Forward from Here: Leaving Middle Age--and Other Unexpected Adventures (Thorndike Press Large Print Biography Series) - Hardcover

Chapter 18. Vanity, Gravity, Levity

I've often hoped that as I advanced in years I would also advance as a human being, "every day, in every way, getting better and better," as the old saying goes. I've even secretly wished that as a very old lady I might become a truly saintly individual, like one lovely old woman I used to know. She was almost incandescent with goodness, having spent a selfless life helping others and never uttering an unkind word about anybody. She had a beautiful face, and beautiful hands softened by innocent old-fashioned lotions that smelled like roses, and yet she seemed to be entirely without vanity.

I've also thought it could be interesting to go in the opposite direction and turn into a little old Holy Terror. I've known a couple of those, too.

So far, though, I just seem to continue being me, the same person I was at twelve and at fifty. If sainthood or deviltry is my destiny, then destiny is taking its own sweet time, especially in the "getting better" department. Though I try to be friendly and polite and generous and thoughtful, as my mother instructed her children to be, I have many faults. I know I'm not selfless, for one thing.

At sixty I'm just as self-indulgent as I ever was, possibly more so. I put extra butter on my English muffins, I paint my toenails bright red in winter even though nobody can see them but me, and at certain times you will find me lying on my bed reading a book when I should be sitting at my desk writing one. I try not to utter unkind words, often because they generate a kind of troublethat is both painful and time-consuming. But never? How I wish that were true!

Vanity may be less of a problem than it was forty years ago, though I can't take much credit for that. At this age, what choice do I have? When my late sister, Anne, turned fifty she told me, "After a certain age, there's only so good you can look." Anne was a beautiful woman all her life, so to hear her say this made me smile, but I understood what she meant. One reaches a time in life when the attempt to look gorgeous requires an effort greater than any results it can possibly produce. That's when it makes sense to make friends with reality.

I find that I don't mind looking at my face in the mirror anymore, except maybe in the middle of the night -- that can be scary. I've "grown accustomed to my face," to paraphrase the song Professor Higgins sings about Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. I'm not only accustomed to my face, but I've also become quite fond of it. This is a very different feeling from the one I had at twenty or thirty or even forty, when I worried constantly about its faults and flaws. Maybe I care less now than I did then about how I look to other people, or maybe I know from long experience that most people ignore our imperfections because they are concentrating upon theirs.

Furthermore, I no longer have the good eyesight and steady hands to do what I did every single morning when I was twenty. I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror trying to hold an eyelid still with one hand while brushing eye shadow on it and then painting a tiny stripe of eyeliner along the lower part, just above the eyelashes, with the other. This was a complex process, especially for a left-handed person with questionable fine motor skills. I would find myself in a complicated self-hug, elbows crisscrossing over my chest like the gesture that went with a song we used to sing in summer camp in the fifties:

I love myself. I think I'm grand!
I sit in the movies and I hold my hand.
I wrap myself in a warm embrace,
And if I get fresh, I slap my face!

After applying the eyeliner I would take out a tube of mascara and cover my lashes languorously with the little brushy liquid-coated wand, blotting the dark residue with Kleenex in the hope that the stuff would not all be transferred, as it usually was by the first blink after application, to my upper cheek. Mascara provided less glamour than I hoped for, leaving me as it so often did with that sleep-deprived raccoon look.

The place where the mascara once ended up is now webbed with what the cosmetics people call "the appearance of wrinkles." I am aware that it's the reality of wrinkles. I don't care what they tell you on TV. But I also like to think of it as the appearance of ancestors. Sometimes when I look at my face in the mirror now, due to the passage of time and the forces of gravity, I can see my mother's face and even my grandmother's face looking back at me: blue eyes, wrinkles, glasses, and all. It is a very friendly family reflection.

I mention the glasses because I rarely wear them in the bathroom, what with the potential for splattering toothpaste on the lenses, stepping on them in the shower, and/or absentmindedly flushing them down the toilet. When I say I don't mind looking at my face in the mirror anymore, part of the reason may be that I can't see it. That is not such a bad thing, either. I have often felt that the inevitable gradual failing of our eyesight over the years is God's plan to help us let go of vanity. By the time you don't want to look at your face, you can't see it anyway -- perfect solution.

I may feel a nostalgic recognition and a sweet yearning for those long-gone wrinkly faces I find in the mirror, like the feeling I have if I visit a house I knew intimately in childhood. But the truth is that my feminine forbears did not surrender to their own wrinkled landscapes without a fight, and neither will I. I still make an effort, at least "in public," which means in places where the majority of other women wear real makeup, like Texas.

Like my mother before me, I have some pink stuff that I put on my cheeks and some red stuff that I put on my lips (not to mention the toenail polish) and I even have a little compact, with a remnant of face powder in an undetermined color, the label long gone. That's as far as I am willing to go, even if I get to Houston.

Real makeup doesn't work for me. It never did. The mascara was bad, but other things were worse. I couldn't use the gooey stuff that came out of bottles labeled "Foundation," which was applied to the face like a primer coat in house painting, before other applications went on with wands and brushes. "Foundation" made my skin itch and gave me claustrophobia, probably because in earlier years I was susceptible to poison ivy, and spent many spring and summer days and nights covered in pink, flaking calamine lotion. As medicine, it was effective, but it was the makeup from hell.

There are thousands of women of high intelligence, warm heart, and fine character for whom makeup is an art mastered early in life and so essential to one's daily wardrobe that it would be as unacceptable to leave home without it as it would be to walk out the front door stark naked. Most of these women, at least the ones I know, live in states where they would not catch cold if they did go forth into the world naked. Makeup, like the mint julep, is a Southern thing, though not exclusively.

Last summer a friend of mine here in Vermont miraculously survived a terrible car accident. The vehicle was destroyed, but her husband escaped with bumps and bruises and she felt "lucky" to come out of the experience with only a badly broken right arm. It was not an easy time. When some of us stopped by a few days after the accident, she was thankful to be alive, and was managing pretty well under the circumstances. We had been most worried about the pain in her body and the state of her mind, but she told us that another woman had telephoned her, very distressed to hear her news, with only one pressing concern:

"How will you put on your makeup?"

My friend was just beginning to absorb the daily difficulty of brushing her teeth, getting her clothes on, and answering the telephone one-handed, so she found herself unable to answer.

I'm not saying that vanity is all bad. Millions of women -- and men, too, these days -- work hard to counteract the effects of aging. Their dedication provides jobs and profits for the cosmetics industry and enriches plastic surgeons all over the world. It bolsters sagging economies while lifting drooping faces and other body parts. Some people, including actors who depend upon youthful good looks for the continuation of their careers, may succeed through repeated surgery in making themselves look younger than they really are, at least for a while. Other people usually only make themselves look hazardous, because their skin is stretched so tightly over their bones that it looks to an observer as if the whole face might split open at any moment like an overripe pea pod and spill its contents.

No matter how good the results of plastic surgery may be, they don't last forever. Everyone who gets old will look old, someday. Most of us retreat from the battle somewhere along the line, leave vanity to those who enjoy it, and amuse ourselves in other ways.

For those aging women who have lived in the country too long, or have just lived too long to remember the knack of putting on makeup, and for those hopeless fashion duds like me who never got the hang of it in the first place and had creepy calamine lotion claustrophobia, there is another way to cheer your days, brighten your appearance, and enhance those glimpses of yourself in the mirror or in store windows that you can't avoid -- and you know you can't avoid them all.

Ladies, I give you Accessories! Hats, scarves, earrings, pins, and socks, the brighter the better, especially the socks.

I have cheered myself through two weeks of rainy weather and a set of abnormal test results, very scary ones, simply by wearing colorful socks. I have a large collection. My socks are of various colors and motifs, and may be decorated with anything from white sheep on neon-green fabric to red hot peppers against a sophisticated black wool blend. Where I live there is a "Vermont Sock Lady," too, an entrepreneurial genius who understands the power of footwear. She has created a line of vibrant hosiery, every single sock a little different from e...