Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Hands Down!
She reached for a cup and stopped. Her hand hung, outstretched in midair.
“Oh no”, she said.
The fear in her voice put an instant chill in the air. I wondered if she had seen a mouse or worse yet a spider, a big, hairy spider that had spun a web around all the coffee cups and millions of baby spiders were now crawling all over.
I prepared to run.
“Look at my hand,” she said.
Oh no, maybe a spider was on her hand. How could she hold still?
I looked--no spider. She’d had a recent manicure and her nails looked nice. Not overdone, just lovely. No visible cuts or bruises, no blood. I was stumped.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“My hands,” she said. “Look at my hands.”
Her voice trembled, her hands shook. She obviously was upset.
“These are not my hands, she said.
OK, apparently my friend was having a nervous breakdown, and I showed up for tea in time to be a witness.
“These are my grandma’s hands,” she said.
Whew. Now I get it.
Worried that she might have a complete nervous breakdown, I suggested she sit down, and I fixed tea--without laughing.
This is serious stuff.
You can have lifts of every sort--face, brow, eye. You can inflate a sagging bossom, and
perk up a derriere, but hands are often a dead giveaway to the reality that time marches on despite our best efforts.
In scientific terms, she’s middle-aged. Average life expectancy as determined by Harvard Medical School is 77.6 years. Women sometimes get five extra years.
My friend is young in a not-so-young sort of way. While she enjoys watchinf MTV’s “Punk’d” and Comedy Central’s “South Park,” she’s old enough to remember “ The Brady Bunch"and “Hogan’s Heroes”.
She also remembers those old Ivory commericals ("Tough on grease, easy on hands") that featured two beautiful women standing next to each other showing off their hands. The viewer was asked to look at the women’s hands and guess, “Which one is the mother and which is the daughter?”
My friend’s hands weren’t that bad, but she knows what’s coming.
Despite the manicures, despite an ocean of hand lotion, there comes a time when nothing can stop the ravaging effects of sun and age.
Dark spots show up first.
“ I thought they were moles”, she moaned.
Knuckles are more pronounced--slightly red or darker than the surrounding skin. Veins rise up like rivers of blue, swollen from spring rain.
Then one morning she reached for a coffee cup and found her grandmother’s hands at the end of her arms.
This article, entitled “ Hands down, aging is scary prospect” was written by Brenda Brissette Mata, columnist for The Flint Journal. It appeared on Friday March 18th.
The content hit very close to home so I thought I would share!
