Today’s youth are able to harness digital technology to show how they will look like when they’re fifty and up. I do not know how knowing their physical appearance then will help them age gracefully, which involves more than just handling changing looks.
My contemporaries did not have this opportunity for imagination. We went on with life as we thought it should, or often, as our old folk thought it would.
In my mind, my female friends are forever alternately innocent and capricious, and sympathetic and critical, and my male pals, alternately generous and unforgiving, and affectionate and distant.
To this day, at sixty, I see myself at age five, wearing an unusual cap and standing before a birthday cake Mommy took pains to highlight a simple party for me.
I see myself at a much younger age, flanked by Mommy and her officemates and a wee bit overdressed in my favourite red dress, overlooking the famed Balara Filters, then a popular week-end local tourist destination in Quezon City.
I see myself at age ten, awfully fat and dwarfed by the tall pine trees in Baguio, where I had the fortune of spending a vacation along with my wealthier cousins.
I’ve kept the many pictures of my earlier years and I get pretty nostalgic looking at the girl with the dimples, the thick hair, and the plump physique. My mirror now tells me my eyelids are dangerously close to covering my eyes and my hair is more swiftly graying than my hair dye can keep up with. My skin is not that bad, but the “laugh lines” have proliferated.
I seriously realized I was growing old when, alone in a luxurious hotel room in Melbourne in 1997, I saw that no amount of moisturizer could make the dryness of my skin go away. Since then I haven’t used bar soap to wash make-up off.
In 2000, I gamely scaled a rare prime forest mountain in Antique for a writing assignment. It took me most of a whole day to reach the top. Going down was another story that merits another post. The thought that I had a fighting heart that did not give up despite the beating it got from ascent to descent to the pain of an infected wound was the only good reminder of that experience. A bad dark scar on my leg is the terrible remembrance of that episode in my life’s roller-coaster ride.
From then on, I went downhill, physically. I was diagnosed with gout, and then presented with a list of prohibited foods. I was depressed. I had spent a lifetime of good food (read: often forbidden), and yet my good cholesterol level was better than my bad, and I had no diabetes. Gout was not going to ruin my appetite, if I could cope with the pain of uric acid building up in my joints.
Then I left a high-paying job and was immediately plunged into deeper depression. I did not want to even move at all.
My ambition of aging gracefully has flown out of the window. I admire you, Jim Paredes. It is increasingly becoming difficult to think of aging the way you do. It’s a case of “the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak”, instead of the other way around.
But then, tomorrow is another day. While I am more fully aware of my mortality now, thinking of tomorrow might just be an indication that I have not truly aged. Is that good or bad?