Springtime Makeovers

Another winter has come and gone and once again my dreams of looking better didn’t materialize. I had intended to look like the man on the Harlequin Romance book covers, but I still have the same little ministerial potbelly I had at the first of the year. I had also hoped to have more hair, but that hasn’t gone well either. There’s a kid in my town with alopecia and everyone fusses over him and buys him baseball caps, but those same people notice my hair loss and say, Geez, Phil, you’re looking old. Why isn’t there a donation jar with my picture on it at the drugstore checkout counter?

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal, and I thought new clothes might improve my image, but that didn’t work out. Have you noticed how clothes always look nicer in the store, draped elegantly on the ageless mannequin, wrinkle-free, smooth, and shiny new? Alas, an hour after I don new clothes, they’re crumpled and stained with gravy. On the mannequin, there’s never a straining gap between the buttons where my belly pokes out. Nor does the mannequin walk around with a price tag dangling from the armpit, a tag I once failed to notice and remove before giving a speech at a conference, ironically on the subject of awareness.

With my hair gone and my clothing a disaster, I decided to improve my image by becoming smarter, which sounds simple on the face of it, but isn’t nearly as easy as one might think. Since being smart is a lot of work, it’s simpler to tell anyone who asks that you’re a subatomic microphysicist, which isn’t a real thing but sounds incredibly complicated, so people will be overawed by your intelligence and hang on your every word. I’ve been telling people I’m a subatomic microphysicist for several years now and am amazed how it renders others speechless with admiration.

While we’re considering ways to improve our image, let’s not overlook the importance of driving a snazzy car, which is why I can be seen tooling around town in a 2013 pea-green Ford Flex that fairly screams elegance and understated wealth. People stop in their tracks when they see me, pointing, envious, wishing they had a 2013 pea-green Ford Flex. I bought it used in 2014, and I’m not bragging but it wasn’t cheap, setting me back nearly $18,000, the most we’ve ever paid for a car. My wife didn’t think we could afford it, but then I got a job as a subatomic microphysicist and just like that the world was our oyster.

If you still want to impress people, buy a second home, or better yet, save your money and just tell people you have a second home. There’s hardly a conversation in which I don’t mention our vacation home in the Maldives. I say something like, It sure is hard to find good help for our home in the Maldives, or Say what you will about the Maldives, it’s a great place to live if you work as a subatomic microphysicist. The nice thing about the Maldives is that no one knows where it is, so you can also say, What I really like about having a second home in the Maldives is that we can get there in two hours in our 2013 pea-green Ford Flex.

If one grows weary of posturing, one might remember that Jesus told his followers not to worry about their appearance, pointing out the beauty of flowers that neither toil nor spin, but that’s just the kind of thing you’d expect a young man with a full head of hair to say.

Philip Gulley is a Quaker pastor and the author of 22 books, including the Harmony and Hope series, featuring Sam Gardner.

This article is featured in the March/April 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.