We Just Get Old, Yo

There was a co-worker of mine, who worked on a Paul McCartney video years ago, who once observed...English rockers, the older they get they more they look like old women. Ha!
It's true. Mick Jagger could be like...Chrissy Hynde.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the high school girls I went to school with. I looked up a few of them now...they freakin' look like a variation of that serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Greasy, straggly hair, and saggy wrinkly hard midwestern livin'.

The cool thing about Facebook is that you can find old girlfriends. I dug up the one I had in high school. This is the one whose conservative parents didn’t like that she was dating an Asian guy.

While my recollection of many things in life are…foggy now, in high school she was an angel to me. The reality is…life. She’s married now, a few pounds overweight and has children. I recalled the excitement and pains of high school love (documented in journal entries I’ve left back home).  How much she meant to me. How smitten I was just to have a girlfriend. The hours we spent just hanging out. Being young with hope.

She is what happens to most of my classmates after having a life. What struck me is…we’ve all become what we thought would never happen. We became our parents. Bloated, alcohol faces, large thick ankles, wrinkles, grey/no hair. For me, I feel the aches and pains of life. I’ve obviously aged, but it’s strange how much less I did than she did. She looks like a woman now. A full blown life-got-her woman. And that’s what’s suppose to happen. We are suppose to evolve, then leave. As I look on her picture, I wonder how much life she’s lived the last night at prom we spent together. Or when she left the walls of high school (she ended up at Wheaton University in Illinois). What is interesting is how we don’t have any friends in common. In other words, not one high school person has she kept contact with. Though I’ve not been on Facebook long, it is telling how much she considered that time of her life. And why bother now? She’s moved on with her life and seems happy (in all places…where my college girlfriend is from…Maryland).

I’m not going to lie, I was tempted to add her as a friend. I recall that movie “Death Becomes Her” when Meryl Streep shows up with her husband Bruce Willis to a book signing of her catty rival played by Goldie Hawn. Hoping to glimpse the trainwreck she’s become, instead find Hawn a sexy vamp who hasn’t aged. Ha! It’s a good one.