There’s a sculpture I like to look at when I walk to Whole Foods or to my health club. It’s right in front of the Chicago Center for Photography. The artist, Jennifer Dickson, calls it Being There/There Being. I call it Lady in a Keyhole. It’s actually composed of three separate pieces arranged on a small triangular patch of grass. The iron pieces, set on round pads of concrete, I believe, were arranged to suggest the dynamic nature of time and space. Certainly, one gets a very different feeling of the work depending on their vantage point.

But something almost magical happens when I look, straight on, at this feminine shape through the not quite meshing jaws of the two other pieces staggered in front. I identify with the figure, this woman at the end of the tunnel or keyhole. I actually imagine I am in her place, that I am not focusing on a simple figure at the end of a restricted field, but that I am looking out from beyond these giant metal incisors… at the world. When I look at the Lady in a Keyhole, and think of myself as the Lady in the keyhole, I feel more like the “seer” than the “seen,” the observer and not the object. And this makes me think about how differently I feel about myself as a woman in my fifties than I did as a woman in my twenties.

My very Italian friend, Angela, used to invoke the resigned curse of her grandmother when describing aging. Anziani è brutto. Getting older is ugly. Or is it something else?

Last week, I went to a cosmetics store. I don’t start my day “putting on a face,” but I decided I should augment my soap and water routine with some sort of high-powered anti-aging cream.

“I want to get rid of these fine lines,” I sighed to the skincare specialist. “I have a very expressive face, and I have creases above my eyebrows and here,” I pointed. “On the sides of my eyes.” I remember looking up at the forty-something year-old woman with highlighted, well-coiffed, hair. She was wearing a long-sleeved smock cum lab coat that made her look like a scientific artist or artistic scientist.

She said. “Get rid of your fine lines? We can firm things up a bit, but you can’t get rid of them. Why would you want to? You’ve EARNED them.”

Well that was a funny thought, I considered. Then I contemplated how I had become the lady in the keyhole looking outward, a woman of wisdom and compassion, dedicated to being of service without being anyone’s mother or martyr, curious and discerning, simultaneously open to new experiences and deeply appreciative of what was in front of me. I had become someone more concerned with how I saw the world than with how the world saw me.

When I was young, I wanted to be thin enough, smart enough (although not too smart), adventurous and reserved in proper proportions, according to some other defined guide – whatever it would take to be liked, to be desired. I wanted to be wanted. And now, I mostly want to experience life through my own eyes, my own ears and my own skin (even if I have a few fine lines on my forehead). I want to look out at the world from my own perspective and look back through the keyhole at myself and know I am standing tall. I can stand firm and I can move on my own volition.

Loving a woman of a certain age, especially when that woman is YOU, is no small thing.