It has begun.

The conspiratorial conversations held in women’s bathrooms, at local coffee shops and shady alleyway bars to the blips and beats of techno behind us.

“I could dance all night in stilettos double this height,” she tells me, gesturing at the dance floor and her feet in a single sweep of an arm. No saggy skin there yet, I think. But if you talked to some of the women in my inner circle you would think our personal Armageddons are just beyond the bend. My friend goes on to say that when she was twenty-one she had energy reserves to drink until the wee hours. Not anymore. She’s in her mid-twenties, like me. One foot in the grave…

I’m back in my college town after four years away. Most of the people I see from my college days don’t seem to have aged, they just appear to have matured. Aging and maturation don’t scare me as much as they do my peers. I welcome aging as a sign that I’ve learned, traveled, taught and grown. I don’t think most women see it that way, but most of my friends are still in their twenties and child-free. What’s with the worry?

***

Each day I pass an old lady out on her porch with a puff of white hair (in Ajijic, Mexico, my retiree friends referred to themselves as Q-Tips) atop her fragile-looking body. She sits there all day long watching traffic pass, hardly moving, in temperatures upwards of ninety degrees. It’s almost as though she’s slowing herself down to prepare for death.

When I talked to my grandfather this summer I expressed my fear about the heart attack he had earlier this year. He, like this old lady, said he was ready to go when it was his time. He spends hours watching television, yelling at the screen sometimes. I wonder about senility, but this, too, is part of the aging process for some.

It’s indisputable that you will age. You are, even as you read (scan) this blog post. It’s also a fact that you will die. Even if you go the embalming route like Mao Zedong, you’re going to die. The potions, the plastic surgery, even the children, don’t stave it off. Why are we fighting it?

One answer that I’ve found, because I was raised most of my life by my grandparents, is that people don’t understand what it’s like to be “old.” Aging doesn’t mean beauty suddenly disappears. In fact, I think it means you’re able to get “beyond yourself” and focus on beauty everywhere, rather than just within your own limited sphere of understanding. Aging means you start to take yourself a bit less seriously. If all eyes aren’t on you when you step up in da club, you might actually let yourself dance.

I would love to move toward a kind of radical self (and other)-acceptance that finds us women, rather than commenting on her varicose veins with a shudder, noticing the beauty in growth. Maybe it will take peering a little more closely, pausing before dismissing other women in a glance and adjusting our own inner compass for beauty.

Let me leave you with this. About two weeks ago I saw a woman in parking lot on her way to go shopping. She was with her husband and I called out to her that the color shirt she was wearing was lovely. I said something like, “you look great in periwinkle!” I had to say it twice because she didn’t seem to get that I was takling to her. “I haven’t gotten a compliment in a long time!” she said. She was in her mid-fifties. I felt equal parts sad and delighted.

Make an old woman’s day. Tell her she’s beautiful, because she is.

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