THEY WON'T LET US AGE

This week I was down at the Distillery District with three friends. We are women in our 60’s and 70’s. The Distillery District, if you don’t know it, is a cobblestoned pedestrian area east of the downtown Toronto core, and, right now, heavily into the festive season, decorated and cheery, but cold! When it first opened, the district had lovely art studios, cozy restaurants, a village vibe. But now, like every place else, it has become increasingly commercial and outrageously expensive.

We strolled, took the obligatory pics and popped into stores every now and then, not to buy stuff but to warm up, because at this age, who needs more stuff? We’re getting rid of things, not adding tchotchkes and knick-knacks no matter how pretty and pricey they are.

At one store that sold beauty creams and such, the sales lady wooed us in with samples of slivers of hand-made soaps. Once inside, she looked at our faces and determined we needed under-eye serum to get rid of wrinkles and puffiness. Two of us (one of them being me) sat down and submitted to our left under-eye area being patted gently with said serum. Then she held a tiny fan to our faces to blow it dry. When I asked, “But what about my right eye?” she said no, she wanted us to compare because how else would we see the dramatic result? She then proceeded to lecture us on this miraculous serum with a hefty price tag of $199 for a tiny bottle, but, according to her, so worth it!

Squinting dutifully into the mirror, I agreed my left under eye did look slightly better (for a short while) than my right eye area. Of course we weren’t swayed (our collective ages accumulate to over 280 years of wisdom and common sense), thanked her, and left without clutching tiny bottles of the precious goo guaranteed to make our lines disappear.

I was mildly miffed at her insistence we would be wise to spend our money on her product. But the more I thought about it, the more miffed I became. Why does the world keep insisting we need to erase evidence of our aging? Yes, we realize we are aging and we don’t care much for the evidence of it on our bodies, but we are not desperately searching for magical serums. Nor do we need thirty-somethings asserting that our faces require an intervention. I’m quite happy with my much cheaper face cream which I don’t expect to perform miracles in turning the clock back.

When I looked in the mirror the next day, yes, my left under-eye area was different than my right because it was that way before and not because it was younger-looking. None of us are completely symmetrical. I’ll concede that some face creams are superior to others. But I won’t concede that it is imperative we spend our hard-earned money and copious amounts of time trying to reverse the physical effects of aging on our faces, trying to eradicate the fact that we have lived for many years and are the richer for it.  

You might say the young, pushy salesperson was just doing her job (a bit too enthusiastically). But what she might do well to consider is this: Older women are far more interested in having rich life experiences than in having bogus beauty claims and potions thrust at us.

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The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri.

What a gorgeous book, full of emotional depth. The narration on audio is superb.
It’s a story that many children of immigrants to the west will recognize - that strong desire to pull away from the culture of their parents who insist on clinging to it, the need to conform and belong to the western culture they step into beyond their front door, trying to straddle two worlds.

Gogol, the main male character, even changes his name in his deep need to belong.

And then the full circle moments when he comes to understand his parents, why he was given his name, his appreciation of them and his heritage.

The characters, the depth, the details of Bengali customs, such a great story.