Category: pondering

When reality reaches up and grabs you by the throat

I have a milestone birthday coming up in May. It is an age I’m not sure I’m happy about being.

Ok, fine, I have to get old. Everyone does it (barring the alternative, of course). I’m ok with it.

Until I’m reminded clearly and plainly how old and out of it I am.

It began, this past weekend, with the shopping excursion to procure new jeans (see previous post for my thoughts on that). While out and about, I wandered into a store called Anchor Blue.

I’d seen an article in a trashy gossip magazine last week while at the dentist’s office about “the best jeans.” There was a pair of Anchor Blue jeans featured that looked like I’d be happy with them.

So. Anchor Blue. I’d seen the store but had never actually been inside before.

Well. If you go to the webpage (linked above) you’ll see several fresh, dewey-faced CHILDREN on the splash page, showing you just how cool and beautiful YOU can be if you wear their clothing.

Walking into the store, I practically coughed dust and picked cryptkeeper tendrils from my person as I looked around and the clerks looked at me.

I did, actually, pick out a few pairs of jeans to try on, none of them the fabulous pair I’d seen in the magazine, of course.

So, yes, happily, the jeans I’d picked fit me. Well. Sort of. I mean, I could get them on and button them.

But to look in the mirror, you could see clearly where the jeans ended (below my hipbones) and my (evidently) granny panties continued on.

Now, I don’t wear old lady briefs (yet)…what I wear are respectable cotton bikini chones. But in the spotlight of Logan’s Run (In case you missed that film, everyone is executed at age 30), my respectable bikini yonderwear appear to be practically up to my ribcage (just below what they must believe to be my sagging boobs).

I may as well give over to the white belt and Velcro shoes ferchrissakes!

So I gave up on those jeans, but continued to look around the store. I checked out accessories.

They had quite the assortment of Che Guevara-style caps for the ladies. I want to look like an Argentinean communist revolutionary why again?

I looked at skirts. I have this little cloth that I use to clean my glasses. That cloth is larger than these “skirts.” Even if I could get a lens cloth skirt to fit me…no, it’s too terrible, I can’t even go there.

Fine. Thus ended my shopping trip.

Sunday rolled around and The Good Man and I traveled up to Muir Beach to meet with some friends. “Take a walk,” they said. Oh, sure, yes! A walk on a sunny day would be nice. Maybe even help me work off some calories in hopes of wearing that lens cloth to dinner!

These folks are all about my same age…well, TGM and his best friend are a year younger. And the best friend’s wife is a couple years younger still. Ok, so I’m the matron of the bunch, what of it?

So we walk on the beach a bit and then decide to hike a trail. Fun!

An uphill trail.

What?

So evidently that one-year age difference between TGM’s and me is a huge gap, because all of my friends scampered up the hill while I was in the back gasping for air and feeling my thighs wobbling.

Now, the other lady in our group is in knockout shape, I forgive her. But TGM and his buddy have no excuse. They billy-goated they way up the hill with ease, leaving me with hands on knees feeling like I was going to puke.

I was further insulted when a tiny fourteen year-old dog named Chester paced me, turned and ran halfway back down the hill to greet his people, then turned around and paced me again.

His legs are three inches long!

Damn you Chester!

Now it is Monday and my legs hurt. My lungs still burn a little and I’m faced with my group of fifteen employees, not a ONE of them over the age of 30.

I remember 30. That was a good year. My thirties…yes, a fine decade. *sigh*

Going cold turkey

You see, I have this little morning ritual. A morning check in, if you will. First I get on the scale. Then I check my investment account.

This had been going good for a while. One was going down, one was going up and that gave me a self-satisfied smirk to start the day.

Since, oh, about November, one is still going up and one is still going down, but not in that “isn’t it great to me be” kind of way. More in that lurch of the stomach at the twist in the roller coaster kind of way.

The ubiquitous “they” say you shouldn’t weigh yourself every day. “Too much fluctuation” they say.

I’m thinking that’s true of my investment account too.

Or maybe I should just stop checking it at all……..

And that scale. Ay yi yi!

Going cold turkey on both.

Replacement Parts

Sorrowfully, I had occasion to visit with my dentist of twelve years today. He’s a good guy and when you have that kind of trust with a dental professional, you don’t take it lightly.

The reason for my visit today wasn’t an easy peasy cleaning and check up, no. A couple weeks ago I bit down on something hard and felt pain shoot up the side of my face.

That *can’t* be good.

So I was unsurprised when the good Doctor told me I had three cracks in my tooth. The same tooth that was home to not one but two fillings.

Feeling myself headed for “you need a crown”-ville, my dentist looked at my xrays and said, “good news, we can use the machine.”

The Machine?

What the [insert dental-fear inspired curse word here] is “The Machine?”

I guess if you need something more than a drill and fill, but something less than a crown, they have this cool device that takes a scan of your scraped out tooth, then creates a puzzle piece-like filling that slips right in there.

It’s milled out of a block of dental porcelain right there onsite, same day.

So the dentist drilled out my tooth, and then I read a magazine while the machine churned and groaned and soon enough, they showed me the little piece of tooth looking porcelain. Add a little dental glue and ta daa! New tooth!

As The Machine worked, my dentist talked about science’s ability to make new body parts, like my homemade tooth. He said, “I laugh when people get up in arms over athletes using steroids to increase their body’s capabilities. In ten to twenty years they will be making new joints, ligaments and tendons, you name it. Athletes can be created, and steroids will be looked on as quaint.”

I replied, “That’s weird, man. In a good way, but weird.”

Oh well, in about an hour and a half all in, I was fixed up and sent on my way with a droopy drool-y smile and a bit of ache in my freshly manufactured body part.

Weird.

Image from The Searcher’s Flickr Photostream.

A little self-reflection

Or maybe a little self-awareness?

At my place of employment, we have a bank of five elevators that get all us little minions to and from the multitude of floors in our fabulous office building.

Every day I ride in these elevators, and it gives me time to notice some stuff.

Like the fact that the interior of the elevator cars is mirrored. Yup, to a high polish. What this means is each person’s visage is clearly reflected back into the car.

Meaning…if you are standing in the back surreptitiously picking your nose, you are not surreptitious at ALL. We all have to just look forward to see what you are doing back there. You aren’t hiding.

Most people get in there and lock their eyes on the television screen scrolling headline news. You know, the ol’ don’t make eye contact elevator rule.

I sometimes watch the headline news, and have become a repository for useless trivial information that I can whip out at random times to the utter disinterest of The Good Man.

But lately I’ve been watching the show in the reflected doors. People really are odd little creatures.

I’ve caught *numerous* male colleagues checking out the backsides of the comely young ladies who work here. And who can blame them, really?

I’ve also caught quite a few roll eyes or scowls as someone apparently unliked gets on the car.

There are the salespeople on the elevator who try to read the names on people’s badges, I guess perpetually making a sales contact list.

I’ve witnessed some personal grooming that is best left for a private moment.

On Friday, as I got on the elevator and found my spot, I saw the lady to my side and a step back look my Friday casual outfit up and down, roll her eyes, then put her hand to her stomach and smooth it down, as though to assure herself that her midsection was smaller and flatter than mine. It was, she has nothing to worry about.

Evidently people seem to go through life believing, “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.” Except when your every move is reflected back.

Believe me, I’m all too aware of this little feature of the elevator and make sure to keep my hands away from my nose, my errant underwear or my boiling zit.

I kinda want to put up a sign that says, “Objects in mirror may be you.”

PS Yes, I really did take an iPhone photo in my elevator at work…….don’t think that wasn’t odd to explain to the guy who got on two floors down.

PPS Yes, I’m wearing my kicking Fat Babies to work today. Saaaalute! Since Fat Babies are one of the highest searched keywords on my blog, I figured I’d give them another plug.

One of ours finds her way back home

After moving to the Bay Area back in 1997, I settled into my new apartment, without any friends or family to speak of. I was completely alone in a big town. It was at once both terrifying and exhilarating.

I knew very few places I could drive to without getting lost, but I made myself the solemn promise that I would not just stay holed up in my apartment. I would leave the house and explore, even if it tested my bounds of comfort. And it did.

On earlier visits to the area for work, some people I knew in the East Bay had taken me to a restaurant in San Francisco. They had given me directions to get there, and I still remembered the route. I recalled the food was good and the people who worked there were nice.

So it became a steady destination. The restaurant is named Sodini’s, and I’ve spoken about it here before. If you’ve been out to visit me, I’ve likely taken you there.

Anyhow, as I went out every weekend, a little New Mexico girl picking hayseeds out of her hair, the people at Sodini’s began to know me. They looked after me. They gave me advice on how to live in the Bay Area, and they protected me.

Usually, I’d eat at Sodini’s then go across the street to a bar called The Grant and Green to listen to live music. Once in there, a part time cocktail waitress, part time stripper took over looking out for me. She was beautiful but also one tough lady. She would scare off guys she knew were bad news who had come sidling up to me, or would shout down anyone trying to run a scam on me (there were plenty who tried. What did I know? They didn’t have people like this in Albuquerque).

Then, several months later, I began idly dating a blues musician. So now I really had reason to be in North Beach. The blues scene is thriving. Over plenty of nights in various North Beach bars, I became a regular. I became part of the North Beach family. A loose band of a variety of strange and not so strange. Some talented. Some educated. Some rich. Some homeless. We are a little bit of everything. I’ve both been read to from Plato and offered the chance to buy crack in the same evening.

As motley as these folks are, truly, they became my family. I was often alone considering my boyfriend was a working musician. The more I fretted, the more they looked out for me. And I began looking out for them, too.

With all of the people I knew who lived on the streets, I began to worry about them. My big heart would be crushed if I didn’t see Willie on his regular street corner, playing harmonica to cheer passerby. Or if Lorne wasn’t standing outside Café Trieste, looking for some money or maybe to fix someone’s car for a couple bucks. And then there was Millie.

She’s about four feet nothing and would bop from bar to restaurant to bar with a huge gap toothed grin and a Polaroid camera. For $5, she’d take your photo and then give you the biggest hug you’ve ever received from someone so little. Her smile would brighten the entire room.

As the years passed, things turned rather sour with the musician. Then I went through an odyssey of my own psyche. And to add to all of that, then my father passed away. All life changing events.

I stopped going to North Beach so much. When I did go, my family would hug me, ask after my health, worry over me and welcome me home. Then they’d chide me for being gone so long.

Finally, as more years passed, I was alone again and unable to get up the courage to explore like I had before. Things were changing. I was changing. I was profoundly alone and considerably lost.

Then on a sunny day in November, my gray skies parted when I met The Good Man. For a while when we first dated, he lived in North Beach, which meant I visited my old haunts with a new set of eyes and a new man in tow. My North Beach family eyed him warily at first, but were soon as charmed as I over The Good Man.

But, to be honest, that’s not the point of my story. The point is this…recently our friend Millie, the cheery, adorable Polaroid taking woman had gone missing. I’d heard this through the grapevine and was sick to my heart. She isn’t a young lady, and I feared she’d ended up like a lot of my family and succumbed on a cold San Francisco night.

I cried this morning when read this article in the SFGate.

Millie was found in a Reno hospital after taking a bus up there and getting turned around. Some kind folks went up and brought her home.

She’s back in North Beach with her Polaroid and her amazing smile.

I don’t get back to North Beach all that much anymore. The Good Man and I moved into our place on the peninsula and now we’re all married and domesticated and living our new lives together. That’s ok too. It does my heart good to know that even though I’m not still running around North Beach, that my people are there and they are okay.

I’m a strange kid, I’m the first to admit it. I can manage to be homesick over two places at the same time. Both New Mexico and the Bay Area beat inside my heart. I’m not sure how to ever resolve that.

I’m not sure I even want to try.

Photo from the SFGate.