To start with, the woman doesn't like her neck. In fact, all of her close female friends hate their necks. They look good for their age, except for their necks, so they all wear turtleneck sweaters.
She talks about other things that you have to deal with as you get older, like your eyesight isn't what it used to be and how you don't know or even care who the new musicians are and how you don't really like the new electronic stuff cause you can't even get half the stuff on your cell phone to work. She then goes on to talk about cookbooks and getting various jobs and renting apartments. She was married several times, and she was more attached to her apartment than any of her husbands.
I very much enjoyed this book, as did my husband.
After spending most of three days alone in a motel room, I noticed some lines on my neck. I'm sure I'd seen them before, but I just hadn't really given them any thought. Well, that's not entirely true. When I'm making a costume, I think about my neck and where the wrinkles and bulges are. But the rest of the time I don't dwell on that sort of thing much, and my neck usually isn't high on the list anyway.
But I'm alone in this motel room, and I'm looking at myself in the big mirror that most motel rooms have over the sink with the bright overhead lights. And there are these lines on my neck. And I don't like them.
I am nowhere near as old as the woman who wrote this book. But I think that I should like to go out and buy a bunch of turtleneck sweaters. But that really isn't the problem, is it? I like turtleneck sweaters. I especially like black turtleneck sweaters. I can go out and buy a bunch of black turtleneck sweaters and be very happy with them. But I can only wear them until maybe March. Someday I will have to move someplace where I can wear the turtlenecks year-round.
Anyway, I went on this little trip with my husband, even though except for the drive I didn't actually spend lots of time with my husband. So why did I spend most of three days knitting and wasting time watching cable when I have all of this stuff to do at home? Mostly, I just had to go because my husband was taking this little trip to the town where I used to live, and it happened to be on the last days of the season when the Christmas stuff was still up at the college. When I was little, we used to go an look at these decorations every year. But we moved away just before I became a teenager, and I think that this is only the third time that I've been in the area at the right time since then.
It's mostly silly stuff. I'm guessing that most of this stuff was originally bought in the sixties, or maybe even the fifties. Perhaps it is not that impressive today. You cannot see the lights from outer-space or anything like that. It seems like there's some Disney stuff and there is a nativity scene and some stuff from A Christmas Carol and several displays with Santa.
And there's a robot. This is a fifties-type robot that looks like the one from The Jetson's, only more square. He's supposed to blow bubbles, but that wasn't working the day we were there.
So I went on this little trip, because I doubt that I'll ever get to do it again. It is difficult to schedule stuff like this in December. And I don't know how much longer the college will continue the tradition anyway. I think the college has had the decorations since about 1971. But the decorations are older than that, and they won't last forever.
The day after we saw the lights we went to a clearance sale and bought chocolate and a few decorations and some other odd things. And I bought a pencil sharpener that looks a lot like that robot at the college. I never can find a pencil sharpener when I need one. I buy lots of cheap mechanical pencils, because not only can I not find the pencil sharpener for regular pencils, but then I can't find the refill lead for the mechanical pencils either. So I just keep buying new ones. If I have a pencil sharpener that looks like a robot, then maybe I won't lose it. Maybe.
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