Saturday, November 27, 2010

Chicken skin and other indignities.....

OK, what's with the chicken skin? I'm serious.

Nobody warned me about this, just like they never warned me about the Independent Fives when my daughter was growing up. She was the sweetest two year old and never terrorized anyone at three, either. But a little prima donna emerged when she was five who simply didn't need ME anymore, thank you very much, a blonde dynamo I didn't recognize. Anyway, someone stores all this information in a virtual vault somewhere, and then snickers gleefully when we topple over into a chasm of some personal ignorance we didn't even know existed.

One night I was reading in bed, holding the book up so my arms were subject to gravity a bit. And there it was: Chicken skin hanging from my forearms, striated and loose and pale, and just plain disgusting. I might as well have been holding a dead fowl over my head; you know how it looks when you take the wrap off before you put it in the oven for your Sunday dinner?

Nobody tells you these things.

I put my book down and the skin returned to its un-disgusting shape, smooth and....well, normal. If I raised my arms up again, there it was: Loose, flappy skin marked with long lines like someone had driven furrows into my arms with a knife or something. And the thing that is so maddening about this is that the rest of my arms are in better shape now than when I was twenty. OK, maybe thirty. I'm buff from hours of working with free weights in the gym, and the underarm flab is gone, so this stuff hanging from my arms isn't due to being out of shape. That's the scary part of the whole discovery. Does that mean that I'm stuck with arm poultry for the rest of my life?

If I allow myself to think about it long enough, I have to admit that I probably am. Stuck with it, I mean. I'm not a Hollywood star with unlimited funds to do whatever it would take to get rid of this drooping flesh. There must be a way.....although, we don't really see those stars when THEY'RE laying in bed at night, so I'm not sure. Maybe I can hire some paparazzi to look into for us.

Just consider yourself warned. And lay on your stomach when you read at night.


"If we spent as much time feeling positive about getting older, as we do
trying to stay young, how much different our lives would be."  
Rob Brown

2 comments:

  1. "arm poultry" what a vivid picture this painted in my head. I can't read laying on my stomach so I will be looking for more advice from you at a later date. Until then I will wear a long sleeve shirt while reading in bed. bdavid

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  2. I can't dress a chicken any more without cringing. Getting old is a #%*&(!

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