Don't Be Slender in America!

Nobody could ever call me fat. The most I ever weighed in my life was around 130 pounds back in the late 1960s when I lived in London and smoked too much of that hunger-producing substance Bill Clinton never inhaled.

I now weigh 50 kilos (110 pounds) which is perfectly OK for someone 5'4" tall who stays in shape with Qi Gong exercises and a good fishetarian diet. In Thailand where I live no one ever tells me I ought to weigh more, although lately friends do say my cheeks look a bit sunken. You can't tell the aging process where to take its toll and if it wants to suck face, I'm glad that someone--or something--still does.

On the 17th I celebrated my birthday morning whale watching on Bodega Head with Annie and Thea, two fabulous women I've known since the late 1970s when we were pounding pillows in Lois's gestalt group in San Francisco. The terrible storms of the previous week had given way to a perfectly clear blue sky, a cool crisp temperature even someone who lives in fetidly sticky Thailand could enjoy, and a mini-bouquet of hardly wilted pink and yellow roses stuck mysteriously into a small outcropping of greenery on the cliffside. (I think it was a birthday present from my mother who died in 2003....a roses-on-the-beach tale for another posting.)

Anne and Thea told me later that while I chatted up cute Christopher (a 35 year-old tree pruner from San Francisco), his mom asked if I was a cancer survivor because of my short hair and slender body. She probably didn't want her son messing with such a stylish example of the aging process!

Two days later in Santa Rosa, Thea was showing me around her co-housing abode, introducing me to many of her co-residents, all dressed in their drab blue, green, or gray sensible winter clothing. "Are you a Buddhist nun?" one frumpy older woman asked me. "Your hair's so short."

I'm so happy to be back visiting my oldest and dearest friends in the world, but these kinds of stereotyping remarks remind me why I left in 1990. Thanks to the two hip replacement surgeries I had in Belgium in July and August 2007 to revise the two bad ones done in Thailand in 2005 and 2005, I feel better than I've felt in YEARS.

And just for the record, I understand lesbians too have short hair (dunno about their body size) and not that it's anyone's business, I'm not a lesbian either.

I'm just me and for the first time in ages, I really celebrate that!