Caroline

“And how old are you now?!”

And that’s how, between sets of pull-ups, I met Caroline at the YMCA.  At first, I was annoyed.  When I go to the gym I am not one of those social girls.  I am one of those far less common “leave me alone so I can sweat like a pig, but have a really hot ass to show for it” kind of girls.  I don’t like to be interrupted in the middle of my workouts.

“I’m twenty-six”

“Married?”

“No, not married.”

“Kids?”

“Nope, no kids yet.”

“Well you keep being fit and keep being beautiful for you and you’ll be eighty-five like me with all the doctors saying you’ll live to be 105.”

Caroline could probably curl 45s.  CREDIT.

And that’s a pretty good introduction to one of the most wonderful, yet totally insane little old ladies I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.  One of the reason I love the YMCA – and have kept my membership despite having access to the gorgeous student recreation center on campus – is because it is full of old people and not dumb bitches.  And Caroline is quite possibly the best of them.

Before I knew it, Caroline began regaling me with the high points of her long life.  There were two husbands.  There were four kids.  There was three years spent teaching in Germany.  Caroline was one big over-share after another.  This was officially confirmed when she told me all four of her children had been conceived while she was wearing a diaphragm much to the chagrin of husband number one.  Too much?  Probably, but when you’re eighty-effing-five going on 105 you can say whatever you freaking please.  Birth control failures included.

After something about her second husband being initially married to a woman who was “more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor and just as promiscuous,” Caroline began talking about inner beauty. 

“You know I’ve met at least forty people with scars and burns and ugly outsides; people that have been pushed around because they looked a certain way.  But I didn’t ever mind that and I looked right in them and met the most beautiful people in the world.  You’re one of those few people who are lucky to have the beauty on both sides.  It’s a gift that you should spread to the world.  The world needs all the love and beauty it can get.”

Then Caroline reached up, squished her hands onto my cheeks, smiled wide and said she couldn’t wait to see me more.  And as I got back to my pull-ups, I realized I couldn’t wait to see Caroline again either.  Caroline had told me her whole history and made my day in all of about three minutes.

I hope I can live me life half as fabulously as Caroline is living hers.  I hope that one day when I’m eighty-five I can drop a bomb of knowledge on some unassuming twenty-something on a random Tuesday morning at the YMCA.  I want to spend my life being Caroline awesome.

I will however not be trusting my woman parts to a diaphragm anytime soon.