250 Words On Growth

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve been surprised that my sixties have marked a period of tremendous personal growth, by which I mean organic materials growing out of my body in new and alarming ways and places.

First, from inside my nostrils and ear canals, hairs in a riot of textures and colors intent on tickling and harassing me. Also, more startlingly, right out on the very tip of each ear, a little crabgrass patch of hairs poking up like wiry antennas craning to pull in a distant TV station.

When you’re 11 and a school nurse hands you a pamphlet titled “Your Changing Body,” they never mention that someday you’ll be shaving your lobes.

Seborrheic keratoses are brown scaly waxy lumps that, as one medical website colorfully describes, “look as if they were dripped onto the skin by a candle,” and my epidermis churns them out. They’re benign, if you consider looking like the Fantastic Four’s Ben “The Thing” Grimm benign. 

The ones I can reach, I scrape off with a fingernail. You’re not supposed to do that and it’s not supposed to work, but I do and it does. For those on my back that I can’t reach, I see a dermatologist, who freezes them off with liquid nitrogen.

At my last visit, she looked and said, “Wow, that’s a lot.” After treatment, I asked if she’d gotten them all. She shrugged as if to say, “I’m not a miracle worker. Make peace with the reality that this is how you look now.” 

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