Remember when we were little girls, and boys had
cooties?
Now, I wasn’t a prissy child. I played with frogs,
pollywogs, and worms. I did outdoor tasks, such as raking leaves, shoveling snow, and the correct flip of the wrist with which to toss dog poop
into the acre of weeds which surrounded our house. In summer, I made roads in
the gravel of the driveway and built houses in trees, so I was no stranger to
grub, grit and summer sweat.
Nevertheless, little boys were gross. They smelled funny,
like members of some other tribe—which, of course, they were. Their hair was
cut short in those days, so their big heads and pink scalp was always in view.
Lots of them picked their noses. They sneezed and burped and farted—and then
laughed about it. Their ears might be full of wax. (A girl’s ears might be full
of wax, too, but she at least had hair to hide it.) Boys were rough and loud,
likely to break out in a match of pushing and shoving as easily as just stand
there and wait for the bell which signaled
that it was time to leave the playground and march back inside.
Then the inevitable change happened. We all grew up.
Suddenly those bare-scalped boys—some still not as tall as we girls—became, for
the first time, extremely thought-provoking. Friends started to-- “like” was
the euphemism--certain boys. High School Romances began. The participants traded
each other like cards, one by one, entering the School of Drama & Heartbreak.
Sometimes a girl was popular and sometimes she was not, mostly depending upon
how dreamy/eligible was her boyfriend. Boys became men and we became women. The
mating game began in earnest, with all those triumphs, tragedies, ecstasies,
and Nymph-and-Satyr-Aphrodite-in-her-nightie lusts and longings.
I’m sure you get the drift, so I’ll fast forward.
And it’s
easy to do that, now that I’ve reached the Crone age. All the organic bits that
made the other sex desirable--so lubricious and exciting--have withered and
shriveled or been excised by the good docs. Men and women have never been on the same page
as far as our methods of communication go, and now, once again, men have regained
their old status as an alien species.
Some women, I know, do not share this experience, but I mean, really! I sure as heck don’t
look hot anymore, with all these wrinkles and sags and neither do my age mates
of the masculine persuasion. I have one of
these fellows at home, who, despite 50 years of marriage, of pleading and/or nagging,
is still pretty much in the classification of “bear with furniture.” I see other
males, too, in and out of the a.m. gym for the Silver Sneakers © programs, or bored and wandering about the supermarket with their bill hats and their
flannel shirts, their “chests that have fallen into their drawers,” as the
Grand Olde Oprey joke goes, bellying up to the deli counter. “Testosterone burns,” have inflicted hair
loss, sometimes resulting in an unfortunate style choice which I call “the Atoll,”
greasy long hair which encircles a
desert island-like bald spot. But even if they’re the lucky old dude
with a great wardrobe and lots of Country and Western curls, men, as a group, have,
once again, taken on an alien aura reminiscent of my childhood.
Amen, sistah. And amen again.
ReplyDeleteBless you, my dear. My only commentator on this clearly controversial subject.
ReplyDelete