Ode to Turning 50 by Lisa Waters

ODE TO TURNING 50

It is now August of the year I turn 50, which means that it will be only a few weeks until the “Big Day”. It has been a fact of my life that I would be 50 one day.
I’ve always thought about it, in some way or another.
When I was a kid, I used to think things like “boy, when the turn of the century occurs, I will be 47! We’ll probably be able to do things like go shopping on the moon and stuff!” Well, we can’t exactly do that but, hey, some things are sure different. This past January I really realized that this was the year, for sure! I was standing out in the street, in Mesa, AZ, at midnight, looking at all the stars and kissing my husband in the New Year, when that thought really hit, big time. Wow, this is 2003! That means I turn 50 this year! Jeez, how did that happen?

My life has been very strange, no kidding. I never would have thought that I would be married to my third husband by the time I turned 50. And the funniest thing to me is that those first two marriages were no mere flashes in the pan, no sir, they were both of tenure, for sure. I mean, don’t teachers get tenure after 10 years? Yup, they were ten years long, both of them. So that works out to 20 years of married life. And then you factor in this marriage, it’s of 5 years duration, plus the 2 years we lived together, so that’s 8 years I’ve been with this man. Never in my wildest thoughts, when I was a little girl, did I think 3 marriages would be in my future. That would be odd, but I’ve met many many people over the last 50 years who’ve done that, and more, so…life is kinda weird sometimes.

One of things about being 50 that I didn’t know was how tired I would get, so quickly and so easily. Like, now I love taking naps!!! You know, you couldn’t get me to take a nap after the age of 5 for nuthin’. Too much to do and not enough time. Very busy, and besides, I didn’t want to miss anything. Plus, for several years, I had 3 little kids keeping me very busy. I guess it’s good I had them when I was young because I surely couldn’t keep up with them now! Yeah, I really like my naps.

And I get up very easily at 4:30am, too. And if, God forbid, I don’t get a nap, I gotta go to bed by 9:00pm, that’s it. I’m washed out, done for. Pitiful. And what do I do at 4:30am? Get ready for work and go to my job. I have to have that hour or so of “getting ready time” or else my goose is cooked. I can’t function without being awake. Of course, on the days that I am off work, I still get up early. I sit there, smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, look at my dog and think about my life.

There are some people who are not here anymore. People I never thought would leave this plane of existence before me, and some that I expected would probably leave before me. My mother has been dead and gone for 11 years now. That was horrible when it happened and now the sting is less but I don’t think a day really goes by that thoughts of her don’t go through my mind, like wisps of campfire smoke go wafting through the trees. She’s always with me somehow.

And my cousin Freddie, who has been dead and gone for many years, too. He was my boon companion in childhood, up to our teenage years, when we traveled different paths. But he was always in my life, even if only on the margins. He was so lost, in so many ways,

but one thing that he never forgot was to call me on my birthday. And he would sing to me, that song by Bette Middler, “The Rose”. Oh, how poignant it is to hear that song. It’s so beautiful and it always speaks to me of Freddie. What karma there is between Freddie and me I will never know, but he will never be forgotten because there are still many of us left who love him, including me.

And last year, I lost my best friend of all time. She knew me since I was a teenager. There wasn’t anyone who knew me that long, that wasn’t related to me. I met Chris in high school and we remained friends to the day she died. Our lives couldn’t have been more different. Sometimes I think our friendship was like a rubber band being stretched and then relaxed. Sometimes we were closer to each other and other times we were farther apart. But we always loved each other, sometimes just from different parts of our lives. You know, I got married and had kids at a young age and she was out doing the single young woman thing. Then she got sick and we came back together. And then she got married. And then she got divorced. And then I got divorced. And we would talk, oh, would we talk. And sometimes we didn’t talk for months, long months. But we always knew the other one was there.
And then she had kids, long after mine were babies. In fact, my baby used to take her oldest child under her wing, took him trick’or’treating, babysat, too. My baby loved Chris. Chris was her role model. We both took her death hard.

I don’t understand the deaths of Freddie and Chris. On one hand, I accept that they happened for a reason, but on the other hand, I think why? Between me and myself, I think Freddie was lost for so long, most of his life, and maybe his death was his release from a heavy burden.

And as for Chris, that’s a lesson for those of us who are left. Her sons and family and friends. Love always those you love. Never take anyone for granted. You never know. You just never know. So I kinda feel like I’m turning 50 for the 3 of us. Freddie would have been 50 in May and Chris would have been 50 in July. I was the baby. Ha. So here I am, the only one left of that group to turn 50. Does that mean, if I turn 50 for them and me that I’ll be 150?

Yeah, I’m the first of all my cousins to turn 50, now that Freddie has gone. There are several of us. Me, Shawn, Kim, Andy. (Freddie), Mary, Ellen, Julie. Joe, Beth, Tim, Maureen, Maria, Chrissy and Johnny. Roberta, Molly, Eve, Pat, Mike, Jim, Erin, Ivy, Riley. It’s getting weirder and weirder to say you’re 50 years old.
I remember when I discovered my grandmother was 50. God, how old did that sound to me??!! I remember when my Aunt Cathy turned 50. Wow, big party, black armbands, the whole nine yards. Yeah, we got her lots of neat stuff like adult diapers, Geritol, dentures, hearing aides-you know, good stuff old people need. A cane, yeah, I remember that, too. So, now here I am, ready for a hearing aide, for real. I mean it. It seems I can’t hear so well anymore. And stuff hurts me, too. Now, my memory doesn’t seem to be getting any too worse. How’s that for correct grammar? But, really, I seem to have the same amount of trouble remembering things now than I ever did. But, a funny thing is that I seem to be getting better at math and remembering new people’s names. I don’t know how long that will last, but, hey, good’s good. Right?

I don’t remember my parents turning 50 though. Maybe that’s cuz they were in Florida by then. Who knows why I don’t remember. But I don’t. Maybe my sister Kimberley can remember. She’s the one who remembers things in this family.

What else? Well, I’m on a diet, which seems to be working. It seems like I’ve been fighting with my weight ever since I got to be 12. And I’m working out at a gym 3 days a week, too, so that’s good. I’ll be like Totie Fields-she lost all that weight and then she died.

It’s been an adventure, that’s for sure. 50 years. Wow. Lots of things have changed and some things have remained the same. I still have blonde hair, but it comes from a bottle now. My dishwater blonde hair from my thirties began to really gray when my mother died. I remember that day well, too. Yeah, about six months after she died, I was in the bathroom brushing my hair and I noticed this streak of gray coming in on the left side of my forehead and I thought “Look-you’re getting that same gray streak all the other girls in your family did. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that cool? You’re just like the rest of them.” And I looked at streak for a few months and then one day I noticed that-wait, just a minute. What is all that gray doing around my ears? And hey!! All through my head!! Oh, no. A gray streak was one thing but total gray? No way. Loreal, here I come. So hence the hair still is blonde. Better living through chemicals, right? No one can ever say I don’t have a little vanity. And I still look kinda youngish, I think. My hair is longer now than it has been in a while. And a little fat really will plump up your wrinkles. And I have a good attitude, too, that I've developed over the last few years.

I used to be afraid of many things. Really ephemeral, futuristic, “what if” kinds of things, things that mostly didn’t materialize and some of them that did. But I found out that usually the things that happen to you aren’t as bad as the things you are afraid of, and a lot of the things that happen to you are things you never thought of to be afraid of in the first place. So, no sense worrying. Planning, that’s a good thing. But worrying, no. Bad. Doesn’t help nuthin’. Not one thing ever got helped by worrying about it. Sometimes I have to have talks with myself about that attitude, though. Bad habits are hard to break. I have to keep reminding myself of my own discoveries. And besides, sometimes the things I thought that, if that ever happened to me, oh my God, how awful, well, it turned out ok. Sometimes even better that ok.

And I’ve seen a lot of the country in the past year. That was the result of letting go of fears and letting the “bad things” happen. See, after 9/11, my husband lost work and finally his job and we almost lost the house to foreclosure. But, it got sold and the debt paid. Of course, I didn’t get but $3,000 for it, but hey, that’s better than a kick in the teeth.

And speaking of teeth. I still have them, all of them. Even those impacted wisdom teeth, the extraction of which I keep putting off. I just don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars yanking out something. But, I’ve come to the conclusion that they must go soon as they are hurting me a lot, lately. And it’s so funny to look at my teeth. I remember the big discussion of the relative crookedness of my teeth and my sister Shawn’s teeth, in relation to the crookedness of my sister Kimberly’s teeth and my brother Andy’s teeth. Apparently Shawn and I had less crookedness to our teeth and so the orthodontia money went for Kim and Andy and their teeth. So, the teeth in my head are still crooked. And I thought, hey, I wonder what would happen to my teeth if I had those wisdom teeth out? Would my teeth get any straighter? Wouldn’t that be funny. Besides, the gums are starting to recede, if I am to be completely honest. They are. A little.

And things have fallen, on my body. My butt, for one. I remember it as being just a little bit higher up on my body than it is now. And I think it was a little cuter, too, just a little. But now, jeez, it’s just kinda flattened out and droopy. And my arms. Oh God. The “old lady bat wings” have appeared. And let’s not even mention the boobs, which I know used to be much more attractive. They fell down a long time ago, after 3 pregnancies and nursing 3 babies, they look like-well, I won’t gross you out. But suffice it to say that if I ever get any extra money, they will be up where they are supposed to be, along with my butt. Well, they won’t all be in the same spot, but they’ll be back where they originally were, that’s for sure. Better living through surgery, right?

Where was I? Probably no where, just ambling along in my mind. You know, “stream of conscious” thoughts. Rambling. Or, as my kids have been known to say-“Mom, you just go on and on, and on”. But I say, so what? I find myself to be quite fascinating. And besides, this is my Ode, so I can go on and on if I want.
So, the upshot of the whole thing is I can’t believe I’m turning 50. I mean, I don’t feel 50. Do I? See, on one hand, my stamina is less and my body knows things I won’t admit to, but I feel younger than I remember 50 looking and feeling on other people. Except my mother, who never looked to be in her 50’s, even though I knew exactly how old she was. She was quite mad when I figured out her age. And I never let her forget how old she was, either!!! Besides, no one ever believed her age anyway. It’s all in the attitude.

And mine is good. I feel like I’ve learned some things about life and myself and people in general, along the way. It’s kinda fun to think about how the next 50 years are going to be.
Interesting. Different. Surprising
(I like surprises) and more than likely, some painful things will happen. It always does. I finally learned that there is nothing I can do to avoid pain. In order to avoid painful events, you have to forego happy times, and that’s just not something I am willing to do. You would have to cut yourself off from everything good in order to not feel pain, cuz that’s just the way it is. And, as my mother used to say, “things’ll get better, honey”. However, she died without telling me when. I’ve had to figure that part out for myself. Hell, she probably didn’t know when, anyway. She liked to hear herself talk, too. And no Ode would be complete without addressing some of the things that have changed in the world in the last 50 years.

I won’t even pretend to try to list ALL the changes and technological advances. But start with this…. when I was little, I watched the Mickey Mouse Show on a black and white TV, a huge piece of furniture in the living room. With a tiny little screen. And when the TV went off, it turned to green, which faded slowly away until there was nothing left but a little white dot which finally left, too. And the TV had to warm up when you turned it on, sort of fading in the opposite of how it faded out. And the telephone used to be this strangely shaped tabletop instrument.
Black. Heavy.
Big and almost square shaped, with a skinny “electrical” cord instead of the curly ones they have now. And the phone numbers were much shorter, and then they got longer and started with two letters followed by five numbers. And we had party lines, too, where a bunch of neighbors shared the same phone number. And you could tell which neighbor the call was for by the type of ring. And, let’s see. I remember microwaves and dishwashers and color TV. Not that we don’t have them now, but that we DIDIN”T have them then and what a huge deal they were, and how cool you were if you had one. And women used to go to the hairdressers and get their hair done once a week and then all of a sudden someone invented blow dryers and then no one went to get their hair done anymore, at least not like that.

And I remember mini skirts, and shag hairdos. And I remember shag carpeting. And Avocado appliances. And I remember “princess” phones. And I remember when gas was 50cents a gallon, and bread and eggs were 50cents, too.
And I remember when I got my own telelphone, in my own room, and I bought my grandmother’s 1963 Valiant from her for $100.00. And paid for my own car insurance. All on the salary of a shampoo girl at the beauty shop of Bob Strelecky, a family friend. Oooh, how cool I was to have my own car.
And then I remember “Pong”, the first computer game, which wasn’t really a computer at all, more like an Atari, which was hooked up to you TV, which by then was a 25 in. color model, sitting on a TV stand in the living room instead of a huge piece of furniture, like a credenza. And then, we got mobile phones you could use in your car. Then we got pagers and in the beginning the only people who had pagers were doctors and dope dealers. Sometimes those are interchangeable.
But that’s another Ode.
And what else, oh, yeah, then we got home computers, that didn’t have Windows but were, um, jeez, what was that system they were operated on…..oh, yeah, DOS. And then came Windows. And a proliferation of cell phones. Oh, my God, I forgot about answering machines. How could I forget them? And caller ID, too.
So many things. Like cruise control in your car. Even if they aren’t like the cars they had on the Jetson’s, they still have become different over the years. I remember huge fins on the backs of the cars. Heck, I remember when they were like big boxes, the old cars, and they had these skinny little steering wheels, and there wasn’t any power steering or power brakes. No power windows. You were in the big time if it had a radio. And then they all started coming equipped with AM/FM. And then tape players. Now CD players. And I remember when air conditioning in the car was when the windows were rolled down. And let’s not forget tape players to hook up to you TV. To watch movies. And you could record your favorite shows and watch them later. And what was that other tape player called? Not VCR, that’s the “newer and better” model. It was called….BETA. Yeah, remember BETA? That was a flash in the pan, eh? Boy, there have been many technological advances.
I remember when I played my music on records, on my record player. Now they have Walkman, and headphones for your cell phone so you look like you are having a psychotic break with reality, talking to yourself. And people fax things in their cars, I hear. And the Internet, the information highway. Shoot, I remember when they built the I-94 highway. Dragging on Telegraph on a Saturday night. Cruising the drive-through hamburger places on Michigan Ave. I remember when the city of Inkster was a village and crazy people walked away from Eloise hospital.

I think that things are different now, but not necessarily worse. Some things are bad. Very bad. But people have been killing each other since people have been invented. One of the things I think is the worst thing to happen is how kids are now killing each other. I think that is the saddest commentary on our society. It shows that parents are not minding their kid’s business, like they did when I was growing up.
It had changed some when I was raising my kids, but I tried to be a tyrant, as much as I could. I think I turned out well, and I figured if that stuff worked for my siblings and me, it should work for my kids, too, and it did.
They saw and experienced some things that I didn’t, but, that is the way of the world. I saw and experienced things my parents didn’t. That’s part of the evolution of humans. And like I said, people have been killing each other since time began. You have to sit on your kids day and night, nag them all the time, check up on them, question everything they do and say and who they are with, etc., etc., etc. You raise them right and trust them as much as possible, but don’t be blind. They will do stuff. We all did stuff.
People will say it was a more innocent time when I was young. I guess it was in some ways, but hey! It wasn’t my generation who invented the atomic bomb so who was innocent? It was just life. And in life, you have to mind your children’s business. Of course, that is just my opinion and as we all know, opinions are like ass holes, everybody has one.
There are some good things about turning 50. I don’t compete with anyone anymore. I have nothing to prove. I have done what I wanted to do. I had my children and raised them. Now, I just compete against myself.
Can I do this? Can I do that?
Do I think I can accomplish this goal to my satisfaction? Yeah, this is much better, competing against myself. Someone should have told me about this before.
And I’m thinking my perception of time is much different that before. Then, everything had to be done “now” and “soon”. Now, it gets done when I feel like it. That’s a change.

So, I have some wrinkles and some body parts have migrated south. Any squeamish men should just skip this next paragraph.

I think I’m going through “the change” and that’s a huge relief. I think I’ve been getting my period since I was 9 years old. That’s a long, long time. Let’s see…..50 minus 9 is….41? Can that be right? For all those years, the only time I was late or missed a period was when I was pregnant. For the last few years, I’ve had all kinds of strange things each month, and sometimes nothing for a few months at a time. When all this “changing” started, I was not happy. After all, I was now going to be old and dried up. But the first time I actually missed a period-wow!!!! What a wonderful concept!!! I quickly changed my attitude about the “change” and welcomed it with open arms. Yeah, no horrible hormonal fluctuations!!! My God, how absolutely wonderful not to have my period!!! I’m still liking it. And, so far, knock on wood, I haven’t had any nasty hot flashes or anything bad. Maybe I’ll be really lucky and just sort of slide through it all.

So, all in all, I think turning 50 is going to be good. What a concept. I still don’t really have a handle on it. Think about it…. a half of a century. Man, now I get to be in the AARP, too, don’t I? Yeah, I get discounts and stuff, I think. I’ll have to let them know I’m out here, just being 50 and all. Does this mean I have to start eating at Perkins? Did I mention my new fondness for naps? I did? Oh.


ADDENDUM
September 16, 2003
Well, I’m happy to say the big day has come and gone. It was good. Very good. For all those of you who dread getting “old”, let me tell you it is not so bad. Life has just gone on, being life. Nothing bad has happened.
Well, except for the little incident the other day. I was walking into the gas station, to pay for gas, on my way home from work. It was my misfortune to walk into the store behind a young couple. I mean teenagers. And the girl was an obvious “hottie”, you know, the hard body, miniscule outfit, cute face and hair, etc. So, I sucked it up, told myself “be a woman, go in behind the “hottie” like a big girl”. She was so hot the old dyke behind the counter wouldn’t even look at me, and I used to get looked at a lot by the lesbian community! This just really hurt my feelings. But, hey, that’s life. And it’s good here in the 50’s. I know some of you are saying, “yeah, right, that’s like saying “we all float down here””, but I’m serious. Come on in, the water’s fine. No 50-shark will eat you.
Love to all my family and friends. I never knew I was so loved and nicely thought of. Or were you just trying to get it all in while I was still here, you know, thinking “God, she’s really getting up there, we ought to give her that Life Accomplishment Award while she’s still here”.
LOL. Yeah, that’s the secret of life. Laugh as much as you can. It’s all funny anyway, isn’t it? Laughing is as good as napping.

Lisa