They say your eyes are the windows to your soul, but I’ve known some people who have eyes and no soul.
A better axiom is your skin is the window to your age, as my personal narrative attests.
Our skin travels with us through thick and thin. But sometime down the trail of life, the thick takes a detour and we’re left with just the thin. In the ultimate irony, this occurs even if we’re obese (for the record, I am not).
To be thin-skinned in a figurative sense is to be sensitive and quick to take offense to criticism and slights. You can have this condition at any age. Even when your 12 and your Little League coach says you couldn’t hit the ocean if you fell out of a boat, let alone hit a curveball.
To be thin-skinned in a literal sense is having aging skin that is thinner because there’s less fat to act as cushioning. You have this condition when you’re old enough to have used the breaking news of the Titanic sinking as an ice breaker in dinner party conversations.
Literal thin skin leads to easy bruising. Ever since the needle on my age speedometer pushed past 70, I’ve been prone to this.
A couple of years ago I was walking into my doctor’s office, no less, when a quick-closing door clipped my right arm. I was wearing short sleeves and the door sliced off a nice patch of skin. Some marriages don’t last as long as it did for my arm to heal.
Old skin bruises easily because bloods vessels are more fragile than Venetian chandeliers and easily broken. Bruises occur when blood leaks out of blood vessels. Older people who take blood thinners bruise even more easily.
When my father was in his 80s, he was on blood thinners and his arms routinely looked like he had either been wrestling a mountain lion or had gotten entangled in barbed wire while trying to rustle cattle.
Thin skin tears so easily that you need a skilled surgeon to skillfully remove a simple bandage from your arm without taking all the skin with it. An arm without skin is essentially raw meat, hideously uncomfortable and hideously unattractive.
Old age and sun damage frequently mate and give birth to crepey skin, especially the loose and wrinkled skin that dangles from your upper arms like the wattle underneath a rooster’s neck.
They call it crepey skin because the skin is so thin, wrinkled and fissured with fine lines that it has a crepe paper-like appearance. But to me, crepey skin is a call to arms. Which is why I lift weights regularly to keep my arms as muscular as 75 years permit.
Alas, it’s not enough to totally knock out crepey skin. I shouldn’t be surprised. Nobody kicks Father Time’s butt. Heck, even Tom Brady eventually retired from playing quarterback.
Another delightful aspect for those old enough to remember using fountain pens to write on papyrus is dry and itchy skin.
After every shower my skin feels like I used cactus, not soap. So I lather myself with so much CeraVe it looks like I’ve made of myself a pillar of white frosting. It takes forever to apply. I’d be better off having the CeraVe billow out of an aerosol can with several sweeping strokes of sprssssshhh.
Like a lot of dummies of my generation, I’ve had way too much sun exposure. Compounding matters I have fair skin and was too lazy to apply sunblock unless I was tanning at the equator. That’s bad, bad news once you creak into geezerdom.
OK, I’ll admit I’m fortunate because I’m not wreathed in liver spots, skin tags, wrinkles and laugh lines. But I routinely sprout actinic keratosis spots like dandelions in the spring. But my actinic keratosis spans the four seasons.
Actinic keratosis is a precancerous skin lesion that if left untreated could morph into basal cell carcinoma or, even worse, squamous cell skin cancer.
So three times a year my dermatologist treats my actinic keratosis with cryotherapy using liquid nitrogen spray to freeze my skin surface lesions with extremely cold liquid.
It’s so freaking cold, around minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, that it actually burns so badly the sprays awaken the demons in the dungeons of my soul. Suffice it to say I now regularly use sunblock and wear a hat since old age snatched away my once flowing blond locks.
Too much sun frying your face over the decades also triggers rosacea in your latter years. Rosacea causes flushing and redness. I have some on my cheekbones and, quite frankly, there’s nothing rosy about it.
When folks ask why my face has red spots, I don’t blame rosacea and actinic keratosis. Instead I go macho and fib that I’m coming off a title fight with Rico Verhoeven, the world kickboxing world champion.
After looking in the mirror one night, I remarked to my wife perhaps I should transition to a woman so I could wear foundation and makeup on my face. After looking like she had just swallowed a squid AND a frog, she said that it would confuse our grandkids, and it would be too much of a hassle to legally change my name to Candy Bubbles Zielinski.
So I no longer look in the mirror, which makes shaving a real adventure and routinely adds additional red nicks to my mutilated mug.
At least the elderly have one positive thing going for them: the wisdom of old age. Granted, that’s dependent on whether or not their memories have developed more holes than Swiss cheese. That’s why I exclusively eat sharp cheese.
As my parting entreaty, please refrain from make fun of the elderly. We can’t take it because we’re thin-skinned, figuratively and literally.
Mike Zielinski, a resident of Berks County, is a columnist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
Source: Berkshire mont
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