food and give up their own blankets and s'mores to help us out.  And why might we do that?  Because we said so, that's why.  Plus, we deserve it.  We're old.

Stop that right now.

Get up.  Grab your pack.  One of the smiling Fellow Future Geezers will help adjust the straps so your clavicles don't get rubbed raw as we shuffle on down to the Last Parking Lot Ever.  There are still plenty of adventures ahead, but for this next stretch:  Gravity's actually on our side.  (And - bonus - less neck strain if we're not constantly looking back to criticize whatever's happening in the years we've already had.)

Once in a while we'll stop and listen to the sounds of the young ones coming up the other side of Life Mountain.

Singing.  Laughing.  Slipping and taking little tumbles of their own.

As one of the world's smartest people, I promise you now that Expert Trailblazing has never been more important.

(Remember drowning in embarrassment when your grandfather told his 'special' joke to your first prom date?  Yeah.  She probably remembers it, too.  Meet me back here next week - I'm hosting a refresher on Campfire Storytelling Etiquette!)