This Birthday is Bothering Me

My age is not who I am, but this turning sixty is sure as hell getting to me.
I remember asking my ninety-something grandmother how old she felt in her head, and without pause she replied, "Why, in my mind I am always eighteen."

And yes, I am fourteen in my head. For fourteen was the year I first fell madly in love with a guy I met in my Latin class. He was cute, funny and smelled deliciously of English Leather aftershave. Fourteen was the year that I had crossed the line between young girl to woman-in-the making.

I was fourteen, and I was budding in my sexuality. Oh, I was a good girl Most of us were then. I mean I didn't know what a French kiss was until I was seventeen. And I thought it a rather gross way of kissing at that first time.

I had been groomed on the soft open mouth kiss that gradually turned hard and somewhat frantic. The kiss that took place in the 1965 Chevy Impala with Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity" playing on the radio. However, I did note that my breasts felt as though they were pushing to be released from the heavy layers of my Peter Pan collar blouse, my v-neck mohair sweater and my wool coat on that subzero night in southwestern Michigan.

But first base is the only base I would ever go with this beautiful boy- my first true love.

It is below freezing that night. I am bundled in my Chesterfield coat with the velveteen collar. My body is flashing and wanting more of this beguiling swirly charge that I feel when I smell him, and when he kisses me.



Sixty is freaking me out. Or maybe some of it is that I was in a very horrific car accident six weeks ago. Or maybe it is because I learned in May that my younger sister may live only five more years. My god. It seems only yesterday that we were cute, tanned and sexy little hippie chicks. Living in old houses out in Lutz on lakes married to artsy brainiacs who opted to be hippie carpenters because they were not ready for the nine to five.

Nothing more to say. It is just getting to me about being almost sixty years of age.