Gravity

The New Oxford American dictionary on my iBook defines gravity as “the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass,” or maybe just parts of a body. I’m still trying to figure out how gravity found my negative-AAA breasts, which by now could be called belly nipples.

I recently turned 52—yes, finally playing with a full deck—and discovered that, though somewhat slender, I’ve not been able to hide from gravity. For my birthday, I drove to Breckenridge, Colorado, in an attempt to defy gravity by ascending one mile in elevation, but climbing those peaks every morning still made me feel gravity’s embrace, particularly when I collapsed under the ski lift. My friend helped me up and remarked how I resembled a smashed bug on a windshield.

“You can’t escape me,” I heard Father Gravity murmur after John brushed the dirt from my negative-AAAs.

“Well, try this on, you ol’ FG,” I shook my fist at the ground. “I might be old, but I can reverse your bulge-inducing effects by standing on my hands.”

Standing on my hands. It all began during my grade-school years in a Montevideo, Minnesota, summertime. While my parents were at work, I watched Lunch with Casey, a kid’s variety program on WTCN-TV based in the Twin Cities. Casey Jones was a railroad engineer and Roundhouse Rodney acted as his sidekick.

A former Ice Capades skater, Roundhouse would occasionally walk around the set on his hands. I was impressed with his balance and decided to give it a go. I was hooked. From that time on, I could rarely just watch TV. I stood on my hands, did the splits, reverse-curved my spine to make a bridge, did front and back walkovers, and exercised whenever the tube was making noise. If I were to watch TV today, I would probably fall back into the same habit.

Fly forward 10 years and two cities later. I was living in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and still going to university. Rich, a college friend from Chicago, had graduated and moved to a Minneapolis suburb. He frequently invited me to visit on weekends, so in sunny or snowy weather, I’d tootle in my yellow-orange geometric form (Opel station wagon) two hours west.

One day while Rich was in the bathroom, I found a wide, open space in his apartment to secretly drop my hands onto the floor and sling my fuzzy-black-socked feet up to rest against the wall. A while later after he emerged from the loo, Rich glanced up at his wall and said, “What is that?!”

“What?” I asked.

“Look at these black marks on my clean, white wall!” Voiced raised, he appeared to be turning red.

Being insecure, and at this point, scared, I sheepishly looked up into his eyes and said, “I was standing on my hands,” and when he couldn’t calculate the connection, I hesitantly demonstrated.

Rich exhaled an exasperated sigh and handed me a lint remover, so I could pull sock fragments from the popcorn-finished wall.

These days I’m more conscientious about where I place my feet, but ol’ Father Gravity is going to have a tough time keeping them down.

The Golden Years (my ass)

When I was young, it drove me crazy that older people—usually my boyfriends—would turn their conversation around to their health. Well, it wasn’t really about health, it was their lack of health. Dialogue gravitated to aches, pains, their wives, and what didn’t work that used to, how they used to be able to do something they no longer could, and how hard it was to keep up.

That was during a time when I’d rather have been talking about whose parties were coming up, sales I’d made, music I’d played, weekend jaunts I’d taken or planned, dinners, and sex. Now those topics were exciting.

Even ten years ago I said, “I’m so much more comfortable with myself as I get older. I look better, feel better, and have more confidence. But now? You know what I think of “the golden years”? They suck like a pool drain. I hate getting old. What makes it even harder is that I’m still a teenager in my brain.

But when I hit 49, the declining-health talk I’d formerly cringed at began to eek out of me when I spoke. It’s not as if I planned it, it simply emerged. I began talking about what was happening to my body: cells that needed to be destroyed, movements that weren’t being inspired, not feeling like a hottie, shrinking boobs. And whereas talking about bodily events used to lead to interesting discussions, the exchange became more of a dirge.

And you know that phrase “There are those who do it and those who talk about it”? I was talking about it. By choice. I got so self-conscious about all the purportedly uncontrollable* things going on in my body that I couldn’t imagine being too close to someone, not even the dog.

If this rings any bells with you, we’re part of the same club. The dreaded Silver Club, like a golf club—not the building, the silver rod with a mallet at the end to hit balls with. Hard, ’cause you’re so pissed off. How can you feel so young in your brain yet have a body that looks and acts so different, so old?

When I aged another year and joined Club 50, I decided to view the physiological changes as natural and not fight them. You know, start loving myself in this evolutionary stage. For 50, I figured I didn’t look too bad anyway. ’Course I need glasses. Plus the only person who sees me in the morning is my daughter, and she’s way past the shock.

So what do I do with the wrinkles around my eyes? Fill ’em with makeup. When the inner tube that used to be a stomach area gets too big, I wear long shirts. I use the little bumps that used to be my boobs as an excuse for not wearing a bra. Really, what’s the point?

When my pants feel tight, I don’t wear any. And because I work from home, when I look old, fat, and unacceptable, I can forgo being seen, except of course by the critical chick in the mirror. But I’m learning to ignore her criticism. (She-devil.)

So if you see a caulked-up, long-shirted, brassiereless gal wearing no pants, walking her dog, don’t think, Whoa! There’s a golden girl who’s lost her marbles. Think, teenager. Think, Woodstock. Think, titillating!

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

* purportedly uncontrollable: I’ll elaborate on this topic later.

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