On Looking at Looks:

I am not beautiful. To look at that is. I am proud of the beauty I have within. I do look more like Grandma Addams then any other character in that wonderful show. I have a baby picture of myself looking so much like Uncle Fester that I thought it must be a mistake when I was younger and wanted to be a beautiful people too.

I did have a cute phase in which I looked some what like Shirley Temple, curly hair and all, enough to be asked by smiling strangers if I could dance and sing like her. But alas, I was only two years old and could not. The smiles went away from their faces.

Most of my life I was not skinny or fat, just middlin. The rest of my family are tall and I am short, being slightly dwarfed in my arms and legs. (When I sit next to my tallest brother we are the same height. But when we stand I am more than a head shorter, over a foot in fact.)

As a kid I was smart and had a good imagination. I was not good at book learning or in school work. I was interested in things that made others moan and groan. I liked what others shunned. I was a misfit.

I saw through their sham lives. The lies they told themselves so that they were not left behind the crowd. The hoops that they jumped through, the disguises that they hid behind with smiles so practiced that they didn’t look fake any longer. I distrust smiles.

I found faces with wrinkles and the people behind them far more interesting than the smooth faced ’pretty’ liars around me.

The wrinkled people didn’t lie nearly as much. They didn’t have to pretend that things were different than it really was. They were old and only the people that really loved them or were really interested in what they had to say paid them any attention.

My mother would say, “Don’t stare!” And I’d think to myself that I wasn’t. I was committing them to memory and that there was so much more to remember in an interesting wrinkled face.

Wrinkled faces are soft and comfortable. You can read their eyes so much better. They have a patchwork of interesting roads mapped out on their faces. Leading to questions about all that experience hidden beneath.

I was lucky to have lived as a child before all this accessible eternal youth. To have discovered this treasure before it was harder to find and it rarely disappoints me even now that I‘m a wrinkly too.