Daffy Doormat

Too much pink wine.

I had. Before I wrote that last post. To make it perfectly clear: certainly not all French men are creepy buggers. They do look you up and down, though, if you're a girl. I must be very unused to this after so many years in New York, where no one can be bothered to take a blatant peek, lest it betray their infinite coolness. My husband in return thinks most French women are weird, in his words "oddly masculine-looking", and they've totally been checking him out, so hey, it's a tie! Poor man, he's seen a few too many naked boobs at the beach here, mostly older, shriveled ones. Although today he noted today that he's "gotten used to it". What that means in relation to my perky ones, I do not know. Perhaps he now has a mature fetish?

Anyhow, must not get too attached to the French way of ogling, since we are leaving for Italy tomorrow. Time to put on the short shorts! Ciao!

You know what?

Blogging is hard when you're on the South of France. Let it suffice to say that much wine is being consumed, leading to early nights and fruitless genital fumbling. I cannot ever concentrate! Also, French men pay more attention to women. Creepy buggers! Haha.

Hospital hair.

During my week by my grandmother's hospital bedside, one (rare) source of amusement for my mom and I was the prevalence of horrible hospital hair. All the old chicks had been lying down so much that everything faced forward, know what I mean? No matter how much I combed my grandmother, her hair kept springing to the front. My mom pointed out that seeing these ladies is like taking a ride in the House of Horrors. Yes, my mom. Gotta love her. She says it like it is.

Anyhow, here's a pic of my grandma and her comrades having lunch one day. I couldn't resist. And I was egged on by my mom, who kept saying "Take the picture! Take the picture!" like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, so, please, you can blame her, not me. The photo made me laugh when faced with fear and sadness. Aw, I love my grandma, even with the hairdo from hell...

When mothers strike.

Thank you for suffering through my previous diatribe about death. As it should be obvious by now, I had a disturbing week prior to writing that. And just for the record: I changed my mind (as happens often) and I now do NOT plan to die at age 65. Although now I feel I may have seriously jinxed myself.

As if to jolt me back to land of the emotionally living, Mother's Day arrived. I read this post, on Judy McGuire's blog. Her lilac-scented memories of her mom made me remember how lucky I am that mine is still around, occasional bitchiness notwithstanding. It also made me doubly, no, triply thankful that my grandmother made it to eighty — and possibly beyond. And then I read this essay by Diane Mapes, linked on Judy's blog. And boy, did that one shut me up. I have no sisters (or brothers), but I do have a mom and a grandma (and both cook and bake wonderfully yummy things) and everything in that piece just massively broke my heart. 

It occurred to me that I simply know nothing about my future, my old age, who will love me then and who might miss my fried chicken. I can't say now that I wish to die at 65, because there may be someone who would feel a great loss. Who am I to so selfishly inflict that wound? To deny them decades more of my Stuffed Peppers, my Vanilla Kipferl, my love and nurturing seems wasteful and ignorant.

I do hope I'll make it there, varicose veins and all. I hope my husband will be by my side (perhaps mercifully with less sharp eyesight). Or some of my friends. Maybe a few of you will still be hanging around to change my Depends? I'll bake you a cake if you do!

Whatever you do, do NOT get old.

I must warn you. Today I feel entirely nihilistic and this post will not cheer you up whatsoever. But if you could stand a good dose of pessimism, mainly because your life in comparison will seem almost jolly, then read on. Also, if you have lost a loved one too early, you might resent my sentiments — and I entirely understand. So, first off the good news: my grandmother is out of the hospital and seems to have beaten the case of hospital-acquired pneumonia that threatened her life. She is home and, although weak, doing reasonably well. She now needs to rebuild her strength. Her arms look like toothpicks. She can't bathe or dress alone. It's not entirely guaranteed that she will be the same as she was before entering the hospital almost five weeks ago. I am at least trying not to be overly pessimistic. I still worry every minute. I tell myself, she IS eighty years old and old age happens, so I need to face reality, however much it hurts.

I am back in NYC, recuperating from this crash course in real life. I can honestly say that I spent the last week in an alternate universe. I have never before been exposed to old age and illness in such an in-your-face manner. I saw so many shriveled people lying down and waiting to die that it robbed me of sleep on several nights. I began to worry. When I get old, will I be unable to sit up to even just hold a glass of water to my lips? Will I have the same haunted look in my eyes, that penetrates everyone and everything, yet doesn't take much in? I don't have kids. Will I die alone, in a soiled diaper, in a crummy hospital room, while the nurses chit chat at their station and ignore the lit alarm light over my door? Probably so. Unless I am lucky and fall over dead while grooming the roses in my garden one day. The garden I have yet to have.

Ergo, I have decided that I do not want to be that old. It goes against today's generally positive outlook in our cure-all-obsessed society, where everyone now assumes they'll just be bumping and grinding well into their 100's, because researchers will be able to switch off all the bad genes in our genomes. No more cancer. No more heart attacks. No more dementia. No more flabby skin and wrinkly folds. It's going to be a geriatric wonderland. Except when it's not. When all of our friends and our family have passed and become only memories, and the only people around us are the ones we pay to give us care, life as we knew it will already have stopped. My grandmother is lucky... she has a number of family members all swarming around her. I wouldn't be that lucky, I suspect. It would be the ultimate doormat existence.

Someone said to me the other day "When you're that alone when you're old, then that says something about you. You must have done something wrong to be so alone and unloved." I agree with this otherwise oddly judgmental remark only in that, yes, I believe if that happens to you, you did do something wrong. You didn't die when you still had the chance. On better days, I too hope that science will ease or cure the diseases that afflict humans. I know by the time I am eighty, I will benefit from the advances of the next forty years. But ageing is not curable and to think otherwise is silly. There will come a day when I no longer will have any control, over my bodily functions or my senses. I'm just asking... is it really so desirable to go there? Or should I just start drinking, smoking and eating what I want right now, and call it a day at, say, sixty-five?