Mirror, Mirror

The Mirror speaks—How could I not love this face?  Changeable as it is, aged as it has become, I still find beauty in the shifts and quirks of the emotions that ripple across its surface. Hers is the face that fills my world and, in those moments when she rages against the erosion of years on her skin, I hold each wrinkle and spot as sacred signs of a life well-lived. I love this face as if it were my own, for in truth, it is. And it is truth that I reflect, but what I offer as a gift and testament to all she is, she receives as an admonition and cries out against the unfairness of a verdict that she cannot appeal. Time plays havoc with us all. Even my smooth and silvered surface, laid down in perfection all those decades ago, has pocked and peeled leaving coppery islands and inky streams. If I could speak to her beyond those words the enchantment allows, I would share my admiration and remind her that the face she sees is the face she has earned.  Inspired by Little Snow White by the Brothers Grimm.

“I’m done.” In the mirror our eyes locked in reflected gazes; mine resolute, hers quizzical and maybe a touch concerned. “I’m just done.”

Decisions are never easy for me. I had flirted with this one for months and though my angst might seem like the fretting of a woman loath to release her hold on something that, in reality, had slipped from her grasp long ago; the truth of the matter is I am lost in that no-person’s land of an aging woman in a youth-centric culture. The familiar signposts and landmarks that guided me through my younger years no longer seem relevant and the map I’ve chosen to follow doesn’t match the cultural landscape.

Perhaps my children should worry. If I decide to go gray in a world that insists I need to look as young as I can for as long as I can, what does my decision say about me? Is this the first plodding step along the slippery slope to the valley of despair. After the golden highlights have faded and the low lights are no more, will I tumble into despondency and cease to bathe? Or could this hard earned decision be a declaration—a shot across the bow of a social standard that denies the beauty of anyone who has passed their middle years? In my heart, to Deny the Dye has become my manifesto.

My hairdresser was not happy. My visits, which used to be characterized by long comfortable chats and shared intimations, became strained. Now we came together as strangers, instead of acquaintances of many years. I suspect the chill behind her forced smile said as much about her own approaching dye or not to dye moment as the impact of my decision on her bottom line. In her eyes glinted the fear of time and the relentless passing of days. In my naiveté I had hoped she would guide me along a gracefully graying path, but her terse denial, “there is no way to go gray gracefully” turned out to be a personal rejection as well as a professional philosophy. Today I am glad to say, she was wrong.

So far the changes have been subtle. My scalp has become a loom weaving silver and platinum threads among the browns of my birthright. And you may think me mad, but I love it. I find myself rejoicing in my new, natural roots. There is something primal about the brindle colors of salt and pepper and cinnamon. My hair is no longer a coif, but a mane. No longer something to be lacquered into submission, but a creature to release into its natural state. With a growing understanding that encompasses more than my tresses, I realize I’ve spent my life chained to someone else’s idea of what I should look like. For me, it’s time to break those chains.

By the end of my marriage, I had learn to approach the mirror with trepidation.  Like the queen in Snow White, I cringed at my reflection and lashed out at the damage done by time and circumstance. I hated my face and its features and I started searching for ways to recapture the person I was before the destructive years took their toll. Somewhere, I believed, there had to be a spell or a potion, a dye or a cream, that would return me to me. But the victories were few and fleeting and my hair still grew gray and my jawline still sagged. Finally, one morning as I listed the faults revealed in my reflection, I literally said, Stop.  And I asked myself this question, if this face belonged to a stranger, what would I think? Would I be repulsed?  Would I see the lines and wrinkles as excuses to turn away? To be angry? To believe this face wasn’t worthy of my compassion? Or would I see a face who has survived and still smiles; who has suffered and still goes on? Would the kind eyes and laugh lines mark this countenance as someone I would offer a grin and a nod of my head?  In asking those questions, I found my face was worthy and fine and even beautiful in its way.  In forgetting myself, I was able to find my-self in the mirror once again.

Women and, with increasing frequency, men step up to the looking glass with an eagle eye for the flaws and faults. Our culture tells us we are never good enough. If your nose is slightly crooked or your eyebrows are too furry or, heaven, forbid, you have gray hair, you have to do something and do it right away! But this is not the experience I want for myself, or my handsome sons and my beautiful daughters-in-law.  It is not the experience I want for your beautiful daughters and sons. And, it is certainly not what I want for our grandchildren.

This summer my granddaughter danced on the beach the day she turned four.  She burst into song when it suited her fancy and made silly faces without blushing.  But already at four, the culture is starting to shape her self image.  In preschool the children talk about what things may be liked; which classmates may be played with; who will or will not get invited to parties and play dates. Soon it will be what clothes measure up and who is too tall, short, dark, or fair and I have no clue how to change the conversation. But maybe by letting my hair go gray and my jawline sag, I express my joy in who I am. After all, the story of Snow White is not so much about the princess’s beauty as the queen’s rage. So here is my selfie with my hair going gray and its natural waves and cowlicks untamed.  And I know that not everyone will think I’ve made a wise choice, but that’s okay.  For one thing I’ve learned is that if someone doesn’t like the way I look, it says very little about me, but it speaks volumes about them.

So love your face.  And for those of you who’ve spent distressing moments in front of the the mirror lately, here is some love and some Michael Bublé.

 

Shoeless

Where had she lost the shoes?  Dorothy rubbed the dust out of her eyes and considered the riddle of her stockinged feet.  Moments before she had hit the ground like a pint-sized meteor, tumbling head over heels through the buffalo grass and startling the grasshoppers into spontaneous acrobatics.  Pushing herself upright, she wondered what else was lost?  The basket, packed tight with her second best dress and the Munchkins’ farewell gifts, no longer hung on her arm.  And where was Toto? Was he already chasing Auntie Em’s chickens through the barnyard or was he wandering the desert that divided Oz and the civilized world? “Toto?” Perhaps some unused magic still clung to the cotton of her stockings and if she closed her eyes and tapped her heels, it would carry her little dog the rest of the way home.  But before she could try, the weeds rustled and parted and with a yip Toto hopped into her lap. Like Dorothy he seemed surprised by her shoeless state.  So much had depended on those silver slippers and they would have been an uncommon comfort in a land without magic. Overhead crows cawed in a cloudless sky and a feeble breeze tickled her nose with the scent of hot earth and cowpies.  “Toto,” she sighed, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Oz anymore.”  Inspired by L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz—Chapter XXIII

Dorothy Gale at sixty–my imagination flares and I see her standing in her garden at the end of the day, a figure so real she is more memory than fantasy.  Her cotton dress is faded from sun and countless washings.  Her loosely bound hair is threaded with silver.  On her feet she wears broken down boots, cracked at the heel and scuffed at the toe,  their color as gray as prairie dust. Purchased at a store in Kansas City, they were Uncle Henry’s final pair.  Dorothy knows they belong on the trash pile, but to her they are more than boots and she suspects they will be sitting in their place by the backdoor long after the wind has swept her footsteps away. Though the hard life of a Kansas homestead is etched on her face, Dorothy’s eyes still hold the wonder of a world beyond the rainbow.

Not long ago a friend asked me how I felt now that I was “really sixty”.  I sputtered about looking for an answer, searching to see if I could put a finger on my newly attained sixty-ness, but at that spot in my psyche that is essentially me, sixty hadn’t settled in.  Or maybe I had barred the door and refused it admittance.  This same friend turned sixty last April and she had faced the milestone head-on with a house full of celebrants and presents piled on her hearthstone.  But as my birthday neared, I became a master at deflecting invitations to celebrate, burying that small, hard seed of discomfort about my age ever deeper under a compost heap of denial.  Inevitably, by the time my birthday arrived I was sick, my subconscious opting for a viral infection rather than dealing with the transition out of my fifties.

If my parents were alive, they would be telling me to suck it up and get on with the business at hand.  Stoicism had been burned into their DNA by uncounted generations of Celts (mother’s side) and Vikings (father’s). It doesn’t take much to imagine my ancestors blowing raspberries at me from over the centuries.  After all, turning a year older is the work of only a moment.  As my mother always said of her own birthdays, it’s just another day.  But this year, it felt like I had arrived at the edge of a chasm and contemplating the crossing had me in despair.  What waits on the other side?

Original illustration by W.W. Denslow.

Until I reached my fifties, my life had progressed in a fairly predictable fashion.  The cultural footwear I had been fitted with at birth worked well for the standard set of heartbreaks and joys I’d encountered along my way, but they’d also adapted to the side-trips that were uniquely my own. By fifty-five, I had a reasonable, though sometimes disquieting, expectation that the rest of my life would progress not unlike my parents’ or my grandparents’.  But then everything changed. A friend of mine from Kenya recently described his community’s struggles as “a bit of hell over here” and with these simple words he elegantly captured those long periods of loss that every group, every individual, must face.  But the journey forward after we’ve survived our “bit of hell” also has its challenges.  When we return to solid ground, unshod and footsore, we realize that our before-maps no longer fit our after-topography.  Personally, to put paid to my fifties meant I had to regroup and face the years ahead without signposts or OnStar or even a yellow brick road. It seems we never stop coming-of-age.

In her memoir “Wild”, Cheryl Strayed describes the loss of one of her hiking boots off the side of a mountain on the Pacific Crest Trail.  In a moment of stark and breathtaking realization that this most precious of objects is irretrievable, she pitches its mate into the trees and stands on the trail shoeless.  Reading this, I panicked.  I panicked for Cheryl, I panicked for Dorothy and I panicked for myself. How do you take the next step when there is nothing to protect your dear and tender toes?

When Moses went tending his sheep and stumbled on the burning bush, the Lord told him to take off the shoes from his feet, because the place where he stood was holy ground (Exodus 3:5).  With nothing separating his skin and the earth, Moses was at his most vulnerable.  Vulnerability is uncomfortable and frightening and we spend our whole lives trying to escape the feeling of exposure that comes when you realize there is nothing between you and the rock-strewn unpredictability of Life.  So at sixty I stand barefoot, reminding myself to appreciate the significance of each step along the shadowed path ahead and to cherish every grain of sand, every muddy patch, and every sacred stone.

Dream A Little Dream

The wind was the worst, not the cold nor the dark.  Those were effects without consequence.  For what did a ghost care about the cold when there was no flesh to feel its bite?  And why should a phantom fear the dark, when it disguised a dreadful lack of substance?  But there was something unsettling about the wind reaching through your innards to rustle the bed curtains, treating you as if you weren’t there, which of course, you weren’t.  In death Marley had grown to hate the rustle of dry leaves in the grass and the whisper of new leaves in the treetops.  He would cringe when he saw the breeze lift the curls on a child’s head or push waves along the river.  For a ghost could hear and a ghost could see, but touch escaped with the last breath–the body’s last commerce with wind.  Here in the hall outside his old bedchamber, Marley could hear a draft whistle through the gaps in the door frame, a reminder of all that he had lost.  It had taken  him  a long time to find his way back to this room and his old partner.  Maybe this visit would ease his suffering some, shorten his chain by a link or two. If he’d been among the living, Jacob Marley would have drawn a deep breath before he took the next step; but, the times being what they were, he shrugged his shoulders and stepped through the wall.  Inspired by A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Outside my window, insanity reigns; the world has gone crazy with springtime.  Birds warble in symphonic abandon as flowering trees trill arias of demented color.  Not to be outdone, the breeze tickles arpeggios on the new leaves, while bumblebees hum sweet, dirty blues in the redbuds.  And the grass…the grass screams GREEN.  But here at my kitchen table I shiver, lost in the company of Dickens’ miser and the ghosts of problems past.  Life has been difficult lately and it has me sore in spirit and mood.  When I get like this, my father, dead these 13 years and often lamented, drops onto a bleacher seat in my psyche and kibitzes from sidelines.  Dad rarely offered advice when he was alive, but since his passing he’s got an opinion about everything.

This should come as no surprise.  After he died, with heartbreaking suddenness, he visited my dreams: once to touch base, once to leave instructions, and once to make me smile.  A less enlightened person might have thought they were losing touch with reality, but I had long been a student of Mr. Dickens and was familiar with “ghostly” visitations.  Dad came back when I needed him the most and it looks like he’s going to stick around a while.

Like all good ghost stories, my father appeared in my dreams on three separate occasions.  The first visit came shortly after he died.  Shock and stress had decimated my immune system and it seemed like I had been sick for weeks.  Then one night as I fitfully dozed, I dreamt I was driving along the familiar gravel road that leads to the family farm.  It must have been midsummer for the sunlight was white and the roadside was dusty.  Close to the mailbox at the end of our lane, my father stood waiting, dressed in his old khaki work clothes.  Stopping the car, I rolled down the window.  Even as an apparition, he had to bend his long frame to see my face.  “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice soft with concern.  “I’m fine, Dad.  I’m going to be fine.”  And I was.

The weeks passed and the difficulty of making farming decisions as a committee of siblings had jangled every familial nerve.  With five sets of feet trying to fill Dad’s shoes, toes were bound to get stepped on.  Elbows were going to get thrown.  Falling asleep one night while nursing my bruises, a dream carried me to the state capitol in Jefferson City, where I stood in the rotunda and gazed up at the dome.  On the third floor leaning over the balustrade was Dad.  “Don’t spend any more money on the farm,” he called.  If only decisions were always that simple.

Dad’s final visit came many months after his death.  My younger son had graduated from the police academy and in my dream, family and friends were leaving a restaurant in a loud and celebratory mood.  As we strolled along saying our goodbyes, a boat of a car, all gleaming fins and shiny chrome, tore into the parking lot.  Accelerating into a perfect donut, the driver spun the behemoth to a screeching stop right at my toes.  Behind the wheel my father grinned with a twenty-something smile I had only seen in old black and white photos.  “You’d better watch out,” I told him.  “Your grandson is a policeman now and you could get in trouble.”  Hearing him laugh was a gift, a tonic.  “First he’ll have to catch me,” he said.

Even after several years, the dreams of my dad are still vivid.  And still a comfort when that father-shaped hole in my heart starts to ache.  But I also use those dreams as existential Post It Notes to remind me of truths about myself that I have, on occasion, misplaced.  Charles Dickens described Scrooge as “secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”  Accumulated hurts from his past had isolated him in his present and shut the door on his future.  It took the ghosts of Christmas to remind him of the man he was when he danced at Mr. Fezziwig’s and made plans for a life with Belle. In the same way, dreaming of my dad made me realize me that I am not the only arbiter of my worth.  In my parents’ eyes, I was a person lovable, capable and deserving of compassion. Now on the bleak days when I look in the mirror and see nothing to care for, I remember the respect my mom and dad had for my judgment and abilities and their sincere desire for my life to go well. And, Dad, if ever I forget that I hope you’ll drop by, my dreams are always open.