Looks are everything. Don’t buy into anyone reassuring this not to be so.
Yesterday I made the acquaintance of a woman who may become a friend. Not least because she is candid. When I learnt that she is one and a half years younger than me I momentarily lost my thread of coherent speech. From now on I shall look into the mirror, and at myself, in a new light. No, make that in the dark.
To say that I am shell shocked would be to say that I am a crab facing a human for the first and last time.
It sparked a conversation with the Angel, over dinner, about time warps. I love time warps. You can tell a woman’s heyday by the way she does her eyes, plucks her eyebrows. Do men inhabit a space in ‘time warp’? Don’t think so. They tend to go with the flow. What’s a beer belly among aficionados? Though men will mourn over a receding hair line. Which is why I harbour a growing hatred of Delilah. Why did she have to break Samson’s spell?
My one time warp, in my mind’s eye, is my mother. Frozen in time as it were. Since I rarely see her, though speak to her every week for at least an hour at a time, her voice still that of the young woman she was, possibly still is. Have any of you ever contemplated that voice doesn’t appear to age? Other than when one minute you are a choir boy the next you are a man?
I am now older than my mother the way I see/remember her. And my youngest sister, the formidable and pragmatic if ever there was one, mother of four of her own, is still that tiny little girl with big wide eyes, looking at her big sister for reassurance. Except she doesn’t need it any longer.
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