I hope I wasn’t staring – I certainly did not intend to be rude. But, even though I was on a hurried mission and just passing through the mall’s grocery store to get where I was going, I couldn’t help but pause to notice one particular lady. Her time-worn face returned my smile with a red-lipsticked grin of her own. Vestiges of her beauty still lingered on her face of 75 or so years. Her fresh from the beauty parlor hair was wrapped in a chiffon headscarf, geriatric but stylish sensible heels adorned her feet, and she wore a smart gray woolen suit accessorized by a gold necklace and matching brooch. What made me smile (and giggle inwardly) was the wide-eyed look she had tried to create by drawing thick reddish-brown eyebrows in a place on the forehead about an inch and a half above where they once grew on her face.
[I inwardly muse, what makes women do that when they get old? Now that I sport a pair of bifocals, I realize the challenges associated with plucking my eyebrows or wearing eye makeup. With or without my bifocals, it’s tricky. I theorize that when you upgrade to trifocals, there’s no telling where your makeup (or your eyebrows) will end up.]
Back to the sweet elderly lady…
Having paid for her groceries, this darling lady was now gingerly walking toward me on the arm of her more elderly than herself husband. With his tri-pod cane in hand, this dapper-looking gent sported his own sense of style in a pair of black wing-tips, baggy brown corduroy slacks, a tweed jacket, and one of those beret-type hats. No two ways about it…they were cute and they made me smile.
I had apparently stumbled upon the senior discount day at this particular grocery store (which explained the multitude of oddly parked cars in the parking lot). I stopped for a minute to take it all in. In every checkout lane I spied more little old ladies with eyebrows drawn on in pencil, and silver- haired (and barely-haired) men clad in sport coats of an era gone by. The visual scene was also punctuated by the scent of too much perfume competing with too much aftershave and the sound of a nearby walker scootch-scootching over the bumpy tile floors.
I felt young and spry compared to my present company. The truth of the matter, though, is that I have only recently begun filling in my own thinning eyebrows with eyebrow pencil. [A note to my daughter: Please! Hide my eyebrow pencil if I ever start shaving off my eyebrows and drawing them closer to my receding hairline than my eyes! Oh, and don’t forget your promise to clean my glasses and pluck my chin hairs.]
The psalmist recorded in God’s Word that man lives about 70 years…80 if we’re healthy and strong; even with modern medicine, not much has changed about that number.
“The length of our days is seventy years–or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10 (NIV)
In all probability, the reality is that I have now lived more of my life than I have left. “Tomorrow” I will be the little old lady at the grocery store. The choice is mine as to how I use my remaining years before I “fly away.”
Barefoot Lily Lady 