Gentle Humor

I do some photography on the side, and I’ve noticed that older people lack color in their faces. I’m not talking about old women who spend their retirement years in the sun, turning their skin to leather and looking like a Shar Pei. I’m talking about the ones you see in church, or at bazaars, or in the line ahead of you at every checkout counter with a small change purse extracting correct change, one penny at a time.

Older women tend to have a heavy hand when it comes to coloring their cheeks. I used to think it was because they were blind and didn’t realize that they were putting on too much blush, but now I think it’s because they’re starting with such a washed out background that it’s the contrast in color that’s so noticeable, not the quantity of makeup.

Older men lack color too, but fortunately they don’t try to hide it. They’re too busy convincing the general public that they have hair. I’m sorry men go bald, I really am, but must they have those long strings of slick black hair running over the bald spots like someone drew a grid on a basketball? FYI Donald Trump, the general public is not fooled by these comb overs.

When women start losing their hair, they deal with it by cutting it all off. Then they pay a hair dresser once a week to kinky curl it up so that it looks like thin, coarse,  pinkish beige wool all over their heads that you can see through.

Which, I suppose, is more attractive than the blue-haired ladies I grew up with. I don’t know how it happened that so many of them had that magical shade of blue. Did they go to the store and find boxes of Clairol called, “midnight blue” (for blackish blue) “baby blue” (for bluish blond), and “blue all over” (for bluish-blue.

When I started getting grey hair, I fretted about it just like everyone else who was turning prematurely grey (everyone in my age group). After plucking a few hundred, I toyed with the idea of dying my hair. When I had my kids captive in the car, I’d ask them if I should dye my hair. “No, mom, it looks really pretty,” was their standard response. They had learned to say this to keep me from asking additional questions: “Does my grey hair make me look old? How old do I look? Do I look older than the other moms? How about Rebecca, do I look older than Rebecca? What about Cindy?”

One day I asked my son again, “Do you think I should dye my hair?” He said, “You don’t need to color your hair to look younger.” I sat up straighter, thinking what a fine young man I’d raised. Then he added, “It’s the wrinkles that make you look so old.”

I can’t remember exactly what happened next, but I think I used the ef word, and I think I reached over and opened the passenger door and used both of my feet to kick him out on the sidewalk, but it’s all a blur, I could have just patted his hand and said, “we need to see about getting you some glasses, sweetie.” It’s hard to remember the details when you get my age.

I used to like having my house clean when people came over. They’d compliment me on how wonderful everything looked, “even your bathroom faucets sparkle.”

That’s all in the past now. I can no longer devote my life to a clean house, especially for imaginary people who “might drop in.” When the kids were little, and there were stay home moms in the neighborhood, you never knew when the doorbell might ring. I was genuinely embarrassed when stuff covered the floor like fluff from a cottonwood tree. If I got wind someone was going to drop in, I ran around grabbing handfuls of toys, shoes, socks, underwear, can openers, wine bottles, bon bons, and tacky novels and slung them in a back closet.

I realized tonight how far I’ve come since those days because my daughter came home from swim team practice and nonchalantly said, “Maddie’s coming over.” I went in panic mode for a couple of seconds, protesting “At 9:45 on a school night?” “No school tomorrow, mom, it’s Veteran’s Day.” “Crapola!”

I said this into the phone to my favorite aunt in Tennessee, who was telling me a pretty good story about my uncle’s booze scandal. He buys all the books and manages the supplies warehouse for the county school system in my hometown. He’s always been a pillar of the community as well.

My uncle received a couple of bottles of booze as presents (people seem to give women candy and men booze – maybe we should turn that around). He left them in his office, locked up, unopened, in their original gift bags, and planned to donate them as a door prize for an organization he belongs to, thus re-gifting them like any red blooded East Tennessee school official who’s worth his salt would do.

Unfortunately, while he was on vacation, someone broke into the office and stole the booze and other odds and ends. They caught the guy and found the booze, as well as several other stolen items that were not taken from his office including, gasp, pornography. The local paper, in its infinite wisdom, decided to only mention the office robbery, and, interestingly enough, also decided to talk about only two of the stolen items, (guess which two), thus linking my uncle to the booze and porn. Who can blame them? This is such juicy stuff for a small town, and since there wasn’t a cat stuck in a tree or other breaking news story, my uncle’s robbery got front page billing.

It caused a scandal that spread to all corners of the countryside, about three miles from the epicenter of town. My poor uncle, who is literally the nicest guy in the world – in any contest pitting him against all the other nicest guys in the world, he would take the blue ribbon every time – was placed on unpaid leave for a week as punishment for having the booze on school property.

I just consulted the all-knowing Google and found the articles, which pretty much go from pointing a Bible-thumping finger at my uncle in the first one, to later admitting, without apologies, that there was no evidence that the porn came from his office. I read the readers’ comments and liked this one: “Warehouse managers are smarter than school administrators. The warehouse manager did not stand up and say, ‘Yeah, that’s my porn, I brought it in to watch during slow periods and I realize it was a lapse of judgment.’ That is what a school administrator would have said.” After reading that, I’m just thankful my uncle isn’t a school administrator, because those guys must be really stupid if they would admit to clandestine meetings with Palmela Handerson during work hours.

Needless to say, I didn’t get my house cleaned up, but I fed Maddie cheese quesadillas and black olives, so she’s cool with the mess. I’ll keep you posted if I talk to my aunt again. So much excitement in one night!

On Thursdays I go up to the high school and tutor writing for a couple hours. Sometimes no one wants to be tutored, so I get an old book off the dusty shelves and pretend to read until a decent amount of time has passed and I can leave.

This library is nothing like it was when I was in school. For one thing, computers attract the kids like something really attractive. Not that we ever opened a library book back then unless it was an encyclopedia or an anatomy book, but these kids wouldn’t even think of looking at a book.

One thing all these kids have in common is the perpetual use of the f-word:  loudly, and repeatedly, and in every sentence at least once but preferably multiple times used as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, gerund, past perfect participle, and object of a preposition.

Another thing is their determination to reveal acres of skin. I saw one girl sitting at a table with a plumber’s crack as long as the San Andreas Fault.  Back in the day this would have aroused considerable attention, but no one was gawking but me.

The noise level in the library is akin to being at a rock concert, only louder. No one whispers. The school has a boiler-type heater that keeps temperatures just shy of inferno, so the windows are usually open. Whenever people walk by, which is more often than you’d think, kids get up from the computers to go over and make fun of them, yelling things like, “you’re such a dork,” as loud as they can. The librarians are too deaf to notice.

Whenever someone does come over to be tutored, they’ll hand me a paper that their teacher has slashed and scrawled so many notes and corrections that you have to excavate down to find the original work. It’s an incoherent mess beyond repair, and yet I smile and give them lovely suggestions about how to improve the first couple of sentences before they jump up and go spit out the window at a passing dog.

In their absence, I write a little tiny, “ef you” at the bottom right corner of their papers. Not really, but wouldn’t that be cool? They’d get home and think it was from the teacher, which they’d probably think was far out or whatever they say these days. It might create a bond that would last through the school year. On the other hand, they might bring a knife and slash the effeing ef to teach her to effing ef with them, son of an effing ef. It’s hard to know with kids these days.