The magic of aging

I went rushing down to my building’s lobby with a bag containing a bottle of Stem Enhance. The congressman had called. I had not met him before. When he saw me he said I did not look 72. I looked 10 years younger, according to him. That’s because of this, I said, handing him the bag with the bottle inside. Of course, I was flattered. I had just come back from the beauty parlor where I had my regular haircut.

 My hairstylist for almost the past 40 years has been Raki Orejola, tall, skinny, always fashionable and trendy and very intelligent. We always have a good time every time I go for a haircut. Of course, I have very bad habits. I remember there was a time when I would go to the beauty parlor at least once a week to have my hair shampooed and styled, my nails done, all those habits of the young. Then my hair was long and I would always have it styled.

But these days I am old and my vanity is going. I go to the beauty parlor at least three times a year, at most four times. I get my hair cut very short. From behind it looks like a man’s hairstyle. One side very short, the other slightly longer. In other words, it’s a lopsided hairdo. It goes wonderfully with the earrings I make — one side is hooked on the ear giving you dangles that hang in front and in the back of that ear and the other ear only one regular earring from the earlobe. I think these earrings are very pretty and I keep intending to photograph them and put them on Facebook just in case somebody wants to buy but so far I haven’t done that.  Let me say this. Those earrings make you look young.

Maybe that’s why Raki says I am still fashionable. I don’t know, I say. I know I enjoy making jewelry and wearing them.  Where do I go? Well, to the supermarket, to exercise class and once in a while to the beauty salon. That’s where I wear my jewelry.  Really I must do something about my life, I say suppressing a giggle.

Suppressing a giggle. Do I write that at 72? Should I not be turning into a crabby old woman? You know, when you live alone, the surprise is you can do anything at all you want. You can turn on the radio and sing along as loud as you please. You hear the old disco songs you used to dance to and you can dance joyfully alone. Nobody is around to ask – what are you doing? Aren’t you too old to be doing that? When you live alone you can do anything you want, whenever you want. That is such a joy, especially when you spent most of your young life doing what other people told you to do!

But as you grow old of course you need friends. I now have a whole new batch of friends. I have the friends I make at Sunshine Place where I go twice a week for my exercise classes. I don’t zumba anymore. I like chair dancing better. Chair dancing is based on several discs that Harvey Chua discovered on one of her trips. It is a dance routine designed for people who have Parkinson’s, dementia, or even early Alzheimer’s.  I tried it one day because the zumba teacher got caught in traffic and could not come to class.  I found I enjoyed it more than zumba. It has more soul. So I moved from zumba to chair dancing, where you sit and follow the professor, Danny Vinculado, exercise your arms and upper body and your legs.

You think that’s not tiring? Halfway through I inevitably signal my classmate to ask the time because I’m getting tired. Forty-five minutes I pray for the class to end. At the end of an hour my leggings are wet with sweat in the area of my bottom, the part that sits on the chair. I keep thinking of giving up chair dancing for more active dancing but I can’t do it. Those of us who go to this class regularly just love it.

The other delightful thing about aging is that time flies so fast. I know I am 72 but I feel like I’m 36, half my age. I know that everything I know now I learned over 72 years of living, of working and earning my own money to raise my children with. I learned it from having a stroke that turned off my emotions for six years and then discovering Stem Enhance that gave me back my old personality, laughing out loud, daring to be different, enjoying being lopsided and asymmetrical, writing these weird columns.

 Is it StemEnhance that does this to me? I don’t know. Maybe. But I feel great!

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