Wrinkle Cream

We are smart enough to know that many claims for magic anti-aging cream this and miracle anti-aging cream that are not truly staving off the inevitable and actual aging process. We know that we will, as one of my dear friends says, as we age, “fall apart.”

But we also know that we can make the aging process more pleasant, more attractive, more acceptable. My grandmother used antiaging wrinkle cream, the best antiaging wrinkle cream that she could find at the time, Oil of Olay. Maybe she didn’t call it anti-aging cream. She never was really conscerned about that as a goal. Just to keep her skin soft.

Maybe it was not prescribed by a dermatologist or beauty supply expert who “guaranteed” she would look, feel, or BE younger. It is likely my grandmother did not sit at the hand-made vanity in the small and humble bathroom, applying Oil of Olay or Ponds or Jergens out of a profound awareness of any of these as anti-aging creams remedying the effects of “free radical damage;” the phenomena that includes skin exfoliating less often; sebum production slowing; and less oil flushing the skin…thereby drying it. It is likely she wanted to feel better in hands and face and neck after twelve hours as a scrub woman who was exposed to harsh, drying, and flesh-polluting chemicals and solvents.

Then again, as our elders have this almost uncanny insight, this intuition about people, places, things, events, and phenomena that they might night have words about which to articulate, maybe my grandmother was using the stuff in the thick white glass jar with a deep well filled with a pink glop that made her smell buttery, powdery sweet throughout the following day to slow the aging process, to stall the flattening of skin layers, the subsequent thinning of the skin, the decreasing of Collagen stabilizing enzymes, the thinning of blood vessels and their inevitable change of blood flow to the surface of that skin.

Maybe that 99-cent jar was her favorite and as antiaging wrinkle cream, the best antiaging wrinkle cream was the one that worked for her. Her face was always clear, smooth, and virtually wrinkle-free. And when she kissed me hello, I felt the silk of a skin one would never know faced ten hours a day, seven days a week cleaning offices at the local college and cleaning a hundred rooms at the wealthy folks’ mansion on the lake. Maybe, then, it was not only anti-aging cream, but anti-remembering cream, a forgetting potion, for she who worked so hard for so little, or an anti-forgetting cream for those who watched her apply it every night of their childhood…remembering decades later long after she passed, that cosmetic sweetness, that soft, seemingly unwrinkled skin.