Installment Forty-One

Death has been on my mind a lot lately.

Not a day goes by that I don't think about my late parents. Since I moved here, close to my old neighbourhood, the reminders are constant of a childhood cut short because two adults never got to finish their lives.

I have been ruminating about aging all day. Big surprise! But ever since the young girl who used to torture me in high school Carolyn Morrison (née Taylor) found me on Facebook, I have been stuck on numbers.

I'm more than a decade older than my mother was when she and my father were killed.

Thirty is the new twenty-one; forty the new thirty; fifty the new forty; sixty the new fifty. Is there no end to the delusional lives we lead?

Apparently not, since dead is now officially the new old. It was reported in a newspaper so it must be true.

With a daughter old enough now to be married, an empty nest, a middle-age body, and every other physical flaw or mental fault I can't remember at this precise moment but will come back to me later for sure, I've been feeling like a crone when the idea of being a cougar is so much more appealing.

There is great irony at work here that makes me laugh: I was a late bloomer physically and teased mercilessly about looking like a child well into my teens!

That's the main reason actually for not getting all warm and fuzzy thinking about re-connecting with Carolyn. She was one of the worst of the bunch of teenage girls (the ones who dressed as if they were hitting the bars after school, not the Debating Club) who never lost an opportunity to remind me I was flat-chested and skinny like a toothpick.

Allow me, dear reader, to pause for a moment and savour the notion that I was once thin. Of course, I also once had a husband.

Moment over.

The taunting by Carolyn's gang of mean girls was so unpleasant that I'm certain in today's world it would qualify as bullying. Instead of throwing a slurpee in my face, however, my torturers, like Carolyn, would throw comments at me like this one:

"Joelly," Carolyn once pronounced in her loudest possible voice in our home room on the first day I actually wore a bra to school because it had been pointless to own one without anything to fill it, "Your bra straps are twisted!"

Where is my wonderful ability to live in denial? It would come in handy right now to join the delusional generation.

I could deny I'm aging, that I have been tossed for a younger model, that young men think I'm their mother, that no one will hire me because of my age, that I forget why I'm standing in my kitchen, and that I'm really only middle-aged if I plan to live longer than a century.

But even if I got past all that nonsense that would only leave me to wonder how I am going to find a man I haven't seen in more than thirty years.

Another fucking number to ponder.