When your bikini days are numbered

[Alternate title: Gravity is bringing me down.]

I have a love/hate relationship with summer. Mostly it's love.

I love the warm weather. I love seeing leaves on the trees and flowers everywhere. I love the extra hours of daylight. I love not hearing the teenager bitch about school. I love being able to sleep a little later in the morning. I love watching baseball (or I do when the Mets don't completely suck). And I love taking long walks on the beach.

Or at least I used to love going to the beach. Before we all became paranoid about skin cancer -- and the annual ritual of trying or putting on a bathing suit didn't make me depressed.

Fortunately, there are lotions and sprays (and clothes and hats) that can protect you from the sun's damaging UVA and UVB rays. Sadly, however, there is nothing, at least not yet, that can truly prevent or alter the effects of gravity.

Gravity is a bitch. No matter how healthy your diet or how much you exercise, or avoided the sun and nicotine, you can't fight gravity -- or old age. Unless you are one of the lucky people who inherited anti-gravity genes. Which, sadly, I am not.

Even so, I had hoped that having worked out regularly since I was 16, having eaten a healthy diet for over 20 years, having drunk alcohol in moderation all my adult life, not smoking, and wearing sunblock (and not staying out overlong in the sun) would ward off or delay the onset or onslaught of wrinkles and sagging. Wrong! (Note to self: Buy rum and pina colada mix in town tomorrow.)

Now it is summer again. Time to unbox my swimsuits and figure out which ones stay and which ones go. Each year, the decision gets harder -- as I take a longer, harder look at myself in the bathroom mirror and silently weep at the extra folds of skin that were not there last season. And I think to myself, am I now too old, and too saggy, to wear a bikini? Do bikinis have an expiration date, or just the women wearing them?