Happy Birthday Honey!

My husband, photographer Cole Scott, celebrated his birthday yesterday with a new image and a quote from Chekhov.   Surprisingly, these are not stones below the water but ice flow in a pond.  

Milestones

Back in the Day 
Laguna Beach 1990

Last year at this time, I was preparing for a trip to New Orleans to mutually celebrate, with friends, our 60th birthdays.  I was full of angst about how I looked, how I would get around as we were staying near the Quarter and would be walking most of the time.  I needed a long-overdue knee replacement and I felt so old.    Sixty is a daunting birthday when it's in front of you.  I was in constant pain, feeling quite unattractive and unable to do most things I once did without effort.  Inotherwords, not a happy camper. 

A year later, I have a new knee, I feel better than I have in 11 years when I had my first hip replacement, my body is in better shape thanks to a two year work out regimen pre-op, post-op and ongoing training.   I'm comparatively pain-free and it is a game changer.

Certain birthdays are milestones.  We should use them as time for reflection, not self-recrimination.  Most of us are way too hard on ourselves, too critical, too judgmental, too regretful.  

Mistakes are made.  Bodies change.  Faces age.  Goals soften.  That is life.

I'm happier now than I've been in eleven years.  I'm glad that birthday is behind me.  I'm approaching 61 and I honestly don't care.  

What a difference a year makes.

New Orleans 2011  

Betty White "I'm 90 years old."

Couldn't have said it better...I hope I'm as feisty at her age.  I certainly think this way!

It Ain't Me Babe...Is It?

It's very hard to accept aging, no matter what anyone says. I look in the mirror and, if I'm really being honest with myself, I see an unfamiliar face.  Photographs increase my awareness of the changes I've undergone. The photographs tell the true story because they leave nothing to my imagination.  It's all there, in color. Yes ma'am. 


I am particularly touchy about it as this is another milestone birthday year.

My best friend from Jr. High, pictured here, hates having

her photograph taken.  Why?  No idea as she seems to look the best when we review the shots.  Nevertheless, she is and always has been the most reluctant to have her photo taken.

Another friend of mine is always cute and smiling  and our photographs together convey the fun we have.
When we were teens, she asked me to straighten her hair with Perma Straight.  We  became distracted and left it in too long and her hair came out in clumps!  Somehow, we laughed through it all.

This friend and I have shared some seriously hilarious times together. She never minds having her photo taken.  I have some doozies of her when we were in high school.  


What is interesting to me is to view photos of myself I once thought terrible and think,
"Well, that's not so  bad!" 
  
How 'bout you?

Another Turn of the Wheel

My husband awakened me with a nice cup of coffee with extra cream, just the way I like it.  He gave me an oversized card with a photo of the boys and I on the front.  My husband loves to make his own cards and they are all keepers.  Inside the sentiments were pithy quotes regarding my new status. 

"Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened." Cora Harvey Armstrong 

"Growing old is like being increaasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed."  Anthony Powell

And my favorite,  

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.  You are always beng asked to do things and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."  T. S. Eliot

Thanks, hon.  I feel better already!

Birthday

Today is my birthday.  I'm being taken to lunch.  I'm being taken to dinner.  Both very nice restaurants; gifts from friends and my husband.

I gifted myself yesterday with a manicure, pedicure and hot stone massage.  It was heaven and took the considerable edge off having yet another birthday.

 Gina's Nasturtiums by Carson Pritchard

The massage was the best part.  It left me feeling healed, inside and out.  My arthritis, achey muscles and fatigue were gone.  I felt the toxins leave my body.  The lemon, lavendar and tangerine oils revitalized me and the hot stones on the obvious knots eased my soreness.

I need to do this more often; baby myself, treat my body better.  Relieve my tension and my mind.  The last time I made a ritual of self healing was through polarity therapy which I loved.  But perhaps right now massage is the way to go.  Winter is coming;  the snow, ice and wind  bends me, dries my skin and brutalizes my joints. Perhaps I can stave off those elemental reactions.

I would tell you I feel reflective but my husband and I have huge changes upcoming and I'm saving reflections for them. I will need another massage once we've made it through the next five weeks. I'm superstitious or I'd tell you now.

It's all good.

Ghouls & Birthdays: A Metaphor

I don't know if it's the fact we're close to Halloween or that I'll soon turn 58 but, lately, I'm having dreams about being chased by ghouls and creepy characters.

Boris Karloff

For example, the other night I dreamed Boris Karloff was after me, chasing me through a huge outdoor compound.  I was trying to find my way out when I looked behind me to find him in mid-leap upon me.  I screamed bloody murder, woke myself up and was quite shaken til I realized it was a dream. 

I think this is a metaphor on aging.  The prospect of turning 58 is ghoulish.  My birthday is All Saints Day, the day after Halloween.  They are inextricably linked.  I'm a Scorpio, through and through, mind you, and you'd think I'd be dreaming about sex...or Robert Redford...or both.   But no.  Boris Karloff.  Jeez.

Happy Birthday Betty Boop!

Date of Birth: August 8, 1930

Designed by Max Fleischer for Paramount Studio's Talkartoons, Betty Boop began as a dog (a dog?) By 1930 she had evolved into a coy flapper whose innocent skirt-lifting and trademark line "boop-boop-a-doop" were sweetly suggestive of more than just singing and dancing. She starred in over 100 cartoons from 1931 to 1939, getting increasingly less saucy (and less popular). She continues to have strong merchandising power.

Mae Questal, the voice of Olive Oyl, also did Betty's. (I did not know that)

Biography from Who2.com

Now she is une femme de un'e certaine age!