I haven’t had any egregious brain fades for over a month now, so I feel as if I can relax about my dementia risk and go back to what concerns us most about aging – looking old.
On our recent trip to Fiji, we did a day tour to the island where they filmed the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks. It’s often used as a secondary location for the Survivor reality show so we were lucky to have it available for us that day. Our guide grew up on one of the local islands, and had plenty of good stories from what he remembered of the movie being filmed here. They even had a mock up of the volleyball Wilson from the movie for us to pose with. We got some photos but unfortunately they’re on someone else’s phone. Here is a picture anyway of our guide and the island as we were leaving.
The incident I wanted to mention from this day trip was something that happened a little earlier. Our guide was telling us the story of a nephew of his that met a rich American woman who was in the throes of a painful divorce and had decided to take a tropical island holiday to get through it. She was quite a bit older than him, as the story goes – and at that point, our guide turned to me and asked “How old are you?” I was mortified and could only open and close my mouth, aghast and at a loss for words, before he shrugged and moved on with his story. I was the oldest woman by at least a decade out of the three couples on the tour, no one met my eye after this out of joint embarrassment and fellow feeling, I’m sure. This didn’t put our guide off, though, because he was still rambling on about his nephew’s love story – apparently the older woman came back to settle permanently on the island and they all lived happily ever after. But for some unknown reason, he had to ask me again how old I was. God knows why, it made absolutely no difference to his story, I can’t imagine any woman he’s ever asked this question of would thank him for asking it. What a faux pas! This time I told myself off for being so silly, and bravely said it out loud, trying not to flinch. A horrid experience, though.
I was chatting with my cousin back at work the other day – by coincidence we work in the same department. I made a passing comment about aging, and she recounted an experience that was much worse. She is around my age, but has gone grey, and is embracing it without recourse to hair dye. Last week she was buying a ticket for the cable car, and the driver asked her if she had a gold card! Quelle horreur. I said was it maybe that the driver was very young? But no, he was around our age. It is clearly the beginning of the end.
The best advice I’ve ever come across to deal with this is to enjoy the way you look now, because in ten years time, you will wish you still looked like that. It’s good advice but I’m not certain it makes me feel any better.