Fine Lines by Jane Freeman IN Life Begins At by Robin Knight

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FINE LINES.
By Jane Freeman

I have wrinkles. Under my eyes And they are wrinkles, too. Not crinkles. Not those attractive things that light up like a string of fairy lights around your eyes when you smile, but wrinkles. The ones that are always there. Lines.
I found these wrinkles last night when I was trying to clean away a particularly resistant bit of mascara with cotton wool and eye make-up remover. I rubbed and rubbed and it just wouldn't come off. And when I looked more closely, I realised it wouldn't come off because it wasn't mascara at all. It was a wrinkle. So I peered into the niirror and thought, hey, I've got wrinkles and I need glasses.
I hadn't heard such a chime of mortaliiy since the day my hairdresser cheerily announced, "You're going grey." It was such a shock I burst into tears. But then, my flat had been flooded with sewage the day before, so I was feeling a bit fragile anyway.
I'm happy to say I was able to take the wrinkle discovery a little more philosophically, because in the intervening years I have worked out a simple principle that applies to all matters of ageing. It goes like this: by the time you finish that thought about how old and ugly you are getting, you are going to be older and uglier than when you started thinking it, so why waste the time? Or look at it this way - you are younger right now than you will ever be again. Oops, missed it.
By the same token, I will get infinitesimally more wrinkly every day from now on, until the time when I look back on these two tiny creases under my eyes with enormous affection. In not too many years, my face will resemble a bowl of shredded wheat (except I will prefer to think of it as a bolt of Fortuy silk) and these first wrinkles wlll be lost among the crevasses. Then I'll cark it and it won't matter anyway.
So that's my solution to coping with the ageing experience. There is absolutely no point in worrying about it, because there is nothing you can do about it. Hallelujah, praise the Lord!
Actually, there are one or two things you can do about it. You can give up smoking, for starters, because that makes you look older and then kills you, with nothing but bad breath and heart attacks in between. And you can go for a brisk 30-minute walk every day, take calcium and vitamin C, eat organic food, meditate, do yoga, drink litres of water and the odd glass of red wine, and use sunscreen, face potions and eye cream religiously (but make sure you apply it gently to the delicate eye area using your third finger; pat pat pat). That regimen will keep you in pretty good shape. But you'll still always be older than you were when you took your last breath.
Unless you are Michelle Pfeiffer. Flicking through the latest issue of Vanity Fair with my low-fat anti-ageing lunch, wearing large, black sunglasses to keep the sun's evil rays off my delicate eye area, I came across a photo of Ms Pfeiffer advertising the fllm The Deep End of the Ocean. Well, it started out as a photo. Now it looks more like a waxwork, or something Lenin's embalmers have come up with as a joke. In this picture her face does not have one single crinkle, let alone wrinkles, lines, age spots or crepey bits. And she's smiling. Michelle Pfeiffer is older than me. She's a mother. I'm certain she has crinkles. I'd damn well put a bet on it, but this photograph has been enhanced to the point where her face has fewer wrinkles than a plastic bucket and about as much character. Even her hands are as smooth as rubber gloves. It's a ridiculous photograph. And do you know what? I've never seen Michelle Pfeiffer look less attractive. Which makes me think that once the peach bloom of youth is gone,our crinkles and wrinkles can be the nicest things about us.

Jane Freeman was writing for The Age Good Weekend , March 6th, 1999.

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