old ladies

 Sometimes at night, I'll be on my phone, looking at the worst news or reading someone somewhere ranting about something or other and in the middle of this social media wallow, I'll take a selfie. It's random and I don't have a reason for doing it, except when I'm thinking about getting a haircut and want to see how out of control my thinning, greying hair has gotten.

 

I have a bunch of them. 

 

These pictures, more than the daily glance in the mirror let me know that I am an old woman now. There's no way to say how weird this is.  Getting old is an intellectual exercise, until it's just your life. These slightly quizzical self portraits bring it home in a way that knee surgery hasn't, that arthritis hasn't, that this pesky occasional sciatica hasn't, that never sleeping through the night hasn't, Maybe it's because I identify myself with my face than the various components of my body. I'm not a dualist. My body is me, no question, but if I think of Renée, it's that face, not an elbow,

 

Our faces reflect our age, I thought that was true of everyone I knew until I found some pictures of an old friend's recent trip to California, We're not close. Our point of contact these days is I follow her on Instagram, where she posts very pretty garden pictures, There aren't many selfies and none close up, but the person she was traveling with took pictures of them at different places and so I saw her face, close up for the first time in decades. It seemed odd, but I couldn't figure out what it was. It didn't seem like plastic surgery, but something and then I saw it.

 

The startled face of Botox.

I started this a couple of weeks ago because that Instagram thing was so annoying. The woman I used to know was rewriting her past for the umpteenth time and the thing I decided to frame this around was the Botox. It's an easy frame that gets me to talking about how we do and don't accept aging. It could have been fun to write, but now I won't finish it because someone I know is probably going to die in a few months and that is a lot of what being an old lady is. 

Responding to the news is hard because we have a relationship that is complicated in my head, though probably not in hers. She asked me to come up to Seattle to get some records from her partner's collection; her partner died a few years ago, but I know, and suspect she knows, that this trip is to say goodbye. It's goodbye to more than her and that is another part of what being old means.