infant, child, adult, dead.

he's so feeble, so awkward. he hugged me and leaned his musky, soft, loose skin into me to kiss my face and i couldn't help slightly recoiling. i don't know what it is with me and old people. since she died, i've been unrelentingly bothered by them. they are decaying life. she was decaying life, but i didn't see it at the time. all i saw was an old, lonely woman who couldn't do much for herself, who loved telling me stories and asking me about girl scouts and school, someone who always had some little treat to offer me, never got annoyed with my incessant coming around to plop on her plush and dusty antique furniture. then i walked through her wrought iron gate, bounded past her roses (the same ones i stole to dry in containers only to find, months later, that they hadn't dried but rotted fittingly) and ant-infested peonies to shove my stubby finger into the familiarly chimey bell beside her intricately carved front door. and no one. three days later, her face was in the paper. she had died. and i avoided the house i'd loved, walked the other way around the block, didn't want to think of her just suddenly not talking, staring, the way she sometimes did, only dead, not just pausing to recollect herself.
ugh. i'll bet her body reeked.
they're getting old, too. it's been so long since he didn't have a full head of white-ish hair. his back is bothering him. he's having trouble seeing. he's decaying as much as he's denying. she's getting old. i wonder what she looks like now, how much saltier her dark fro must be by now. i haven't seen her in so long. it must be hard for her to age. she used to talk about the things she'd do when she was an old woman. i wonder if it's dawned on her that it's time to start them soon.
she will never have an old mother. at least not one she regards as particularly old. by the time i'm old, she'll be on her way out, too. maybe we'll be friends. maybe we'll have stayed friends all along or will by that time have resolved any differences we'd had. maybe we'll go for perms and blue-dyes together. maybe we'll have little ratdogs to tote around together.
more likely, we'll subvert old womanhood. we'll be rambunctious and ridiculous. we will dye our hair the brightest blue, not just spritz ourselves with the conventional faint indigo tinge. we will drink like fiends and paint wildly. we will walk our snarling pit bulls around the park. we will get some wicked tattoos and sing loudly in the street. we will be a riot.
if we're still speaking when we're old.
he said he thinks mothers and daughters have more conflict than do fathers and sons. he thinks that, for whatever reason, fathers and sons can more easily put aside their problems and resolve to interact functionally anyway. i'm not sure i'm entirely convinced. i've seen too many men in their twenties, thirties, forties still begrudging their abusive fathers. our conflict arises from misunderstanding. neither of us particularly appreciates the other, so we simply limit our interaction. she needs me to need her in ways that i don't. or to need a man in my life like she felt she needed a man in her life long after she'd surpassed my age and supposed wisdom. i hope that an enormous rift doesn't suddenly sprout up between us. although i'll never be the old woman who she'll hold to rock to sleep in a chair, i still love the image of love you forever. i still want us to replace the pictures in the book. i still want to consider her my baby when she's 50 and i'm 65.
people do weird things with their aging parents, i think because they're as bothered by old people as i am. no one wants decaying flesh around to look at every day. no one wants the constant reminder that some day it'll be them, going slowly senile, shitting in their depends. no one wants to watch the people who raised them and cared for them for so long deteriorate into creatures unable to care for themselves, so they shut them away in small rooms with pictures of family and collages of tattered magazines and they visit them weekly if they remember and inquire about bingo and wallet-making in the rec room. but probably, for all the discomfort that it would bring me and that it obviously brings others, that's how it's supposed to be: we are supposed to care for our elders when they are no longer able. it's karmic in a way.
i wish i hadn't cringed when his wizened hand touched my face, his wet lips puckered towards my cheek. i wish i'd thought about what he must have been like when he was young, how women may have wanted to date him, what an incredible father of energetic little boys he was, what a strong, sturdy, sexy man. he has not always been so old, so shaky.