A Face in the Crowd

I'm getting fewer emails.  Visits to my blog are down.  Surely it is something about me, but I can't figure out what.  Maybe that is too egocentric, however.  

Tonight I was eating sushi alone after work.  I had finished my meal and had ordered another flask of sake so that I could keep writing the essay I was working on about the nature of the exotic.  I was sitting outside in the fine, southern, dusky heat watching the slim crowds slip past as I wrote.  One of my neighbors happened by and stopped to chat.  This led to that and he told me about his visit to his gym that morning.  He had signed up for a tai chi class, but it was cancelled due to lack of interest, I guess, and so he found himself in one of those new boot camp groups.  He was miserable, he said.  He couldn't move.  

Then he told me something more interesting.  He has been at the same gym for five years, he said.  "As in any gym, people come and people go, but there are a few who have been around forever.  You don't know their names, but you bob your head and say hello whenever you pass them.  Today I did that, but I realized I was seeing myself in the mirror.  It was a shock.  I didn't recognize myself at first.  I stood there for a good three or four minutes, staring.  I've kept myself in shape, I thought.  I am fifty-six, though.  My face looked older than my body, but I thought, 'I've done a good job.'"  Still, I realized that I don't look the way I see myself in my head.  I mean, I don't look the way I did when I was thirty-five."

"Yea," I said, "don't get too worked up over it.  You can become mentally ill trying to look young your whole life."  

Our conversation continued on for a little while, but I felt is was really too depressing for him, and in a minute he excused himself and was gone.  

I tried to turn my attention back to my writing, but it was over.  I was done.  

The worst thing about aging is becoming invisible.  I remember vividly the first time I disappeared.  I was middle-aged, but I could still hold the attention of a woman for a time.  This one night, I was doing fine until a young, handsome man walked into the room.  Suddenly, her eyes drifted and I was gone.  I could have said anything at that point and she would have smiled and nodded her head as if I had offered to get her another drink.  

It is worse at fifty-six, I wanted to tell him, but he was already gone.