I was getting in the shower today and casually looked at myself in the mirror. It was a big mistake. No, it wasn’t a mistake to take a shower. You know what I mean. A woman of a certain age should never look at her unclothed body in full light. That’s why we hire electricians to put dimmers on all our light switches.
It got me thinking about globs of flesh and what happens to them with age. Remember how in high school everyone was obsessed with the size of their thighs? That’s why Suzanne Somers invented the Thigh Master. Did she win a Nobel Prize for that? And we did those isometric things, pushing our palms together, saying “we must, we must improve our busts.” We didn’t improve either our thighs or our busts and now these are the least of our problems.
I used to have a flat stomach. The only compliment my former husband ever gave me was when he told me that he remembered what a great flat stomach I used to have. That was well after the flat stomach had been slackened by pregnancies. The former husband wasn’t big on flattery.
The way of flesh is humbling. It slips and slides. It sinks where you don’t want it to sink and it forms unsightly bulges where you don’t want it to bulge. But here’s the good news—I figure that it’s going to keep slipping. With time it will slide from the belly to the knees. Then it will form an unsightly bubble on the calves and the ankles. This will be the stage when I wear bell bottoms. From there, the feet will become grotesquely distorted like clown feet. But that’s the beginning of the end. If I can just hold on through the clown feet stage, gravity will take over and the excess flesh will seep out of the bottom of my feet. One morning I’ll get up and find a giant oil slick on the floor, like melting cans of Crisco. I’m so looking forward to the melted Crisco day.
No comments:
Post a Comment