I want to earn a Growing-Old-Well badge.  It will take its place of honor next to the Sewing badge on my ancient Girl Scout uniform.  Currently, I’m working on my Feeling-Beautiful-Without-A-Face-Lift badge (though I have had my eyes lifted so I can see, as it was going, my upper lid was becoming a blindfold).

I think of all those badges I sought when I was young, now attained or irrelevant.  Fourteen, first kiss; sixteen, go steady; nineteen have sex but don’t get pregnant, twenty-one, figure out how to have great sex, (I’m still working on that one), get into and out of college, first job, first husband.  Today, health and stability rank at the top of my to-accomplish list.

I want to protect my breasts and colon from cancer and my arteries from heart disease.  I get a thrill from a good cholesterol reading and happiness from aches and pains that respond to Advil.  I love taking vacations and returning home to my family, my friends, my dog and Peet’s coffee.

I get a kick out of seeing a good movie, reading a good novel, and working up a good sweat in aerobics class.  Notice the operative middle way goal of goodness.  Aging has softened my drive for the peaks.  In my fifties, good is the great of my thirties.  Who has the energy for great anyway?  The gym is ten minutes away, CSI is on Wednesday nights, Chinese take-out Fridays. Life is good.

However, there is one great pleasure I pursue unabashedly, the company of my women friends.  These friendships are a stretch of sandy beach on an island where the trade winds are a tender caress and it doesn’t matter how I look in a bathing suit.

Now in our fifties as we sip martinis, we know dark things swimming beneath those blue seas, will soon to surface. Remember the ominous theme music from Jaws: da Dah da Dah… da Dah da Dah. That’s the sound of our mortality and our youth. We all hear it, a distant hum. Sometimes we listen to it. Sometimes we laugh over it. Sadly, it never really goes away because we know too much.

Looking at the lovely faces of my girlfriends, I see a new reason for wanting to live a long life. I want to be part of our collective old age. We are the women who demonstrated, rebelled, experimented. We had casual sex before it was casual. It was just daring and fun. We saw movies when they were films. We suffered the disillusions of Viet Nam and assassinations of our heroes. We demanded more than one path for women, and often we had groin pulls from trying to walk two trails at the same time.

It’s time again to break old molds and build new ones. We are the first generation of women where the fifty decade is astonishingly young and we might measure our future life span as no other generation has before us. Moreover, we do not intend to hide our lives away, alone in a condo in Miami, playing cards in the afternoons. We are about to change what it means to be older women.

The possibility of years stretched out before me feels like summers when I was a child. I remember the last day of school, the clang of emptied lockers, the confetti of discarded papers, the smell of sunlight and dust. Most intensely, though, I remember the enchantment of being on the verge, the heady abandon of stepping off into summer. This was the fourth grade equivalence of anticipating a love affair.

However, as do love affairs, summers end. The difference for us is that our past-middle-aged summer doesn’t end with going back to school in the fall. It just ends.

Beautiful young men call me ma’am. Now there has to be some compensation for that, doesn’t there. Time again to be pathfinders and explorers. Remember our aches and pains still respond to Advil. And whatever else happens, I have every intention of earning my growing old well badge.

Recently, I was home on a free afternoon. I could either work on pulling weeds first, or do laundry and watch T.V. I decided to do the latter because who really gets up in the morning and say ” Oh boy! I get to pull weeds today!” While channel surfing I landed on one of the T.V shopping channels that had a popular skin care/cosmetic line doing a product demonstration. The program was on for about a half an hour and it said that it had awesome breakthroughs for aging skin. I have to admit that I was very skeptical about this, but like people who stare on the freeway at the remaining wreckage of a car accident I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. The person went on to say that people that are 30 needed to start the aging skin routine so that they can ward off wrinkles/discoloration/sagging for as long as possible. Good Grief! I am 32! Does this mean that I have lost out on two whole years of possible anti-aging? Will I look 2 years older than someone who uses it right on their 30th birthday? And I thought all I had to do was use sunscreen, avoid baking in the sun(which is not hard in Seattle) and use antioxidants along with the other things Paula recommends (which I know is all I really need but I was getting sucked into this presentation).

The person who represented this line continued to stress the importance of using each product in the routine and she said that she used them on a daily basis. I can understand why so many people are so hooked on this and proceed to purchase the kits that are on this program. The representative of this company had flawless beautiful skin, looked like a supermodel and talked about how all of her clients/friends in Hollywood swear by these products when they can afford much much more. They think ” If I use her products, I will have skin that looks like hers, marry a rich man, move to a nice neighborhood, and have beautiful friends that take my skincare/makeup advice” (well, maybe I exaggerated a bit.)I kept count of all of the products that she said that she personally used and it ended up being close to 25 different items just in skin care on a daily basis. I don’t know who has time for this! I would have to quit my job to take care of my skin if I was to do all the steps she does, and this is not something that my disability insurance covers!

They went on to show the “dramatic before and afters.” Honestly, the way the representative/esthetician/makeup artist, applies product to the person’s face rivals a boxer in the ring. She would be a worthy opponent for Oscar De La Hoya. Ever notice how they cut away during the time that we are waiting to see the dramatic “after?” Well, trust me, they are applying a lot more than just more of the product that they are hocking. They are applying the equivalent to exterior house paint to cover the bumps and bruises that the poor model endures while these people rush to apply products. This is so that they can show that even a busy person has time for 25 steps in the morning.

The buzzer of my dryer startled me back in to reality. Good thing that my load of laundry had finished as I had all I could take of horse thievery that I was watching. Now, if only the T.V shopping networks just had something that would pull weeds for me?

A very attractive, young, pert, blonde receptionist who had just heard me do an interview on the radio station where she worked asked me on my way out, “Should a 25-year-old start using anti-aging products?” I thought, what does she want to do, revert to birth? But I knew what she meant and I responded by saying, “the only thing you really need is a great sunscreen, and be sure to never get a tan, and you will do fine; the rest is just skin care, important but not as relevant in any way in comparison to being sun smart.” She sat up and in a 20-something kind of way, said “But I love the sun and I love getting tan, I just don’t want to wrinkle.” I said, “Well then, you might as well buy a lottery ticket, because you probably believe you will win that windfall as well! False hope springs eternal; the reality you live in isn’t how skin works.”

Okay, I was in a mood. I usually just smile and walk away, but it’s getting worse out there, not better and my frustration is at an all-time high. If I believed in conspiracy theories I would say the media is in bed with the cosmetics industry, but alas it isn’t theory, it’s fact. Every time I do a talk show I’m always asked if I’m going to be critical of any of their advertisers, of if I’m going to say anything that might be of legal concern (sort of like Oprah Winfrey saying she didn’t want to eat hamburger). Advertisers are in control of what I say on TV or radio, and even to some extent in print (fashion magazines are a foregone conclusion; they treat me as if I don’t exist or simply don’t know what I’m talking about).

Reporters all over the world ask me what works, but the answer assumes that something must work to get rid of wrinkles. The endless press releases from mainstream cosmetics companies, physician-owned cosmetic companies, and spas and salons of all kinds have created the ultimate, anti-wrinkle products, you just have to find the ones that aren’t lying to you (somehow we know everyone can’t be telling the truth, but the notion that everyone is lying to one degree or another is something most women just won’t believe) and the one in front of you at the moment (especially if you’re feeling vulnerable) or that’s endorsed by a celebrity or has an attractive ad wins every time.

Women seemingly never tire of a product promising it can firm the skin, erase wrinkles, restore youth, fight aging, and on and on. There are literally thousands and thousands of anti-aging products perpetually using the same nebulous yet miraculous claims that often stop just short of lying (or blatantly lie). In some ways it is beyond belief how many products are launched every month, year after year. But because women keep believing the claims from the endless assault of anti-aging/anti-wrinkle products, I guess for me, it’s job security!