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The first time I saw it, it was by itself, sort of brownish black in color. I was quite surprised to to have it attach itself to me, and I decided immediately it would have to go. There was enough going on in my life right now. For instance, getting old. The funny thing about that is that I don't remember getting there. All of a sudden I was. Or am.

Sure, I had gradually grown used to being called Grandma from a number of laughing, wiggling little clones in perpetual motion that my children kept adding to their households.

The first time I got that title I was only 39, and no one considers that to be old. It was fun, in fact, when people thought I was the mother. But as I said, those years went so fast I didn't see them slip away.

One of the signs of getting old that brought the truth to light was when I decided to stop coloring my hair and wear it short. In a little while I looked like a slightly melted snowball had permanently nested on my head. On the upside I noticed that my wrinkles didn't seem as prominent as they had with my darker hair. I decided to keep the snowball for awhile. But all is vanity someone once said.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I began to notice that whenever I was driving, cars behind me seemed obsessed with racing to get in front of me even though I tend to drive a little bit over the speed limit like every one else. That never happened when my hair was long and brown. Do they automatically think white-haired people drive too slowly?

The next thing to bring my attention to this state of the elderly was that I could see better when the newspaper was several feet away from me, or even on the floor. After a while reading a book with my arms stretched out so far got a little tiresome. I succumbed to a pair of drugstore reading glasses, not wanting to admit or pay for an extravagance I was sure I would only need occasionally.

That, of course, changed the day I wore one navy and one black shoe to church. I also thought it particularly strange when the waistbands on my skirts and slacks all began to shrink while the length of the clothing items stayed the same. And the day I couldn't see my knees while putting on my shoes, I seriously thought of changing my motto "Life is short - eat dessert first." My sister unwittingly encouraged me by saying that fat was only deep skin. I decided then, that I could at least hang onto my backup motto, "A chocolate a day is really okay, but two is even better."

Then I started to do dumb things. I told myself not to tell my children lest they consider putting me in a nursing home. There was the time I stopped at a gas station, paid for my gas and promptly drove off to do errands. I had to do a bit of talking when I returned to the station to get the gas I paid for. On more than one occasion I put a cup of water in the microwave to make tea and upon opening the door found that I hadn't even turned it on.

The worst one was when I left my billfold in the top of a grocery cart in broad daylight and didn't miss it until I was all the way home. It was a total of 50 minutes from the time I left it and the race back to retrieve it, all the while praying it would still be there. The Lord blessed me, for amazingly, it was in the cart. I told myself these incidents were all due to preoccupation, but try as I might, I couldn't think what I was preoccupied with.

Now, I had to deal with this unwanted visitor. My thoughts went back to when I was a little girl watching my dad shave. I never dreamed I would one day have the same nuisance in my old age. Whoever heard of a woman with whiskers? Except maybe Barnum and Bailey. Is this, too, a part of growing old?

It only took a second to pluck it, but as time went by it multiplied, and the task of removing them grew into a lot of minutes each day. I finally resorted to a razor. That was not the way to go. They grew quicker and with more vengeance. I now had an idea of what my dad went through, and I didn't appreciate it any more than he did when on occasion I nicked myself and had to walk around with a tiny dot of tissue on my face. I'm slow breaking into new ideas, as a T-shirt of mine says, "Traveling 33 RPM in an Ipod World," but I must check into something else to delete whiskers.

My sister laughed when I complained about it. She had been dealing with it herself. She said she just thought of them as stray eyebrows.

- Lenna C. Wyatt

Lenna C. Wyatt, of Scottsdale, Ariz., has written dozens of short stories, many with O. Henry-style endings. She's nearly finished with a mystery and continues to work on an archaeological novel about the first 2,000 years of human history.