Peers – Jumping the Girdle

When the best friend of thirty plus years decides to move back, friends have to get one thing very clear with each other. Not privacy, not sharing clothes, not fighting, not ignoring each other tastes but a much practiced fact - that we are not kids ratting around and nineteen years old anymore. The physicality of watching each other age is different from the practice of actively sharing in each others aging process. In as much as we both have one parent to look out for, we have each other to look out for too.
Much like bra burning of 1966, the act of jumping the out of the girdle was a major effort to tackle, even in these times. Now to know the back support it might give each of us house daughters and sons in the garden. It makes us thankful to wear the girdles with or out stays, known as the back brace. Moreover, for this effort of care giving we would need an excellent model of bracing our backs.
Maturity is not a clever game. It does sneak up on the caregiver and it seems never the parent. At first you compare, then feel good about being better at life skills than the parent is. Then when standing, walking or picking something up next to a member of your own peer group, you begin to notice the difference that age as affected each of the two best friends. Our aching backs.
The lean is not as limber, the lumber is not as quick, and the mind is made up faster because the sense of taste and style has been defined separately. Although, within the relationship of friends, navigating the history of home - we each must give adequate room for allowing changing to be accepted by the other in different frames of time. It may take more than one parent with more than one experience to know how much room is required.
Cammy was visiting the Adobe Disneyland to look for her new house when Gina, my mother took a slide. Not an exactly fall, just a slide down when her slipper got stuck and didn’t move with the foot, leg and hip and the body turn down on Gina. Who had slid, gently twisted, and slowly dropped to the carpeted floor next to the stove.
After a phone call next door to my house, Cammy and I wandered over to view mom, who had crawled over to the living room telephone to ring me up for assistance.
I could only look at my friend who knew all her efforts to move closer to her own mother could culminate into a situation like this. Cammy was not prepared for the appearance of this type of event. A parent falling to the ground.
Looking at Cammy, I said, “Do you know how to lift someone?”
Ah! Would the stays in that girdle would really be a support for her. Gina hadn’t been on the floor from a fall, in three years, and probably wouldn’t have been for a few more years, since she overtly practiced, ‘the slow and careful movements’ and let everyone know it. Yet, Cammy’s mom would not accept that notion of slowing down at 75 or 77.
We got Gina up and on the chair with ease. Still, Cammy’s head inside was turning to her own mother, also her own senior years. Such is this life, of the house daughter or son, to have to jump the broom and marry. Jump the generations of time passing and find the logic in a girdle and its support.
New friends your life, don’t seem to understand this thinking like your own old, old, and older friends.