Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

by Laurie Notaro

I’ve seen so much stuff that I had to purge 90 percent of my childhood memories from my brain in order to make room for passwords and PINs.

Aren’t you proud that you know how to use a dial phone? That you lived a whole, full life without a digital device in your pocket? You remember who Gilligan is! You watched Fonzie jump the shark! You remember when coming in second place was still awesome. You know how to use a phone book and roll down a window manually. You probably drove a stick shift. As a kid, you played outside all day until dinner. You lived in a time when you could walk your loved ones all the way to the gate in an airport. The guy who sang your favorite song on the radio wasn’t also a model. You know what “Where’s the beef?” means and remember when everyone ate Hamburger Helper. You watched Jaws at the drive-in. We have seen a lot. We survived Aqua Net. We were the last generation of children to ride in a car without seat belts! And there’s nothing shameful in saying that.

If you buy it at Safeway with cash, you’re going to have to stand there while the teenaged cashier studies it like it was a new planet he discovered, saying, “Huh. I’ve never seen this before. What’s it for?” If that happens, I want you to say, “Call your mother on your next break and ask her what vaginal dryness is. And then never ask that question to anyone ever again.”

14. I AM NO LONGER HOUSEBROKEN. HELP! I warned everyone about this in one of my earlier books: I try not to pee too often because those parts wear out, and they don’t have replacement parts for them yet.

18. WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER ANYTHING ANYMORE? In my book, you really only have to remember two things: to brush your teeth and where your insurance card is. Everything else is a bonus.

“But why is your doctor making you do this?” he tried again. “Beats me,” I explained. “She told me, but my memory is like an overstuffed Chinese commuter train. You can fight your way in, but, ultimately, something is going to fall out and get left on the tracks. Looks like the pee jug fell out.”

My point is: the problem is not that we are losing our memory. It’s that we are at capacity, and if new stuff wants to come in, we have to start throwing old stuff overboard.

WANTED: Teenager to help two old people figure out how to cast Escape to the Chateau from their phones to their TV. We do not know what kind of TV it is. We think we have iPhones. We made a mistake by not having children eighteen years ago, and we are willing to pay the going rate to make up for that now. Nephew could not help us because he was helping his grandmother put an attachment on an email and was visibly upset when we FaceTimed him.

Expert Tip: “No matter how old and achy I am, I can still haul ass outta bed when the dog starts making vomit noises.”—Connie Sherretts, MAW

Why? Because we are superwomen. Because it’s how we are. We’re high, we’re sleep deprived, and we’re still doing all the shit.

The brilliance of growing older is that with each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear. I have less tolerance for unexperienced voices who think they know more than a person twice their age, and I’m not afraid to say so.

Now, I live in Eugene, Oregon, where people are so far to the left that they have almost looped around again to the right, and they have no problem demanding that other people not ruin their nature walks by doing laundry. This attitude is super typical of the neighborhood. We are liberated and free! We delight in passing that liberation on to others by telling everyone else exactly how to live.

People act poorly because other people have let them act poorly, and they have been able to get away with it for a lifetime.

Flowers bud, blossom, and shrivel, and so do we.

As a culture, we prepare children for the next stage in their lives as they morph into adults, but where’s the Talk about moving from an adult into an elder?

But if you feel like an elephant is standing right here, that is a heart attack. If the pain is up here and it’s burning, that is not a heart attack; it’s because you ate a hush puppy three days ago and didn’t sleep sitting up.”

Bald monkeys. Neck vaginas. These are things people need to know about before the day they just suddenly have them.

Listen, ask any woman who has lived the last twenty-five years of her life on repeat if that is cruel and unusual behavior. She will tell you that no jury of her peers (women who are still married to their selective-hearing husbands after two and a half decades) would convict her. My trigger is “What?” I’ve lost half of the last twenty-five years to time spent being a skipping record, and at this point I do not hesitate to give dirty looks to random husbands who shoot that word to their wives like a missile in public.

“You get one free question a day. One. Any questions after that, I charge a dollar per answer. Three dollars for an answer I have to repeat. Do you understand?” “Why?” he asked. This is the reason we don’t keep weapons in the house. “Do you really want to use your free question for something that’s going to end up costing you hundreds by the end of the day?” I replied. “Don’t ask why. Just say, ‘Okay.’” “Can I say that I think it’s unfair?” he dared. “No, and with that, sir, you have just used your complimentary question,” I said as I went downstairs to the basement to bang my head on the concrete. “Have fun figuring out what the Netflix password is. I’ll give you a hint: you picked it.”

“What time does the bank open?” I hissed in a whisper of fire, hunched over like Gollum. “Am I the bank psychic? I am not the keeper of the bank! Of course Safeway carries almond milk! Are almonds an endangered nut? Why would Safeway not have almond milk? Is there an almond milk embargo? Just drink regular milk like every other normal person on earth. My God. Friggin’ almond milk. It looks like filthy bathwater. STOP ASKING ME QUESTIONS! Google it like a grown-up. What time does the bank open? Google it! Is there an almond milk embargo? GOOGLE IT! I can’t take it anymore! Where is the bank? Drive around until you find it. What am I, the Wizard of Oz???” I paused to catch my breath to go into Tirade, Act Two, when I heard a voice from another floor in our house say, “You know, I can HEAR YOU!”

I entered into a contract over a quarter of a century ago to marry this man and to spend the rest of my life choosing not to kill him.

There are two old ladies living in my house, and neither one of us can figure out how we got here. One lives in a quiet, blurry fog, and the other watches, hoping that she can stretch time, wield it in some way that is impossible. She is also so thankful that we’ve been able to grow old and older together, determined to soak up every bit of joy, mayhem, and love in every day we have left.