Everyone has Thanksgiving war stories to tell and this one’s mine. An old friend of mine joined my extended family at my house for dinner. I had tried to find something presentable to wear, which is hard these days because so little of my clothes fit me. I managed to settle on a pair of black pants with a black shirt. My entire wardrobe, in fact, is black. Perhaps a sign of mourning for the loss of my fetching body of yore.

“Dayna,” she says, leaning in towards me. “You should try Spanx.”

Spanx, I learned, is the modern version of a girdle.

“We burned our bras in 1968, remember?” I said to her. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I wasn’t wearing a bra in 1968 because I was only 8).

No doubt about it, I would look slimmer in Spanx. But the thought of wearing a girdle is as appealing to me as dying my hair blond. It might look swell on others but I’m having no part of it.

Had she told me that my rear might look better if I started climbing up the steep streets of the Berkeley Hills where I live, I might have listened.