Middle-aged Teal

I really envision myself as being a travel writer, but the current budget is not allowing me to do much else besides go to Publix and get gas for the car so I can continue to go to Publix.  There is only so much one can write about that kind of travel, and I guess at this point I have pretty much covered said topic.

So I am resigned momentarily to write about ‘teal’, a colour I’m not really fond of, representative of the chapter of life I have entered.

The concept of teal as a metaphor for my current situation came about several years ago while taking skiing lessons.  Our instructor told us by the end of the class we will have traversed some green slopes and a few blues and could probably consider ourselves ‘teal’ skiers by the end of the afternoon.  That made perfect sense to me, and I’ve been blending colours and assigning them to various phases of my life ever since.

Sadly, teal is where I’m at.  The good news?  Being in my teal phase means I don’t care anymore that I ended the previous sentence with a preposition.  The bad news?  I know better, and I should care.  That’s what teal does to you...it catches you in the crosshairs of caring and not caring which almost sounds like something Lao Tzu would say, but I digress.

Just because I’m not a fan of teal doesn’t mean I have to treat it dismissively.  It’s just being itself, a blend of green and blue, with no other aspirations, having reached its goal in life.

I, however, do have aspirations.  I have conquered the beginner slopes and easy runs of life.  Greens have been mastered too and they have been challenging physically and mentally, but exhilarating and beautiful.  Just now testing the blue slopes.  Scarier and more challenging, but I know that view will be captivating, exquisite, magnificent and full of many additional adjectives.  I will press on until those challenges are conquered and goals are met.

Skiing, a cat and teal-coloured print!  Meme success!

The black slopes sound like they will be full of wrinkles, health problems and bad knees so I’m just going to pencil in that one and let it evolve, or not.  There’s always the bar at the ski lodge as an alternative.

Meanwhile, caught in between green and blue, this middle-aged teal is everywhere, damn it!. It has taken over my brain.  When I think about myself these days I see a slightly hazy version of me in my late thirties and I honestly think that is how I still look.  Until I look in the mirror and see my mom staring back.  And then I clear my throat and my voice cracks and I realize she has moved in. 

Instead of having one bottle of Windex on hand I now have four, and yet I can forget to buy toilet paper for a week running.  Don’t even get me started on back seat driving.  I don’t verbalize as much as I used to, but flinching, small gasps and using the air brakes are getting their message across, and for some reason I perceive the recipient of my care and concern as being highly annoyed.  I’m pretty sure it was cute and endearing when we were dating.  Teal is chipping away at my cuteness.  Where’s my bottle of wine?