No-Tell Hotel

                                                      

When we were away this past week, we had a problem with the first hotel we stayed in, necessitating an immediate switch. 

We didn't know this ahead of time so, in the interest of being comfortable, we got to the hotel and unpacked completely.  And I mean completely. We divided up the dresser drawers, then we filled up the drawers and emptied our suitcases. Daughter lined up her stuffed animals on her bed. I created a makeshift kitchen, even though there was only a refrigerator.

Then, suddenly, because of a heating unit that sounded like an airplane was taking off from our room and Sleep Number beds that left us sleeping in a large, concave hole, we wanted out. So we packed. And we forgot something. My hair shine spray.

I have problematic hair, a big ball of tangled Jewish hair. This hair requires a lot of products to actually look human each day. Since product purchasing or figuring out is actually beyond my capabilities, I've enlisted professionals to help me with this: my hair stylist and my six sisters.  So each day, to transform my hair from what it is - an Interesting Jewish Fur Ball into what I want it to be - Human Hair - I use about ten products, including my shine spray.

So, of course, I go back to the first hotel from the second hotel to see if they found my shine spray. The Interesting Jewish Fur Ball might have been tamed into looking like hair because I have the other nine products but, hey, it's still not shiny. The front desk clerk, who checked us in a few days before, and could best be described previously as possessing lank, dull hair, looks different. She has suspiciously shiny hair. The other front desk clerk also has shiny hair.  I see some Housekeeping staff wheeling a cart by. Shiny hair too.

She asks me for details and disappears for a long time, allegedly looking for my hair spray. Is she going to try to palm me off with some Aqua Net? She comes back empty handed, accompanied by a bustling manager with, of course, shiny hair.

I leave with nothing, the doors to the hotel full of shiny-haired employees swishing shut behind me.

Sleepwalking Zombie

I've been doing a bit of clothes shopping lately. Since we only have two seasons in Arizona, one short and one really long, my summer clothes wear out pretty fast.

There's this tiny, little season we like to call "winter" when I pull out the heavy part of my wardrobe. This is the season when winter visitors come to Arizona and practically wear bathing suits in the streets, acting like it's hot out, while I'm contemplating whether I'll look dumb wearing mittens when it hits 50 degrees. It turns out I will look dumb.

Then there's summer, which is the rest of the year. During that season it's really too hot to wear any clothes at all but people do rather than strut around naked. Clothing is painful in 115 degree weather, no matter what you're wearing. And when you add in the vagaries of some pre-menopause-type symptoms, we're talking several shirts a day.

And this is why I'm shopping this year. This year my aging body has new needs and last year's summer clothes just won't do.

I was fat from age 15 to age 40 - that's 25 years, from 1975 to 2000. I pretty much missed all the fashions for all those years because even though I told myself I could wear the really gigantic size of all the pretty styles, once I put them on in, like, a size 20, I looked like a wall moving down the street. When I was fat, I preferred to dress like I was invisible - in something to camouflage me. I preferred to wear black from head to toe so that I'd look like a black hole of anti-matter and people would just look away from me and onto the next, more colorful, person.

So I missed all those styles and, just my luck, when I lost my weight at 40 it was too late. First of all, I found out I had no real sense of style at all. I stumble into my closet every day and come out with the same thing on, a top and a bottom. The same combination I wore when I was fat. Never a bracelet, never interesting earrings, never a scarf. Second of all, I found that I couldn't just let myself dress out of my age group. I can tell when I look dumb.

And now there's the new problem with my arms.

You know when you're young - like 48 - and you look at your mother's arms which are all wrinkled up and you think, "Wow - I hope my arms will never get like that. I'm sure they won't because I'm part of this new generation and we refuse to age!" - or something like that? And then you turn 49 and you're kind of blind because you can't see far and you can't see near and you put on a shirt and there's this line in the mirror and you can't really make out what it is so you look closer and closer and closer, and, guess what? It's the big wrinkle from your mother's arm.

So I had to go shopping. There was a choice to make, after all. Was I going to listen to the burning hot, menopausal voice inside of me telling me to to take it all off, or was I going to listen to my new visitor, the wrinkled zombie, who was telling me to cover it all up? I experimented a little in front of my mirror and I realized that if I modify my clothing a bit and then hold my arms just in front of me a little when I walk so the wrinkles fall backwards - kind of like a sleepwalking zombie - my arms actually look great.

And that's working for me now - the sleepwalking zombie look. We'll see about next year.

Hairy But Hairless

It's just a normal day. I'm sitting around the JCC, happy, wearing my long shorts. I'm happy they're still kind of in style, even though I do see a lot of teenagers lately wearing these micro-mini shorts. Those are not an option; I'm happy to be wearing my quasi-shorts. At least until I notice there is hair growing on the tops of my kneecaps.

The sad thing is that this isn't the most horrible surprise in the world. Like I don't completely faint dead away because I think I'm turning into a werewolf. I don't check to see if there's a full moon or anything. No. It's only a surprise because I realize I missed shaving this area. Among the many miles of shaving I have to do every day, oops, I forgot my kneecaps. See, I'm not really a woman, I'm a wolfman.

There's the normal upkeep, that everyone does: the shaving of the legs, the tweezing of the eyebrows; and then there's the abnormal upkeep, that only mammals like me have to do: the shaving of the arms and the shaving of the moustache. What could my husband be thinking when he looks at me across the divide of our bathroom and sees me shaving my moustache? Does he want to hand me his can of Barbasol? Does he want to compare 5 o'clock shadows with me?

When I was in high school I hung out with a pretty natural, earthy group of girls. One year we all decided to grow out our leg hair. We had all thought about this shaving thing and found it unacceptable. Shaving and shaving for decades and decades just to satisfy somebody's ideal of smooth hairless legs! It was the 1976 Scottsdale, Arizona version of burning our bras.

So my friends grew their leg hair out and nothing really happened. There was a little blonde baby fuzz here and there. But I grew mine out and a pelt grew in. A pelt that hunters might be interested in. I understood there was probably something biological going on there. My family had emigrated from Poland and Lithuania not so many years before. Maybe this was the makeshift coat that generations of ancestors used to keep warm during those freezing Eastern European winters. Of course, it wasn't working too well in the Arizona heat.

My friends continued wearing their flowing hippie dresses, after all, nothing had really changed for them. I, however, suddenly took quite a liking to pants and tights - heavy tights. And heavy pants. My friends were very, very kind. They'd say, it can't be so bad. Let's see. And I'd show them and there'd be silence.

Soon after that, I gave up. I took up my Lady Schick and here I am, decades later, hairy but hairless. Wolfman but woman. And, except for the spots I miss, except for my eyesight failing in the dim shower, except for those kneecaps, I hide it well.