Groceries.

Over the season’s last plums, mounds of asian pears and pebble-skinned avocados, I overheard him speaking to a grocery clerk.

Could you help me find cashews? My wife does this so much better than I do.

He was an older man, tall despite stooped shoulders. He wore a straw garden hat. Khakis with sneakers. A kind smile.

The small grocery store was more crowded than usual and the gentleman looked overwhelmed. He steps were slow and cautious. His timid energy contradicted the cheerful tunes blaring on the speaker system (she wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny), the customers rushing to maneuver carts around each other, the precariously stacked piles of food.

We crossed paths several times as we each made our way through the store. He asked forgiveness from anyone in his vicinity for getting in their way. He shook a plastic produce bag, struggling to get it open. His veined hands trembled. I wanted to know how this story–Elderly Man Navigates the Grocery Store–would end. Thoughts of him and his wife swirled in with my mental grocery list. Where was his wife? Greek yogurt. Had she died? Whole wheat or french bread? Was she sick at home? Shoot, forgot the carrots for mushroom barley soup. Was she no longer mobile? We’re almost out of string cheese. Did his wife sit by the swimming pool in a yellow polka dot bikini a long time ago?  Jumbo brown eggs versus cage-free white. Does she continue to sunbathe in his mind?

Every person, a story. Every moment, a story.

I wanted to tell him that sometimes it helps to lick a finger and separate the thin leaves of sticky plastic produce bags. I wanted to put my hand on his. I wanted to tell him: you’re doing a great job. You’re beautiful, you in your straw hat at the market, and everything will be okay. But I did not tell him anything.

Let me tell you: you’re doing a great job. You’re beautiful and everything will be okay.

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Today’s poem is for moments (and lives) that pass by us unnoticed.

Splitting an Order by Ted Kooser

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half…

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And one more. A surprise because aging is always comes as a surprise, louder and more insistent than kazoos at a surprise party.

Jane by George Bilgere

Jane, the old woman across the street…

Sunglasses at night, and other signs of aging.

Last weekend was uncomfortable: I spent most of it wearing heels at a series of formal family functions, immobilized and in pain, unable to feel my toes but excruciatingly able to feel the vertical lines between my brow, that river of vexation, deepening with each moment.

I’ve written about the malevolence of shoes here before. I save a special sort of loathing toward shoes heeled with noodle thin spikes. Like many things in life, it wasn’t always this way: I used to love wearing heels. The height of the heel was directly proportional to how much fun I knew I’d have. A memorable night was in the making whenever I strapped on stilettos.

But it seems that I’ve lost the ability to walk in heels and breathe at the same time. So, when I wear heels, I try to remain seated and avoid moving unless it’s absolutely imperative, like fire, earthquake, or last call. I sit the night away, legs crossed, the dagger of a stiletto pointing at the floor.

The squeeze of lemon on the cut of last weekend was that I lost my glasses. Glasses are the first thing I put on in the morning and the last thing I take off. I can’t see beyond six inches without them. So how could I have misplaced them? I’m sure the heels had something to do with it. Heed my warning, ladies: high heels lead to bad mistakes.

I spent Saturday night wearing my prescription sunglasses because dark glasses are better than no glasses. S reassured me that it’s no big deal to wear sunglasses indoors at night: people will either think you have an eye disorder, or that you’re a celebrity. Fabulous. And yes, of course I’d be easily mistaken for an LA starlet, with my 19th century TB patient cough, my daughter leading me by the hand to help me through my temporary blindness, and my signature red carpet walk, stopping every five seconds to catch my breath and curse my heels. Fuck you, Jimmy Choo.

I’ve lost my patience for struggling with heels. I’ve lost my patience for contact lenses, worn for the sake of inching ever closer to a man’s definition of beauty.  They make my eyes feel like cracked windshields, and clear vision has become more valuable to me than a man’s second glance. It turns out that my lifetime allotment of patience for phoniness, the fake bullshit you get smeared with at these formal events, has also dried out. I used to sling it back as quickly as it was handed to me. No more. It’s exhausting.

Imagine my elation when I first encountered the following passage on Lisa Rivero’s blog. It comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a researcher and author of several fascinating books on flow and creativity) and it has provided comfort and clarity to my bespectacled, flat shoed, self:

Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise. They wear clothes that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial, they do only things they think are important. Of course, such idiosyncrasies are not endearing to those they have to deal with…. But personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from the expectations that make demands on attention and allow intense concentration on matters that count.

Both CF and aging are sculpting my present, but this passage reassures me that my curmudgeonly attitude might also have something to do with fiercely guarding what I treasure most. My penchant for elastic waisted pants is not something to hide, but rather a flag to wave in honor of my choices- I rather spend my time writing, reading, creating, or hanging out with my loves than give that time to squeezing myself into skinny jeans or slathering my face with colorful goo. My antisocial tendencies make more sense in the framework of the passage above, as does my frequent and shameless use of the word no. “No” no longer feels embarrassing: it’s the padlock on the pantry of my most valuable resources.

I don’t know if the culprit is CF, aging, or my eccentricity that leads me to make these decisions. Maybe it’s a dark, meaty, simmering stew of everything combined. But I am beginning to feel the rough bunion of aging with each step, a knobby reminder that there is more behind me than in front of me. And with that knowledge, I’m left holding the basic fact that there is a finite amount of time, energy, and attention at my disposal.  So I make choices on what or who will receive my time, energy, and attention carefully and without apology.

On that night without vision, I thought about my predilections and odd choices. The clink of wine glasses and diamonds rang in my ears. The lights were streaky, and the hotel chandeliers looked like stars in the sky. I felt old, disoriented, and unsure. But eventually I remembered that other way of seeing, the one Rilke urges us to claim for ourselves:

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late

to open your depths by plunging into them

and drink in the life

that reveals itself quietly there.

This is my guiding vision. This is how I let the losses of my body fall away from me without too much grief. This is how I steady myself from collapsing in overwhelming envy when the young and beautiful, the healthy and strong, walk by me. For now, it’s the only jar of anti-wrinkle cream I dive into. 

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For the bravery required to find our own definitions of a beautiful life.

Today’s Poem: (click link to read entire poem)

Bedecked by Victoria Redel

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy

store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger…