Let's get dirty

“Mommy?  Is it ok if I get my pants muddy?”

I looked down at Molly.  She and her sister were splashing at the silty edge of the Chena River. There was mud oozing through the mint-green holes in her Crocs, mud caked in a ring around the bottom of her pants, and mud on her arms up to the elbow.  By normal standards, her question is a wee bit late in coming.  But I knew what she meant.  “Go for it,” I told her.

“Yes!” Molly let out a happy-kid noise, and just in case her twin didn’t hear the good news, passed it on:  “We can get dirty!” And both children immediately plunged waist-deep into the dense brown muck.

Part of me sighed inwardly.  Letting kids get dirty – really dirty, as dirty as they want to be -- is not without consequences.  Those consequences are not only logistical, but also social.  Filthy children earn odd looks from strangers – or, even worse, non-looks.  You know what I mean: that brief and scuttling glance that is followed by a fixed inability to see all things that are simply too vile and offensive to exist in polite society. 

This is no minor taboo.  Americans are clean folks.  A New York Times article from 2010 starts with the lead, “A daily shower is a deeply ingrained American habit. Most people would no sooner disclose they had not showered in days than admit infidelity.”

Well… gosh. 

Of course, my ruminations here are focused on my filthy children, and my propensity for allowing them to become even filthier, rather than on my own habits with regard to… um… showering. Thus, I don’t really need to confess as to the frequency with which I fully immerse myself in water (not every day – and my hair only once-a-weekish).  Nor do I need to divulge how often I wash my jeans (occasionally), my sheets (when I remember), my windows (only in extreme cases), or my computer keyboard (once per U. S. President).   And yet, I now realize that our culture is so squeamish about being “dirty” that we don’t necessarily clarify whether that means the same thing as being “covered with dirt”-- which my children, at that moment, indubitably were.

Dirt and dirtiness are related, of course – and yet also peculiarly unrelated.  As far as I can tell, there are several fundamentally different reasons why we wash things.  These include health (influenza is bad; cholera is really really bad); odor (Americans have declared a war on armpits); comfort (wow, these sheets feel nice without all the crumbs); visual aesthetics (no, Lizzy, you can’t save that ice cream on your chin for later); and a combination of social pressure and cultural habit (I can’t go out, I haven’t taken even taken a shower!)

Okay: health.  That’s easy.  I’m… wait for it… in favor of it! Yes!  Yay, health!  I get annual flu shots and the recommended number of physicals, and I vaccinate my kids. I try to keep everyone’s immune system in tip-top shape via consumption of blueberries, brown rice, and chard; plenty of sleep; and vigorous bike-riding, wrestling, and duck-duck-goose.   I encourage lots of hand-washing.  I avoid contact with bubonic plague-bearing fleas, and I generally eschew exchanging bodily fluids with strangers. 

Moreover, I’m an avid washer-off of the type of dirt correctly termed “super-nasty-chemicals-that-we-insist-on-spraying-on-stuff”.  These, like Yersinia pestis, aren’t usually visible.  Nonetheless, they come conveniently ready-applied to our fruit and pre-injected into our farm animals.  How handy!  Ironically, toxins (which to me seem like the ultimate in “dirtiness”) seem to show up in a lot of our cleaners, probably because anything designed to obliterate germs tends to be iffy for your own body, too.  I’m careful (but not always consistent, and certainly not obsessive, because who has the energy to be either consistent or obsessive?) about avoiding that kind of dirt – the kind that no one thinks of as “dirt”.  Heck, I don’t even use mosquito repellant with DEET in it.  Yes, that’s right.  I don’t use DEET.  And I live in Alaska.

Speaking of mosquitoes, let’s move on to the “comfort” argument.  Well, I’m in favor of comfort, too – but my views on what is delightfully cushy don’t always seem to mesh very well with other people’s opinions.  In my world, grimy sandals held together with duct tape are extraordinarily comfortable, as is this marginally stained t-shirt and this pair of shorts that are on their third or fourth or maybe seventh wearing since they last rolled around in the washing machine.  The smear of bike grease on my leg and the trace of ketchup on my elbow are probably comfortable, too given that I’ve forgotten about them.  Stiff new shoes and buttoned-up cleanliness?  Not so much.

Most adults seems to take it as a given that being wet or messy is intrinsically uncomfortable.  But I suspect that this is a learned discomfort, rather than an intrinsic one.  Small children make great bell-weathers, in that they are hyper-sensitive (read: scream like banshees) in response to the smallest boo-boo.  They will do their very best to reach their 117-decibel potential¹ if they are too cold, are stung by a bee, or are forced to wear an itchy sweater.  However, they don’t much care about being a little sweaty, or even dripping with sweat.  So long as they are not chilly, they also don’t mind being rain-damp, or full-on head-to-toe sloshing-with-every-movement rain-soaked.  Mud? Grime?  An upended jar of honey?   The more the better!  They will happily wiggle their hands into the Play-Doh, plunge their arms into the wet sand, and hurl their whole exhilarated bodies into a swamp. 

Which is, of course, exactly what my kids were doing on the banks of the flooded Chena.  We were, at that moment, eight miles from home, with only our trusty tandem Trail-a-Bike as transportation.  Whatever degree of filth and moisture the kids accumulated, they would be wearing, publicly, all across town.   I, of course, would be branded as The Mom Who Let Her Kids Go Out Like That.

Which bring us to the “social norms” argument for cleanliness.  I worry about this one, at least occasionally.  Given that “odor” is in some ways a sub-category of “respectability”, I do augment my sporadic shower regimen with frequent spot-washing of any stinky areas.  I do this mostly for the sensibilities of others, rather than for my own.   Katherine Ashenburg, author of a book entitled “The Dirt on Clean,” notes that the idea that human sweat is unutterably repugnant is both relatively new and relatively geographically localized.  Still, I wear deodorant.  I draw the line at anti-perspirant, though -- because what IS that stuff?  Does it fill your pores with Crazy Glue, or what?

I also worry, with regard to Not Being A Social Freak, that word is already out that if you drop off your innocent child for a playdate under my care, she will be returned with mud stains, grass stains, blueberry stains, and weird stains of unknown origin.  You might find, for example, that when she gets into your tidy family car, her shorts are soaking wet.  There may be twigs in her hair.  On one notable occasion, over the course of about five hours, I managed to transform two perfectly respectable and fully clothed girls, then aged six and ten, into feral shirtless creatures streaked with dirt, fermented wild-cranberry war-paint, and dried blood.

Yes, this can occur in the space of time that it takes you to enjoy a nice movie-date and shop for some new patio furniture – because, okay, I really am The Mom Who Lets Kids Do That. 

I am also The Mom Who Remembered Being That Kid.  There’s a correlation, I’m betting.  My own mother told me stories about her early childhood, which – despite being somewhat lacking in store-bought toys, due to the wallop Great Britain took in WWII – was apparently rich in entertainment.  Did you know that little sweet little English girls back in the 1940’s enjoyed chasing each other around idyllic and bucolic fields, hurling partially dried patties of cow poop?  Well, now you do.  Perhaps not surprisingly, my mother often happily allowed her own daughters to be Those Kids. 

When Heckscher Park redid all the earthworks around the tiny artificial lake (which was always crowded with ducks that had grown neurotically greedy and diarrheic from being fed PBJ crusts and the stale ends of Pop-Tarts) the temporary result was… mud.  We children marveled at the oodles of wonderful mud, replete with rivulets of water just begging to be dammed, redirected, and coaxed into a miniature mud-nirvana of lakes, ponds, streams, and, well… mud.  The moms – it was almost all moms at the playground, back in the Carter era – fell into two distinct camps regarding whether it was okay to enter this heavenly world.  I can’t have been more than about six at the time, but I remember the inner gratitude and relief of knowing that my own mother was in the correct camp.

Living on Long Island, we also spent a lot of summer hours on the beach.  Grownups seemed to use the beach as a place to read a book, and perhaps, if it got really hot, to take a sedate swim.  After swimming, they went through elaborate towel-rituals to avoid getting too sandy.  I, on the other hand, thought of the beach as a place to dig, splash, collect peculiar sea-treasures, and roll around until coated like a sugar-doughnut.   Every time I got home and took off my bathing suit, I discovered that I’d been harboring upwards of seventeen pounds of sand in there – and maybe a few yards of seaweed and a horseshoe crab or two.

As I got older, though, I recall feeling a vague pressure to start being cleaner. Big kids – especially big girls -- were supposed to start living by some of the grownup rules.  What were those rules?  Well, as Ashenburg puts it, “For the modern, middle-class North American, ‘clean’ means that you shower and apply deodorant each and every day without fail.”  Certainly, I knew that Big Girls were supposed to be tidier.  Neater.  Less grubby.  Not only were we supposed to be that way, we were supposed to feel that way.  We were supposed to think that dirt was ewww, gross.  Spiders, caterpillars, and competitive spitting of watermelon seeds² were all right out.

I never quite managed this transformation. (You’re all shocked.)  Oh, some things changed. I stopped wandering around with chocolate ice cream on my chin, and I tried not to pick my scabs or my nose in public. There may have even been a few teenage years during which I did not plunge myself bodily into hip-deep mud.  But I never fully internalized the correct repugnance the stuff our whole planet is made of – namely, dirt.

And then, thank goodness, I found summer employment doing trail repair – first, in high school, with the Student Conservation Association, and then, in college, with the Adirondack Mountain Club.  As a member of a trail crew, being dirty – really REALLY dirty – wasn’t just a matter of course, it was a matter of pride.  We were foul.  We were encrusted.  We were so dirty that we were banned from the Lake Placid Laundromat for fouling their washers, and had to take to presoaking our clothes in the lake.  My summers were, in short, delightful.

I couldn’t remain forever in a time-machine College Summer, but moving to Alaska was the next best thing.  Watching my kids cavort in the Chena, even knowing that we’d be sloshing our way home, I still felt like less of a pariah than I would have if we’d been about to board a Long Island Railway train full of people reading the New York Times and pretending not to be able to see me.

Of people like me, the Times has this to say: “Resist the urge to recoil at this swath of society: They may be on to something. Of late, researchers have discovered that just as the gut contains good bacteria that help it run more efficiently, so does our skin brim with beneficial germs that we might not want to wash down the drain.”

Good to know, New York Times.  My bacteria-friends and I get along pretty well.  Still, I’m feeling a bit sensitive about your use of the word “recoil”. 

Indeed, I’m guessing, based on the NYT take on the matter, that most Americans, as products of a media-driven profit-motivated “culture of clean that has prevailed at least since the 1940s” really might recoil – from me, from my kids, from the muddy bike ride across town that was now inevitable.  Their TVs have told them to scrub, to cleanse, to sanitize, to deodorize -- and the TV knows all.

Likewise, Ashenburg notes the effect of the power of advertising, and the inexorable pushing away of dirt that began around the time of WWII.  Her assessment adds yet another twist: “While ads for men told them they would not advance at the office without soap and deodorant, women fretted that no one would want to have sex with them unless their bodies were impeccably clean. No doubt that's why the second-most-frequent question I heard during the writing of this book — almost always from women — was a rhetorical ‘How could they bear to have sex with each other?’ In fact, there's no evidence that the birthrate ever fell because people were too smelly for copulation.”

Oh, heavens.  Nope, I’m not going into detail on that one.  But, seriously, America?  If you really, truly think that sex is a 100% neat, tidy, sanitary, non-sweaty, super-clean activity that looks like a Disney cartoon and smells like Scrubbing Bubbles… um, I hate to criticize, but I think you may be doing it wrong.

It’s not just sex I’m talking about here, America.  Even as I worry about how I may be judged, I know that telling me to stay squeaky clean all time – well, it seems like about as viable a notion as telling a goldfish to stay dry.  Gardening involves dirt.  Chopping firewood is not neat.  Hiking through a forest, canoeing down a river, and biking a trail are not sweat-free and fully sanitized activities.  Earth, soil, worms, dogs, joy, connection, exploration, LIFE – none of these things are anything like a blue Windex sheen on a polished surface.  And yes, America, having kids is not tidy, either.  Not at any stage in the process.

I glanced at my own kids, splashing with delight in the murky water – then looked again.  I was pretty sure I only had twins, but now there were three of them.  A round-faced little boy, slightly smaller than my two, had sprouted from nowhere and sidled in to join the fun.  As I watched, he gazed admiringly at his role models – my filthy, filthy, daughters.  As I watched, he precisely copied Molly’s mud-ball-forming technique.  As I watched, one of his legs sank gleefully knee-deep. 

“Tyler!  Tyler!³  From the park plaza above, I heard the distinct call of a mother duck who has lost her chick.  Her voice was not yet worried, but was thinking about being worried.

“He’s down here,” I called, not without some trepidation.  He’s down here, and I’ve ruined him.

Within seconds, both of Tyler’s parents ambled into view.  They looked at their kid.  I looked at them.  I saw, from the mom-person, a slight grimace.  But the dad was now watching Molly, who was bent over and digging rapidly and assuredly, like a puppy, making a fortification out of a huge heap of mud.  Then he looked at Lizzy, her pigtails flying half loose, her jeans sodden, and some unknown substance caked on one side of her face.  Finally, he glanced at me.  I wasn’t precisely IN the mud, but, then again, my sandals were neither clean nor dry. 

Tyler’s dad grinned enormously.  “He’s found friends,” he said.

¹ Roughly equivalent to a jackhammer or a jet at takeoff.

² What has happened to all the seeds, you zombie-fruit-designing agriculturalists?  I want the watermelon seeds back!

³ Not his real name.  I’m not trying to protect him; I just can’t remember his name.

Just Passing Through

Photo of our community living room, blatantly stolen from Scott Pauker's blog
(http://spokeandwords.com/hitching-prudhoe-bay-part-2/)

When the kids and I found the sheet of fresh cookies and the pan of homemade brownies that Scott Pauker had left on our kitchen counter, I felt a twinge of regret that he would not be there to share them with us. 

Not that our little community of nine adults and four kids would have any trouble gobbling down the treats without outside assistance.  We have a strong track-record in Postprandial Gooey Deliciousness Consumption.  It’s part of the rhythm of the evening, which starts when we hungrily gather to sniff out whatever the chef du jour has concocted, and ends when we drag unwilling children home for necessary slumber. 

Dinner itself is usually gratifyingly replete with dark leafy greens, organic legumes, and whole-graininess.  While dining – and in the comfortable after-supper half-hour of plate-scrubbing and leftover-wrapping – we all decompress from work, gripe about current events, share our very best in off-color humor, or (in the case of the eight-to-ten-year-old crowd) happily absorb the off-color humor while bouncing off the walls.  Finally, we settle down to the pleasures of Dessert Time.

For two evenings during the previous week as well as two evenings this week, Scott had made a nice addition to that tableau.  His sunburned grin radiated his total lack of concern at finding himself in the midst of some kind of weird intellectual hippie mini-commune.  They use an outhouse and make jokes about Oxford commas?  Yeah, I’m cool with that.  He filled us in on enticing tidbits of Seattle news and biking lore.  He shared amusing details of his Adventure Thus Far -- and we were fond of his penchant for washing more than his share of the dishes. 

But, of course, he couldn’t hang around Fairbanks, Alaska forever.  He had places to go…such as Tierra del Fuego.  On his bicycle.

“Will we ever see him again?” asked Molly. She was indirectly responsible for the hoard of baked stickiness that was now brightening our morning with the joys of anticipation; with the honed cunning on an almost-third-grader, she’d been the fastest responder when Scott had kindly asked what sort of foodstuffs he might contribute to the general well-being of Tamarack Knoll. 

“Probably not,” I admitted.  “But we can follow his adventures online, if you want.”

“Okay.”

Molly sounded interested rather than disappointed.  She’d liked Scott.  Still, at age eight, she already seems well-acquainted with the fact that people come and go.  Travelers don’t always return. 

She strapped her own bike helmet over her raincoat hood for the decidedly less epic ride to this week’s summer camp – Shakespearean acting for the eight-to-twelve set – and the subject shifted to the question of why Lizzy’s bike has a rear mud-guard, while her twin’s does not.  But, as we splashed our way up our dirt road, and as I offered pointers on what gear a bike ought to be in on a steep incline (“Try a lower one, kiddo… no, a LOWER one…”) I found myself mulling over how we relate to the transient people in our lives: The Travelers.

I’ve blogged previously about the importance of community; of friendships; of sense of place; of ties that are permanent (okay, fine, not permanent on an intergalactic scale, but you know what I mean); and of people who are SO AWESOME that one can pawn off one’s kids on them at short notice. These myriad bonds are at once as complex as calculus and as comfortable as couch cushions.  In our clock-watching, parking-lot-infested, glowing-screen-riddled lives, the time-and-connectedness algorithms are often tricky to compute, and the fabric of community needs a bit of darning, to say the least.  But where, in weaving that mathematical tapestry, do we place the person who is new, foreign, strange, unknown, and temporary?  What is the role of The Archetypal Traveler?

The Traveler shows up in plenty of stories, from the Odyssey on out.  He or she is the Gypsy, the Tinker, the Explorer, the Warrior, the Vagabond, and the Stranger all rolled into one.  She is the Fairy Godmother, who appears for just long enough to do her trick with the pumpkin.  He is that Brad Pitt character who runs off with all the money in Thelma and Louise – but that’s not why you remember the character, now is it?  He is Gandalf, who never quite seems able to stick around long enough for the entire adventure, due to mysteriously pressing business elsewhere. 

Scott, of course, is not an archetype; he’s a specific, cheerful, 37-year-old man from Seattle with muddy Spandex and a liberal-arts background.  But, for the purposes of my ruminations, he makes a splendid archetypal proxy. We’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago.  He came our way as the friend-of-friends-of-friends, in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of way. 

Jay mentioned to me, in a vague sort of way, that “some biker guy” might be passing through, like, sometime, and did I think the community would be okay with letting him crash in the guest room?  As the Communications Specialist of the family (a job that falls to me by default, not based on any useful skillset), I posed this question to whomever happened to be around, received some unperturbed “yes” responses, and promptly forgot all about it until my phone rang, showing an unknown out-of-state number. 

“You’re where?  Old Nenana?  Okey-doke, you should be here in about twenty minutes.” 

I went to find a set of sheets, some sandwich-fixings, and a towel with not too many holes in it.

The Traveler is, by definition, is on the move. He’s not merely someone you’ve never met before; he’s someone who has been places you’ve never been, and is going places you probably can’t even imagine: “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”

Han Solo may not have known the difference between units of distance and units of time, but he was definitely going places: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money.” The traveler may or may not be one of the Good Guys in White Hats, but he’s interesting – and undeniably, oddly magnetic.

The Traveler doesn’t just crop up in literature (yes, of course Star Wars is literature!); he or she also seems to crop up with some regularity in our community.  Why?  Well, I’m not sure.  It might be because, given that there are five households in our group, we naturally receive five times the standard-issue number of guests.  It might be because Fairbanks is the kind of place where people frequently couch-surf – sometimes in a not-getting-off-this-couch-without-a-crowbar kind of way.  Or it might be because our community has an excellent reputation for not yet having slaughtered a single visitor in our ten-year history. 

Be that as it may, the vast majority of our guests have brightened and enlivened our lives.  Fairbanks is not a place that people “just pass through” unless they are up to something just a bit peculiar – such as a stint at Toolik Lake field station, measuring arctic shrubbery while enjoying the enthralling company of a few billion mosquitoes. We’ve housed researchers, families, relatives, and strangers.  We played host to the now-community-legend Fred, a retired African-American factory worker who came up to Alaska just to take part in the White Mountains 100 wilderness race.  I’d explain all about Fred, but this sign that the kids made says it all.  

Some of this enlivenment-via-house-guest, granted, involved a sort of after-the-fact “Type 2” fun.  The young woman who left a large, bloody, meaty item in our freezer, for example… well, she might have been lacking a few rudimentary social skills, but she left us with a most excellent story.*

Why are we drawn to The Traveler?  Why, knowing that we have no chance of developing a permanent bond, a reciprocal relationship, or even a real friendship, do we eagerly take in the traveler, make him a sandwich, and tell him to “make himself at home”?  Scott gave us wine, dishwashing, and brownies, but such generosity wasn’t expected or required.  What intangibles make The Traveler worthwhile?

What is The Traveler giving away for free?  Well, in the course of my 42 years, I have not only encountered The Traveler many times; I’ve also been The Traveler.  When I signed up to join the US Peace Corps at the ripe old age of 21, I had only the vaguest notion of what it might mean to go away and live in a less-developed foreign country for two years.  That is, I thought about many of the things I might have to give up: running water, electricity, spaghetti, Cadbury’s.  I didn’t understand quite so clearly what it might mean to give up familiarity, belonging, being at home.  I didn’t understand what it would be like to have to explain – weekly, daily, hourly – everything about myself, my worldview, my race, my nationality, my culture.

But there was no choice.  I was The Traveler.  I needed to describe snow to children who had never experienced temperatures below sixty Fahrenheit.  I needed to describe the American educational system to people who had struggled to get as far as seventh grade.  I, a lone white woman in a sea of resentment, needed to discuss racial tensions, the misunderstood plots of soap operas I’d never seen, the entire history of slavery, what New York City is like, the fact that I was NOT a Mormon missionary, class warfare, hurricanes, the CIA, school gardens, international trade, and English grammar.  My role as story-teller was non-negotiable.

I recall, with peculiar clarity, the day when I was seating at the bottom of a pit – destined to be a new school latrine -- with a shovel and crowbar.  The temperature was well over ninety.  It always was.  I was dripping.  But I was digging with fierce determination, in part because I knew that everyone had one eye on their own work, and one eye on me.  As I worked, a very old man, seated comfortably above-ground, turned to no one in particular and wheezed, with absolute conviction, that white girls sure can dig an outhouse.

If it hadn’t been clear before, it was clear then: the payment for my acceptance was not only my tales from afar, but also my role as a proxy for every American that everyone had never met.  I was The Traveler.   And being The Traveler is fascinating.  It’s exhilarating.  It’s also utterly exhausting – although not usually in the bone-weary sledge-hammer sense.  It’s draining socially, psychically, and emotionally. 

Scott passed through our humble not-a-commune on his way north to the official start of his bike ride at the Arctic Ocean.  He passed through again on his way south.  We saw him for a total of four evenings.  Since then, we’ve followed some of his adventures via Facebook and his blog.  “Oh, look, Scott made it to Whitehorse… Hey, did you read the piece Scott wrote about Skinny Dick’s Half-Way Inn?…” 

We won’t see him again.  The brownies are long gone.  The kids are not pining for the missing guest.  But when another Traveler gets in touch with us (by text or Facebook or pure-white carrier pigeon tossed upward from the slopes of a mythical volcano), we’ll welcome her.  We’ll make her a sandwich, and offer her a shower (replete with caveats about our limited water supply).  And we’ll ply her for stories, for mystery, for vicarious armchair-adventure.  She’ll understand the currency.  It’s one with a long history, and yet – despite the Age of Communication, despite supersonic speeds and instant messaging and a distinct lack of tinkers, magicians, Gypsies, and bundle-carrying train-hopping hobos in  a world grown small -- it still clings to shreds of its former value.

Community spells comfort, familiarity, home.  Without a community of friends and family, it’s easy to feel lost, ungrounded, purposeless.  The Traveler, on the other hand, symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown, the adventure you haven’t yet had, and the places you haven’t yet seen – but might.  Without The Traveler, the world can seem too small, too dull, too unchanging, too lacking in possibility. Thus, Community and Traveler are yin and yang.  We need one because we need the other.  And– at least at some time in our lives – we all need to take at least a brief turn at carrying the tales.  We probably won’t cover as many parsecs as Han Solo.  We probably won’t keep our pedals turning all the way from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America.  But we’ll at least gain some appreciation for those who do.

Happy trails, Scott.

* The young woman in question called us up about six months later and told us that she’d be swinging by to pick it up.  When we informed her that’s we’d thrown it away (not without some confusion and disgust), she was incensed.  “You threw away my bear heart?!”

The One Secret Trick...

Based on the ads that clutter the edges of my computer screen, I should be worried about a lot of things.  These include my wardrobe (“The latest in plus-size fashion!”), my finances (“Interest Rates Plummet!”), and my shoes (“Dozens of cute styles!”).  But there is one problem that the Internet Gods feel is even more appalling than my lack of trendy new pumps: the hideous signs of my decrepitude.

I should be stressing out about the dry skin on my feet, the wrinkles on my face, my maternal abdominal fat, and my general overall sagginess.  Scars are a biggie, too.  I should be trying to smooth them.  Erase them.  Photo-shop them.  Something.  Anything!  Indeed, I should be in a state of continual semi-panic about the visible effects of the Sands of Time. 

My proximal reaction is amusement at how poorly the digital universe seems to be tracking me. I’m not terribly prone to tinfoil-helmet-type fears; my thoughts are not valuable enough for anyone to want to steal them.  Still, it makes me snort and giggle to see just how wide of the mark these ads fly.   I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take an MBA to guess that a person who spends her time reading peer-reviewed journal articles, cracking obscure Star Trek jokes, and utilizing an online text-to-hexadecimal translator is probably not in the market for “The Revolutionary Secret That Dermatologists Hate!!!”

Come on, Google and Facebook, can’t you do any better than that? With all my keystrokes at your disposal, you still don’t know me one whit!

Or… do they? 

Oh, I don’t mean that I’m about to get liposuction and dermal abrasion, or start sighing abjectly in front of a mirror. (I can hear my friends snickering.)   Nonetheless, I do sometimes feel a disorienting disconnect with my sense of self.  Is that forty-two-year-old mom really… me? 

I clearly remember the summer day when I had recently reached the exalted age of ten, and my mother divulged that, deep down, she was still a ten-year-old, too.  The idea that my reliable, stolid mom-parent was simultaneously the pigtailed child grinning impishly from black-and-white post-WWII-Britain both comforted and terrified me.  Part of me wanted to cling to the childish idea that she – and all grownups – were omnipotent, omniscient beings who existed in a higher plane than my own.  But at the same time, I was already feeling the complex world of adulthood closing in on me like a pall of dense smoke.   I already knew that I didn’t ever want to lose my essential self. When it came time to navigate that daunting world, I wanted to still be me.  The me I knew. 

I am now the age that my mother was, on that particular day in 1982.

I don’t obsess over vanishing beauty; I never had it to lose, anyhow. At ten, I was not an adorable Shirley Temple; I was a grubby little nail-bitten creature often found somewhere high up in a tree.  At fourteen, I was not a peachy, blossoming young sylph; I was an uncomfortable collection of bony elbows, scraped knees, and miserable uncertainty.  At nineteen, I was not a gorgeously unblemished young lady with perfect curves; I was a doughy lump of acne skulking in a shapeless pair of overalls.  But through those horrifically awkward and sometimes terrifying years, I still believed that I could grow up to do world-changing things.  Cure cancer?  Visit Mars?  End war?  Discover new subatomic particles?  Heck, yes.  I adored logic puzzles, science fiction, running around in the woods, and asking way too many questions.  I liked inventing, and building.  I liked playing.  Playing!

And then Father Time wreaked a quarter-century of collateral damage. 

Facebook wants me to worry about the physical wear-and-tear and the visibly droopy bits, but what about the metaphorical scars and blemishes?  The wrinkling and graying of my perspective and personality?  The cumulative scarring of all of life’s failures and disappointments and disillusionments? Those seem far more difficult to treat with ointment, loofahs, supportive undergarments, or That One Secret Trick Your Doctor Won’t Tell You*. 

A few months back, a friend in his late thirties who is half-heartedly doggy-paddling around the dating pool expressed consternation about the fact that all the women he met had “emotional baggage.” 

My middle-aged cynicism kicked in instantly.  Baggage?  What, just like mine?  Just like yours?

Jay, who has been married to me for a full dozen years now, was about as unsympathetic as I was in the face of our friend’s complaint.  His thoughts on the matter, however, were radically different from mine.   While I inwardly harrumphed that all of us middle-aged farts carry a gray, wrinkly knapsack of past woes, Jay stoutly (and sweetly) maintained, “That’s silly.  Not all women have baggage.  Nancy doesn’t have any baggage at all.”  Yes.  He actually said that out loud.

Oh, Heavens to Betsy.  The assertion alone threw all the dirty laundry in my head into a fast spin cycle, churning up the staple set of humiliating and miserable memories that refuse to fade into obscurity.  I’m sure that hundreds of happy days have blurred together into a polyglot, but the most sparkling examples of my personal idiocy, embarrassment, and loss are as immovable and as obtrusive as pillars of polished marble. 

I should pause here to say that, given that I don’t have Baggage-with-a-capital-B, I have absolutely no ability (and no right whatsoever) to comment upon the agony of extraordinary emotional pain, loss, or paralysis, any more than I have the ability to imagine what it might be like to suffer physical paralysis. Nor do the Facebook ads that plague my screen offer cures for debilitating diseases, severe burns, or past abuse. They focus on the superficial effects of the passage of years: the everyday wear-and-tear and the inevitable scars, not the profound ones.  The ones we all acquire.  With time.

I worry that the impacts of all those small scars have cumulatively, yielded a crop of cynicism, inertia, and stolidness.  I peer in the metaphorical mirror, suspecting myself of giving up adventure for security and reneging on idealism and perfectionism in favor of Just Getting Shit Done.  Do I see just a hint of jadedness around my eyes?  Is my optimism sagging, thus allowing my sarcasm to flop around?  How did I get to be forty-two years old without ever paragliding, publishing a novel, or setting foot in Africa?  Why can’t I watch romantic movies without groaning and rolling my eyes, rather than sighing and tearing up?   At what point did the wrinkles of time inform me that my vote in the next Presidential election probably won’t matter, the Indigo Girls aren’t all that profound, and I’m never going to go to Mars?  My idealism is mottled with stretch-marks, dammit!

Stretch marks.  Yeah.  Okay, fine.  What about them?  The real, physical ones, that is.  Maybe there’s something I can learn from the physical that will inform the metaphysical.  So, okay, what of all the other physical changes and scars? 

I took stock of my scars.  And I found a few stories.

Left knee: don’t slide into first base if you are a second grader playing whiffle-ball in a parking lot. 

Right thigh: don’t go hiking up snowfields with an ice axe that you don’t know how to use. 

Left thigh: if invited by a family of Jamaican farmers to stop by any time before five o’clock, do not arrive five minutes late, after they have set loose their pack of trained German Shepherd guard dogs.  But if you do, pretending you came to play super-fun doggie games will fool five-and-a-half of the six. 

Lower abdomen: removing twelve pounds of tightly wedged twin by C-sections, by Jay’s report, involves a crowbar. 

Left breast: some lumps are benign.  Some days are full of gratitude. 

Arms: if you donate blood enough times – like maybe fifteen gallons or so by now – you’ll eventually have a collection of little needle-marks.  But they’re not junkie-marks, okay?  Okay? 

Face: for gods’ sake, stop picking at the acne!  Also, dusk in moose territory is a bad time to be driving relatively fast on a gravel road – but the doctor and two nurses in Meadow Lake Saskatchewan in the summer of ’99 were a kind, down-to-earth, and deeply generous team with a copious supply of heavy-duty black thread.

What does this all add up to, other than a complex roadmap of scar tissue (private tours -- by invitation only)?  Well, first of all, it shows that modern medicine is nothing to take for granted.  Second, it’s clear that I’ve gotten off pretty darned easily.  Third, it shows that scars tell a complicated story of good and bad luck, good and bad choices, and lessons fairly or unfairly learned.  But I think it offers a few broader hints, as well. 

One of those hints is – I kind of like my scars.  Mythologically speaking, those who try to turn back time do about as well as those who try to stop the tide or fly with wax wings.  But I don’t want to stop time, and more than I want to erase my scars.  My worries have less to do with my neck-veins, my unsightly calluses, and my too-too-solid thighs than with world-traveling still undone, world-saving still unaccomplished, and relative lack of parties at which everyone blasts the music immoderately high and starts taking clothes off – and these desires, I now realize, don’t have to be tied to anyone’s calendar but my own.

Yeah, I’m female, and yeah, I’m middle-aged.  As a result, the Advertising Gods think they have me pegged: “You Won’t Believe Our Miracle Scar-Erasing Crème!”

No, you’re right, I won’t believe. 

But there are things I do believe – and one of them is that I’ll happily ignore you, Facebook Advertiser.  I don’t want your snake-oil goo.  I don’t want your Dorian Gray outlook on life. I don’t want to erase my scars, expunge my past, return to high school, or reclaim all the fears, credulity, insecurities I’ve shed along the way. 

On the other hand, there are things I do want to hang onto.  My optimism is one of them. I want to believe that I can make a difference, that some songs are worth getting stuck in my head, and that sure, I will still travel the world one day with just a backpack on my back.  I want to stay up too late, and run around in the woods, and ask too many questions.  I want to eat s’mores with that once-me ten-year-old.

I’m pretty sure she’s here with me for good.  She’s a bit battered and scarred.  But… that’s okay.  She’s in for the long haul.

*Admittedly, my doctor does seem awfully youthful, but I’m pretty sure she’s not holding out on us.