From Stillness To Flight: On Beauty At Sixty

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Let me begin by telling you what I think I know.

Written by Karen Richards

Not night and day, but dusk and gloaming, the faint echoes of light from the sun caught in the lowering sky of evening.

It’s something you do, and feel, made through an unseen alchemy―kneading a ball of stubborn dough between your floury fingers until―like the magic of yeast devouring sugars beneath a damp cloth―it rises unbidden from the darkness.

I find myself here. Six decades in. Still thinking from time to time, sixty cannot happen to me. To others, yes, of course.

Six decades means I can no longer use the word girl to describe myself and neither can anyone else, except perhaps my father. Not a miss, but a ma’am. Not a pretty girl any longer, let alone a beautiful one.

Sixty began with a surprise party three thousand miles from home held for someone who does not welcome surprises. And ended with a day of unexpected joy: dancing to songs of the 70s―James Taylor Fire and Rain, Cat Stevens The Wind―tissue paper and tears, the words of a poem my teenage son wrote for me: as willows fall and darkness seeps, my mom is standing tall, both feet. An opal necklace with two heavy stones that belonged first to my Irish grandmother―a gift from her husband at the end of the Second World War―then to my mother, who wore it for weddings and christenings through the years, resting for the first time in the hollow of my throat. Trying to fall asleep in the blackout dark of a strange air-conditioned hotel room, my husband’s hands clasping mine as we matched our breaths in the moments before our separate dreams overtook us.

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Beauty

I’m not certain at this moment whether I’ve lost or found it.

I’m neither embracing nor resisting growing older, but peeling back the complicated veil of vanity to reveal what is underneath. Retracing and returning again to the girl I once was, the woman I am now, and the girl I will always be.

A memory appears unsolicited on my Facebook feed. The familiar sandstone clocktower of the Ferry Building piercing a brilliant blue sky. A photo of me in San Francisco on the wide boulevard of the Embarcadero after a day of walking the hills from the Financial District up through Chinatown and North Beach down to the edge of the Bay. Standing straight and tall and looking directly into the camera.

I did not yet know what was to happen to me. I hadn’t settled into the person I would become, not yet a mother or a wife. The confidence in my stance rising still from a place of innocence, from unknowing, and the obstinate strength of youth.

Dare me, she seemed to say.

Am I still that girl, or now someone else entirely?

Are the other girls inside me―at three, thirteen, twenty-three―still me―Russian nesting dolls, the infant in the center cradled by later versions of herself?

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I reject the idea that all those girls have disappeared.

They are all me. Beautiful for their fleeting hours of life. Absent now from the rooms they once inhabited, yet always just beneath the surface, like thin layers of paint on an old chair.

Perhaps then beauty is merely the faint imprint I’ve left behind. Like the remnant of bergamot and spice as a woman hurries from a room on her way out for the evening. The low November sun shimmering prisms through the surrendering leaves of autumn trees. A baby’s first cry, startled and pure, ringing new notes into the world. Briny wave upon wave, the beginning of each curl rolling back into the embrace of the tidal pull, like small children gathered to a mother’s broad lap. Air and fire, earth and water, shifting from liquid to solid, back to the invisible touch of soft air on an upturned face. A last breath, the one that will someday contain the pregnant exhalation of my own farewell.

Beauty will not be pinned down or classified. It resists living behind glass. Splayed wings and pins. Genus and species. Insisting instead on embodying imperfect life―in bloom and in decline―shifting in the course of an instant, from stillness to impossible flight.

My husband, beside me for more than three decades, studies the old photo taken not with a smartphone, but a bulky Nikon camera I lugged around in a shoulder bag wherever my travels took me.

“You look the same to me,” he announces. Wide smile, long hair parted in the middle, same tilt of the head looking into the lens.

The photo was taken just a few years after we met. I smiled with an assurance I didn’t really feel. I was playing the part. Young and free and exploring a new city, cocktails and thrift stores, street musicians and salty pretzels from a cart.

A few years later I would visit a fortune teller, a psychic who held my tanned fingers in her ringed hand and told me I would marry a man I already knew, and bear two children, a girl and a boy. I believed her, and I didn’t. I was still deciding who I would be. What my life would be.

My husband and I spent ten ambling years together before we married, long days on remote Northern California beaches where we hunkered down on woven blankets with bottles of champagne and books, tent camping in Yosemite with our food hung from a tree in a canvas bag to keep it safe from bears, exploring pumpkin farms and apple orchards on the Russian River, hiking in the damp magical shadows of the redwoods, salmon fishing out beyond the Farralon Islands in our little boat, road trips to the painted Arizona desert and the red rocks of Utah listening to R.E.M. and Dave Matthews, waiting for the stars to come out from the cliffs above Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, bright days walking between the smooth rocks and desert yuccas of Joshua Tree.

Did all that happen to me, or to that other girl, gone now so many years?

My blooming took its time

Fair infant, with the dimpled cheeks of a blonde Gerber baby. Then a cute scrappy kid, skinny and freckled, with brown hair cut tomboy short, skinned knees and hazel eyes dominating my face, taking it all in. Awkward in middle school and most of high school, muffled under insecurity, eyeglasses I hated to wear, teen breakouts, and a layer of baby fat as we called it then. An impossible distance between the girl in the mirror and the images in magazines: long-legged, thin, sophisticated and cool―Cheryl Tiegs and Margaux Hemingway―even the Charlie girl in the TV commercials. The only one I could find to relate to in those glossy well-thumbed pages of Glamour and Mademoiselle was Patti Hansen, who in her early modeling days had a round face, freckles and a wide grin.

I decided I’d rather be nearsighted than wear my glasses, stumbling through years before contact lenses of not recognizing people from a distance because I couldn’t see them.

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After suffering the indignities of both metal braces and a tortuous night guard, by the time I graduated high school I could smile with my teeth showing. When I went on the pill to alleviate menstrual cramps, I discovered the added benefit of clear skin.

My freshman year in college I contracted mono and dropped twenty pounds. Everything changed. Now I had straight teeth and cheekbones, a bustline and a small waist, thin longish legs. This was before breast augmentation became popular, so at the time my body was a bit unusual. It made boys stupid. Which at first, I didn’t know what to do with, but later became accustomed to. I learned over time how to use the way I looked to get what I wanted. It sounds crass now, putting it that way. But I saw my body―and the way I looked in clothes and out of them―as something discrete from myself. Like a Porsche or a jeweled necklace. Lacquered, far away. To be admired from a distance.

I never called it beauty. I didn’t feel beautiful. I found no association between the way I looked and my emotions. No peace, no pleasure in it.

The only times I approached beauty―and knew it for what it was―was when I strung together a graceful series of words writing a poem, mastered a long passage on the piano, delivered the line of a song with perfect pitch. Things I did from the inside out, that didn’t connect to the sheath of my new body.

Other people might remark, “That poem was so beautiful,” or “You played that beautifully.” Hmm, I would think, me or not me? Does doing something well make a person beautiful? And why does everyone want it so badly―to be beautiful?

Why do I?

An article in one of my ever-present magazines asked women: Which would you rather: Give up a year of your life, or have perfect skin forever? The majority picked the latter. The holy grail of perfect skin. Along with an optimal waist-to-hip ratio. Thick hair. Graceful hands. Long legs. Large eyes and plump lips.

How many hours did I spend at the full-length mirror of my shag-carpeted teenage bedroom searching for beauty in my reflected image? As if it was a puzzle I could solve, the dream of a completed Rubik’s cube, solid colors on every side. I stared until my vision doubled, inspected my pores through a magnifying glass. Pinched the layer of skin and fat at my waist and tried to measure it with an old compass from Geometry class.

I went so far as to map the dimensions of my face after reading an assignment about survival of the fittest. The author posited that males choose their mates based on facial symmetry, and are more attracted to women with large breasts, slim waists and small hips, as well as youthful features like big eyes, clear skin, and full lips―all indicators of higher estrogen and an increased likelihood of reproductive success. Human males are also more attuned than females to the visual in their choice of partner.

From this I can assume that another of my traits, my baby face (vs. the beautiful one I so desired) has helped preserve an external illusion of youth. When I showed up for my first real job after college, the receptionist directed me to the lobby where the high school tour was taking place. I was twenty-four at the time. When I moved to California a few years later, men I dated assumed I was a recent graduate, though I was in fact nearing thirty. Three decades later, people don’t quite believe me when I tell them I am sixty. The number still sounds awkward on my tongue, as if I’m speaking about someone else, in a language I am just beginning to learn.

It’s nice to appear younger than your chronological age. Of course, it is. It would be a lie to pretend otherwise. But it doesn’t make me any younger. The math is still the same. If I live to be one hundred, that’s four hundred and eighty more months. Seven hundred and twenty―gone.

I had children late, always the oldest mom in the room, sometimes by ten or fifteen years. My age was something I allowed people to calculate as they saw fit. Part of it was pride. I’d started with sunscreen early on, long before it passed into common use. I quit smoking. Took up running and hiking, later yoga and meditation. As the parlance goes, I took care of myself. Between effort and genetics, I’ve had a good run.

But still the questions persist: Am I beautiful to others because they love me? Did love produce this beauty, or is it the complex product of Aquinas’ three characteristics of beauty―consonantia, claritas, integritas?

And how finally might I become so to myself?

“You always look beautiful to me,” my husband reminds me from time to time, when I ask him how I look, hovering at the closet door before going out. And I suppose, other than myself, he’s the only one to whom it truly mat

I’ve lived more of my life than I have in front of me.

I may not see my children marry, or meet my grandchildren when they arrive. I’m not certain how many more pages I will write, how many more walks I will take with my husband at the edge of the Pacific, bending for sea glass and bits of driftwood buffered by time to the color of ashes.

Recently we celebrated thirty years together. I’ve now been with him longer than I’ve been without him. Three decades feels like something. A marker on the map of a vast uncharted forest. A sturdy tree we grew from nothing. Now bearing fruit, and shade, deep roots.

The photographer who’d shot our daughter’s senior portraits took our photos on the Northern California beach where we got married. I carried a mix of native wildflowers and grasses, and wore my long hair down, in a black tulle gown and my mother’s milky white opals on a delicate gold chain around my neck.

We joked to relax in front of the camera, and he spun me in circles as a lone fisherman pulled in stripers at the tideline. We outlined wobbly hearts in the sand until the sun left the sky in a glaze of rose and apricot. The frigid waves crashed over our bare feet, erasing the evidence of our steps even as we took them.

You are loved, I whispered to myself.

No mirrors. No magazines. I didn’t look at myself. But tried to match the way my husband looked at me. To see the world with those eyes, to be fully seen by those eyes.

With a love that made the plain and unremarkable, beautiful.

In that moment he recognized the unchanged beauty in me―an imperfect woman―softened now with threads of fine wrinkles and gentled flesh.

As at last did I.

The now, and the then, the unseen future advancing toward us. The quiet abiding beauty of the girl I once was.

The girl I will always be.