›› Anti Aging Cream
We are smart enough
to know that many claims for magic anti-aging cream this and miracle
anti-aging cream that are not truly staving off the inevitable and
actual aging process. We know that we will, as one of my dear
friends says, as we age, “fall apart.”
But we also know that we can make the aging process more pleasant, more
attractive, more acceptable. My grandmother used a face and
hand cream every night of her adult life. Maybe she
didn’t call it anti-aging cream. Maybe it was not
prescribed by a dermatologist or beauty supply expert who
“guaranteed” she would look, feel, or BE
younger. It is likely my grandmother did not sit at the
hand-made vanity in the small and humble bathroom, applying Oil of Olay
or Ponds or Jergens out of a profound awareness of any of these as
anti-aging creams remedying the effects of “free radical
damage;” the phenomena that includes skin exfoliating less
often; sebum production slowing; and less oil flushing the
skin…thereby drying it. It is likely she wanted to
feel better in hands and face and neck after twelve hours as a scrub
woman who was exposed to harsh, drying, and flesh-polluting chemicals
and solvents.
Then again, as our elders have this almost uncanny insight, this
intuition about people, places, things, events, and phenomena that they
might night have words about which to articulate, maybe my grandmother
was using the stuff in the thick white glass jar with a deep well
filled with a pink glop that made her smell buttery, powdery
sweet throughout the following day to slow the aging process, to stall
the flattening of skin layers, the subsequent thinning of the skin, the
decreasing of Collagen stabilizing enzymes, the thinning of blood
vessels and their inevitable change of blood flow to the surface of
that skin.
Maybe that 99-cent jar was skin care/anti-aging cream…for
her face was always clear, smooth, and virtually
wrinkle-free. And when she kissed me hello, I felt the silk
of a skin one would never know faced ten hours a day, seven days a week
cleaning offices at the local college and cleaning a hundred rooms at
the wealthy folks' mansion on the lake. Maybe, then, it was
not only anti-aging cream, but anti-remembering cream, a forgetting
potion, for she who worked so hard for so little, or an anti-forgetting
cream for those who watched her apply it every night of their
childhood…remembering decades later long after she passed,
that cosmetic sweetness, that soft, seemingly unwrinkled skin.
››
A Healthy Dose of Good Advice
