Every picture tells a story

Yesterday I visited the optometrist. The moment I sat down in the exam chair, he noticed my work badge hanging from a lanyard around my neck.

“Is that really a photo of you?” He said it with playfulness in his voice, but I knew the comment was not meant as a compliment.

I’ve seen this doctor a few times in the past, and he usually talks through the entire exam, non-stop, politics mainly, with an enthusiasm that assumes you agree with all he has to say. He’s like one of those people who doesn’t give you a chance to speak, makes declarations that may be true or not and follows it up with the ubiquitous, “Right?” The earth is flat, right?” “Vaccines are harmful, right?” He doesn’t actually say “Right?” like some others, but the nonstop talking is the same thing. How do you disagree with such linguistic manipulation, with such a barrage of words?

“The photo was taken eight years ago,” I told him. I don’t know why I felt compelled to tell him that, but perhaps I thought I could defer any potential insults by letting him know I already understood what his question meant: I look old. That was hard to admit, and that son of a bitch made me admit it. “It’s a professional photo for work, a complete makeup job and airbrushing of any flaws in my face.”

“Hee, hee, hee,” my Dr. of Optometry giggled.

“Have you seen Caroline Kennedy?” he asked. “When she spoke out against RFK Jr. Oh my god, the wrinkles!” That’s what bothered him about that particular frightening situation, RFK Jr. as our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Oh, but the wrinkles (echoes of oh, but her emails.)

I tried to shift the topic of wrinkles to something else, anything else.

“Do you remember her at her father’s funeral, when she was a little girl?” I asked, wistful at the thought of all those decades that had passed. “Do you remember that iconic picture of her and her brother, JFK Jr. as children, at the funeral with their mother?”

“Caroline definitely needs a face lift. I hadn’t seen her in so long I was shocked to see all those wrinkles.” Him again, in case there was any question. “She must be about 70 now. I would tell her to get a face lift but only to look about 60, any younger and she would look ridiculous.”

“And what about Pamela Anderson,” he continued. “She’s gone make up free!” At one point, he told me he enjoyed watching makeover programs. “I can’t believe it; those women look nothing like themselves!”

This guy wasn’t too macho, which is maybe why I didn’t just stomp out the door in my old-lady self-righteousness. If he’d been some macho guy, it might have been easier to say, “Hey, fuck you, Neanderthal!” He had to be pushing 60.

“You’re no great prize yourself,” I wanted to say, just a graying, catty middle-aged (almost old) man.

But I didn’t say it. Like on so many topics these days, in these times, I keep my mouth shut. The thing I want to cry out, I keep stuffed inside. We live in historic times, dangerous times. And I’m old. Pictures don’t lie.