Sister Age Meets The Pencil Test

My right knee has started talking to me.  This is the euphemism my mother uses when some part of her body doesn´t act as it should.  As in, “I didn´t think I hurt anything after I fell out of the attic, but now it´s a week later and my ankle has started talking to me.”  She also uses the term “acting up” as a synonym for “X has started talking to me,” only with “acting up” she is usually referring to another person.  For example, about five years ago my father had a heart attack while travelling with my mother in West Virgina, requiring him to have quadruple bypass surgery.  He came home from West Virginia and learned that he had an infection, which required us to give him intravenous antibiotics twice a day, once they let him out of the hospital.  Just as he was recovering, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died four months later.  So it was quite a year.  Recently I realized that my mother hadn´t been to church for quite awhile, although she has always been an active member and loves to sing in the choir.  I asked her about it and she replied, “Well, once your father started acting up, everything got crazy and I just stopped going.”

Back to my knee.  About a year ago, my left knee started talking to me.  I felt a little twinge when I transferred my weight while going down stairs.  I ignored my knee´s increasingly insistent pleas for attention until I could barely go up or down the stairs, which was a problem since our house in Brooklyn has three floors, and I was constantly up and down the subway stairs to get around the city.  Finally I went to the orthopaedist, who sent me for an MRI and told me I had some messy cartilage in my knee.  He injected steroids, sent me to physical therapy, and told me to come back for three, weekly shots of hyaluronic acid, injected under my kneecap.  Eventually, I felt better. All of this was designed to buy me a year, which I figured would get me home from Barcelona and also give some time for orthopaedic surgery to advance.

One day, as I lay on the PT table, my physical therapist “massaged” my leg (I put “massage” in quotes because this kind of rubdown is not at all like what happens at the spa), and asked me, “So, how´s the arthritis?”

“Arthritis!” I exclaimed.  “I don´t have arthritis—I just have some messy cartilage in my knee!”

“Well, what do you think that messy cartilage is, dear?” she asked, looking at me as though I was in deep denial.

And now my right knee has begun to act up.  Same little twinge, so I´m sure it´s arthritis.  I dug my ankle weights, stretchy band and foam roller out of Box #18 which was shipped from New York and I´ve started to do my exercises again.  All told the routine takes about a half hour, and I should do it every day.  Here´s what I want to know—how am I supposed to find the time?

Many before me have written about how women my age delayed having children—often to advance sufficiently in their careers—and then find themselves caring both for said children and for their own parents.  They call us the sandwich generation.  However, all the talk seems to be about the bread of the sandwich—the kids and the parents—and no one mentions the meat in the middle.  Once you get to the age of, oh, say 45, things start breaking down.  They need more care, and care takes time.  I have to stretch more before I work out at the gym.  I need more sleep.  I need to do my damned knee exercises.  Before I go to bed, I take 13 horse-pill sized vitamins—four calcium pills, for my bones, which are susceptible to weakness from the thyroid medication I take; 3 fish oil capsules, which are supposed to be good for everything from mood to memory; 4 glucosamine chondroitin for aforementioned arthritis; and 2 women´s vitamins to cover everything else.  It´s enough to make me gag.  As far as I know, no one has found more hours in the day in which I am to do all of this.

And it´s not just the interior that needs extra care.  Well before the age of 45, other, more external parts begin to change.  Some of these changes happen gradually, while other changes occur seemingly overnight.  Any woman who has given birth knows the horror of waking up one morning to find a body part somewhere different from where it was when she last checked on it.  Parts that start out high end up low.  Parts that were narrow thicken.  Parts that were full somehow seem empty.  Anne Lamott, an author who I absolutely adore, has written about her thighs, which have gotten larger and lumpier with age.  Rather than hating them, as so many women do, she has decided to appreciate how well they carry her around.  She calls them “the Aunties” and writes about taking them on cruises and slathering them with sun block to keep them from burning.  I find Lamott´s attitude to be highly evolved.

Which brings me to my next realization.  I hesitate to write this next bit because, well, some of you who dip into this blog know me more professionally than personally, and this is not exactly the kind of thing you chat about around the water cooler.  But what the hell.

When I was in high school, in South River, New Jersey, I had a Phys Ed teacher named Juanita Fiesler.  She was right out of central casting—a mannish woman with a solid body, steel-rimmed glasses, short hair that was more chopped than cut.  At the beginning of our freshman year, Miss Fiesler called the girls together and gave us a lecture about how important it was to wear a bra.  She forced everyone who was sufficiently endowed to take “the pencil test.”  I was exempt, for obvious reasons. The pencil test consisted of lifting up your breast and putting a pencil, parallel to the ground, underneath the breast and then letting go of both breast and pencil.  If the pencil stayed up, held in place by the breast, you had to wear a bra.

I recently caught sight of my hind quarters in the mirror when stepping out of the shower.  And the pencil test, which I had not thought of in decades, came to mind.  “I wonder….” I thought.  No one was around, so I found a pencil and put it under my left butt cheek.  Sure enough, it stayed up.  That would not have happened 10 years ago.  I was part fascinated, part horrified.  Thank god for Spanx is all I have to say.

Many years ago, I bought a used copy of Sister Age in a bookstore in Berkeley.  The book caught my eye because it is written by M.F.K. Fisher, one of my favorite authors.  I had read nearly all of her food-focused books and was thrilled to learn that she had written about other topics as well.  When we were packing our 21 boxes to ship to Barcelona, I threw Sister Age into the book box almost as an afterthought.  It had been a very long time since I had read it and I thought it might be time for another look.   I picked it up a couple of weeks ago and have been loving every page; it’s my bathtub reading.  Fisher writes:

St. Francis sang gently of his family: his brother the Sun, his sister the Moon.  He talked of Brother Pain, who was as welcome and well-loved as any other visitor in a life filled with birds and beasts and light and dark.  It is not always easy for us lesser people to accept gracefully some such presence as that of Brother Pain or his cousins, or even the inevitable visits of a possibly nagging harpy like Sister Age.  But with a saint to guide us, it can be possible.

Hallelujah, Ms. Fisher.  Hallelujah.