Trying to look good is inborn.

“Do I look good?”

How many times have you said that to yourself as you do a last minute inspection in front of the mirror before going out in public. We want to look our best, to make a favorable impression, to have people look up to us. It’s an in inborn desire.

Just the other day when I was at the grocery store I saw a person who obviously had spent some time preening.

She was perhaps in her mid-eighties, rather thin and frail. She wore a floral print mummu that probably fit her once. It was nearly ankle length. Perhaps due to weight loss or general shrinking due to age, the neckline kept slipping off her bony shoulder. She’d adjust it, only to have the other side slip off. She wore several strands of beads. One was long and two other two shorter. Several bangle bracelets decorated her wrists.
Her thin lips were painted with a bright color lipstick to the fullness and shape they once were. Her very fine salt and pepper hair hung straight down to her shoulders, as though she were still a teenager. She had parted her hair in the middle and bobby pinned back by the sides of her forehead. Each bobby pin was hidden with a small bouquet of plastic flowers that matched the print in her mummu.

Her walker was folded up in her grocery cart as she was walking down the isles making her selections.

Then later in the day I went to the big shopping mall, not so much to do any shopping but to observe people. I was sitting up on the mezzanine looking down at the people walking about on the lower level when I noticed a young woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, walking my direction. She must have spent a pretty penny on her outfit. I didn’t look at the price tags in the stores when I first saw those designs. But they must have been expensive. The latest rages are always expensive. She wore a pair of faded jeans which had been torn and frayed in several places on purpose. There was an inset of tan fabric behind the tear. Stores sell that stuff as new! The blouse she wore looked more like a half-slip top than a blouse. If it would have been white, I would have thought she forgot to put on a blouse. I had seen those slip blouses in a store earlier too!

For sure, both women had left their homes that day wanting to look their best. I had to chuckle at both of them.

I wore a pair of ordinary pants with an ordinary, nondescript tee-shirt. “Do I look good?”