Do Mirrors Lie?

Increasingly, I find myself lost in time. I'm not sure exactly which day I'm in, or where in the week we fall. As I talk to somebody, and I want to reference a person, a place, a book, often all that pops up is an empty screen, much like a web page that takes a bit too long to load. It is embarrassing to have become so forgetful, so I've devised a number of techniques to mask this weakness. the best, usually is humor -- I'm having a senior moment, etc. -- but that actually is not a very funny experience. It is frustrating. Let me give you some other examples. Unless you look in a mirror, you don't really know what you look like. (My big sister gave me some good advice on this one: "Don't look in the mirror!") But as a culture, we are obsessed with youth, their beauty, their energy, their sexuality, little of which exists for us as we advance into what used to be called our "golden years" but soon will be known as our "poverty years." It sometimes seems as if what we see around us is a human culture on steroids -- walking faster than we walk, talking faster than we talk, laughing more than we can laugh --in a word, hopeful, in a manner that is extremely difficult for us to embrace. Why should the normal baby boomer feel hopeful? What exactly is there in our future to anticipate with joy? Of course, if we have reproduced, there is the sweet witnessing of our kids as they mature, and their lovely babies as they join this world. That is the personal piece. But beyond that, we are becoming living ghosts, men and women whose bodies no longer excite the imagination of anybody anywhere. We fear the mirror more than would a smallpox victim. We have attained that most-feared status. We are old. This week, to my horror, in one of my many meetings, a young man commented about one of the photos on another of my blogs, "That doesn't look like you. Is that really you?" It really was me, a scant two years past. Have I deteriorated so much in 730 days that now I look like someone else entirely, older, uglier, less attractive by an order of magnitude. People think young people are vain about appearance, and often they are. But the need to feel pretty -- to somebody -- never really leaves us. Tonight I do not feel pretty, and that makes me sad. I bet a lot of others, of all ages, are feeling the same way.