HOW Old Am I?

Growing old is not for the faint of heart. The days creep by slowly, and suddenly you look around and decades have passed... and you have to find your reading glasses to even see what the date says on the calendar! I don't remember my grandmothers being so aware of the passage of time, but maybe that's because I was still young enough to see dust motes and think they were like magical fairy crystals floating in the sunbeam...

When I was growing up I was incredibly fortunate to have two wonderful grandmothers who were a part of my life. They could not have been more opposite -- one was brought up in San Francisco, one grew up in tiny, rural Ukiah, California; one adopted one child, a girl -- the other had three children, all boys; one traveled all over the world, the other was content to read her way through stacks of books. From them I inheirited an appreciation for fine things and a down-to-earth sensibility; a collection of recipes for everything from Wine Country Chicken to homemade ice cream; and a balanced view of the way the world works.

Grandma M. was the original Low Maintenance gal. If her face was washed and her short hair combed she was ready to go. She never wore dresses, except under extreme duress, and she favored a shade of blue that brought out the silvery tints in her hair and made her blue eyes bright, but that was one of her few concessions to appearance. (I sooo take after her in the less-is-more category!)

Grandma B. was vain in the nicest possible sense of the word. She cared about her appearance -- if her "face" wasn't on, she went NOWHERE, and she could pair a sweatshirt and jeans with diamond jewelry and not look like a trailer park escapee. I have fond memories of her sitting at her dressing table, her makeup and brushes and eyelash curler arrayed at her fingertips, pink hair tape securing small curls near her ears, her fresh scent powdery and elegant and somehow rich with good taste. She always had a special makeup mirror -- round, with one side magnified and the other REALLY magnified, and small lightbulbs marching along the sides of the mirror's support -- which I assumed was just a fancy way of putting on makeup, like the eyelash curler or the hair tape.

Would you believe it was only yesterday that it dawned on me why she had that mirror?

I noticed that my eyebrows were once again threatening to take over the spaces that my sweet hairstylist had so carefully carved out, and thought I'd take a tweezer to the offending interlopers. Unfortunately, SEEING the doggone things in the mirror was a bit hard -- and if I put on the reading glasses to get a better view, the doggone glasses were in the way of doing the actual tweezing!!!

Oh my God, I'm old! And I'm going to have Brooke Shields eyebrows (from her early "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins" days, not the sunscreen and dental health version of more recent appearances). And I'm going to have to either suck it up and go buy a grandma mirror or pay to have someone with actual eyes do the dang job.

I'm torn, I have to admit. I like the neat look, and I always admired how pulled together Grandma B was in every situation, but Grandma M's genes are starting to whisper really loudly in my DNA... forget the eyebrows... forget the hair...just wear blue and no one will notice the strays... blue is the answer to everything... blue!

Oh, and the next time somone says that the forties are the new twenties you can snap back that they are idiots. Twenty-somethings don't need reading glasses to "put on their faces," and forty-somethings can't laugh without first visiting the ladies' room. The good news about being in your forties? Dust motes are once again magical -- not just the belief in the invisible fairies that created them, but the powerful magic needed to see them: at least two more numbers up from whatever current pair of reading glasses you have.

Excuse me while I go change into something blue.