Today, for sure…

…and it’s still today and I’m still finding remnants of my past in yet another stash of notes to myself. You know that painful question to a retired person: “Who did you used to be?” I wrote that on a file card along with two other questions:

What do you want?

What did you used to want?

I think the answer(s?) to that one will reveal how much you have changed. i remember a line from a cute poem in Ladies’ Home Journal, some sort of ode to a teenage daughter: “Her social standard is in danger/Without the latest record changer”. [Now why would I remember that?] It’s a vintage line. You could almost set the date by the record changer (I’m so old I remember what a tercord changer was.)

I used to want a silver dresser set—mirror, hair brush, and a really useless comb. My paternal grandmother owned a vanity set (sterling, ornate, of course) with all sorts of matching accompanying utensils and gadgets: a nail-buffer, a powder and powder puff container, a hair dish (?), silver handled make-up brushes, on and on, I can’t remember, plus cut-glass perfume bottles,oh, and an atomizer! It was a passing fancy of mine—I mean, I didn’t have a vanity table to put anything on. I did inherit a silver-backed trio from my mother and I put them out for a while but they needed to be polished and I had diapers to wash every day so I put them away.For a time I thought I wanted a star sapphire ring, but that didn’t last. Again the diapers won. My hands were in no shape to wear a star sapphire ring.

I admired a crocodile hand bag and there was a sale on but the price was the same as a two-wheel bicycle, just the size for my older daughter. No question.

With shifting desires and passing needs and harsh reality come changing wants, and they define the person you have become.

Covid-19 has accelerated the change, Covid and my advancing age. What with no legs and no wheels and several lockdowns, I haven’t bought a lipstick for a year and I content myself with a rosy moisturizer, No one sees my lips behind the mask ,anyway.

So who am I now?

(You can tell I’m getting better because I’m tackling another pile of paper-lovely stuff.)

Artistic Director to Pllaywright: How many playwrights does it take to change a lightbulb?

Playwright: None, of course. We’re not changing a thing.

Playwright to Artistic Director: How many Artistic Directors does it take to change a lightbulb?

Artistic Director: Does it have to be a lightbulb?

News Item: “Almost everything you do today will be forgotten in just a few weeks”—often only a month later. Eighty-five per cent of our experiences have slipped beyond reach, unless boosted by artificial aids such as diaries and photographs.”

Book? The Rich Witch: A Crone’s Guide to Being Healthy Wealthy and Wild—-spells, charms, formulae, hexes, amulets, magic numbers ? (I don’t think so)

* “sanctification of everyday life”—see my essay “The Imaginary Woman” In Dropped Threads (pataphysics)

* from Woman of the Year (movie, screenp9lay by Ring Lardner,Jr. “Women should be kept illiterate, and clean, like canaries.”

* Did you know that when forceps were invented, QueenVictoria, informed of this boon to ease the pain of childbirth, cautioned the doctor not to let women know on the ground that it would just encourage them. Same attitude to anaesthesia.