Grandma and me. She’s the same age I am now.

Things happen to your face when you age, predictable things, but they’re still startling to the occupant. Because it happens so fast. One day you’re a premenopausal woman soiling her underwear on the regular but otherwise perfectly presentable, and the next you’re catching glances of yourself in a store window and saying Oh Dear, and then you’re looking at a selfie and saying Oh Fuck, and then the whole project sails off a cliff and you’re saying Oh Well.

It’s an adjustment. You might have thought you’d be okay with looking super old because Georgia O’Keefe looked great at 98, but the thing about Georgia O’Keefe is she was gorgeous before.

Last I checked, I looked like my Grandma. Her face had the softness of a tub of flour and the topography of a waffle. She had the customary vertical wrinkles but then accessorized with horizontals for a graph-paper effect. I don’t look in the mirror often; first thing in the morning when I wash my face, and I don’t have my glasses on then. So it feels like something that happened overnight.

Fortunately, I really loved my Grandma and I loved the way she looked too. Which is: like a grandma. And here I am.

The thing about this aging business is, the view from the inside of my face has remained the same for as long as I remember. So the other day, when I approached a friendly group of a half-dozen thirty-year-olds tossing a football on the sidewalk, I related to them. I tend to relate to almost everyone at this point, and that’s because I’ve been almost all the ages. And I’m closing in fast on the remainder.

They were taking up the sidewalk and I thought I’d let them know I was coming, so I hollered ahead: “Hey! Don’t throw that ball at me because I guarantee you I won’t be able to catch it!” I am comfortable being self-deprecating about my athletic ability. They used to park me in right field because it got the least action, but if a softball did come out there I’d heave it back with everything I had, and it would describe a little midget rainbow arc and roll partway to second base.

So the fellow who had the ball smiled and said “Do you want to throw it?” And he handed it to me. I squinted at a woman about ten feet away. “I don’t know if I can get it that far,” I said. “Okay, what do I do?”

“Here,” he said. “You put your fingers on the stitches and throw.” I put my fingers on the stitches and then I really was afraid I couldn’t throw it ten feet. My hand was too small for the thing. This was going to be more of a shot-put situation. But I reared back and catapulted it in a wobbly arc to the woman and everyone clapped and cheered and I collected a high-five and continued down the sidewalk. Hey. I like messing with strangers.

Then I overheard the fellow say “That was awesome.” His friends agreed it was awesome.

Awesome? Huh. Really?

One wafer of time. I saw a group of people who were just like me, but with more ink and a different vocabulary. They saw a funny little old lady tossing a football for the first time. The crow on the power line was sizing up pockets for crumbs and snackage. The football shrugged under a new paste of skin cells. A hundred points of view, and all of them are true.