The color was cocoa. The edges were fringed with mini-lilac-colored pom-poms. I didn't need it. It was Christmastime and I shoulda been polishing off my Christmas list. But I wanted it. And as I pondered my indulgent purchase later I thought: Scarves! Scarves may have an important place in my future…! Thinking ahead. Just in case….I mean, when author Nora Ephron wrote her first book on aging, she titled it: I Feel Bad About My Neck. An essay within the book hilariously recalls the day she realized during a lunch with like-aged friends (60-somethings) that they all sported turtlenecks. And it wasn't winter.

I side glanced that cocoa-min-purple-pom-pom crinkled scarf hanging in my closet the other day and remembered my silly thoughts….I don't yet feel bad about my neck. It's holding up fine. Right now. But I'm watching these jowl-y things appear on the lower part of my face. I'd heard about those things. A sign of the 30-extra love pounds during marriage to gourmet-cooking Husband 2.0–? My brow furrows deeply at the jowl-ly things each time I study my face in the mirror. That face turns 51 tomorrow. (Happy birthday, to me!)

Sometimes I wonder if my goal of sitting crossed-legged in a yoga pose on the floor at age 100 might be a pipe dream. It is if I listened to some people. Then there's the impressively athletic older man in one of my yoga classes who. Puts. Me. To. Shame. When our teacher walks around the studio, he tells new pupils if if they are confused about a pose and need a reference, to watch this man, along with a friend of mine who's several years my senior.

Ugly truth is, I'm athletically lazy. I dropped off of the high school track team after the first day. And mid-season, I dropped out of the high school tennis team, of which I was the last-place player. I've exercised pretty consistency since I was a senior in college, but never ever really, really pushing myself. And now, is it beginning to show?

I resisted the urge to ask the age of the tall, older gentleman in my Friday yoga class when he came up to me after class one day. We compared yoga notes. I've been doing yoga since 1987–before it was vogue, I said, adding something silly about my failure to hold certain poses and my missteps in others. I did a upward dog once when the teacher directed an downward. The older man was kind. And then I proceeded to tell him about my disc injury. And my painful pre-arthritic wrists and fingers. About how I slacked off the recent year I wrote my book and now I'm paying for it. "Oh, no, you cannot do that!" said the tall guy. "You've got to keep the joints moving…."

Here I was extolling my aches and pains, roles reversed, to a man much my senior.

Really, I need a personal trainer. Truthfully? I don't want to work that hard. And then I cannot figure how to work it in with the rest of my life. It irks me that I do schedule exercise and yet so much of the rest of society are couch potatoes. And yet, I don't do enough!

This aging thing? I'm trying to sort through it. Mixed bag that it is. I suppose time will tell. And also, importantly, how I choose to spend that time. Dang it.

Tommorrow? I'll be eating cake. And then walking….