beauty · career · happiness · home

Take the Stairs

Jenny1 Comment

I work in an office building in a revitalized downtown. The streets surrounding it are lined with retro neon signs, quirky shops, and tempting cafes, clubs, bars, and theaters. There’s even a converted funeral parlour that serves as a de facto speakeasy near where I park. I’ve been on this job for several months, often telling myself as I walk from car to office or from office to car that I ought to do more midday breaks to really explore, or better yet, stay after work to meet my friends or husband at any of the nighttime haunts: a jazz club, a narrow dive that makes the best Old Fashioneds, an alleyway oyster bar that I imagine the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec would have wanted to paint were he to see it from the street corner at night: dimly lit with dressed up people, some of them happy, eating and drinking inside.

Do I ever do it, though? I don’t.

I have a friend who told me after my first marriage ended that he was going to teach me how to be married to myself. My time, my travels, my hobbies, my home, and my life were to be deliciously mine, all mine, and I could fill the blank canvas however I wanted. I didn’t take him up on that offer, as I do like going through life with a partner, but I’m not sure the offer expired or required me to stay single. Why is it so hard for some of us to just spoil ourselves this way by choice? Why are the life-enriching “promises” we make to ourselves often the easiest to break?

Yesterday as I walked to the parking garage at dusk, I noticed the entrance to the garage stairwell and was reminded that I also keep breaking my promises to myself around my health. Why would a perfectly able-bodied woman of my age not just take the stairs? Four flights of stairs could do a person good.

So, I took the stairs.

As I rounded the switchback to the third level, I was rewarded with a soothing view of butter-pat windows reflecting the setting sun. Beneath them: brightly painted murals all along a nearby street I never walk, sandwiching one grayscale mural of a legendary and much-loved singer born and raised here. She sang the first song on our wedding processional playlist (and you might recognize her if you look closely!).

This. This!

It might not look like much to others, but for me, it was soul-lifting and an enticing reminder to pay attention to a world that invites me to treat myself. Look! Whenever we so choose, we can decide to be in so much more of the painting rather than just walking past it with our head in our work, our phones, our worries.

I highly recommend taking the stairs.

beauty · death · grandparents · intentional happiness

Sugar Shaker

Jenny1 Comment

My grandfather had shoes big as frying pans, and he used to let me stand atop them while he and I partner danced in his basement. He wasn’t particularly graceful, so I’d curl my toes to anchor myself as he slid us around the damp room that smelled of ping-pong balls — small strides for him amounting to large strides for me. A gentle giant with an Elvis lip-curl, he spent his workdays as a lineman for the phone company and his off-time, apparently, amassing records.

I can still hear the sound of a ’45 dropping down onto his treasured turntable, the staticky hiss of the needle as it made contact with the record. His record collection was so large, it filled an entire wall of shelves in his South Dakota home, and my sister and I would run right into that room almost the minute we arrived from Arizona for our visits. We’d be sure to listen to Walk Right In, Sea Cruise, Teen Angel — songs that propel me back in an instant when I hear them now.

Upstairs, my gorgeous and hilarious grandma would be snapping green beans from their garden, swishing around the kitchen in the ugly-prettiest polyester robe, floor-length and patterned in flowers the color of my childhood: harvest gold, avocado green, rust. Her filed fingernails, always painted a delicate pearlescent pink, were seemingly always prying and poking at foodstuffs in the kitchen (not likely what she wanted to be remembered for). “I’m never full,” was her constant refrain, usually said while squinting her eyes devishly, her front teeth tapping together as she crunched on a green bean, a crab leg, a pistachio — whatever was left.

If your grandparents are like mine were, they will thin their belongings as they age until there’s almost nothing left. The painted gray house with the cozy Murphy beds and garden will be sold when they move to a little apartment that’s gentler on the knees. The gold vanity stool on which your grandmother sat painting her nails the color of backscratches, or putting on fuschia lipstick from a golden tube, will be rehomed at her last garage sale. And the vintage record collection that lives in your soul will be quietly donated to charity after she passes away, your grandpa’s way of preparing for his own death: ridding his closets of things relatives might fight over.

By the time my grandpa died, there was little left from inside that home where I danced atop his shoes — a mantle clock, some jewelry, a half-empty bottle of White Shoulders perfume. One exception was an amber-glass sugar dispenser with an aluminum top, likely purchased at a dimestore at a deep discount. I remember it on the circular table in the kitchen where my grandma snapped peas and, decades later, on the counter in their knee-friendly apartment. After my grandma passed unexpectedly in 2002, my grandpa took it with him to his assisted-living apartment. A Depression-era boy, he made such things last and last and last.

Today, it sits on my own kitchen counter, looking like nothing special but containing so much more than the sugar. Every time I use it, every time I look at the chipped base of it, I think of them both and their wonderful little house, their green garden full of mosquitoes and curling green vines, my grandmother’s hands tipping it over the last morsel of cold Christmas lefse, my grandpa’s hands tipping it over his coffee, and I know what a wonderful thing it is to have been their granddaughter.

beauty · body image · circumcision · friends · intentional happiness

Pretty Wrinkled

Jenny2 Comments

When I was in my early 30s and my now ex-husband was working in a dermatology practice, a stacked Russian blonde newly on the clinical staff began making suggestive comments to him during the workday. “You know Jennifer Aniston’s character in Horrible Bosses?” she asked him . “That’s gonna be me, with you.” She was pretty awful.

A few months after she got her sea legs, she hosted a Botox party at the clinic. Such parties were a new fad at the time, but as a young and new mom, I was busily creating wrinkles, not fixing them. What an awkward moment when I swung by the clinic to drop something to my husband days later, and she blocked me in the hall to say, “Why did you not come to my Botox party? You need it!”

Remembering how she scrutinized my face, I suppose I should have punched hers, but her remarks were so misplaced that I couldn’t think straight. It was as though she’d asked why I didn’t come to the bris and wasn’t getting rid of my foreskin. Stunned, I kind of sharply joked to her that she was no billboard for Botox, then went on my merry way, arms cradling my juicy little baby.

Now, at 51, I would not be so stunned if interrogated that way. I’m definitely sporting wrinkles, including one long, deep one that extends away from my left eye almost to my hairline. I tend to think it looks like I’m scarred from a knife fight, but I suppose you wouldn’t really notice it unless I’ve slept with my face smashed on that side. Truth be told, I’ve thrown some Botox at that bitch more than once.

Which is all to say I haven’t fallen in love with my wrinkles like some wrinkled women say they do. These creases make me feel, unsurprisingly, old and sometimes as if I don’t count anymore. Because of them, am I easier to dismiss as some old “Karen” who could at any given moment start screaming about inadequate foam on her Starbucks latte?

Well, that thinking has begun to shift lately, and it started with a lunch invitation from a colleague I was friendly with at my last job. I haven’t seen this woman in more than four years. Close to me in age, she and I used to commiserate about cellulite, menorrhagia, sudden food sensitivies, and other joys of aging. On work breaks, we shared super-plus tampons, keto recipes, and hysterectomy plans. We also compared exercise notes, and I remember vividly the day she walked into the office on crutches: She’d jump-roped so much, for so many weeks, that a bunch of bones in one foot simply shattered.

What a delight to meet up with her after these past four crazy years, our daughters both out of the nest, our lives still tracking a vaguely parallel trajectory. She came into the restaurant glowing in all her 6-foot glory, eyes bright and icy blue, toehead hair cut into a flattering new style around her beaming face. She was wearing a crop top, no eye makeup, and, as it turned out, the pride of training for her first triathlon.

“That’s where you and I part!” I said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead running a triathlon.” (More accurately, that’s exactly how I’d be caught if I tried one.)

She laughed so hard at a story I then shared about me peeing my pants every time I, a former gymnast, try to turn a cartwheel in my living room — which is kind of often.

As we talked, I began to see the extra crinkles and wrinkles she’s accumulated around her eyes and, in a flash of clarity, realized what a truly stunning addition they are to her face. Making them even prettier was the fact that she wasn’t trying to cover them up. Suddenly, they seemed like any other thing we put on our faces to make ourselves look nice: darker, longer eyelashes, a touch of pink on the cheeks, a glimmer under the brow. But her wrinkles were somehow prettier, better, because they are natural. And they made her look like someone good to be around, someone who’s smiled and laughed a lot, an ever-evolving woman who will wear a crop top at any age she freaking feels like it, thank you very much.

It’s been a week since I saw her, and the shift she created in my brain has been interesting: Suddenly, I’m seeing the beauty of wrinkled faces everywhere, including in the mirror. I mean, just look at those lines! Think of the stories they tell — of life lived, of the length and depth of life itself, and of being human and vulnerable and durable. With wrinkles, our faces are quite literally decorated with evidence of our own ability to emote. Could it be that wrinkles themselves now make me smile, which means seeing wrinkles is officially causing me wrinkles?

It appears so. And there’s certainly some strange joy in that.

Making wrinkles

P.S. If you are the one person on earth who’s not yet seen the Barbie movie, go see it if only to watch the scene between Barbie and an old woman on a park bench (a behind-the-scenes star in her own right, by the way). It’ll get you right in the tear ducts and is very much in line with this post.