A scene from my dog-walk yesterday: one of the oldest extant structures in my town, the Mount Pleasant Academy, for which my street is named (in fact, in this photo I'm standing at the corner of my street, just some blocks away from my own block). I always love the weathered brick on the old stone foundation --- the solidity, but also the simple grace of this old school building. Nearby Charlotte has bulldozed nearly all its local history, and I'm glad our town has been too small, podunky, and poor all these decades to contemplate doing the same.
Today: the penultimate session of my "How to Read a Poem" class! Once again, Dana Gioia will talk for a big chunk of the session, on imagery, then we'll do some reading for images on our own. This whole course-recording thing has gone so much more smoothly than I'd been afraid it would, and has been a lot more fun than I'd feared. I am glad that I don't have to keep up with all the administrative details of live teaching, because the more I think about it, the less I think I have time for all that --- literally, because I have several other whole jobs.
I'm barely getting my essays done for next week as it is, and hope to catch up and get ahead next week. At our last editorial meeting, we planned the poem calendar all the way to December 1, so I can knock out big chunks of it every week and be ahead by the time my next class-recording session comes around, sometime in November.
Meanwhile: it's a little cooler today, with a projected high of 80F. Not really cool, mind you, but cooler. I don't think I'm quite reaching for the boots and leggings, though I might well take them to the mountains. But the walking weather should be pleasant when I go out later this morning, and I might just prop the doors open all day instead of running the air conditioning.
Wearing:
Okay, let's play Build-an-Outfit. Here's my chosen base: Maggie T, so simple and versatile in this transitional weather, and in a color that makes me feel instantly more alive. (eta: NO, you can't have too many teal dresses. No such thing!) She's lovely just as she comes, but she also makes a good canvas for any number of further choices.
For example:
It was very cool in the house when I got up this morning, so I reached automatically for this alpaca cardigan, which is soft and cozy without being too heavy. There it was, too, just taken off, when I got dressed --- so I put it back on again. It's sunny and dry out today, so I opted for Birk Balis on my feet.
I love the drape of this cardigan, which saves it from being too bulky and boxy. It has a kind of swing to it, as Marly observed when she was talking me into buying it in the upscale thrift store last fall. I knew I'd love the paler aqua on the backdrop of my dark teal dress.
But I dunno, said I to myself. There's something kind of unfinished about this. Not that it's not all right, and I could certainly loll about the house dressed like this and look cuter than I might otherwise have looked, engaged in the same non-activity. But . . .
What if I put on a belt? said I to myself.
I don't think I've ever worn a belt with this dress before. She's a small, and she fits more closely than my marine-blue Maggie, which is a medium. But with a hip-length cardigan, especially one with kind of a boxier, squarer shape --- as opposed to the very vertical shape of a duster-length cardigan --- I thought that perhaps some waist definition might be in order. And indeed, it seems to me that the line of the belt here de-emphasizes the line of the cardigan hitting right at the widest part of my body. It gives the eye a focal point other than that cardigan line. I like the contrast it provides, too --- the tan leather on the teal background is very pleasing to me, especially as it doesn't match, and therefore compete with, my shoes.
Here's the rear view:
Yeah, so I think this outfit passes all the tests. Am I the cutting edge of fashion? Uh . . . probably not. Am I breaking multiple over-50 no-no rules, which I seem to punish myself by reading when they come up on my Google home page? Why, yes, probably I am. Do I care? Do I look like I care?
I'm comfortable, I'm wearing colors that flatter me, I've made some outfit decisions that make (I think) the best of what I've got going on, and I'm dressed for pretty much any eventuality in my day, from walking the dog to teaching a Zoom class to stepping out to the pub this evening. When I get hot I can take the cardigan off. When I get chilly, or to add that third-layer finish while I'm teaching, I can put it back on again.
And nothing about my outfit is especially screamingly trendy, which on the whole I prefer. I might well look back in my extreme old age and say, "Oh, those awful things we wore in 2023" --- but there's nothing about this outfit, I don't think, that really announces itself as of 2023. Birkenstocks may be in or out of fashion, but people have been wearing them a long time, and they're kind of timeless. A basic swing dress: I might have worn something similar in the 1990s, or the early 2000s, or the late 1970s, or . . . The point is that I have always liked dresses kind of like this, with this easy, swingy vibe. The cardigan doesn't really say, Oh, I was "in" for that brief moment. Even my hair is pretty timeless --- there have been moments when the bob haircut has been out of fashion, but honestly, since the 1920s, there have not been that many moments when this was so. Glasses shapes and sizes go in waves of fashion, but at this point I really just have to wear what I can see through, whether it's in style or not. If the teeny-tiny glasses that I loved in 1999 come back in --- well, I'll just be out of luck. OR I'll buy three or four pairs of tiny single-vision glasses in the various prescriptions that currently make up my one pair of larger trifocals, and then do penance for my vanity by constantly having to change them, and by losing them and looking for them and all that.
So I like what I'm wearing. I like what I look like today, the whole effect together. I might not be everybody's cup of tea, but then I was never going to be everybody's cup of tea, no matter what I wore. I might as well be my own cup of tea. I might as well be glad also that my husband likes how I look in my "little dresses," every day. In other words, I'm also his cup of tea, which is all that really matters beyond being happy in myself. In fact, being happier in myself is part of what makes me his cup of tea at this relatively late date in our life together. I can't be younger. I can't really be objectively "sexier," whatever that even means. If I consciously tried, I'd just look pathetic, and be fully aware that I looked pathetic, and therefore be unhappy. And I'd just rather not, thanks.
All the things that awful people on the internet seem to mean by "the high-value woman" --- well, these people (and some of them, pathetically enough, seem to be women themselves) don't take into account the fact that most people, men and women, will one day be almost 59 years old. In fact, you kind of hope you're going to be almost 59 years old, and older, because the alternative seems not altogether desirable. And when you get there, you find that all the things that seem to count as "high-value" don't apply to you so much anymore, because they really don't have anything to do with your personhood, which is to say your soul, which is the thing that perdures.
You get to be my age, or older, and you have the choice of thinking that you've outlasted your sell-by date and are now defective merchandise --- or you have the choice of not thinking that. As in truly, you have this choice. You get to choose how you think about yourself. You get to choose how you talk to yourself about yourself. You get to choose whether you want to talk like what I think are the seamiest, least appetizing, dumbest elements in our current culture --- the voices that only seem to come out from under their rocks on the internet, wearing the comfortably anonymous masks of assumed internet identities --- or whether you want to talk to yourself as if you were a whole person with intrinsic value, dignity, and beauty, and anybody who doesn't see that in you is welcome to walk away.
So there you go. I decided to dress myself today like a person who values herself: in things I like, in colors that give me energy, in shapes and textures that give me room to move the way I want to move, to be the way I want to be.
Anyway, I've got to walk the dog now, but I hope whatever you're wearing today makes you feel that way.
AFTERNOON UPDATE:
And WHEW, which is what I keep saying every day at about this time. One more class session done. Two essays written and uploaded (for better or worse) for next week's Sun column. Only one class session left to go, and then I can scoot off and see Marly! She has family coming in on Saturday evening, so I'll just spend the night and come home, rather than spending days, but we'll get in a nice visit, and I'll breathe some mountain air after my busy week.
Going to eat something now, because I didn't eat lunch before class, and we're going a little late to the pub tonight. Yesterday I really didn't eat enough and then was ravenous right at bedtime, which wasn't a great situation. Today I am trying to eat. I have drunk homemade kefir, which is delicious and satisfying, but I think I need something solid to carry me through, so I don't eat the entire food truck once we get to the pub.
Here's me in the dining room, still, at my computer, looking as tired as I actually feel, but not looking as happy as I actually am.
Also, here's a day-maker for me: On Instagram, I love @neverhomemaker's style and thoughts about style, and today she's wearing BIRKENSTOCK MADEIRAS! I don't know why this makes me so jazzed, but it does. I love those shoes, but I sometimes feel that I'm the only one who wears them, and worry that I'm a weirdo (and that they don't look good). I love the way they look on her --- and just seeing them on somebody else feels like solidarity. Maybe I'll wear mine tomorrow!
ALSO:
One nice thing about being almost 59 years old, and feeling that people who talk about the "high-value woman" can go jump themselves right on in the lake (of fire), is that in the freedom that comes with this space in your life, you can do all kinds of things that you might have refused to do a decade ago, because you weren't buying the steaming load of "high-value" ordure. You might not have worked out, just to stick it to The Man, because The Man out there, The Man talking about the "high-value" woman, wanted you to have perky little glutes, and you were NOT. going there. Now you can work out all you want because you want to be a strong old lady, not an old lady who can't lift the coffee pot. You can walk all the miles every day because you want to be the old lady who can still climb mountains. You maybe even do the glute exercises because YOU want the glutes (or maybe because you're a little tired of having your glutes be halfway down your thighs, I dunno). Anyway, you do the things because you value your life --- because you have value to yourself.
Of course, you could have done these things a decade ago, too. In fact, that's not a bad idea at all. It's never a bad idea to, like, exercise. But if, a decade ago, you were being a refusenik about a lot of things, for reasons that seem kind of obscure now but didn't at the time, it's never too late. And again, this is simply a good thing about getting older. It comes with freedoms. Who knew? I didn't, until I started to get here. But now that I am getting here, I find that I'm kind of glad to be here. Things are not ending after all. They're just getting started.
FINALLY: I'm not sure that much of what I've said here makes any kind of sense. I'm just banging it out, word word word word word. But it is a response to the kind of thing I often see on that site that used to be called Twitter but has now been . . . what's the word I want? Fracked? Strip-mined? Denuded? All of that seems kind of over-the-top, but the change from having a name to not having a name feels disorienting, a change in the landscape, in a way that's hard to describe. It's like today you don't live on this street anymore. I mean, you still live on the street, but it's not called that. It doesn't have any name at all. It's just X. All the streets are now X. Also, there's no longer any garbage pickup, and the city will shortly be rescinding the sewer line.
Anyway, I see all this discourse about women and what makes women desirable, which presumes that women want to be found desirable, which I guess on balance we do. Everybody wants to be found desirable in some way. Or maybe the reverse is more true: nobody wants to be found repugnant. We want people to want to be around us. We don't want all the people around us to want to have sex with us all the time, but then that's a fairly reductive understanding of what it is to desire someone --- which is really the whole problem with that discourse.
It's not only reductive about women as people. It's reductive about what makes one person desirable to another person, because the whole understanding of the desire to be with another person is reduced to a set of transactions, including but not limited to obligatory sex. From the man's point of view, the point is to identify the woman with whom he wants to have this obligatory sex --- the woman, in other words, of whom he feels he will want to demand it, and who will gratify him, as in it'll be really gratifying to him, by fulfilling that demand. Also she should have dinner ready when he gets home. And smile when she sees him. That's it, folks. That's human relationships for ya.
And there's me wanting to put not just my finger but my whole hand down my throat . . . but also feeling that on the whole it's good to have grown up when I did, found someone when I did, and married that person when I did, on terms we more or less agreed to, which were very fuzzy, because we were young and dumb, even for our respective ages. We were especially dumb about what marriage entailed. But here we are, and boy howdy, am I glad to be here.
And you'll probably be glad when I stop banging on about all this, making no sense at all. At least it's off my chest. What you want to do with it now that I've unloaded it on you is entirely up to you.
OH, SUPER FINALLY:
All you gotta do to have a pub-night outfit is exchange the cardigan for a jean jacket. That does the whole trick.