Life

Funny title for a blog isn't it? I call this blog post life because I looked in the mirror of my hotel room this morning in St. Croix, and, for some unknown reasons the wrinkles under my neck looked more pronounced than they do when I look in the mirror in my bathroom at my home on St. Kitts. If there is one place a person's age is sure to show up is in the skin of the neck. Grey hair really is not always an indication of age , it seems more a matter of genetics, but wrinkled neck-skin? You bet your life that is a sure indication that you are no longer in your youth. One can put all the wrinkle cream one wishes on one's face, but the neck-skin will most certainly declare from beneath your chin, that you are over the youth hill, and there is no going back.
 I laughed when I saw the wrinkles, especially because I was drinking a class of water, and each time my throat gulped, the wrinkles jumped out as though to say, "see us right under here". The reason I laughed was because, for the first time in my life, I came face to face with the realization that I have lived long enough to witness my own wrinkles. That is an achievement in and of itself, especially because so many people will never witness theirs.
 wrinkles are badges of honor. It means I have survived some crap, including mistakes I have made through ignorance and early and even latter acts of immaturity.I do not take all the credit for reaching the age of wrinkles. I have to credit my father and mother, my aunties and uncles, especially uncle Sparrow in New Town who gave my mother fish to feed us when I was a boy and he was a fisherman.
 I say this because when many of us reach the age of wrinkles, people commend us as though we did it all by ourselves. We did not. In fact, had it not been for some people we can name who prevented us from killing ourselves, we would never have reached the age of wrinkles under the neck or anywhere else for that matter, and yet wrinkles are only one among such badges of honor. There are man many others. Each of us must look in our own mirrors of our own lives, and reflect on all of the persons who helped us reach to the stage where these badges of honor can be lavishly distributed.