when i'm old

When i'm old i'll leave my hair down, huge and gray, and my necklaces will be huge and beaded and thwap against my chest and my shirts will be huge and look like ponchos with slits for my arms in colors like burnt sienna and eggplant and aqua and i'll wear leggings and clogs. I'll laugh just as loud as i do now and i'll befriend teenagers and drink tea with them at my favorite bakery but i won't be jealous that they're teenagers and i'm old because all that ("that" being adolesence and tight jeans and an epic road of uncertainty ahead) will have it's appropriate place in my memory, next to my dancing shoes and my dad's old Nikon camera). I'll have a best friend that i see day to day and we walk slowly down the street and stop at anything of interest and block the fast-movers behind us and stir them up. I will be at peace with whatever things i have done and how they turned out and i'll go back and read all those books that, when i was 20, i said i would but never got to. I will forgive my father. I'll have new scars inside and out and i'll outline them with marker to see if they are growing. And my sister will be around me, maybe she'll be that said-best friend. I'll knit things for people: hats, scarves, blankets, even socks, maybe slippers. I'll wear big sunglasses and have loopy, grandma penmanship and i'll travel back to Germany and make all those claims about "remembering when" and "being there" and Youth. But no nostalgia. I'll travel back in time. My grandkids will canonize me, because grandparents are actually Grandparents and they inhabit a world that no one understands. I wonder how we're able to continue to store so many memories, but our brains never get bigger. Maybe it's proof of how little of our brains we actually use. Maybe if we got too old, we'd have to erase old ones to make room for new ones. A normal brain looks like a pair of lungs with a butterfly in the middle; a brain with Alzheimers looks like a snowflake. I'll write a book about a singer with a one-word name who moved from Nigeria to London and had a couple hits and disappeared for awhile but some people still remember her. And i'll wonder about people from many years before and i might call them up. I'll look back on a short period of firsts and then a longer period of seconds, thirds, fourths and many-times-over; but when i'm old will be the first time that i'll be able to comfortably, un-self-consciously and liberating-ly leave my hair down.