He always notices what I wear, most of the time, anyway. I am well aware there are certain outfits he prefers over others. It's the way he looked at me. Although occasionally he emphasizes his disapproval by suggesting I might have succumbed to dressing ‘like an old woman’. When that happens I rid herself of the offending garments, but it happens rarely. When I dressed this morning I thought the combination of the Harris tweed flounced wool skirt paired with the hooded bomber-style jacket might not be too appropriate for a woman of advanced years. Then I shrugged off the doubt, it was my style, and that was that. And he liked it, that too was important.
We both think of ourselves as young, why should we not? We’re in good health, despite a few setbacks. And we’ve always been active in the physical sense of using our bodies sensibly, not gradually succumbing to the sense that they will become larger, slacker, less responsive and therefore unreliable so why push them beyond their obvious lack of durability and endurance?
In particular I always thought of us as being fairly indestructible. Oh, I know, that’s the province of the young, the arrogant and the self-involved. There’s that about us, too, of course. We’ve always taken pride in our physical fitness, our enquiring minds. I’ve always looked younger than my age. Our daughter has inherited that. But not our granddaughter; at 14 she could easily pass for 18. It’s both negative and positive; more on the negative side of the equation, I feel.
Up until a year ago I felt invincible. Took pride that neither he nor I had any chronic conditions, took medications of any kind to control the imposition of a health condition, some kind of dreary disease. And then, everything seemed to change, and at such an astounding rate it left me feeling inordinately vulnerable. My ego did a crash landing and I clung to my husband for assurances that I would still be kicking around for awhile.
We’ve got a little companion dog. She’s eighteen years old now, considerable for a little dog. A while ago we became aware her hearing was becoming impaired, and her sight as well. She became easily startled. She was diagnosed by her usual veterinarian with a slight heart murmur. He would keep an eye on it, and on her. Then she began behaving peculiarly; very standoffish. She began to refuse her meals and it was difficult to tempt her with treats, she would disdain them, too. She began this odd pacing routine, looking out into space, sleeping poorly. We became alarmed. Until the vet diagnosed her with a mouth infection. Since she was a puppy my husband had taken care to brush her teeth on a regular basis. For all of that, her teeth began to decay, her incisors to loosen and eventually fall out. Not to worry, we were informed, it was normal for her breed and domesticated dogs had no real need for these teeth, given their domesticated diets. A course of anti-biotics cleared up the problem and her normal behaviour was re-established.
I began to realize that she and I were alike; both getting older and suffering from the normal breakdown of our organ and body function and cognitive abilities. My hearing too has suffered the last few years. It’s beyond irritating to have my daughter, who speaks far too quietly on the telephone, suggest I could make good use of a hearing assistive device.
I’ve been scheduled for eye surgery after having been informed that a hole has developed within my retina as a result of deteriorating vitreous causing a tear. And just recently I was discharged from hospital after an emergency admission caused by low haemoglobin levels occasioned by a bleeding ulcer caused by the activity of H. Pylori. It was there that the attending internist and cardiologists discovered my high cholesterol levels and alarmingly high (their words) blood pressure.
But I still look far younger than my age.
And there was this man, confronting me at the supermarket. Odd how often that happened, elderly gentlemen doing their shopping, and no female companion in sight, stopping to pass a few light-hearted remarks with me. I was receptive, had never shied from conversations in a socially polite, public way. I like brief, friendly conversations, in fact. But also I like to control them.
He was not all that much taller than me, rotund which I am not, grey-haired and voluble. The words fairly tumbling out of his mouth. How, when he’d first raised his eyes around the meat counter and seen me standing there, the first thought that popped into his head was “what’s she doing here?”. The “she”, in this case, as he explained, being his cousin. Who lives in Toronto. Who, to his knowledge doesn’t come to Ottawa very often. But there she was, at the local supermarket he frequented. Only it wasn’t her, after all, but me.
I smiled. Indulgently, I thought, because he seemed so sweetly enthusiastic, earnestly trying to convey to me how incredible this was, how wonderfully peculiar he thought it to be, to discover, presumably close to where he lives, someone who looks exactly like one of the members of his family. I could not find it in me to match his enthusiasm, nor to even come close to it. I did manage to say, however, how odd that was. But, on the other hand, I added, looking directly into his watery-blue eyes, one often hears about the stranger-look-alike phenomenon.
“Exactly!” he enthused, obviously delighted to have discovered in me a sympathetic ear. And then he went on to describe to me in hurried sentences that seemed to run together in a flurry of disorganized thoughts how once, in Toronto at Bloor and an intersection where he had arranged to meet a friend for lunch, he saw that friend, approached him to draw him into their planned enterprise, only to discover it was not his friend at all, but an amazing look-alike. He had prevailed upon the look-alike to wait with him for a few minutes. That was long ago, he said, wrapping up his tale, and his friend and his friend’s look-alike have been friends, ever since.
Would I want to befriend, or even see or meet someone who looks exactly like me? I mused briefly to myself. Myself responded as I thought it would - resoundingly indifferent. If someone existed in a city where I too once lived, who looked exactly like me, might it not be equally possible that through some telepathic phenomenon we could commune? I slapped that sarcasm down; doesn't do to become too cynical now, does it?
It felt to me as though, standing beside this man - listening to his glad tidings of extraordinary happenings in the world of serendipity, nodding my head, smiling in response to his avalanche of pleased reminiscences - as though I was in fact indulging a child. It occurred to me then that while I had a shopping cart brimming with colourful fresh fruits and vegetables along with other foods with which to stock my pantry, there was no sign of his own shopping cart. I was in the supermarket to do my weekly shopping. What was his purpose?
To confront women with improbably intriguing little fantasies? Eliciting their interest through a remote kind of flattery? Could he not see from the quantity of the groceries squatting in my shopping cart that I was indeed shopping for more than one person?
He was fairly hopping with the excitement of his revelations. And I thought to myself, if his cousin looks anything like him, how could she possibly have any resemblance to me? My ethnic origin is evident in my looks, and this man is quintessentially Canadian in appearance. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he was anxious to hear me ask his cousin’s name? Give him some indication that I cared, was interested to know more about her, to meet her? To discover what kind of personality she had?
I did, finally, ask how old she was. He gawked at me, after receiving the question. “Why - uh - she must be about - let’s see here, now - 59 or thereabouts? Looking at me as though for approval in his guestimate. “Oh, I said”, hearing an aloof tone creep into my voice; kind of superior sounding, I thought, “I am 74 years old.” It’s true, I turned 74 a week ago.
My hair is not grey, nor is it white, it is a glittering silver. My face is not very wrinkled, and in fact I’ve red cheeks, burned by the icy winter wind slapping them earlier in the day when we’d gone for our usual ravine walk before embarking on our supermarket shopping event.
He stepped back, a confused look overtaking his previous look of childish excitement at discovering this sudden link revealing itself in the pedestrian aisles of his (I assumed) local supermarket. “You…you’re very well pres…you look really good for 74”, he finished awkwardly. I smiled. Chirped “bye now”, and he repeated it, vanishing around the corner of the aisle we’d been standing at.
I wondered where my husband was. Likely, I thought, lingering longingly around the processed meat products he knows I will only occasionally relent and agree to placing in our refrigerator, for his guilty delectation.
Or, possibly, chatting up some woman shopper as he often likes to do. He’s also the kind of person who enjoys casual conversation with other people. Just like me.
