CROCK OF AGE'S

I used to think of myself as comic relief in a world frantic for perfection. I am the human with a deflated resume, one who runs around looking for eyeglasses propped on her head, and has mailed a bill or two without the check enclosed. I swelled with pride when a hairdresser said if I were perfect, I’d be on display in a museum, instead of loose out on the streets. I didn't care that he was referring only to the cowlick he'd just left on my head.

Sadly, it is no relief to find myself out on those streets wandering up and down, wondering what the hell I am doing there. It took a week to remember one reason was to replace my new watchband. I needed three days to remember I went out to pick up dry cleaning. Yesterday I made a special trip to buy Caesar Salad dressing because I wanted to use the head of romaine I would have sworn to you was languishing in my hydrator bin, but I came home to find the bin a perfect picture of emptiness. I have become so terrifying Al Qaeda should hire me.

When Buddhists talk about impermanence, I mechanically nod “Yes” because I see it in changing marital status, car design and waist lines. I hear the opinions of TV commentators shift hourly, the call plans of cell phone companies even faster. Our culture just loves moving on. But now that impermanence has hit me, I can't believe it. Every second of my life feels like a new Survivor challenge.

My friend Joan calls the forgetfulness part “galsheimers”, the piling on of the way too much women have to do. We can’t help it: stuff slides off the periphery. This version of the absentminded professor is so great for misplaced car keys and burned pots, I blame galsheimers at least once a day. But it only goes so far, and that's definitely not far enough. The great ear I had for languages is so deaf after repeating six times How Are You? in Nepali, I can’t remember five minutes later how to say it. Also, it took three months to remember I completely forgot the birthday of a childhood friend, an event we have continuously celebrated for 40 years. And when I did remember, all I could do was scare the hell out of myself about how much stuff I probably didn't know I forgot.

It's scary that I actually spent last Sunday afternoon discussing with my friend Joan not the usual topics we chew on when we get together —writing, travel, men—but how her Mom had the real deal Alzheimer’s. That’s why she’s sure she knows how we can tell the difference between it and, say, minor dementia, or galsheimers. It was a really big phew! to find out wondering why you have placed yourself in the car and driven to a certain street because you have no idea what you are suppossed to need there is not at all the same as putting the silverware away in the car trunk because you’ve lost the ability to distinguish between a kitchen drawer and the car trunk. We drank to that.

Unfortunately, Phew! is not exactly what I uttered the following day as the plane lofted into space and I remembered that, for the first time ever in my well ordered life, I’d left the car rental papers inside the dropped off rental car, exposing my credit card information to the world.

My friend Susan, an artist, entered before I did this badlands where the chasm time cuts between your failings and your needs opens wide and clear. She is always trying to remember what she was going to tell me but, she said yesterday, what she can't forget even when she gives it all she's got left is how when she was on crutches after her skiing-eroded knee was replaced, and she was struggling to make her way out the back door of her local Peet’s, the manicured twenty-somethings with their long hair and lattes and baby strollers bigger than aircraft carriers refused to clear her way. “Why don’t you just go out the front door,” one snapped, “and not bother us.”

She must have forgotten about generation gaps. What came between my elders and me was the original one, manufactured by the new, benighted consumer culture all atwitter about packaging. The whole "not your mother's" concept was in fact enshrined in a clothing franchise called Gap and dedicated to the lucre that could be mined from everybody impulsively doing their own thing. That meant no forbearance for fore bearers, those slow moving know nothing slugs over 30.

My grandparents, who once curtsied to the Queen of England as honored guests, would shake their heads, unable to figure out why I was flying around to European cities and Mediterranean beaches the way they used to motor off to the shore or to Manhattan. They couldn’t fathom that thanks to a new technology called airplane, the world had become my neighborhood. That grandfather, normally a clear-eyed captain of industry, interpreted hippie long hair as the inevitable slackened demand that accompanied the rise in barbershop prices. My grandmother screamed how profligate I was when she heard I had paid $.27 for an individual can of tuna fish—the way I cringe and think life's gone amok every time I now pay $2.27 for the teeny can.

One thing still clear to my fast fading mind is that those older folks had their frame of reference ripped out from under them, like Charlie Brown’s football. Impermanence blindsided them with totalitarian vengeance. It just isn't clear how I got to the other side of that abyss, two gaps away, kissing my reference points goodbye. I am so not on My Face or You Tube or into rap hop or assault rifle mouths, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. I can't even find the brands and products I prefer because they're so...so...so passe.

Did I fall through the gap because I don’t have the time young people have to navigate the edge? The basic business of looking the way people remember me has become a full-time job. I have to fight to remember so much stuff now: avocado on the face, oatmeal scrub, whitening toothpaste, the balance ball. Gotta keep moving to get moving. Have to keep the hair deceptively not gray, the nails strong, the hormones balanced, everything moisturized. And all this comes with me just trying to remember how I used to look.

Aging is a maddening marathon of challenges. Hair falls out of your head instead of off your legs. Your waist abandons you. Your eyesight lets you down. Languages, phone numbers, whole trains of thought fall out of your memory just as cartilage dissolves in your knees. You have to join the frequent fiber club. Right now I am in the middle of a metabolic tug of war between eat less or exercise more, hoping for a lose-lose-situation.

I am hampered by lots of unexpected do-it-yourself stuff. I may be alive and even lively, but I have become...well, forgotten. Nobody rushes to voluntarily pump gas for my car any more or take my dinner order they way they do for my god daughters. Nowadays nobody even holds the door. They forget everybody but themselves, keep talking into their cell phone and let it slam in my face.

The days of baby boomer age creep fill newspapers with advice about fitness for this great adventure race. Crossword puzzles are highly recommended, which is good news. I love crossword puzzles. I have been doing them since you could call the New York Public Library and get all the clues you needed to finish the big one in The Sunday Times before your friends who didn’t have the secret number (which, believe it or not, I still remember). But this is also bad news because somehow all those incarnations of Vishnu I could count on to fill the weird spaces and odd letter combinations have been replaced by hip product brand names or hip hop song titles I am clueless about. It always seemed safely normal not to be conversant with the 85^th incarnation of a Vedic deity, but, frankly, not getting the title of last year’s Grammy rap winner makes me more terrified of being out of it than I already am.

Not long ago, on the day I drifted in and out of the bathroom before remembering I wanted to polish my fingernails, I had to look up a phone number I’ve dialed for years. It just went out of my head, so far out I couldn’t recall it. With excruciating horror I realized I had become my grandmother, who when she was around 93 phoned me in a huge tizzy and shrieked: “You have to do something, you have to help me!”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I just tried to dial Gladys (her niece), and I can’t remember her phone number. This is it. I’ve gone senile! You have to do something!”

What I did was laugh. And laugh some more. “Not to worry,” I said, unable to stop laughing, “If you were senile, you wouldn’t be calling me to announce it. You wouldn’t know it.”

Telling that story now, I can't, for the life of me, remember why it was so funny.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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