(11/26/2009) All across America today families are clasping hands around the dinner table to proclaim what they are thankful for. I thought we should do the same thing. I’ll go first.
I am thankful that I live in Montauk. I am thankful for groups like the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, who are like Power Rangers fighting for the environment and against those who only look at Montauk with dollar signs in their eyes.
I will be thankful if I cook the turkey perfectly, don’t ruin the gravy, and get all the lumps from the mashed potatoes. I will also be thankful to have enough food to feed everyone who shows up at my table.
I am thankful that my children are happy and healthy. I am thankful that my first grandchild, Sullivan Peter Matthews, lives less than five minutes away from me.
I am thankful that I never got a tattoo. I know too many people who are having them removed and it appears to be a painful process. And don’t think I didn’t want one; tattoos give people an edge. I was a frizzy-haired, freckle-faced, scrawny teenager with paler than pale skin who desperately needed an edge.
But I recognized early on that I was also a good Catholic girl and would probably look ridiculous with an edge. I had to settle for pierced ears for the edge, even though the earrings I wore always got tangled in my frizzy hair and made me look more like one of those nerdy girls constantly trying to untangle her earrings.
But now I’m thankful I didn’t go for the tat. Like people, tattoos tend to stretch and change over the years. As skin ages and, invariably, sags, a crouching tiger starts to look like a constipated house cat. An Aries ram looks more like the Cowardly Lion than an astrological symbol. Young women can expect the sexy barbed-wire tattoo that’s wrapped around their taut biceps to end up looking more like a chain-link fence wrapped around a sausage in their later years.
I often wonder, if I had gotten one, what would it have been? I know people — mostly fishermen — who document their lives with tattoos. One burly fellow sports a sinking ship; another has a striped bass that’s beginning to fade and looks more like a guppy, one of the weakest links in the food chain. Many of them have anchors tattooed on their arms.
I did dive on a rusty anchor once and tore off the surface of my foot. It was pretty creepy to see what the inside of my foot looks like, but since we’re all dreaming of turkey and sweet potatoes today, I’ll skip that part. I guess I could have gotten an anchor with stitches wrapped around it, but that would have made me look like Popeye and I don’t have Popeye’s biceps.
And with the birth of my first grandchild this year, I think I missed that opportunity. What child wants their Grammy to sport a sinister-looking tattoo at the beach?
Various starlets have tattoos that define them, the most notable being Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie. Fox’s says, “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies.” But what does that mean and what is a gilded butterfly? I think I’d have just gone with a butterfly.
Ms. Jolie has the longitudes and latitudes of her six children inked on her arm. Since her children were born in different countries around the world, it’s a good concept. But my three were born in Southampton Hospital and were quickly, too quickly for me, whisked home to Montauk. So my dilemma would be, do I get Southampton or Montauk? And if I got lost and ended up with amnesia somewhere, would they notify the Southampton or East Hampton Town police?
My daughter who now lives in Hawaii had MTK for Montauk tatooed on her foot in a dark, inky blue. When we sit at the beach together I want to swat at it. It looks, to me, as though a bug landed on her.
On the same beach is a woman who sits alone on the jetty and talks loudly on her cellphone. She swears worse than a sailor and has something inked on her calf. I won’t get close enough to see what it is because I’m afraid of her. She’s a scary mama! She’d probably drop the F-bomb on me and shoo me away. I imagine that when she was in high school about 60 years ago she was one of the really mean girls.
Please don’t take this the wrong way. I swear I am not stereotyping tattoo wearers. I’m just jealous. They are very cool on some, just not on me. I am a firm believer in the freedom to choose what we do with our own bodies. And for that I am thankful.
Janis Hewitt is a senior writer at The Star.