When did everyone start talking about Core Muscles?  Was it around the same time everything we put on our bodies became Product?  I only ask because my back problems became intolerable in the late1980’s, but it was twenty years before someone told me that I needed to suck up my gut—only the terminology was “engage your core.”   By then everyone I knew had been raving for some time about Pilates and I had only just gotten clear that Product referred to pretty much anything for the hair or face that was expensive.   Suave is still just shampoo.

An earnest young beauty operator once told me in all sincerity that the Product she had put in my hair had Memory.  I thought that was rather a weighty concept to ascribe to hair gel.  But I don’t argue with the girls at the beauty school or at the spa.   I already feel like the Pity Client because I wash my face with soap and water.

Another young woman asked me if I had been on the pill when I was younger because her aunt was about my age, she had used the pill; and she had that same fuzz on her cheeks.  I was alarmed because I had never noticed fuzz on my face.

“How old is your aunt?”

“Oh like you—in her 30’s.”

“Is it that obvious, this. . . fuzz?”

“Oh no, not really, It’s not like you can see it at all from far away.”

That was a relief.  But the larger point she was trying to make is that she could recommend Product.  Not a product.  Product.  It sounds like there is only one Product, like those belief systems that tell you there is only one God.  And Product purports to do just about anything God can do on top of which, it probably smells better.

I rather enjoy being older.  The more interesting aspects of life now are the ones that Product can’t fix.  And I wouldn’t want to.  I love the wrinkles and crinkles around my eyes; they remind me that through a lot of difficult times, I have never forgotten how to laugh.

There’s a richness to life I was too busy to notice back when I first bought a Lady Schick.  And nowadays there isn’t much leg hair to shave anymore.  Of course some of the leg hair seems to have gravitated to my face and I am not talking about fuzz.  They are what my friend with the theological chops, Joan, calls stray eyebrows.  Or as she might put it, except of course she didn’t, I did:  Hair that strayed from the flock of the perfectly coiffed eyebrow devoid of the one true Product.