What she wrote: Still loving getting older?

 HALLIE EPHRON: Welcome once again to WHAT WE'RE WRITING week! I wrote a magazine piece years back, about getting older, written from the perspective of middle age. It's one of the many efforts I've exhumed from my computer's depths and am revising. Here's the opening: 

I'm sitting at my computer trying to read the title of this piece, the letters swimming on the screen – "I Love Getting Odder"? Make that "Older." I try to remember where I left my glasses. In the bedroom? I go upstairs, pause on the landing. Why did I come up here? When I scratch my head, that’s where I find them.

Yes, middle age can be a series of bad jokes. Failing eyesight, forgetfulness, not to mention a drooping eyelid that reminds me of Columbo (who’s that actor – Peter something with an F?) whenever I look at myself in the magnifying mirror.

On the upside: not having to wear panty hose, shave my armpits, or blow-dry my hair.

Would I trade aging for youth? Not a chance. I was a pathologically self-conscious teenager for whom life was a constant source of humiliation. I slouched through high school with my shoulders hunched, school books hugged to my front like a plate of armor.

Every new place had its unwritten rules that everyone knew but me. When I walked down the street I was sure everyone was staring at me because I had on the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, the wrong haircut, and walked like a duck. When I got lost I was too embarrassed to ask directions.

When I was 15 I begged my parents for modeling lessons which of course they refused, saying it was a ridiculous waste of money. For weeks I practiced walking with a book balanced on my head. I posed the way I thought models posed – one arm bent, my hand floating in front of me, the fingers delicately arranged. Holding that position, I pushed my hips forward, trying to imitate the way those sylph-like creatures slide down the runway, pause, pivot, and then retrace their steps, eyes trained on some invisible vanishing point at the horizon.

When I sprained my pinky finger for the third time ramming it into a door jamb as I tried to pass through, my mother gently suggested that I give it a rest.

At least now I don’t worry about how I walk and I know strangers aren’t looking at me – in fact, I’m not even on their radar. As an older woman with graying hair and a blurring middle, I am wonderfully invisible. Best of all, I’ve discovered that I can pretty much do whatever I please because there are no rules. There never were any. Other people are just as clueless as I am. ...  

So today's question: So how's it going for you? Are you embracing the years or fighting like hell to turn back the clock?