It is just a number.
It's just that the number keeps getting larger.
*****
You look great!
Oh, really. Compared to what, I might ask.
I think of myself with dark hair and and regular features. The mirror shows me jowls and Daddooooo's eyebrows and G'ma's wrinkles around the mouth. Modern technologies could remedy all of that, but, as Ogden Nash said,
My face, I don't mind it
Because I'm behind it.
I'm not quite sure to do with the end of the poem, though.
It's the people out front that I jar.
Could it be that they are unsurprised to see this old woman's visage, merely reacting to the beauty within when they tell me I look great? Am I really this old?
*****
When I was 25 years old and applying for employment, I remember writing 18 in the box next to age.
Rechecking the information before handing it over, it took me a moment to recognize what was wrong. It wasn't really incorrect, but it was wrong. Wasn't I 18? No, that was freshman year in college and you have a master's degree now. i did the math, subtracting and realizing with a dull thud in my chest that I was, indeed, 25 years old.
*****
Old feels different at every stage of life, I guess.
The Prince scholars cannot comprehend how I can be so old, frequently reminding me that death is right around the corner, filling me in their grandparents' ages and infirmities, and marveling that life still exists within our crumbling structures.
They, on the other hand, are quite proud with every added year. I Am SIX!!!! is the happiest sound on the playground
*****
There will be more thoughts. Like JES, I'm still trying to figure it out.
I never tell the first and second graders my real age when they ask. I tell them I'm a hundred and one. They are flabbergasted and we carry on. I was 62 when I started reading to the students at Columbia, thinking I was really old then. Now, 10 years later, I am still the same person, with just a different age number! I do wonder how long I can keep doing this, and hope it can be for at least one more year so that I will have touched an entire generation--first to 12th grade.
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