Dear Self,
Happy birthday, girlfriend. You're 45 now. The same age your own mother was when you got married.
Only, where she seemed wise and worldly and really elegant — what Grace Kelly SHOULD have looked like, instead of what Grace Kelly DID look like when Her Serene Highness was middle-age — you feel like the awkward girl you were.
You still walk into closets when you mean to walk out of front doors. You still talk too much in some situations, not enough in others. You still get tangled up in your own feet.
Excellent example, the tangled-feet part. Just last week, your father made you stand up in front of a large group of people to whom he was speaking, so he could introduce you. You stood. You smiled. You nodded like someone just crowned you Miss Strawberry Days. But somehow, when you tried to take your seat again, you missed it completely. So, instead, you wound up on the ground, wrestling with your folding chair while strangers (and your very surprised parents) looked on.
Your father tried to cover for you as best he could. "As you can see for yourselves," he said to the group, "my daughter is better at standing up than she is at sitting down."
(People are always asking you if your stories are true. The answer is YES. Especially this one. You even have witnesses and the bruises to prove it. Big plum-colored purple ones. The size of colliding continents.)
So, you still have your two left feet. But now that you are 45, you are getting some wrinkles to go along with them.
Sometimes, you study your wrinkles in the mirror, tracing your finger over their patterns and trying to get used to them, because, frankly, you are startled these days when you catch a glimpse of yourself in glass without first mentally prepping yourself for the experience. And you do a quick drive-by of the standard questions people your age always ask.
When did THIS happen? Who I am now?
A new you takes some getting used to.
Still, you aren't too bothered by the direction your face is heading, which is mostly south. You have the example of the women in your family aging well. Your mother, the former rodeo queen, graduated from college after her 60th birthday. Your father's sisters continue to get better-looking each year. And your grandmothers, when they were still alive, were fearlessly loading their little rear ends on airplanes and hauling for the four corners of this planet.
Then, there is that essay you just read — "Skin" by Richard Selzer, a medical doctor who writes like a poet and a lover. His skin, he says, is a road map of his experience, a physical record of his life.
You try to look at your own skin this way, too.
You look at the scars on your knees, and you remember that sun-drenched September afternoon when you and Timmy Anderson, both 6 years old, got married in your basement, then ran outside to ride your bikes in the church parking lot, where you came screaming around a corner only to go head over handlebars.
You look at your fingers (covered with ink from a pen that has just exploded!), and remember the February night your father examined your hand and asked when you were going to stop drawing all over yourself when you were supposed to be doing fifth-grade math instead.
The two of you were eating banana splits at Price's Ice Cream Parlor in Provo, and you smiled back at him because as far as you were concerned, your dad just got back from hanging the moon. And sometimes, when you look at your hand now, the one your father held, you remember the morning in May you cradled one of your own babies there, close against your palm. Another son. Tiny and red and not breathing, and you remember how your husband grieved that day.
Your 45-year-old skin is an imperfect, messy record of an imperfect, messy life. Which suits you just fine. Because perfection (yawn) has never interested you very much — not in this world anyway. You like quirky. Different. Offbeat. Human. You always, always have.
Which is why, when your 17-year-old son grins as he trots toward third base at the start of a new inning, now that baseball season is here and hot summer is coming, you love him for his crooked smile.
And, honey, not in spite of it.
E-mail acannon@desnews.com