Maude McDaniel, Columnist
Cumberland Times-News
February 15, 2008 10:03 pm
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Here I go again, reporting from the Great Beyond. Beyond 60, that is. Okay, beyond 70. Okay — well, maybe we’d better leave it at that. Just thought I’d let you know some more of the things I have learned as time passes ever faster.
1. Time passes, um, ever faster. I always thought life would get slower as you got older. Turns out, those time-spans you thought would never end, like the weeks before Christmas and Easter, and your birthday, and summer vacation, and growing up, disappear now like voters in a snowstorm. For some reason, an accumulated 75 or so of them just don’t catch your attention so much as the first 10 or 15.
2. Arlo and Janis, who get a lot of things right, have it right on this one too: You can’t do what you used to do. That’s supposed to be sad — but I’ve learned that, by the time you can’t do it any more, you really don’t care that you can’t do it anymore. And that holds from riding the roller coaster at the summer fair to eating half a pound of pistachios out of the shells. Believe it or not, life goes on just fine without doing either one.
3. The truths of a lifetime can be overturned in an instant. In this case, it was my second cousin who, at the age of 16 last year, suddenly grew taller than his father. He had never experienced this before, and neither had his father. It was an ecstatic, traumatic experience — I’ll leave it to you to decide which adjective matches which guy.
4. Some questions never get answered. For instance, I will go to my grave never knowing — do you put on your lipstick before going to the dentist? (I mean, assuming you’re female.) Would a male dentist be insulted as a steady stream of unimproved women sit in his chair, showing that they really do not consider him worth making at least some small effort to look attractive for? Would a woman dentist despise you for not looking your best. After all, one doesn’t want to be inconsiderate. On the other hand, smearing lipstick all over their latex gloves doesn’t strike me as endearing either. If you have an answer to this let me know before I have my next appointment please.
5. Things-that-are-in and things-that-are-out lists are a waste of time. Fashions, fads, and the very latest things are a wild goose chase, because there is always a later thing, if you live that long. Although, by that time, the later thing may be something you remember from your youth, and not always happily. For instance, when I was a child I despised little all-over geometric prints in clothes, because that’s what all the old ladies wore. And all the old ladies who wore them sat in the pew in front of me in church — so I got my fill of them. Guess what? Little all-over geometric prints are the latest thing these days — for teenage clothes. They still strike me as the ugliest pattern in the world. You just don’t get over stuff like that.
6. Not only can you not remember things as well as you used to; the things you do remember you don’t always remember right. The other day I paid a bill, putting the check in the envelope and laying it down on the corner of the dining-room table. Five minutes later I looked for it and couldn’t find it. Now I distinctly remembered laying that white envelope flat on the corner of the table. I STILL remember it. But no matter how hard I looked, it wasn’t there. In despair I wrote another check and put it in a regular envelope, and put it out to mail. That morning at breakfast I found the lost envelope. It was blue and someone had stuck it vertically between the salt and pepper shakers.
7. You don’t always have to read the whole thing. Just last month I realized that I already knew pretty much of what was in most of the articles in, for instance, Good Housekeeping and the Ladies Home Journal. I had read them all before. So I look at the pictures, which are always new. If I despise or am bored by a book after I’m halfway through it, I put it down and start another. It used to be a matter of honor for me to read everything I started through to the end, and maybe that was a good idea in those days. But no more. Life is too short now to waste my time on something I hate.
8. You know you’ve seen it all when there is not a Christmas cookie recipe to be found this last season, in all the magazines and Web sites, that you haven’t already known about.
9. And always there will be the unanswerable questions that pile up through a lifetime. Do literate people enjoy alphabet soup more than illiterate people? Are you a cannibal if you chew your fingernails? When did we start “cutting” checks instead of writing them? (I still write mine.) How come the Doublemint Twins are at least 50 years old but still look 16? How can sour cream be fat-free? Did you know that Toni Collette had a baby — who the heck is Toni Collette?
10. Finally, some excellent advice from someone whose name I forget: Never start to catch snowflakes on your tongue until you’re pretty sure most of the birds have gone south for the winter.
Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her columns appear on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.
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