Old Ugly

Old Ugly, or The Angry Spring

I don’t know how it comes to other people or if it even does come for everybody, but for me it was like a door slamming and you look up and it’s standing there — old age, or, as my brother and I used to call it, Old Ugly. We used to say so and so had Old Ugly, like it was a disease or something, a name we got from one of our younger sisters, who thought that’s what our Great Aunt was always complaining about. Of course Ray and I knew it was a mean way to talk, but honestly when you’re seven or nine or twelve years old it seems absolutely impossible, absolutely impossible, that the old people were ever smooth, fast, awake like you are or that you will ever be like them, worn out and horrible. But it stopped being impossible all in one minute for me. I was sitting in my apartment looking at a page of my college notes, which already seemed twenty years old and not just 10 months, when the truth of my own age came home. It couldn’t have scared me more if an angel walked through the wall and said, “You were found dead one hour ago.” ~ July 1980