ALIVE

   DMan and I went this morning to cheer on his sister Barb in her first 5K. When we spotted her, she looked so ALIVE:  cheeks flushed scarlet from exertion; breath spurting white like locomotive puffs in the frosty air; arms and legs pumping fierce; a huge smile on her face before she even saw us. She knew she was almost there, almost ready to cross the finish line of a goal she'd been working toward for a long time. All of the participants -- marathoners and half-marathoners, grade-school kids, seniors, parents pushing strollers, even one guy running with bare feet -- had that same ALIVE look, that there was no place else they'd rather be, nothing else they'd rather be doing at barely eight o'clock on a cold Sunday morning than kicking butt on a goal they'd set for themselves. It didn't matter that they might be sucking air and sweating and tired, they were DOING IT in a big way. It was beautiful and inspiring to see.
   Congrats to Barb and all who ran or walked on your accomplishment! And wishing everyone out there something in your day that takes your breath away, makes your heart throb with excitement, and makes you tickled to be ALIVE.   

Sandy's Love Train

   Last night I was catching up on the aftermath of Hurricane turned Super Storm Sandy. The devastation I saw is beyond comprehension:  streets flooded or turned into sand dunes; homes and businesses swept away, ruined by wind and water, or burned to rubble; snow piled up to car windows; trees dead on the ground like road kill; boardwalks ripped apart and scattered like leaves. What really broke my heart was seeing families' possessions piled up on the curb to be hauled away forever, watching a little girl helping clear sand off her street with a toy beach shovel, hearing one woman tell how alone she feels because no one has come to help, and seeing the shock and helplessness on people's faces as they described their experience and loss.
   I understand. In January 2007, the Ozarks suffered a horrific ice storm. We went through days, a week, or for some several weeks without power or water. The store shelves were often bare as folks scrounged for whatever they could find to survive on. Broken limbs, still covered in ice, were piled house-high next to the streets. Then in May 2011, a monster tornado hit Joplin, destroying homes and businesses, killing 158, and changing the lives of those left behind forever. We felt shocked and helpless, thought life would never get back to normal again. But it did. With time and lots of help from neighbors and kind people we didn't even know, we got through our version of "Sandy."
   Since watching last night, I can't get the O'Jays' song "Love Train" out of my head:

People all over the world,
join hands,
start a love train, love train.

So let's start a love train to reach the victims of Sandy. If you can, send money or donate necessities. The Red Cross and Convoy of Hope are already there helping folks recover and can use all the donations they can get. If you can't donate, then pray. Or send out loving thoughts. Call or email someone you know affected by Sandy and listen to their story, encourage them, make them laugh. 
   Do something, anything, to help these people believe they'll get through this. Come on everybody, get on board.  

Ladies, I need your help!

   I've been working on a piece about the aggravations of aging.  It may go into a book of essays, or I may shop it to a magazine as a feature article, I'm just not sure.  So I desperately need some female feedback!  Is it funny?  Does it resonate with your experience of aging?  Are there nips and tucks and tweaks needed?  If you have time to give it a read, please post a comment and share your suggestions.  THANK YOU!

GET OFF MY FACE

   Do you think about your looks? I do. I try not to, but still I do. The older I get, the less I like what I think about my looks. And what I see. My looks have gone to hell in a handbasket. Hell isn't pretty. The handbasket either.

   I'll be the first to admit: I've never been a pretty woman. Cute, maybe. Interesting looking, probably. I had the unlucky genetic draw to be dealt my dad's pronounced nose and chunky-knuckled, veiny man hands. They look fine on him. On me? Not so much. But I'm okay with that. Who needs the pressure of maintaining pretty anyway? It requires an endless siege against that relentless flesh-wrecker Mother Nature and her evil sidekick Dr. Gravity.^*  One night of drunken splurging on all the infomercial gadgets and goos it would take to youth-anize the age spots, firm the flabs, smooth the sags, and make my teeth Chiclet white would bankrupt me. So I'm just fine with being an average-Jane.

   But there were times when I felt pretty good about my un-pretty self. Take good hair days, for instance. Even though I have a Medusa mop for hair – not curly enough for actual curls, not straight enough to be tamed into an actual style, more like a cascade of cowslurps than cowlicks – some days I got lucky (if there was 0% humidity and I prayed hard enough while blow-drying) and it turned out just right. Those were feel-good days. I felt like I could fly on those days no matter what shape the rest of me was in. Except that flying would have messed up my “do.”

   My arms are another example. Years ago when I was doing massage therapy for a living, using my arms every day to muscle the knots and tension of out my clients, these babies dangling at my sides were a work of art. I was proud to don a sleeveless shirt and strut my toned triceps, defined deltoids, and beefed-up biceps. I would even be so bold as to say I was buff. Once. For a brief while.

   Though I didn't have six-packs abs, I did have a waist and a flat(er) stomach. You never could bounce a quarter off my ass, but in my prime you might get a respectable recoil with a dime. And when I sported a tan to camouflage the cellulite, my legs looked damn fine. From a distance. In the right light.

   But those feel-good days have gone bye-bye for good. Good hair now is when I get my hair coloring timed perfectly so the white roots don't show. My buff arms are covered in buff-colored crepey skin these days, complete with butt-crack armpit creases and Jello jiggles when they dangle at my sides. My closet has only three-quarter length or longer-sleeved shirts, with anything arm revealing relegated to workout duty in the privacy of home. My waist is wider, my stomach squishy (and crepey, too, as if squishy wasn't bad enough), and the only thing you'd get off my ass nowadays is a soft sploink and ripple effect no matter what coin you use. I still tan once a week to relax and treat myself to a hint of color, but unfortunately my “natural” glow turns the veins fronting my calves a God-awful green and highlights the hollows in my cottage-cheesy thighs. Ugh!

   Nora Ephron, in the sadly true but oh so humorous essay “I Feel Bad About My Neck” from her book by the same name, says that for women everything goes soft and south when they hit age 55 no matter what they do. She is a damn fine writer (rest in peace, funny lady) and I mean her no disrespect, but Nora, you got it way wrong. My downhill slide toward the Savage “S”es (soft and south) started at 49, and now that I am 49-Part Two – I refuse to say 50, I actually had to write the number on a medical form the other day and nearly had a stroke – the slide has snowballed into an avalanche. Practically overnight I've become a breakfast cereal advertisement: waking up to a noisy snap (my ankles), crackle (my feet), and pop (my knees) with every step instead of every bite. I don't even daydream about being young and spry anymore; I dream of wielding an oil can like Oz's Tin Man to lubricate away the creaks and pains. Sometimes I even say it out loud – “Oil can, oil can” – in a squeaky, lock-jawed voice when my joints are loudly protesting my every movement, but so far the magical motion potion hasn't materialized.

   As much as it hurts to acknowledge how everything south of my neck has gone south with sags (and just plain old hurts some days), it's even worse to face my face. Whenever I inadvertently catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror – I never advertently look in the wretched thing – it scares the bejesus out of me. If my face is my window to the world, then I'm surprised children don't actually scream when they see me on the street from thinking the boogeywoman is alive and real and walking around in broad daylight. Especially when I'm lost in thought (usually about my aching body or whether Medicare will cover facelifts if it is still around when I hit the jackpot age) or deep in one of my black funk doldrums (about feeling old, no doubt), my face becomes a swamp of sad sags. I'm not kidding. If I frown, which is unfortunately my natural facial state, I've got a crevasse in my chin deep enough to carry an echo. I do my best not too let my boyfriend, DMan, whisper sweet nothings near my chin for fear the reverberating “I love you, I love you, I love you” might frighten him off for good.

   I used to wear eye shadow on those feel-good days or for date night with DMan. No more. Somehow the browns and grays I was partial to migrated into the creases below my lashes, and next thing I knew it people were asking me how I got the black eyes. Not what I want to hear when I've taken extra time to glam up. And lipstick? I've given it up, too. No amount of liner will keep the color from seeping into the indentations spiking from my top lip and making my lipstick job look like a three-year old's depiction of the stock market fluctuations. So I've reverted to my junior high makeup repertoire: mascara (waterproof so it doesn't creep into the creases), moisturizer, and Bonne Bell Lip Smacker lip gloss (but in a more sophisticated Berry Peach now instead of teenybopper Dr. Pepper). I figured why try if the results are only going to make me cry anyway. And I save money and time to boot.

   I'm also conserving cash since switching up my SJP NYC signature scent to MMR (Mentholatum Muscle Rub). I do miss the sweet, sultry undertones of magnolia in the SJP, but the zingy menthol both wakes me up and takes the edge off the aches. I just have to warn DMan not to get close to the lubed-up areas – neck, shoulders, low back, knees, feet – until the eye-smarting smell dissipates. So pretty much no morning hugging or kissing, another time saver.

   Who knows, maybe by the time I reach Medicare age I'll have saved enough to pay for my own nip-and-tuck (and vacuum the gobbler neck and plump the lips while you're at it, please!). If that doesn't work, maybe my mind will go south along with the rest of me, carry away all unhappy thoughts, and leave me with an instant wrinkle-lifting perma-grin. They say the mind is a terrible thing to waste, but it might be worth it if I get a free facelift out of the deal.

   I joke about aging because I don't need anything else making me frown, but I am really angry. It feels like I am being punished for following the rules by attempting to age naturally as a woman without turning myself into a waxified, monster-like caricature of my youthful self in an era when looking young is prized above all else and some people that are even older than me (Cher, by 16 years) look younger and better now than I ever did (Cher). It's just not fair (Cher!).

   I'm reminded of a gripping scene from the funny and poignant movie classic “Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.” Sidney Poitier, playing Dr. John Wade Prentice, is the “who” that's coming to dinner at the home of the much younger white woman he wants to marry. Keep in mind the film was made in 1967, when black + white = illegal in many states, so her otherwise liberal white parents were shocked and his conservative black parents were downright appalled. The scene that keeps playing in my mind is when the doctor's father is berating him for making the biggest mistake of his life for breaking the rules by wanting to marry outside his color. Mr. Poitier angrily responds:

You don't own me! You can't tell me when or where I'm out of line, or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don't even know what I am, Dad, you don't know who I am. You don't know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried too explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand, you've got to get off my back!

   What a wallop of a speech! When I'm hearing it in my head, it becomes me blasting out those words at society and the media for setting the impossible rule that while the population is growing increasingly older, we women are expected to look young forever or become an embarrassing eyesore blighting the world of the beautiful rule-minding people. And I am lambasting Mother Nature and Dr. Gravity to get their dead weight off my back. Only I realize my back is one of the few parts on me that has held up pretty well – at least what I can see of it in the dang mirror without my glasses – so instead, you two GET OFF MY FACE! Just lay down and die and leave me alone to age and ache in peace. Please?!

   Until my speech starts working or my facelift ship comes in, I'll carry on with my mentho-masca-rizer routine with a side of lip gloss and the occasional apricot scrub (I think of it like taking a chance on a lottery scratch-off ticket and maybe one day I'll get lucky and all that scrubbing will reveal a whole new face). Might be a good idea to watch the movie again and then practice my spiel in the mirror to give it an extra punch. Oh no, the mirror, the dreaded mirror. I know, I'll practice by candlelight. Everything looks better in the soft flicker of candles. Even my face.

*An ironic sidebar about gravity, defined as physical bodies attracting each other with a force proportional to their masses. This cracked me up. The way I see it in the mirror – an absolutely abhorrent invention, by the way – the more gravity is involved, the less physical bodies will attract each other, especially when those bodies are carrying more mass.     

Pure Passion

   Last night I experienced pure passion.  Not in the bedroom but at Jalen's  watching Techs and the Roadies play.  At one point, the only people in the bar were DMan and me, another couple we invited, the mother of a band member, and the owner John, but Techs played like they were on stage at Madison Square Garden in front of 20,000 screaming fans.  Eventually a few more folks wandered in to have a drink at the bar, but the door take couldn't have made the band more than $20 or so apiece for four hours of intense work.  Didn't matter.  They belted their souls out for the love of the music and the joy of entertaining even a handful of people.  And I was mega entertained, as always, by their spot-on harmony and repertoire of Tech-ified sing-along classics, but more than that I was inspired by their pure passion for what they love to do.  Sometimes I get really discouraged that my writing is for nothing if no one reads it, but they inspired me to keep going because I love writing, it makes me feel alive and that I'm fulfilling my special purpose on this planet.  And if I can make even one person smile, like I was smiling huge at them last night, or feel true joy, like what was jolting through my body as I grooved to their music, or be inspired to pour their soul into something they love even if the effort may not seem to make a difference, then writing is worth it.  
   Thanks, Techs and the Roadies, for doing what you do simply for the love of doing it and for making our world a much happier place through your beautiful music on a cold Friday night.  YOU ROCK!
   Have a rockin' weekend of your own, Yall!  And thanks for reading.    

Going Downtown

   Hung out with my Sister K in downtown Springfield yesterday, on a gorgeous sunny afternoon perfect for people-watching.  From the window of Jimmy John's, we saw folks either dressed up in their snazziest urban-bohemian duds hoping to be seen (how do women manage those sky-high heels on the cracked and bricked sidewalks without breaking their necks??) or looking like they headed out still in their pajamas for a quick run to Kum & Go and ended up downtown hoping not to be seen.  At Park Central Square, we saw the usual mix of grunge skateboarders, bicycling families, and scary-looking, fringe-of-society teenagers hanging out in boisterous clusters.  The Square looked as pretty as I'd seen it in a long time -- clean; not mired in construction; decked out with huge pots of burgundy, goldenrod, and pumpkin-colored mums; and not a storefront vacant (except for the Heer's building, of course -- will that eroding eyesore ever find a tenant??).  
   Heading down South Street, we tried to avoid a threesome setting up literature on a card table on the sidewalk, thinking they were campaigning for some politician or cause.  When the head guy cornered us and asked if we wanted them to pray with us "about anything, love . . . finances . . . health, anything at all," I quickly said, "No, thanks," and walked on.  Sister K gave him a quick lecture about already being a Christian and not needing his help to pray and walked on, too.  Even she thought it was a weird thing for the threesome to do.
   We noticed a new restaurant where Trolley's used to be.  It's called Ry Mac's Rub and Pub.  The slogan on their sign out front read:  We love to rub our meat.  It may be a catchy catchphrase, but even if I wasn't a vegetarian I don't think I'd want to eat their meat.  That's just tacky.
   We popped into another newcomer to downtown, South & Walnut Bar & Grill, to take a peek around.  Sitting on the corner of South and Walnut where Bugsy Malone's used to be, this place has an elegant ambiance, with dark wood floors, cozy tables and a pop of stainless steel stripes fronting the bar.  Daniel, the owner, was always friendly and super knowledgeable as sommelier when he worked at Vino Cellars, so I'm hopeful he'll do well in his new venture as restauranteur.  DMan and I will definitely be going back there again soon to try out what I'm sure is an amazing wine and food selection.
   Strolling down Pershing Street, Funtiques Market looked like a fun place to peruse.  Once inside, we felt like we'd time-warped straight into the living rooms and closets of the Brady Bunch and our grandma!  If you are into everything seventies and earlier, this place will blow your mind.  Their prices were a bit mind-blowing as well, but it was a hoot to trip down the avocado greens and harvest golds of memory lane.
   Itsalldowntown.com is Springfield's website to everything going on around the Square, and they aren't lying.  You can see and experience it ALL downtown.  Check it out for yourself if you haven't been in a while.  The Halloween Pub Crawl is coming up next Saturday, sure to bring even more crrr-aziness to downtown.
   Enjoy these warm temperatures and the rest of your weekend, Yall!              

This and that thoughts

   Driving around town this morning running errands, I was going gaga over how gorgeous the leaves have turned:  the reds were flaming bonfire embers; the golds glowed as if the sun was radiating from inside them; the oranges swayed in the breeze like juicy Florida oranges ripe for picking.  Then at a stoplight I took my sunglasses off to find something in my purse and noticed the colors didn't look nearly as glorious and vivid as they did with through my tinted lenses.  In fact, they looked downright dull.  At that moment I wished wearing my sunglasses all the time would make everything about life seem more spectacular and awe-inspiring.  There's probably a pill that will do that.  But it would probably cost a fortune and there's no telling what the scary side-effects might be.  I guess I'll just stick to wearing my sunglasses.
   Speaking of pills, one of my stops was at Planned Parenthood for birth control pills.  Sitting out front on a lawn chair was a senior lady, fingering her rosary beads with a large cross hanging down and twisting in the wind, having a stare-down with anyone going in the PP office.  I got out of my car expecting her to yell at me.  Or worse.  But she just moved her lips, maybe in silent prayer, and fingered those beads.  Instead of getting angry, I thought: Thank you senior lady for the prayers; I can sure use them.  Here I am a 49-Part Two year-old woman (I still refuse to acknowledge the big 5-0!), with no health insurance, and paying $30 bucks a month for birth control because I may or may not be in menopause but I'm not taking any chances.  Please, by all means, pray that menopause will finally have her way with me and I will no longer have to endure periods or cramps or buy costly birth control pills.  Pray that we will finally have true universal health coverage in this country and no one will have to go without and need to sneak into Planned Parenthood and endure your dagger stares just to get birth control or a gyno exam.  And when you're finished praying and staring me down, please put your sunglasses back on and enjoy the sun shining on the beautiful fall leaves.
   Maybe my sunglasses are helping me see the world differently already.     

One year ago today . . .

. . . my feet hit the luscious sand of Myrtle Beach to begin my dream-chasing adventure of living at the beach and being a writer.  Remembering that feeling makes my heart flip all over again.  I felt like I was home.  Of course I had buttloads of stuff to unpack and figure out where to stash in the dinky condo I had rented, but I was home.  Finally.
   I could sit and stare at Mother Ocean and feel the relaxed peace only she brings me.  I could commune with the sun and moon, nothing separating us but the waves.  I could walk the sand and let my mind be absolutely empty except for the splish splash of the ocean and shrill of the seagulls.  All of those joys I could have any time I wanted.  What a blessing!  I miss it, I miss it all.
   I wish I could understand why this Missouri gal loves the beach so much, why that place so far away from me is the only place that truly feels like home.  I wish I could look around me at the autumn leaves and gentle hills and plentiful lakes here and smile and let that be enough to make me happy.  But I can't.  My heart just doesn't feel that way.
   Guess that's why the title of my blog is "Life Be Crrr-azy."  Because it is.  I am here, but my heart is there.  I can wish all I want to, but that doesn't make it so.  I'd better start wishing again to win the lottery, that way I can trip down to the beach when my heart needs a fix without having to run away all over again.  Or if the lotto doesn't come through for me, I can settle for reading about my beach adventures in my memoir.  That would be cheaper, for sure.  But it wouldn't be the same as feeling that luscious warm sand between my toes, feeling the cool waves lapping over my feet, or feeling the sun and beach breeze on my face.  Not the same at all.
   When will my life go south again?  I wish I knew.