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?