Not My Turn


Like me, Abigail Thomas has a Jennifer. But that’s not what this is about, except vaguely (just, our daughters aren’t old biddies).

Thomas writes, “I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don’t feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. ‘How did that happen?’ I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It’s somebody else’s turn now.”

Which puts me in mind of something Jeanine said. Jeanine checks skin. I like when I get her at the dermatology office. “If people grew more beautiful as they aged,” Jeanine remarked, “we’d be in a hot mess.” That’s how she put it: “hot mess.” Oh oh oh, so true. Never mind the disappointment, the sad last gasps, the aversion that looks back at us olders in the mirror, because this regressing is the only way things can possibly work. Imagine the young never ever ever getting to believe they’re on top of the world. Which they’re not, actually. But they don’t know it. The downhill slide will be bumpy but there for a while they were little gods.

(Photo: not Jennifer, nor one of her daughters, but a different grandgirl at age 14??, playing duchess, I guess.)

 

 


 

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