How young do I look? I am serious
here; how young do I look to you?
I’m asking because the other night I
ended up taking my sister-in-law to the emergency room. Now, you need to know
that my sister-in-law is only about three months younger than me and Konnie’s
big sister, Jacki, AKA Dictionary. They were born the same year.
So, I took my sister-in-law,
Shirley, to the ER the other day because she’d taken a fall (yes again) and
passed out for a time. And this happened to me.
I had helped Shirley inside at the
door, then went to park my car, when I joined her at the registration desk, the
lady there glanced my way and asked Shirley if I was her daughter!
I said, “Come on, I don’t look that
young, do I?”
This lady excused her faux pas because the masks we had to wear hid tons.
I simply pointed out that Shirley
wasn’t old enough to be my mother.
But that wasn’t the last of it. Once
we got to the exam room (and could take off our masks) the nurse walked in, glanced
at me, and asked Shirley if I was her daughter.
Now come on! I do not look that
young!
Yes, my hair was in a ponytail, just as
it is in the picture above, but I have definitely aged over the years, just
like everyone does. Okay, so I don’t show my age as much as others do, but that
is just ridiculous.
Though I admit it isn’t the first
time someone has considered me the daughter of the woman I was with when the woman I was with was only a year older than me.
The first time it happened, I was in
Downtown I.F. with Jacki, and she ran into someone from her past, they spent
several minutes catching up, then that person asked if I was Jacki’s daughter.
Boy was Jacki mad!
Which seemed funny, since when Jacki
was in her mid-teens, she’d been in downtown Poky with our mother, and they ran
into someone our mother knew from work, that someone asked if Jacki was our
mother’s sister.
Jacki had felt it was cool that an
adult thought she was an adult too.
It had never once dawned on Jacki
that looking older than you are at fourteen or fifteen usually means that you’re
going to look older than you are at forty plus. (At this point she is now
sixty.)
On the other hand, Konnie and I always could pass for younger than we are, which frankly came in handy
being behind in school. But even still, our junior year, after moving to Tacoma
Washington, I had someone think I was still in junior high!
Okay, I admit, it was January, and I
did have my warm enough for Idaho winter's coat on, so that did cover my build,
but still, I can’t possibly look that young! I was eighteen back then, not
fourteen.
But over the years few people have
ever guessed my age correctly.
There was once a lady who came
within five years of my age, but she admitted she guessed higher than she
normally would have guessed because I was there (this happened at Lagoon, which
is a theme park near Salt Lake City back before I got married) with a bunch of
clear young adults.
The people in my group ranged in age
from pushing thirty to barely twenty-one, and I was not the youngest one
there, I was in fact twenty-three.
The lady said I had been there in a
group that was a mix of ages, she’d have assumed a “family outing” and guessed me
to be a younger teen than what she had guessed.
I wasn’t even a teen!
I can think of plenty of other instances
where people had my age all wrong.
I once mentioned my husband went to
high school with my youngest uncle, and the lady I was speaking to said, “I
thought he was quite a bit older than you!”
There was another lady present for
that interchange whose husband is ten years older than her; Tom wasn’t even
four years old when I was born, at least not quite. His birthday is in August. He’s
not that much older than me, but then neither was my uncle. He was five when Konnie
and I were born.
And I can’t tell you how many times
someone has been shocked when I revealed my age! And that was even recently.
So anyway, how old do I look?
Happy writing everyone!
PS. I did finish Nano this past Saturday. How did the rest of you do?
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