Cha-Ching!!

Your skin begins to dry out like leather; ashy even.  It takes a bottle of lotion a week to keep it from looking like alligator hide. And I don't mean that sweet-smelling girly lotion either. I'm talking about the thick, greasy kind that you keep in the medicine cabinet that smells like your Grandma. Well, now it kinda smells like me.

I cannot see two feet in front of me. And read? FORGET IT. I left out for the grocery store, got half-way up the road, was squinting at the road signs and realized; no glasses. I thought to myself, I can do this, the grocery store is nothing. I buy the same things every week; well yeah, I do, like milk and bread, which I have to read the expiration dates on. I left the buggy right where it stood, on the bread aisle; that was as far as I got.

I used to work with a lady that had a pair of those “store boughts” for every outfit. I remember thinking how cool they were; strapped on a decorative string around her neck. Now I know why they were on a string. Ladies just keep them on your face, admit it, you need them; you’re wearing everybody out creating a search party to help look for them every five minutes. 

I cannot remember much from one minute to the next. I make everybody write everything down. I have a purse full of sticky notes. I have no idea who some of them came from now, but I have them. So if you give me a note, you’d better write your wishes and your name on it, or else you might get a bottle of Maalox instead of the chocolate covered cherries you requested.

I leave myself “reminder” messages on my work phone and house phone. You should see my face at 9am Monday morning when I am listening to the messages I left on my work phone for myself the prior Friday night. As it begins to play I am wondering, whose bossy but familiar voice is that, telling me what to do? Because not only do I not realize I am listening to myself, I no longer remember what the heck I was originally talking about.

I’m headed there and was given another sign of my impending doom the other day; a friend was relaying a story to me about her mother and how seemingly senile she had become. The gist of it was, they were in public and her mother did the most awful, unimaginable thing.  My friend was declaring her embarrassment and shame when I reminded her that we had seen that plenty of times when we worked at a local grocery store a million years ago. The other end of the phone line got quiet and in-between snickers on my end I said; “Don’t worry, as long as we can keep our hands out of our bosoms, digging for money and change, we’re not there; yet.