Please don’t show me yours
Some things just aren’t as much fun as you get older, I’ve realized. For instance, when I was a kid, I loved to trade secrets with others. “If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine” was a promise of excitement when I was about five years old. I got to see captured frogs, secretly-crafted valentines, Halloween loot, and special hiding places.
Now, fifty-odd years later, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” is much less exciting and, often, downright scary.
(See? I bet you’re already getting nervous, and you don’t even know where this is going, do you?)
The reason this truth popped into my head recently was because of a discussion I had with a lovely elderly lady I met in a long line at the grocery store. As is often the case with us older folks, we began to talk about our health issues. I mentioned to her that I’d had a pre-cancerous mole removed from my leg, and she became as animated as a coffee junkie getting a double espresso.
“Oh!” she declared. “I had one removed from my shoulder! Look at this!”
At which point, she pulled her shirt off her shoulder to show me the scar.
“And the doctor had to do a skin graft since it was such a big hole. He took the skin from my thigh. Do you want to see that?”
I managed to spit out a “No, that’s okay,” while I looked around frantically to see if anyone else was catching the show-and-tell.
“Really, it doesn’t look so bad now,” she continued cheerfully. “It was awful at first, like a shark had mangled me, but now you can barely see the outline of the graft.”
“That’s good to know,” I nodded, wishing I was anywhere else in the world instead of in this particular check-out line at the grocery store in front of a woman with whom I’d just been trying to be polite when I opened our conversation.
I didn’t know it was going to become a public display of skin surgery.
“Plastic or paper?” the cashier asked me as she reached for a bag for my apples and cottage cheese.
“Skin,” I said, still rattled by the woman’s uninhibited disclosure. “I mean, plastic! Plastic!”
A woman in the next row over caught my eye. “Don’t do it,” she warned me. “I can tell you stories you don’t want to hear…”
No doubt. So please, please don’t tell me. I REALLY don’t want to know.
