If I were asked to name a new rock band, I’d call it Ava’s Gardner.
I thought about that while waiting in line at the Walgreen’s in my hamlet. I know it would only be effective to ‘people of a certain age’, still I found it funny.
Then, I pulled up to the clerk behind the bullet proof glass and the metal drawer that when fed various forms of negotiable currency, it magically dispenses all kinds of drugs that are supposed to help combat issues associated with ‘people of a certain age’. If only the drug dealers of my wanton youth were as accessible, compliant and not under DEA surveillance. The drawer of my bedside table is littered with amber hued pharmaceutical bottles. Aging it seems, has to be treated medically.
In 1973, when I transitioned from an 8th grader to a high school Freshman, I discovered FM rock stations. What a concept. No AM static or hiss or loss of signal when you drove under an overpass. Even standard songs that ran amuck on AM station playlists sounded better on FM. I remember one of the first songs I heard on this amazing new format–aural splendor. It was an Elton John tune that was a few years old and rarely played then, much less now. It was entitled Friends, from the movie of the same name, about two young teen lovers (a term I loathe). The beginning of the second verse is as follows:
“It seems to be crime that we should age….”
Turn 14 and all that that implies, and listen to those lyrics and try NOT to experience new-found teenage angst and existential doubt.
Back then I swear I felt like Atlas with a better rack.
Funny how amplified a pimple, a break up, an unrequited crush, a mid-term exam, the prom, being popular or not, can be everything at one point be in one point in life. How small was the world of a young teen in a free society circa 1973?
In those years, my mother was an enemy. We butt heads on everything. I matured faster than than my two older sisters and that was a cause of concern for her. She was very strict. I was very normal, but she couldn’t wrap her head around how different I was than my two older sisters. I was constantly threatened with being sent to convent school and forced to seee priests and shrinks because she just couldn’t understand me. It wasn’t long before I realized our mother/ daughter dynamic was textbook skewed. She knew it too. The truth is, she was hardly the mother for a girl like me and I was put the daughter for a woman like her. She was short and even shorter now, even though I surpassed her in height decades ago, but she has always nine feet tall. As a mom, she was completely imposing in her very countenance.
It took a number of years before I understood as a woman.
She turned 86 in June. She is slow and doddering, her memory will lapse and she’s now at that point where if she can’t remember it, it didn’t happen. “Damn liar!”, I’ve decided, is a term of endearment.
It’s taken years to understand how unkind onset of senility can be.
She has good days. She has bad days. She has aches and pains. She’s deaf and refuses to wear her hearing aid. She’s often grumpy. She talks more openly about her death, a topic I hate, but I know my only place is to remain quiet and absorb everything she says as opposed to denying her the priveledge. After growing up in The Depression, after watching friends and brothers fight in World War II or Korea and never return home; after all she’s witnessed, such as the advent of TV, astronaut Neil Armstrong take one giant leap for mankind…and after giving birth to two compliant daughters and one ABC After School Special (aka me), she’s earned that right.
It’s taken a few years to appreciate aging along side my mother.
It’s odd that we’ve finally reached something akin to common ground that’s painted as gray as our hair and on a landscape of wrinkles I also it’s all the same places, which either means zip look very old for me age, or she looks good for hers.
Earlier this year, she moved into a lovely, semi-assisted living scenario and still has her independence, but the familial discussions about additional care and other things are becoming more frequent. My two sisters see her once a month. Her decline is more obvious to them. But I notice it too. Often, from day to day.
But despite that, life goes on, thankfully and I’m renewed in some way that we still argue, we still have distinctly different views on almost everything but we have a better understanding of each other which remains unacknowledged. And that’s okay. We’ve never been demonstrative in word or deed. She told me she loved me by giving me coupons for products I liked or highlighting newspaper articles about how to find THEE man of my dreams. I’m emotionally awkward too, though I can say I love you easier than she can. She’lol say it in return if told first, but she never initiates it.
And that’s okay, too.
I understand so much more than I did at eight or 18 or 38 or 58, which if you must know, staring me down in a matter of months.
The reality is my time with her grows short. Someday, the phone will ring and life as I’ve known it, will cease. One day, I know I’ll miss being told no, or that what I’m wearing, watching, driving, drinking and thinking is all wrong. Someday, I’ll even miss being called a Communist spinster with a bad attitude. I’ll even miss the criticism that comes with wearing bra that’s completely ill-fitting for a woman with what she calls, some “heft”.
Someday, she’ll be gone.
And it will take years for me to get over it.
