~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
Nearly half a century ago, I wrote a column with the headline “Gracefully moving into wrinkles.”
It is hysterically funny. The naivete of it, the innocence . . . oh my. I was 35 years old, for heaven’s sake. If I had a known then how many wrinkles I’d wind up with, I might have died of fright.
Did I know a smooth face could turn into a topo map? I can feel the ridges now, the mountains and valleys of a once non-grooved terrain. When the sun shines through the bathroom window in the morning, my face wrinkles cast shadows from right to left across my visage, a bas relief of time delicately, deeply carved on malleable skin.
Who knew that the face, the most obvious part of me that meets and greets, smiles and welcomes, would give in to the enemy so easily? That it would spend my life being so tractable, so easily influenced by sun, wind, weeping, smiling, frowning, theses natural, daily expressions of what a face is supposed to live through in life, to do in life? Couldn’t it have been a little stauncher, holding fast to its original tautness, unyielding to the forces of nature and time?
Did the out-in-the-open skin of my face have no strength of integrity to stand firm against the vicissitudes of my life? What a sad example of who I really am, a strong, opinionated, thoughtful person of character and goodwill. My face is a betrayal of all these pious traits, as if I spent my life being a hoodlum, a crank and a crackpot.
I am a cracked pot. In the porcelain trade, an old plate that is busily cracked across its entire surface is called “crazed.” This is what old women are often called, and I can understand it. Who wouldn’t become crazed at looking at her once okay self as an increasing web of cracks that can erase all trace of a former her?
[An aside: I don’t know why men get so crabby in their old age as they move along looking handsome in their wrinkledom, accepted by society as debonair as we women wrinkle away to obscurity, another double standard we must endure.]
The only thing that got me through a life with mirrors was laughter, I realize now. At 80, reading about my beginning-to-age-at-35 face made me laugh – that young woman knew nothing. But it is true that the old, old column was the beginning, a woman learning early the fate of woman. I created more wrinkles as I laughed my way through the years to the crazed pot of a sometimes familiar face in its dotage.
Had I cried, it would have resulted in the same wrinkled countenance, and as I ponder the past, I remember that I had a good time becoming an embossment on a once unblemished background. Isn’t that a form of art?
Look! I’m still laughing. I’m still inside here, chuckling away.
