At age fifty, I decided it was time to stop buying the same drugstore perfume I’d first received from a high school boyfriend whose brother worked for the company. I must have mentioned this to my daughter who took it upon herself to find me a more grown-up scent. A New York performing artist then going through her counter-culture stage in life, she went to a big department store and spent a considerable time sniffing first one perfume and then another until making her decision. My mental picture of this young woman in her torn jeans, paint-spattered shirt and combat boots, rubbing elbows with the fashionably dressed and perfectly coifed, makes me smile. I continued to use the perfume she selected for many years.

At age sixty, I decided it was time to stop buying my makeup in the drug store, so I underwent a “makeover” from the staff of a famous makeup artist. I bought everything they recommended that day and for many years replaced items as they were depleted. Also in my sixties, an opportunity to travel to some remote parts of Africa convinced me it was time to give up the electric hair rollers and the hairstyle I’d worn since college. “A person should change her hairstyle at least every fifty years,” I said.

It was also around that time that I discovered three gray hairs and my hairdresser suggested I camouflage them with highlights. Very subtle highlights framing my face. Somehow, as the years progressed, the highlights became less subtle and I became more blond. Publications were writing about “the graying of America.” My friends and I joked that in our case, it was more like “the blonding of America.” A man told me about serving as an escort for a woman attending her fiftieth high school reunion. “Funny,” she said as she surveyed the room. “I don’t remember there being so many blonds in my class.”

At age seventy, I despaired of ever seeing Italy before I died. So, in spite of suffering with sore feet, I persuaded my husband and a cousin to go for two weeks. We hit eight cities and untold museums and sights. My feet hurt every step of the way. And a great many of my photos show my poor cousin up ahead waiting for her hobbling relation to catch up. I vowed that my seventies would be the time to finally get my feet fixed.

It’s also the time when I began to wonder how much gray there was under all that blond. I look at women with gorgeous heads of gray or even snow white hair and I think, That’s truly beautiful! “The way to do it is to first cut your hair very very short,” a woman recommended. It may also be, I tell myself, a time to hide indoors. Perhaps while my feet heal. But in truth the gray is showing up haphazardly. Salt and pepper, they call it. I’m thinking of it as Nature’s highlights.

So here I am with graying hair and sore feet. I hardly ever remember to wear perfume and at this rate, I have enough to last the rest of my life. Increasingly, I skip making up my face and find myself replenishing my supplies with products from the drug store.

So much for age-related pronouncements. On toward the eighties.

This leg was once able to swing effortlessly up on a ballet barre.  Or over my head while I balanced on the other one.  Along with its partner, this leg could clear the back, not just the seat, of a chair set in the middle of the ballet studio for giant leaps, a somewhat useless skill for a female dancer.  And when my father in his increasing impoverishment was quick to accept my half-hearted offer to quit ballet, I went on to other pursuits. Then this leg and its twin were able to reach over my curved back so the feet could touch the back of my head during a cheerleading jump.  It could do the splits.  And in college, this leg danced with a tall Norwegian man whose skill, and mine, caused others to step back, relinquish the dance floor and watch in admiration.

This leg walked in grade school and high school and college graduation ceremonies and into job interviews, and when I began working on newspapers, it took me out on assignments and then rested under the desk while I wrote my stories.  Once, when I’d climbed to the roof of an old mansion designed as a castle, the rest of me froze at the top and had to be coaxed down by the photographer accompanying me.  He held onto my legs and guided my feet down the iron bars imbedded into the castle walls.

This leg supported feet in pointed-toe shoes with spike heels whose metal core caused crescent-shaped indentations in people’s linoleum floors so that hosts began requesting women leave their shoes at the door.

This leg walked down an aisle and carried babies.  It helped children learn to walk and ride bicycles and drive a stick shift.  It walked alongside a long succession of big dogs on walks up and down hills, and it climbed innumerable ladders in many rooms of many houses that we owned so I could paint many walls.  This leg dug holes for planting plants in many gardens, and followed behind wheelbarrows hauling gravel for paths and topsoil.  We were hard workers, this leg and I.

And now, in my eighth decade, this leg is rebelling. When I try to get it to accept its share of my weight, it registers its agony.   “Maybe arthritis,” the doctor says.  One of the forms he has me fill out contains lists of activities and asks if I do them:  vacuuming?  Of course I vacuum.  Why doesn’t it also ask rug shampooing?  Or window washing?   Or, for that matter, sightseeing or trawling through art museums?  How about tromping around the ruins of Rome and Pompeii.?  This leg and I have been through a lot.

Now, I struggle with crutches and curse my awkwardness.

The newspaper had a story about an 80-year-old woman who slipped on the ice in her horse corral, lashed her legs together to stabilize the hip that broke in three places and dragged herself through ice and mud the 40 yards back to her house.  It took her four hours, and once she got inside the first call she made, before 911, was to her daughter 30 miles away, telling her she needed to come to feed the horses.

I want to be that woman.  I want to be like all those impressive old women I read about, women in their 80s and 90s who keep going in spite of the accumulating years.  Women who stare down old age and dare it to get in the way of what they want to accomplish.  Who refuse to accept the stereotypes of old age.  Who would not own a rocking chair if you paid them…

Damn!  When will that pain pill start to kick in?

There are reasons why older people ought to hang out with one another.  I mean aside from when your eyebrows need tweezing and there’s a long gray hair growing out of your chin.  Your older friends’ eyesight is not any better than yours so they can’t see those things either.

Furthermore, you don’t have to feign interest in such things as blogging and tweeting and the existence of Facebook.  And let’s not even go there when it comes to popular music and that truly strange art form known as rap.  You can’t understand any of the words and have a feeling that it’s probably better that way.

More important, though, is the matter of historical context.  Increasingly, I am noticing that I draw blanks from younger people at certain points in the stories I have been telling for years.  Like the time I mentioned that my husband had spent his career at the former Bell System.  The young person to whom I imparted that information said, “What’s that?”  “That,” for any young person reading this, was the nationwide telephone system whose efficiency was admired around the world and whose breakup in 1984 mystified the company’s counterparts overseas.  “If it’s the best telecommunications system on earth, why on earth change it?” was the headline on an ad at the time in which the company tried to explain itself.  My husband, who had a hand in creating that ad, said the company caved because an antitrust suit was threatening to drag on for years. And AT&T wanted to be able to compete in the marketplace that was changing the telephone business. Things such as those that now enable blogging and tweeting and the like.

Recently, when I told some younger people that I had grown up in New Jersey, one asked why I did not talk like the Sopranos.  Well, for one thing, most people in New Jersey do not talk like the Sopranos.  But the question offered an opportunity for me to tell the story of the remedial speech course I was encouraged to take in college.

I enrolled at the University of Missouri where my Nebraska-born father was happy to send me, perhaps in the hope that I would lose some of my New Jersey accent and also because it was cheaper even for an out-of-stater than the Ivy League.  At the time, back then in the Ice Age, all freshmen were required to take a speech test.  As I recall, it consisted of standing in front of a group and speaking a little about where you were from and what brought you to the university.  As I’ve told the story, a fellow before me was wearing bib overalls.  That’s probably an embellishment but it enabled me to add, in an aside, that in those pre-hippie days I had never seen a person wearing bib overalls.  He related in what I considered a “country” accent that he was from a small town in Missouri and had come to major in agriculture.

I smiled to myself as he spoke.  My New Jersey home was just across the river from New York City, a place we New Jerseyans began making our way to as soon as we looked old enough to get away with lying about our age.  The drinking age then in New York was eighteen, unlike New Jersey’s twenty-one.  So I considered myself the ultimate sophisticate.  Of course I would breeze past this silly test, but that farmer fellow needed help.

So yes, he passed and I failed.  The speech professors trolling for students asked me to stay behind.  “We think you would benefit from our course,” one said.  I exploded.  “This is so unfair!  Just because I’m from a different part of the country.”

“Well,” the other professor said, “didn’t you come here for an education?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“When you leave here, don’t you want to sound like an educated person?”

“Yeah,” I said again.  “What do I sound like now?”

“You sound like a gun moll.”

Now when I tell this story, I get blank stares at the end from younger people, which is disconcerting since it makes the punch line fall flat.  I guess you had to grow up reading Dick Tracy in the comics to know that a gun moll is a gangster’s girlfriend.

I did take the course and learned to watch the pronunciation of certain vowels.  I also spent four years in Missouri and then moved back and forth across country several times.  Once in San Francisco I was being considered for a job in television because, the interviewer said, I had no noticeable regional accent.  I chuckled to myself at that one.

Younger people probably aren’t aware that consumer interest – car loans, credit cards, department store accounts and such – once was tax deductible on a person’s income tax.  A daughter who just learned this was shocked.  “What was the rationale for that?”  Probably a ploy, I said, to get us all hooked on buying on credit.  And look where that got us.

So another of my stories to retire.  Back in our younger days, we filled out our own income tax returns, and sometimes we were audited.  For one of those audits, my husband gathered up all the statements we had accrued in the year and took them in to an IRS office to present to the auditor.  “Where does it show the interest?” she asked.  “I’ve never had a credit account.”  Oooh boy, my husband thought, we are in trouble here.  And we were – until we settled with them.

I have been thinking lately that I need to retire these old stories and find new things to talk about.  But I tell you, I refuse to do it in a tweet.