Shades of the 1950’s I
thought when I walked into the bathroom at the L.A. County Arboretum. I
could imagine women sitting on the metal stools brushing their stylized
hair then taking out ozone depleting tin bottles of hairspray and
spraying with abandon, mist falling in tiny sticky globulettes. To
complete the touch up, golden tubes of lipstick, opened to unveil shades
of red, (not pink nor orange nor white, those were in later times),
were twisted to full height and applied sensuously to pursed lips that
always kissed tissue or toilet paper to blot and hold the color. The
changing table was a nod to later times, beyond the 1950’s, into the
2000’s, when benches and chairs would no longer do for changing baby’s
bottom. Before the changing table, the mist of hairspray would have
been mixed with the haze of cigarette smoke.
Standing in the bathroom imagining
the scene, I felt deprived. Glamorous times when bathrooms were more
than places of necessity. But how glamorous are metal stools, cool to
the seat, whether on summer or winter day? Elegance attempted though.
This had been a classy place.
Even though I’m a native
Californian and the Arboretum has been in existence since I was in
single digits age wise, I’d never been there before my visit last month
with a good friend of mine, a friend from my childhood. We choose a very
hot day to wander the grounds, and we did not spend too much time
wandering. We vowed to go back.
Before I went to the Arboretum,
I’d been thinking about deprivation, in a kind of what we once had
sense, not in the we never had it sense. Deprivation in the never had
it sense would be another entry, another time, much heavier and would
entail thinking about justice and fairness and equity, issues which sit
on my sleeve and weigh my shoulders down, but which I don’t want to
tackle today. Today the deprivation comes from the sense of what we had
and now do not. So many things, so many places, so many notions and
ideas. Not nostalgia, deprivation.
In this kind of deprivation, what
was gives way to what is now. It is the gap between the was and the now
that the feeling of deprivation fills. For example, I am no longer
young (whew, thankfully), but neither am I old (well, to some, but not
in reality). To shake off young or even middle age requires me to move
into or towards old. And here I sit. I’ve been here for some time in
my adult life but only now am connected to this feeling of deprivation.
I once could run around the bases after hitting a well pitched ball. I
once had long auburn brown hair. I once had young children, adolescent
children, young adult children. I once taught school. I once was
married. No longer. I feel deprived. I feel like the metal stools
waiting for the return of the glamorous 50’s, lined up in a row before
the mirror occupied now only by schoolchildren who realize they can sit
and stare in the mirror rather than stand and stare in the mirror.
My feeling of deprivation doesn’t
define me. Instead it serves to remind me of a fulfilling past. A past
that has grounded my future into which I will age with wisdom,
hopefully, so that I can continue to see the use of this type of feeling
of deprivation as a filler and connector, and then write about the
injustice in the world when deprivation does not lead to hope. In that
sense of being deprived, what was, is. But it need not be. That is my
hope.
