As I drove down the freeway, my radio program was interrupted by an enthusiastic young man suggesting products I might buy to overcome the ravages of the aging process. Really? I thought. Am I ravaged? Ravaged sounded permanent. Like a building that has already collapsed.
When I arrived home, I removed my coat and shoes, then my bra (we’ll get to that later) and readied myself for a full body scan to assess my ravages. Pulling off my socks, I focused on a nearly 40-year-old bunion (a direct consequence of the requisite pointed toe shoe designs of my pre-feminist young adulthood) covered with a day-old curling bunion pad and started the process at ground level.
My feet are decidedly flat. When I was 8 years old, my nervous mother took me to a chiropodist who determined that I needed steel arch supports placed inside my Buster Brown oxfords. They didn’t work, my arches never rose, and he later became my piano teacher, but that’s another story. My toenails are currently a bright red because five of my old woman friends and I just came back from a vacation/celebration of our 30-year friendship and knowing I would be wearing a bathing suit in public I decided to paint the parts of my body that still lent themselves to decorative enhancement.
Moving northward, I arrive at two silvery scars, one over each knee, announcing the placement of titanium where there once was bone. I could have paused to mention puffy ankles from middle-aged falls that I never bothered to treat. I just elevated, iced and forgot about them. I still do. My ankles are fine. Strangers pat my knees every time I go through airport screening, but they work remarkably well. The pain of the surgery has dimmed just as my surgeon—who had a blindingly toothy male smile—assured me it would: “It’s like childbirth.” How the fuck do you know what childbirth is like? I thought. But he was going to be re-designing my body with complex carpentry and I was going to be unconscious. It didn’t seem the moment for feminist education. I’m still angry at myself for not letting him know it wasn’t an appropriate parallel.
From The Kitchen is Closed and Other Benefits of Being Old
by Sandra Butler