Gone Grey and The Seven Senior Dwarves

When I was a very little girl, my mother took me to see Snow White. I was so traumatized by the wicked witch that I had nightmares for weeks. But oh, how I loved those dwarves. Even at a young age, I got the connection between their personalities and their names.

The other day, I was sitting around a lunch table with some friends. Suddenly Betsy bent over, reached down, and began to scratch her left ankle energetically.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I’ve got this really itchy patch on my ankle. Just call me Ms. Itchy.”

“Sounds like one of the seven dwarves,” said Myra. “You know, Happy, Sleepy, Dopey… Itchy …”

“It’s one of those things nobody warns you about, when you are growing up,” said Maeve. You think you’re Snow White, until all of a sudden one day you find that you are Gone Grey.”

Of course that triggered an onslaught of competitive silliness. We’ve all gotten to the point where making fun of the discomforts of our aging bodies is just one more way of coping with them.

So, with apologies to the memory of Mr. Disney, here are our nominations for the Seven Senior Dwarves.

The first one is actually conjoined triplets, so they count as just one:

Flaky: has skin so dry that whenever she removes her nightgown, tiny flakes fill the air. If ever you want a sample of her DNA, just shake the tee shirt she has tossed into her laundry basket. Itchy follows her sister Flaky, but precedes sister Scratchy. Itchy is in charge of keeping her sister Flaky from settling down, but Scratchy is the liveliest of the three. She cannot hold still, and is always bending and stretching and reaching to stay in contact with her two sisters. Her most cherished possessions are her long-handled back scratcher and her collection of body lotions and greasers.

Sniffly: tries to have a tissue with her at all times, but she goes through her supply every few minutes. Her nose starts to run for all sorts of reasons: shifts in temperature, warm to cold or cold to warm; dust in any form; friends with strong perfumes; a bowl of hot soup steaming away on the table in front of her; bits of down that fly out of her pillow. Her nose is particularly prone to running when she has both hands full and nowhere to set down whatever she’s holding.

Wrinkly: The crows’ feet could be passed off as something caused by a temporary squint in bright sunlight, but nowadays they remain when she is indoors, too. And then, of course, there’s the fact that her dimples have morphed into long, narrow crevices, and the backs of her upper arms and thighs have taken on the texture and loose swing of elephant skin.

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Gone Grey and The Seven Senior Dwarves

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