Monday July 26th
I recently met a woman writer who lives nearby who I like very much. A clear thinker who makes no bones about her opinions, we exchange occasional emails to check in. Yesterday she wrote that she had found photos of me on the internet. This somehow always surprises me. I expect ones from The Broad Stage, talking mostly to ticket buyers in the lobby, but I don’t remember photos from forty years ago unless an occasional newspaper article pops up somehow. ‘You were beautiful’ she said. ‘Mmm’ I murmured. This led to a conversation about beauty that went in an unexpected direction. ‘When you write you have to explain what affect your beauty had on you’ she said. I was very surprised and tried to explain that I didn’t experience beauty as personal. I didn’t get very far and she demanded that I go away and think about it.
I dug out some old photograph albums from when my daughters were very young, and looked at the pictures. A freckled smiling young woman stared back at me, usually in a bikini with a child on one arm and holding the hand of another. In other photographs, corporate head shots, my cropped white hair and red lipstick showed a serious face and a pair of large earrings.
What I remember was that from my early teenage years I was good at persuading people they should hire me or include me. I got a job working for a big hotel chain scrubbing the coffee bar each Christmas and Easter. I persuaded the local librarian to let me take extra books home. I do remember being called handsome occasionally and finding that upsetting. Why couldn’t I be pretty like the other girls? The question I was asked yesterday has unsettled me and pushed me to look behind the doors closed long ago.
Today as I consider this and I look in the mirror, it makes me smile. One can hope there is a beauty of a kind in aging but not the kind that resides in one’s face or body. Serenity brings comment, a certain kind of uprightness that has clear eyes looking into the camera. I have a neighbor with great eighty-year-old cheekbones, a thin bony face that speaks of a life well-lived. There are also sunspots and freckles that have gathered together to celebrate the years spent in the ocean, on boats and walking long demanding distances. Lips shrink, noses apparently get longer, physical beauty belongs to the young, but the joy of leaving behind outside measures about what is acceptable, including the way we look, is bliss. What is left is the core of who we are, upright, resilient and free to be ourselves.
