JUST SAY YES!

I was standing in line to get coffee one morning at a café in Sebastopol, my California hometown, and began chatting with the woman in front of me. We didn’t know each other but had both been looking out the door at the little red headed girl in yellow boots stomping around in a mud puddle, and we went from there to talking about doing brave things.
She said that she was about to leave on a trip to the Arizona desert where she was going to lead a vision quest. It was the first time she would be in charge of a trip that she had previously attended with others, spending time in meditative walking and quiet contemplation.
She was nervous, though, about being the leader, not the follower, and had worriedly said to a friend, “I’m too OLD to do this.”
And her wise friend countered, “You’re too old NOT to do this.”
She and I shared a knowing laugh, I wished her good luck and we went our separate ways. But I thought a lot about what she said.
Age can be a big cop-out. It’s a good excuse to not do a lot. You get to a certain point in life and people start letting you off the hook. Instead of saying “Oh, come on, you can do it,” they’ll give you a pass.
Go ahead, sit out the volleyball game. No, you probably wouldn’t want to take a bus to Mexico.
It’s almost like they don’t expect as much of you anymore and don’t challenge you like they once did. Maybe in deference to your age, energy level, creaky bones. Or maybe because you’ve become an old poop.
What this woman – whose name I never dig get – took from her friend’s counsel was that now was the perfect time to accept, not decline tempting but scary challenges. She has valuable knowledge to share. Her experience counts. She gets to be the wise one.
If she didn’t lead the group now, she might never get another invite. She might lose her nerve.
Right on. We’re too old not to say, “Yes. And more yes.”
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

All About the Jeans

May 21

I write a newspaper column and also stories on local people in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a recent story I interviewed Joan Felt who is the daughter of Deep Throat Mark Felt. The revelation of Deep Throat last year brought the world’s press knocking on the front door of the Felt’s home in Santa Rosa. My follow-up story examined how their lives had changed in that year under the spotlight.
Not surprising the story generated a lot of interest and I quickly had a box full of email comments on the story. The same day the Deep Throat and Family story ran, so did my newspaper column titled Bad Butts and Good Jeans.
This was a giddy piece on the new trend in cosmetic surgery – to add fat to bottoms in order to make them fuller and rounder. I mused on how this was all pretty ironic since most of us had spent our years since junior high asking “is my butt too big?”
That lead to reporting on my latest clothing score, what I called “miracle jeans.”
A friend and I were visiting another in Phoenix who knew a brand of jeans which claimed to lift and contour one’s own bottom. She thought she knew a local store that carried them, a boutique in a very pricey hotel.
We found the place and as I pulled on the most expensive pair of jeans I’d ever worn, and not only that, but with rhinestones running down both legs, my friends encouraged, “Do it. Do it.”
So, I wrote the column and talked about the jeans and how they were surely more practical than $20,000 worth of butt surgery. And the email requests pored in.
So, what were these jeans? And where did one find them?
In the newspaper business we try to avoid naming labels so your writing can’t be taken as free advertising.
But I can tell you here. The label is Not Your Daughter’s Jeans. They make me feel taller and take better care of the belly than most jeans, through some special stretch magic. They might not do the same for all bodies because as we all know one woman’s miracle purchase is another’s regretful splurge.
I was telling a Denver friend about my new-found jeans and she launched into a lecture on how the American woman’s sloppy reliance on jeans is another example of the nation’s cultural decline.
But she kind of brightened over the rhinestones.
In THE JUICY TOMATOES GUIDE TO RIPE LIVING AFTER 50, clothing expert Brenda Kinsel weighs in on our life-long jeans dependency. But she warns that the style requires updating to accommodate our changing derrieres. “Don’t let your ancient jeans make you look ancient, too,” she says.
By the way, the number of requests for more info on the jeans soon outnumbered those wanting more details on Deep Throat.