I vividly remember the day. I was marching briskly around and around the outside of my house wearing an ugly, out of season, huge, floppy hat. Also wearing not one, but two pairs of sunglasses (large over-sized ones over dainty little ones). I was pumping my arms up and down with our portable phone in one hand and a can of beans in the other.
Faster and faster, I charged around the house, my face in a death grip scrunch of determination, intense focus, and mild pain. I was huffing and puffing and counting to see how many times I could circle the house in a half hour. My confused dog bounced along with me but occasionally just waited for me to march around to meet her. She barked gleefully "What a great game" as I I growled "Out of my way!"
I planned to do it all over again that afternoon. And I would see if I could beat my record.
My poor husband, uncomfortable with the word eccentric and certainly mortified by any such manifestation, didn't know this was happening. If he had known, he would be grateful that we have no close neighbors. Living on a dirt road in the country reduced the odds that anyone would see me. I, on the other hand, was beyond caring. In fact, I took some perverse pleasure in the possibility of a silent, invisible deer hunter gazing through his binoculars. I imagined the hunter oblivious to the buck that has wandered into his range because all of his attention was focused on trying to figure out this wild woman going around and around her house.
Crazy old ladies do odd things because they must. Let me repeat, 'because they must'. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Every detail makes sense once the context is understood.
Here's the context.
I needed exercise and fresh air in order to be in tip top shape for upcoming surgery. I was visually impaired due to Corneal Dystrophy and could not safely walk on our road by myself. My husband's work had taken him out of town and he would not be here to take me for a walk. Hence I did laps around my house where the terrain is familiar and memorized.
I was waiting for an important call which I could not miss. Cell phones didn't work in the hilly forested area I live in. That explains the portable phone.
The degenerative disease of my cornea causes intolerable pain in sunlight which accounts for the huge hat and sunglasses.
And the can of beans and pumping arms? That should be obvious by now. I could increase the value of this work out by adding weight to my free hand.
Michael J. Fox once said of his Parkinson's Disease, "Vanity is the first thing to go". It's hard to let go of it. But once released, you are comfortably free to do what ya gotta do. Without vanity there is room to focus on what is important, solving the problem at hand. Secondly, releasing vanity opens the door to humor - life's kindest gift. The ability to laugh at yourself walks right in, and will stay as long as you need a friend. And last, in the place once occupied by vanity, compassion blooms. We can stop holding ourselves and others to unhealthy and impossible standards.
I now see "crazy old ladies" as the brilliant, adaptive, resilient women they are. I once condescendingly saw them as cute and interesting, their odd behavior as irrational. Now I see them as creative and brave people who have flung aside vanity and a compulsion to be "normal" in favor of living life and embracing reality. They and lots and lots of people with invisible disabilities do what they do, dress how they dress, in order to live life to the fullest.
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