Every picture (frame) tells a story

Outside a construction site at Great Jones and Lafayette

My way or the highway

This morning Other asked me whether I thought I was beautiful. I’ve actually thought about the question of physical beauty since 18 months of cancer treatments catapulted me from looking fairly youthful for my age to looking outright elderly. 

I do miss my lost looks. The old me—with the even complexion, thick brown hair, enviable figure and actual homegrown boobs—was nice-looking. I don’t remember feeling beautiful, but when I look at pre-cancer photographs, I can see that I might have been.

Now I feel certain I no longer conform to anyone’s ideal of conventional beauty. My skin is marred by brown spots. My hair is thin and gray. I’m bony and boobless. Men don’t do double-takes. There are no flirtatious glances. 

And it hurts a bit. 

But here’s the thing: I don’t feel like doing anything about it. If I put some work into the project, I know I could refashion some of my lost looks. I could get skin peels and rejuvenating facials. I could dye my hair and figure out a way of augmenting it. I could have surgery to implant silicon pillows into my chest and get nipple tattoos. Many women do all that.

I’m built differently. If people are going to dismiss me because of my ruined appearance, I say, Fuck ’em. I don’t want to live in their world. 

I want to be valued for my ugly, old, contrary self. I want unconditional love. It won’t happen. But I can’t seem to make myself invest the effort it would take to craft a more lovable self, even though it might make me happier. So I’m destined to pass my remaining years feeling a little out of sorts with the world.

Masks of age

Other had a lovely description of what it’s like to get older: When you look in the mirror, the eyes are yours, but as time passes, masks descend over your face—with lines, wrinkles, freckles, brown spots.

Spring comes to Union Square

Time off but not away

Retirement is like vacation without the vacating.
So here’s what I’ve accomplished in the first two weeks:
*Took 11 yoga classes 
*Read three books
*Read an entire issue of the New Yorker, front to back, including Goings On
*Read the New York Review of Books (sort of)
*Solved 12 crossword puzzles
*Napped morning, noon and night
*Took a zumba class
*Attended one party, met three friends for lunch, four for dinner
*Got my e-mail hacked
*Visited the Genius Bar
*Changed every logon and password
*Actually read and annotated my financial planner’s financial plan
*Lay on the couch for hours on end not really doing anything

Is it over yet?

I hate retirement

I am cranky. 

I am sick of cat hair. I don’t know what I was thinking when I got a white cat.

I hate it when my yoga teacher rubs my scalp with fingers drenched in lavender oil leaving my hair looking like a wet dog and smelling like a sock drawer.

My gorge rises when I hear the animal noises—grunts, vocalized yawns, burps, borborygmi, snores—of others.

Natural-born heroes

This is one of my favorite photographs. I think I look pretty lively for someone who had finished a year-and-a-half-long course of cancer treatment just a few months earlier. And I’ll always be fascinated by the guy I’m with—Wes Autrey—a.k.a the Subway Hero. 

In 2007, Autrey was waiting for a train with his two daughters when he saw a young man fall into a seizure and stumble off the platform onto the tracks. In an instant, Autrey made a multitude of dazzling mental and moral calculations: that the train was coming too fast to stop short of the spasming body, that Autrey didn’t have time to jump down and pull the man to safety, that the space between the trackbed and the undercarriage of the train would accommodate two men lying one on top of the other, that he wanted his two little girls to see him doing the right thing. And he jumped, flattened the guy and held him down as the train passed over them—while his girls watched.

I try hard to be a good person and do the right thing, and I generally make defensible ethical choices, but it would have taken me days—and a measuring tape and a calculator and a lot of Googling of math texts, plus perhaps more courage than I could muster—to make the decision Autrey made in a split second. 

Every time I think of Autrey and try to figure out the wizardry of his act, I end up gibbering. Despite all my years of yoga, I cannot grok how he had the sheer presence of mind to act so fast and flawlessly.