Dusty

Dusty

Our lives are quite busy most of the time.  Not much time for sitting still unless it is forced upon us, like when you have to be completely still for an MRI.  I am struck by the thought of how very little time is spent being still and listening to one’s own thoughts. I did this during a recent MRI. Through the first round of brain pictures, the technician did not plug my headphones in and I was forced to think of things to distract my body and mind from all the clunking and shrieking going on inside the tube.  Some people freak out at the thought of this confinement. Even without any official claustrophobia I felt a little twitchy. I have decided that spending small amounts of time on one’s own thoughts is enough.  If I could only focus on happy things that would be grand, but the noise in my head about applying for jobs, not feeling qualified for anything but chief laundress and poet (not very lucrative), what I’m going to make for dinner after spending two hours with a child that desperately needs help with homework, wondering if I’ll have time to take a walk for exercise to stay healthy/lose weight/fight my high cholesterol....  In this day of techno-bombardment, infotainment,  nonstop news and analysis, our thoughts take a beating and sometimes I use the rest of the world’s misery to help me drown out some of my own.   The noise of the mundane, perpetual neuroses that drone on in my ears is too much to take sometimes. Other times my own mess is quite preferable to the tumult of the world’s chaos.  Why can’t everything just be still for a moment?

My 85 year old mother has more stillness now than she’s ever had in her life. It sounds like it might be nice but it isn’t really. She played basketball into her forties, rode roller coasters into her fifties, wore high-heeled shoes into her sixties.  She is still keeping house after living in the same house over 50 years.  She knows every square inch of it and could easily get around blindfolded.  She can hear the dust land.  Dirt and trash set off a sonar-like sensor that drives her crazy because she wants to make it all go away.  Her arthritis keeps her from being able to do the deep dark cleaning she used to do, but by golly her house is far cleaner than most and she does what she can everyday.  Use it or lose it.  Doing something is far better than doing nothing when your choices get reduced by what life throws at you.  Don’t dare try to do any of it for her though or she might rip you a new one...Aging hurts. Dust hurts when you can’t do anything about it.   Your knees my not let you kneel, or you hands may not have the strength to scrub. You can feel the dust falling on you, around you and after cataract surgery with the lens replacement you can see it all better than you ever could. How maddening.  

No one wants the dust to settle. Not really.  Our usefulness gives us purpose.  Sometimes the more challenges we face, the harder we try to prove we can still jump the hurdles, in full make-up and high heels. 

Finding myself or at least my glasses

The notion of finding oneself always seemed funny to me as a child.  Why don’t people just look in a mirror?, I thought.  Not such a bizarre idea. How can you find yourself when  you are always there, inside the body, the vessel that holds together your innards? At mid-life, the vessel I call my body doesn’t look so familiar. I don’t take very long looks like I once did.  As a child I spent hours making faces or practicing hairstyles or glopping green eye shadow and mascara to try to look older. There’s a foreign concept.. trying to look older.  

I need glasses now to read and I rarely have them on when I am getting ready for the day. In fact, right now I can’t locate any of the four pair that I own...

I get a shock now and then when I do have them on and really see the crevasses forming on my face and the drooping of the skin on my neck. Then I take them off and feel and look better..  I don’t worry about it too much and I’ve never been a very fussy person about my appearance (except in high school when I HAD to have the Calvin Klein jeans and wore giant rollers in my hair for an hour at a time to straighten my hair.)

Luckily, my husband’s eyesight is much worse than mine and I feel that this works dramatically in my favor. I had thought about asking Santa for one of those light--up, magnifying mirrors for Christmas, but after testing a few at the mall recently, I decided I like the fuzzy, unlit version of me way better.

Maybe nature’s weakening of the eyesight works on other levels, too. Maybe I see more gray now and a little less black and white.  I like the perspective that aging gives me.  It was fun being young and stupid, but I like getting older and wiser. When I ‘find myself’ in the mirror I see a person that likes to laugh, loves her family and friends and wishes all people had a more blurry view of life.