SMOKING

As I was driving into town yesterday, I had to stop for a red light behind a dark BMW. Although the temperature was below freezing, the window on the driver’s side was open. I knew this because from out the window snaked a woman’s gloveless left hand with a cigarette gracefully lodged between the second and third fingers. She then raised her left thumb to replace the the second finger while she tapped ash with the second finger into the road. The light changed, she drove on, I turned left and realized it was a long time since I had seen anything like that, and even longer since I had done it myself.

Nobody I know smokes anymore. Nobody I know knows anyone who smokes anymore, if they ever did. My children, who are in their mid-forties, don’t smoke, and neither do any of their friends. My grandchildren are all under eight but almost certainly never will. [That is, they won’t smoke a cigarette with tobacco in it. Other exotic substances I can’t speak to. And won’t be around to find out about.]

The last time Bill and I were in Europe, five years ago, there was still plenty of smoking going on. So I don’t know what the situation is over there by now, or in South America, or in Africa, or the Far East. I understand that the American tobacco giants, like Philip Morris, are still doing very well — but they must be doing it by selling overseas, because there sure isn’t much puffing going on around here. It’s not allowed in public buildings, most office buildings, most offices, theaters, movie theaters, restaurants, bars — nor in many homes. You can’t even do it in the office bathroom. When all this prohibition first went into effect, there used to be huddles of cold, wet unhappy smokers hunched together near the doorways of buildings, snatching their nicotine fix in the rain, sleet or snow. I don’t work in a big city anymore, but I bet those huddles are much smaller than they were ten years ago, if they still exist at all. According to the latest estimate from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention), in 2012 just 18% of adult Americans smoked.

This is truly remarkable, because I grew up in a world where almost all adults smoked. I mean, that’s what they did. As far as I could tell, if you were an adult, you smoked. [And if you smoked, maybe that was enough to make you an adult. A lot of kids thought so.] Although I have read some statistics that in 1964, the percentage of Americans smoking was 42%, that couldn’t have been true in the urban Northeast. Just about anyone you asked on the street could give you a light, if you needed one. Learning to smoke was a rite of passage; twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys shared a ciggie after school, trying hard not to cough so as not to look like a novice. All right, nuns didn’t smoke, and very prissy ladies apparently didn’t (except maybe once in a rare while), and people with lung diseases weren’t supposed to, but sometimes did anyway. In any large business organization, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in your department or group who didn’t smoke.

Indeed, years before I was born Lucky Strike was advertising, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” and women who were trying to keep their figures did just that — as did the fat ones, to get their figures back. There was “Marlboro Country,” with a manly cowboy smoking a Marlboro cigarette on the billboard or the ad page. Word even had it that the light brown illustration of a camel in profile on the package of equally manly Camel cigarettes was intended to suggest a male scrotum and always erect appendage — yours, I suppose, if you inhaled a sufficient number of Camels.

In the space of less than one long life, all that has changed. It’s partly the effect of tobacco taxes, which in my time have driven the price of smoking through the roof. In 1952, the year I emerged from college, a pack of Chesterfields cost 20 cents — less, of course, when bought by the carton of ten. Now? It depends where you live (and therefore what the combined federal and state taxes amount to). The cheapest state in which to smoke is Kentucky, which in 2013 dropped its state tax on tobacco by 26%, making a pack of cigarettes $4.96. The most expensive is New York. As of July 1, 2010, New Yorkers began paying the highest cigarette tax in the country when the state tax increased from $2.75 per pack to $4.35 per pack. In New York City, which levies its own municipal taxes, the total combined state and local tax on cigarettes increased to $5.85 per pack. According to the New York Post, this pushed the price for one pack of cigarettes up to $14.50 at some New York City stores. Sneaking ciggies is certainly no longer an affordable after-school act of daring for little boys anymore.

There are also the warnings that Congress eventually required on each cigarette package and cigarette ad. [Although I must ask. “Smoking may be hazardous to your health?” Is that really going to stop a teen-ager who believes he or she will live forever?] In addition, tobacco companies can no longer recruit smokers on campus by hiring young folks to distribute free three- and five-cigarette welcome packs to incoming freshmen, as they were doing when I went to school. There’s also the hassle of having to ask for cigarettes to be brought up from behind the counter if you want to buy them. Time was that you could just take what you wanted off any grocery shelf, drugstore shelf, or supermarket shelf in the country and bring them to the counter yourself. And not have to worry about any minimum age requirement, either. Cigarettes also used to be in vending machines everywhere — in the subway, lobbies of movie theaters, restaurants, coffee houses. Also at newsstands, in tobacco shops. (Tobacco shops? Are there such things anymore — except as expensively exotic places to shop where the very rich congregate?) I haven’t seen a cigarette vending machine in years. All this is the result of the right of citizens to breathe clean air finally trumping the right of individuals to smoke wherever and whenever they want.

But probably the main reason that cigarette smoking is dying out in the United States is not that it’s become so societally difficult and economically very expensive to smoke. I think it’s because it’s no longer so smart/’cool/whatever to start. And if you don’t start, you don’t have to stop. The fact is: once you’re really a regular smoker — and by that I mean not just one or two, once in a while — stopping is extraordinarily hard.

I used to work for a law firm that represented Philip Morris in the Northeast. We had all the “scientific” jargon down pat. So I could tell you that nicotine isn’t really “addictive.” Why not? Because it doesn’t require you to ingest more and more and more of it to reach the same level of satiety, as is the case with “addictive” substances. (Think heroin, for instance. As time goes on and your body becomes used to it, you need more and more to “feel” it.) In legal parlance, nicotine is just “habit forming.” That means once you reach a level of satiety — by smoking ten, twenty, thirty, forty cigarettes a day, whatever your individual requirement may be — then that’s all you ever need to feel satisfied. More and you begin to feel sick. (But woe is you if you don’t get your daily fix.)

For a smoker, that’s a distinction without a difference. Once you’re hooked, you’re hooked. Even after you’ve become sick, and have been warned, and are being treated, you’re still hooked — physically and psychologically, and may go on sneaking cigarettes until you die. So it could be that we have much less smoking in the United States than we used to, not just because of the factors I’ve identified above, which discourage the young from starting — especially now that there are newer excitements, like “body art” and piercing and doing drugs, as well as that old and reliable standby, getting drunk. But also because the confirmed smokers of my generation and just afterwards have now got old and/or sick, and are dying out — either from age alone, or lung cancer, or emphysema, or heart disease, or some other smoking-related ultimately fatal condition. And anyone younger who’s seen a friend or family member slowly and painfully dying from inability to pull enough air into the lungs, or from chemotherapy and radiation that fails, is not going to say yes to smoking. Or if already smoking, is going to make renewed and determined efforts to stop, however hard that may be.

But I digress. In 1931 when I was born, my mother and father both smoked. (I was a nicotine baby!) My mother brought the habit with her from Russia; at eighteen, when she arrived on Ellis Island, she was already smoking papyrossi, with long white cardboard mouthpieces built into each cigarette that doubled its length between the fingers. By the time I came along, however, her brand of choice was Chesterfields — then short, and without filters. I remember her tapping each one on the table, to pack the tobacco more firmly in its paper tube, before putting it in her lipsticked mouth to light it. (And then daintily removing a tobacco crumb from her tongue.) Once a pack was opened, it always left more crumbs at the bottom of her pocketbooks. She would shake them out periodically over the kitchen sink. Her possessions were always as clean as her home, inside as well as out.

I also remember that ashtrays and ceramic cigarette boxes were an important decorative element at our house. For show, she had several very beautiful hand-painted but rather small ashtrays from France and Italy — and for everyday use, other larger industrial glass ones with indentations in them, where she could leave her cigarette burning while she went to do something else that required two hands. She carried these bigger ones around with her from room to room; they were less aesthetically pleasing but more serviceable than those kept in the living room for company to use.

My father smoked Lucky Strikes. They came in a dark green package with a red circle outlined in gold and white in the center. I don’t know when he began. I do know he stopped when Lucky Strike Green went to war. (That was the advertising jingle you heard on the radio: “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War!”) The green coloring for the packages was advertised as having been requisitioned for military use late in 1941 or early in 1942. Lucky Strikes, when you could get them, then began to be sold in a white package. They still had their red circle, now rimmed in green, black and white. But they became very scarce, even in their new package, and my father took their near disappearance as an opportunity to stop smoking. He never talked about whether he found stopping difficult or not. Based on my own experience twenty-eight years later, I think he must have been a very light smoker. He was also a man who did what he decided he had to do.

My mother survived the war with whatever unknown brands the local drugstore at the corner was able to procure. She pronounced them terrible, but continued her smoking. She never went beyond twenty a day; usually it was fifteen or sixteen. When the war was over, she abandoned Chesterfields for Parliaments. They were long, had tips which allegedly “filtered” the smoke, and came in an elegant white package. She continued to smoke for almost all of her life. Eventually, in their sixties and seventies, my father complained; as a result, she had to smoke in the bathroom with the window open so he didn’t know (although of course he did; he could smell it) — but she went on smoking until she was 79. At that point she managed to quit all by herself because, she said, she didn’t want to die. Luckily, she escaped every disease then known to be directly related to smoking, and passed away ten years later of colon cancer, probably induced by extremely poor and roughage-free diet choices but now also alleged to be smoking-related. She might as well have gone on smoking until the end; after my father’s death when she was 81, she wouldn’t have had to hide in the bathroom and exhale out the window.

Well! When I went off to college in 1948, all of that was still ahead. Our recently deceased president had smoked — with a long jaunty cigarette holder from Alfred Dunhill clamped between his teeth. Everyone in the movies was smoking. Catch the black-and-white film classics from the forties and fifties on television and you’ll see it: Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford — all romantically wreathed in smoke, all dramatically drawing poisonous tar into their lungs. Was there a movie hero in that period who didn’t place two cigarettes between his own lips by moonlight (preferably on an ocean liner), light both between cupped palms, and then tenderly insert one between the moist parted lips of the heroine?

Clearly, one of the first things I was going to have to learn when I got to campus was how to light up myself.

[More tomorrow.]

THE HUNGARIAN’S QUESTION

My first husband found the Hungarian for me. That is, he found two therapists, the first with an American name and the second with a foreign, almost unpronounceable one. To me, the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe, it was a no-brainer. I chose the the Hungarian.

My first husband was unhappy that I was taking too many naps on late weekend afternoons. He wanted me to stop it. That’s why he had looked up the names of therapists. He had other concerns as well, such as the fact that he had found empty candy wrappers under the seat of our car. I think the naps trumped the candy, though. I had only gained about five pounds and could still fit into my clothes so didn’t need to buy anything new, whereas the naps interfered with my listening to him, playing with him, and generally admiring him in any spare time I might have.

I wouldn’t have dared tell my first husband the naps were to avoid being with him so much. But I could have told him, with equal truthfulness, they were because I was really tired — from working five days a week to support us, making dinners and washing dishes afterwards, cleaning the apartment every Saturday morning, pulling a shopping cart to the A&P five blocks away every Saturday afternoon to bring back a week’s worth of groceries and other necessaries, going ice-skating or playing tennis with him (depending on the season) in Central Park on Sunday mornings, and doing the week’s laundry in the basement machines on Sunday afternoons. [There were other tasks, too, but you get the idea.]

However, my first husband wouldn’t have wanted to hear all that. He felt he was entitled to a wife who could take care of everything without requiring naps because he was a genius who had to spend almost all his time, when he wasn’t ice-skating or playing tennis, writing unpublishable books and therefore needed at least some admiration from someone, especially on late weekend afternoons. Also, he was certifiably handsome, which in his eyes counted for a very great deal.

The Hungarian was about forty and had an office off the lobby in an apartment house on East 86th Street, between Madison and Park. He called me “honeybunch.” I liked that. I very much needed to be someone’s honeybunch. Twice a week after work, I would wait on a chair in the lobby until the previous patient had left. Then I would knock, he would open the door, smile as if he were glad to see me, and say, ” Come in, come in.” After I had taken off my coat, he would add, “Ma, honeybunch. So how are you?” (I think “ma” meant “well” in Hungarian, but I never asked. I was just happy not to have to head home right after work, and to have a place to go that was just for me.)

But honeybunch came later. First, there was the initial visit. The Hungarian asked why I had come. He listened very carefully. I asked if he thought he could help. He said he could help if I did my part.

Then he said he was going to ask me a question which I should answer quickly, not thinking about it — with the very first thing that popped into my mind.

This was the question: “Who are you with when you’re alone?”

[Before I tell you what I answered, ask yourself how you would answer. “Who are you with when you are alone?”]

I said, “What kind of question is that? When I’m alone, I’m with nobody.”

The Hungarian said, “Really? When you’re alone, you’re with nobody?”

“Well, what do you expect me to say?” I asked. “When I’m all alone, of course I’m with nobody. There’s nobody there.”

“But there is somebody there,” he said. “When you’re alone, you’re with yourself.”

It wasn’t just a word game. I was twenty-eight. And to myself I was nobody.

So that’s where we began.

I owe him a lot.

“TOO GOOD FOR EVERY DAY”

Hanging in my closet as I write this, carefully protected from dust and moth by plastic bags, are:

1. One pair of navy blue silk Armani palazzo pants, never worn since I bought them on sale at Neiman Marcus in 2000 even though I have several long-sleeved white silk blouses, also unworn and in plastic bags, purchased especially to wear with the pants if I were ever to wear the pants;

2. One pale greige Armani summer suit with elegant but difficult front closure, bought on sale at the Newbury Street Armani store in Boston in 2001 and worn twice to client Board of Directors meetings while I still practiced law. One daughter-in-law now suggests jacket could still be worn over sleeveless black dress in late spring and early fall, but perhaps doesn’t realize that sleeveless dresses are not (or should not be) for eighty-two year-old mothers-in-law, who in any event no longer attend events where Armani jackets wouldn’t look out of place;

3. A St. John sequined knit jacket (color: peach), with matching knit short skirt, long skirt, and floor-length pants (skirts and pants without sequins), purchased reluctantly at Neiman Marcus to wear as mother of groom on two separate occasions in the summer of 2003 — short skirt in June for younger son’s wedding, long skirt early in September for older son’s wedding. Pants never worn. Skirts worn only once each. Price: $2500 (plus tax) in 2003 dollars for whole kit and caboodle. Too expensive to give away/donate/throw away. Too good for every day.

There’s more, of course. And I haven’t even begun with the unworn shoes, unused handbags, leather gloves, three large silk scarves still in their lovely Hermes orange boxes, and even never-worn hats in my possession. But here’s a good place to stop and consider “too good for every day.”

This expression, and the conduct it purports to justify, came from my parents in my youth. They had both gone a long time with hardly any possessions at all. In their youth, they had with great difficulty escaped war, revolution, inflation and penury only to arrive in a new land where at first they had to scramble to earn even enough to eat and rent a room. It took quite a while before sales at the seductive department stores in New York that lined Fifth Avenue from 34th Street to 59th Street were within their reach.

Accordingly, they always said of their own new clothes and shoes, especially if “expensive,” that they were too good to wear every day. Such purchases were taken out of their boxes, tried on once more at home to make sure there had been no mistake, and then carefully put away, with their tags still hanging, in protective plastic bags. The tags and bags made the “good” clothes hard just to slip off their hangers and put on, even if it was a special occasion. “Good” shoes also had to be extracted from their bags, and the shoe trees removed, before wearing. Better, and easier, to wear the same old comfortable things all the time. That way you wouldn’t spoil the “good” ones.

Their philosophy could not be applied so rigorously to purchases for me while I was a child because I was always outgrowing my clothes; if everything new had been saved for “good,” I would have had nothing to wear. That said, one dress and one pair of shoes were always designated as not for every day.

It did apply, however, to dishes and flatware and tableware. After I grew up and my mother took a job at an upscale department store in Los Angeles where she enjoyed an employee discount, she acquired a whole set of fragile Noritake china for twelve. It had a dainty silver-edged rim of delicate pale blue flowers and was nearly translucent when held up to the light. But it was perhaps only once or twice used on an actual table, when a guest my parents considered sufficiently important came to dinner. Moreover, the Noritake took up too much room, and might be exposed to too much knocking about, on the kitchen shelves. It therefore needed a fine china cabinet of its own, which was duly purchased for a very good price at an estate sale in a wealthy suburb and placed against the wall in the dining alcove. Once in the cabinet, God forbid the Noritake be actually taken out, eaten on and have to be washed. A piece might break in the sink — and then it wouldn’t be a complete set, to be admired through the glass doors of the china cabinet.

Need I add there was eventually a silver-plated Revere flatware service for twelve in its own velvet-lined mahogany box, to be used with the Noritake if the Noritake were ever used? (Sterling was forever beyond my mother’s reach. Not that she wouldn’t have reached if she could.) And there were odd bits of crystal glassware, from which my parents seldom drank. (Never a whole matching set, alas!) There was also a shelf in the linen cabinet for fine linen tablecloths, with matching linen napkins. And napkin rings. The tablecloths came in various sizes, for variously sized tables, all but one of which my parents never owned. Thank goodness my mother did not go in for cut glass, a mania in which my second mother-in-law overindulged.

[I once also had a sister-in-law, acquired through late marriage to a former brother-in-law, who not only put plastic covers on her “good” upholstered furniture, but also plastic covers on the allegedly “antique” wood tables and cabinets in the living room. I know she was saving everything from cigarette burns and circles made by wet whiskey glasses. But saving it all for what? For whom?]

I understand now that all this saving was like saving money in the bank. It was to have for a rainy day. It was because “we may never again be able to afford another like it.” Some of that is likely what keeps the Armanis and St. Johns and Ferragamo shoes, and virgin Hermes scarves and Longchamps handbags safely in my possession — although I almost certainly will never again have any occasion or opportunity to flash such finery. For a very long time in my life I had absolutely no discretionary money at all, and then during a relatively brief period of lawyering (after paying off all debt) I did have the money to buy these very nice things, and now I don’t and never will again.

“Wear them, use them!” says Bill. I know he’s right — at least about the shoes and scarves and handbags. (Armani at Whole Foods or walking along the Delaware-Raritan canal might be a bit much.) So what if I can’t replace them when they wear out? I’m wearing out too, although I hate to admit it. I might wear out before the shoes and bags.

That’s what happened to my parents. When my mother died, I found two double-wide closets full of nearly unworn clothing that was too good for every day. Hanger after hanger of immaculately preserved black and navy and grey coats and dresses the Duchess of Windsor would not have turned up her nose at. Half a dozen pair of Italian pumps made of beautiful glove leather, much too small for me and ten years out of style. Bags, scarves, kid leather gloves in eight neutral colors, fine hemstitched batiste handkerchiefs, some embroidered by hand with her monogram: “M.”

I kept three of the handbags (one was a Mark Cross), some of the scarves, the gloves (although I never wear gloves until it’s too cold to wear my mother’s unlined ones), her few pieces of real jewelry (one of which I had given her) — and also one red sweater that must have been much too big for her but did fit me, because it had kept a faint trace of the fragrance she favored. All the rest I had to give away to the nursing aides who worked at the assisted-living facility where she spent her last weeks. What else could I do with it?

A daughter-in-law accepted the box of Revere silverplate. I don’t think she’s ever used it though. Maybe it’s too good for every day? The linen and napkin rings I donated to the Vietnam Vets. Neither daughter-in-law wanted the Noritake. I don’t either; it’s not what I would have chosen if I had to choose a china pattern. But there it is, taking up space in my kitchen cabinet. Sometimes I even use it, usually when we have more than two or three other people for dinner — because I myself have no “good” dishes. It’s so clearly not my style that when I do set it on the table, I have to keep myself from explaining that it’s my mother’s. Unfortunately, so far there’s been no breakage; it’s still a complete set.

I’m also working on wearing the Hermes scarves and carrying the Longchamps handbags more often. Really I am. The Armanis and St. Johns? Habits of mind are hard to break. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about them tomorrow.

A PLAYFUL POST

A propos the speed with which time passes as one gets older (discussed in yesterday’s blog post about Marcia Angell), it seems only yesterday I bought some little-kiddy toys to have in the house for when my children might come visiting from out of town with their brand-new little boys. Bill also contributed:

[You can tell we both like red. You should see our living room!]

Yes, we also had ring stacks, and shape-sorter boxes, and baby books. But the cars are more photogenic, so let them suffice by way of illustration. We did enjoy a couple of visits. But mostly the parents (my children) brought their own toys. And then suddenly, the two little toddler boys weren’t toddlers. They wore bigger size clothes, and played with other kinds of toys.

Yes, it was suddenly. Okay, on the calendar five or six years. But I had barely gotten used to the idea of grandchildren when — before we knew it — they weren’t interested in pushing stylized cars around on the floor anymore. (Although they did like matchbox cars for a while.) We gave away the ring stacks and shape-sorter boxes and baby books to neighbors who were expecting.

But I couldn’t give away the two red cars. I mean, it was only yesterday. So now they sit on my bookcase, waiting. (Not, apparently, for another little toddler. Both of my children have assured me they are not going to provide anything like that.) One car is next to an ashtray which somehow or other made its way from a hotel in Firenze onto the plane with us. (Don’t tell, please.)

The other keeps company with a small leather cup and even smaller leather box from Italy (both also from Firenze, judging by the gold imprint inside the little cup), that my mother acquired with her employee discount at J.W. Robinson’s in the 1960s.

Is a retired lady lawyer’s bookcase any place for small red toy cars?

Actually, I do know a little boy who likes toy cars. He lives with me. However, he said I should keep the two red ones in my office, because he already has two of his own. They’re Deux Chevaux — modeled on a real Deux Chevaux (two-horsepower car) he used to drive when he was a very young man in Switzerland, long before he became a little boy in Princeton. We walked all over Montpellier (France) finding them for him. Now he has them in his own office at home.

He also has other wheeled objects to play with in his office. This one turned up at a street fair in Lisbon:

And if we cast an eye around, we find other kinds of toys as well: Kyoshi dolls from Japan, pre-Columbian figures from Guatemala. [And Freud and Einstein to figure it all out.] The Modigliani you’ll just have to overlook. I should have removed it before taking the picture, but I suppose you could consider it another sort of toy for boys.

In fact, when my grandchildren come to visit these days, they make a beeline for the stairs. “Let’s go play in Bill’s office!” they cry.

No wonder Bill never gets any work done in there!

MARCIA ANGELL ON LIFE IN HER SEVENTIES

As far as I know, Marcia Angell is no relation of Roger Angell, who recently wrote of life in his nineties for The New Yorker (as I noted last week in this blog). The identity of last name is simply a happy coincidence — happy for me and maybe you, because both of these people have had something of interest to say to those of us who are getting older. Marcia Angell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. She is also both a physician and an author, whose principal areas of investigative interest are the pharmaceutical industry and end-of-life issues. Last year, she was seventy-four.

In the May 9, 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books, she reviewed Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, a book by George E. Vaillant (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), which summarizes a study of 268 Harvard sophomores — at that point in time all male — who had been selected from the top of their classes in 1939 through 1944. Although the original aim of the study was to determine what constitutes the best possible health (which it was assumed that these highly privileged youths would possess), it was later broadened to identify which early characteristics predict a successful life. Most of the survivors are now in their nineties, which makes the Harvard Grant Study one of the longest and exhaustively documented studies of adult development in existence.

In the course of her review, Angell raised several interesting points, one of which is that the study showed that the marriages of the participants were happier after seventy. She further agreed with Vailliant (the author) in his belief that “the empty nest is often more of a blessing than a burden.” Then she added an additional speculation of her own, which my own observations support. (I do believe that, with exceptions, men are less resilient than women, especially as they age.)

A more speculative possibility: it seems to me that old age takes many men almost by surprise: it sneaks up on them, and is all the more disturbing for that. In contrast, women are all too aware of aging, starting with their first gray hair or wrinkle. By the time they’re in their fifties, they’re well accustomed to the losses that come with age. That may make them better able to help and support their husbands as the men find that having been a master of the universe is no protection against old age.

However, it’s her last four paragraphs which led me to save a clipping of her review for almost a year. Except for her interest in now learning Italian and taking a course in astronomy, I ‘m almost completely on the same page with her. (Our paths diverge only at her last thirteen words.)

Like Vaillant, I am in my seventies, so a book about aging holds special interest for me. Ultimately, old age is bad news, of course, and I would rather be young. But like many of the Grant Study men, I find offsetting advantages, one of which is a sharper sense of what is important in life. Perhaps it is analogous to Samuel Johnson’s observation that ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ Anyway, I believe I have a clearer sense of what matters and what doesn’t.

My sources of pleasure are different, too, and more varied. For example, I take great pleasure in beautiful vistas, something I did not when I was young. Ordinary daily activities, like reading the paper and discussing the news with my husband over breakfast, have taken on an added pleasure beyond the activities themselves, just because of the ritual. Although I continue to be active professionally, I am less concerned with maintaining a professional presence, and I look forward to learning Italian, taking a course in astronomy, and finally reading War and Peace (I have no interest in cultivating an actual garden).

But even though my microcosm is in pretty good shape, I have become much more pessimistic about the macrocosm — the state of the world. We face unsustainable population growth, potentially disastrous climate change, depletion of natural resources, pollution of the oceans, increasing inequality, both within and across countries, and violent tribalism of all forms, national and religious. Dealing with these problems will take a lot more than marginal reforms, and I don’t see that coming. Particularly in the United States, but also in the rest of the world, big money calls the shots, and it is most concerned with the next quarter’s profits. Although I’ve spent much of my life writing and speaking in opposition to the corrupting influence of money on medicine, I find doing so increasingly pointless because it seems futile. Worrying about the world my daughters and grandsons will inhabit is what I like least about aging.

Nearly everyone over a certain age observes that time seems to pass much more quickly, and I am no exception. So extreme is the acceleration that I wonder whether it isn’t a result of some physical law, not just a perception. Maybe it’s akin to Einstein’s discovery that as speed increases, time slows. Perhaps this is the reverse — as our bodies slow, time speeds up. In any case, the rush of my days is in stark contrast to the magically endless days of my girlhood. I also find it hard to remember that I’m no longer young, despite the physical signs, since I’m the same person and in many ways have the same feelings. It’s particularly disquieting to recall that many people and places I knew no longer exist, except in my memories. Still, although I dislike the fact that my days are going so quickly, that’s the way it is, and I’ve had a good run. Like the men in the Grant Study.

It’s the “that’s the way it is, and I’ve had a good run” part I can’t agree with. I don’t find that consoling at all. It’s rather like telling a hungry person that he’s had plenty of good juicy steaks in his time, and now it’s someone else’s turn.

But then, I was always a sore loser.

NOT JUST A NAME ON A CARD

When in a feeble effort to throw things out, I go through souvenirs of trips Bill and I have made together since our first one to Lipsi and Turkey in the summer of 2002, I frequently find business cards given to us by people of whom I have only a scrap of recollection and whom we will certainly never meet again. Out they go: the card of a businessman with whom we chatted for twenty minutes in the Istanbul airport almost twelve years ago. (He thought digital technology was going to be big.) The card of a couple met on a train from Lugano to Geneva, who were going on to Paris. (The husband, significantly older than the wife, was the youngest of seven Jewish siblings, the other six of whom had all been exterminated by the Nazis during their occupation of France.) The card of a youngish man who taught English at the University of Vermont and was staying overnight at a bed and breakfast in Antigua, Guatemala in 2005. (He was moving on the next day to a speck of village on the shores of Lake Atitlan, where he had a cottage and his neighbor in an adjoining cottage for part of the year was Joyce Maynard, who in her youth had had an affair with Salinger.)

But there is a man whose card I would keep, if he had given us one. We spoke with him over a bottle of Makedonia white wine — he did most of the talking — for only two hours or so one evening in the late summer of 2002. He did offer his email address, and later (by email) his street address and phone numbers. However, we never saw him again, although we subsequently exchanged a couple of emails and he also sent us two books, one by someone else for which he had made several drawings, and the other a book of cartoons he himself had done ten or twelve years before we’d met, because we’d asked to see it.

That man’s name, and the Italian e-mail address he gave us, which may or may not still be his, remain on my computer contact list. His name, the e-mail address, a street address in Milan, one cellphone and two landline numbers also remain in a leather-bound address book I’ve had since 2002. Would any of this data lead us to him if we tried to get in touch? I have no idea. We don’t try. (What would we say?) But I don’t throw any of it out either. We might not recognize him if we were to meet him again, but we feel — I feel — we know him. He’s a friend. Because of the two hours, and the book. Sometimes life is funny like that. And who knows?

Actually, he was the one who first spoke to us. It was during our initial visit to Lipsi, a very small Greek island in the Dodecanese — a one week exploratory stay that led to four more summers there. On the fifth day of the week we took a boat tour of five speck-sized surrounding islands. Ten euros per person: what could be bad? The boat was the Margarita, the islands were Makronissi, Aspronissi, Tiganaki, Marathi and Arki. You could only get out at Marathi and Arki (and we did, but more of that another time); the other three were rocky promontories good for photography and for swimming near (but not too near). Swimming off the side of small boats was not for us. We did do a bit of photographing, though. Bill took one of me (and the arms and legs and back of some of the many Italian tourists crowding the Margarita):

Me, and parts of Italian tourists. On the Margarita, August 2002.

I took one of a lonely-looking little boy sitting by himself:

And we both photographed the rocks and the water:

But mostly we did what both of us do best: We talked with any people who spoke a language in which we could function. On the way back after lunch and siesta on the sand at Marathi, our talk was mainly with one French couple, because neither of us speak Italian or Greek (the languages of perhaps 90% of the other tourists on the Margarita that day), but I can get by in French and Bill speaks it fairly fluently (although, say the French, with a Geneva accent). And what people who meet far from home tend to talk about, in an effort to make some connection with each other, is where else they or their families have lived or traveled. So it was with the French husband and me. We cobbled together a conversation about what had brought his parents to France from their native Latvia and what had brought my parents to New York from their native Russia. (The connection was that both his parents and my mother had come from Vilna, now Vilnius — once Russian, then Polish, then Latvian, but the same city through all the changes of nationality.) Then the Margarita reached land, we all disembarked, and we made an appointment to meet the French couple for supper at a waterside taverna the following evening, which would be our last on Lipsi.

The harbor at Lipsi, August 2002.

As we stood uncertainly on the dock, not sure whether or not to head back to our not entirely satisfactory room to clean up right away, a man spoke to us, somewhat apologetically, in fluent German-accented English. He had been on the Margarita, he said, and had overheard my conversation with the French husband. He asked if I still lived in New York. I explained that I didn’t (those were my Boston years), but had grown up there and knew it very well. It seemed he had traveled extensively in the Western Hemisphere, had lived in the United States for a while, enjoyed his time there, and liked Americans very much. He wondered if we could have a drink together after supper. His wife and son were somewhat tired from the five-island excursion. They had actually done all the swimming offered at all three rocky promontories. (Quite coincidentally, the boy I had inadvertently photographed was his son, who resembled his Italian mother.) So they wouldn’t be joining us, but if we didn’t mind….

Of course we didn’t mind. And that’s how, later that evening, we got to know at least a little something about a tall, good-looking man from Switzerland who was then about fifty, and who had fallen in love with a woman from Milan, married her, and now lived there himself.

Caspar, c.1990 — about twelve years before we met him. [Photo credit: Caspar Frei.]

Caspar was primarily a cartoonist — a political one, for the most part. He sold his work throughout Europe. (He also knew five languages.) I can’t recall everything we talked about that evening, although I do know that conversations with Bill and me tend to be one-sided, since we are both professionally very good at asking questions. So what I mainly remember is that we soon got down to Caspar’s thoughts about the meaning of life, whether it had any purpose, and if so what purpose. And after that, we reached his feelings — of being split between longing for life in Switzerland, where he had been born and spent his childhood and where his mother and family still lived, and his connection to Milan, where his wife — who was a psychotherapist — had family, including a problematic mother for whom she felt responsible, as well as a referral network and clients who depended on her, and where his child was in school and growing up Italian. When they married, they had initially settled in Milan, he said, because he could work anywhere and she could not. But now he felt torn by competing ties, and saw no resolution….

If Caspar ever sees this account of my memory of that night, I hope he forgives me the details. They may be wrong. It was one evening twelve years ago. But I’m pretty sure I’ve got the thrust of it right. Life is hard. Life is painful. Whatever we do, we hurt someone we love. Whatever we do, we hurt ourselves. And sometimes we can say to strangers what must not be said to those who are not strangers.

He and his wife and son were leaving the next day. We never saw him again. (We never saw the French couple again, either. They stood us up.) He sent his two books though, and for a while we discussed by email our coming to Florence and Milan for a visit the following winter. But Bill and I were still working — at jobs that didn’t permit spontaneous flights to Italy to check in with new friends. So nothing came of it. Several years after that, he was in Florida on business and had a day free before his return flight. Knowing it would likely be impossible, he asked anyway if we could meet him there. Of course, we couldn’t. (I also suspect he had far more discretionary money than we did, the kind of money that can make things happen right away, if they must. But we never discussed anything like that.)

However, I would be leaving you with a very lopsided view of him if I didn’t also disclose some of the contents of the second book he sent us. I’ve omitted that part of his work which is most bitter and mordant, and also whatever requires knowing German, a knowledge I lack. (Although I did manage to translate, roughly, what the man on the book cover is writing to his beloved.)

[As the cover notes — and you should too — all cartoons that follow are by Caspar Frei.]

My love, believe me! These words, from deep in my heart…..

Some are cute, or sweet:

Some have more bite:

And some make a trenchant point:

This is Bill’s favorite:

And these are what? Swiss whimsy?

After I thought of doing this piece, I went right to Google — mainly to make sure nothing bad had happened since 2002. Unfortunately everything I found is in German, including a You Tube five-minute segment of Caspar explaining something or other about illustrating a children’s book. It was made in 2009, and he looks considerably older than in the 1990 photograph above, or even than I remember him looking in 2002. On the other hand, I did decipher another link that describes him as “Swiss-Italian” and says he now lives both in Switzerland and Milan, so perhaps he has found some closure for at least one aspect of his difficulties now that twelve years have gone by.

But Bill and I don’t really know the man in the You Tube segment. The one whose name and addresses and telephone numbers I keep is the one who wrote us a note soon after our meeting:

I wish we had had more time to talk too, Caspar. Maybe someday there’ll be a time when we have more time…..

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN, PART 3

[…continued from previous two posts…]

Suddenly Sarah had less than a month to get ready. A tiny island. That meant beaches. And a bathing suit. She had not bought, or worn, a bathing suit since her sons were still coming home for the summer. She could not face her aging white thighs in a Saks or Neiman mirror and ordered one black “tankini,” whatever that was, from the Lands End catalog. One, she calculated, should be enough. She still owned an ancient polka-dot cotton suit she could bring in case the “tankini” didn’t dry overnight.

Jake caught her trying on the tankini in the seclusion of the bedroom. “Whatcha doing, sweetie pie?” he asked.

“Shoo!” She pushed him gently back out the bedroom door with one hand while clutching a pillow against her lower half with the other. “Don’t look! It’s supposed to be a surprise!” One of the good things about living alone, she thought as she leaned against the closed door, was that you could do body and wardrobe maintenance in privacy. Why did Jake always need so much togetherness? The following week, she hurried to Saks on a lunch hour for tanning spray. Old thighs looked better brown than white.

Jake inspected Sarah’s suitcases in the basement and pronounced them too big.

“You don’t want to bring too much stuff,” Jake said.

“Nobody’s going to help you get your luggage on and off those Greek boats,” Jake said.

“You need a new bag,” Jake said.

“I’ll come with you,” Jake said.

They went to Luggage World, where she bought a red Victorinex roll-on not much smaller than the ones she already had and not cheap either. She was pretty sure she could have managed without this purchase. But Jake, as she was beginning to be aware, enjoyed shopping. While they were there, he bought two small black leather bags for himself. They were the size of toiletry kits.

“What do you need those for?” asked Sarah.

“Nothing at the moment,” he said. “I just like bags. And you never can tell when an extra one will come in handy.”

Odd. But then Sarah’s mother had been a collector of boxes. After they got Sarah’s new red Victorinex home, Jake decided he liked it so much he went back to the store by himself the next day and bought a slightly smaller grey one exactly like it. He also bought two black leather luggage tags.

The two Victorinexes — bigger red and smaller grey — stood against the bedroom wall with their tags on, waiting to be packed.

“They look good side by side together, ” Jake said.

“Just like us,” Jake said.

He hugged her. Maybe it really would be a honeymoon.

Sarah made packing lists and folded her clothing into neat piles. She spread towels on the duvet to protect it and opened the two Victorinexes on the bed — grey on Jake’s side, red on hers. Jake laid two changes of underwear and socks, two clean shirts, a pair of sandals, three black swim briefs, and an extra pair of jeans on the towel next to the grey Victorinex.

“That’s all you’re taking? For three weeks?”

“It’s very casual on those islands,” he said. “Besides, we can wash things out. Or buy stuff.” He added two t-shirts to the clothes on the bed and began zipping smallish hard objects into little black bags, which he zipped into slightly bigger black bags.

“I’m not doing laundry on vacation.” Sarah counted out eleven pairs of panties. (Who would know if she wore underwear for two days? Plus she would have a pair on for traveling.) The panties were full-size cotton briefs. (Sarah didn’t buy bikini panties any more; they cut a line you could see through her clothes in the rear view mirror.) Together with four bras (two black, two white), all those panties made quite a bundle. And the pear shape of the Victorinex was not as accommodating as a rectangular bag. Why had they left the packing till the final evening? Why was he distracting her by rushing back and forth between the second bedroom, which she had given over to him as a study, and the master bedroom? She needed to concentrate, or she would leave something out. Correction. She would have to leave something out. The red Victorinex wouldn’t close. Even when she sat on it.

“How many dresses for dinner?” she asked.

“None. You don’t have to dress.”

“And what about a sweater?”

“In Greece? In August?”

“Just asking.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“Don’t get nasty.” She stared at his side of the bed. He had built a heap of bulging zipped-up black bags and books next to the grey Victorinex. “What is all that stuff?”

“Things I’ll need.”

“Like what?”

“Like a short-wave. My camera. Extra pairs of glasses. First-aid kit. Notebooks. Clothesline. Reading material. Other things.”

“What other things?”

“Never mind. You’ll find out when we get there. Maybe.”

“You won’t fit it all in.”

“So I’ll bring a second bag.”

At midnight, they brought up some of Sarah’s old luggage from the basement. At one o’clock, four bags stood fully packed by the front door. At two, Sarah got out of bed to check that their passports and tickets and insurance papers were all in her handbag. “Did you bring enough money?” she whispered into his good ear after she had slid back under the duvet. “Mmmmmm,” he said. She wasn’t sure he’d heard. Hopefully, there would be ATMs on this tiny island they had found.

[End of chapter one.]

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[The island was real. Its name was Lipsi — Lipsoi or Lipsos, if you want to be Greek about it. Sometimes I miss it, although it was never really our island. We were just renters. Even in the novella, where I was going to call it Mythos, it would turn out not to be Jake and Sarah’s island. They would learn by the end of the novella that the island of their own they had set out to find was the island of two they were making together. And that at their age, they were stuck there — whether they liked it or not — for richer or poorer, till death did them part, and had better make the best of it. But that’s too dark for a chick lit novella. And also not so fun to write.

So you’ve reached the end of Jake and Sarah. However, we may take some day tours of Lipsi, you and I together. Maybe this spring. Or summer. If spring and summer ever come.]

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN, PART 2

[…continued from yesterday…]

Getting away for three weeks was no problem for Jake; he simply informed his patients that he would be gone in August and then found another shrink to cover for him in emergencies. Sarah had to make more elaborate and extensive preparations. Although the lawyers at her firm were supposed to take four weeks off every year (“We work hard but play hard,” was the mantra intoned for the benefit of incoming associates) — taking the four weeks, or even three weeks, all together was just not done. (Suppose a client needed you!) The customary modus operandi was a week here, two weeks there — as each lawyer’s practice, and annualized billable hours, permitted.

Sarah began announcing her vacation plans in May. She announced them more frequently — at the coffee station, in the womens’ john — in June. She made sure none of her cases was headed for trial over the summer and found colleagues to handle what needed to be done while she was away (thereby incurring several heavy IOUs). In July she stopped taking on new matters and began to emphasize, at firm lunches, how difficult this tiny island was to get to. (She didn’t mention Turkey.) She explained that Greece was seven hours ahead of Boston, that she didn’t know if there was a telephone available to her on the island anyway, and that she understood from Jake mail could take as long as six weeks to arrive — much of that period consumed between the time it got to Athens and arrived at its final destination — so that she would, as a practical matter, be unreachable during the time she was away. “You’re so lucky!” exclaimed Mabel, the lawyer in the office adjoining hers. “I always have too much on my plate for more than a week in Chatham!”

Sarah considered this comment to be less about three weeks away from the office in Greece than about the arrival of Jake in her life. Mabel was eighteen years younger than Sarah, in the process of a drawn-out divorce, and frantically looking for a replacement husband. To her, Sarah’s near-miraculous acquisition of a new man represented a major triumph over the adversities of life for the older woman, and Sarah saw no reason to disabuse her. Maybe Jake wasn’t absolutely perfect, she told herself, but she was pretty lucky. How many women of seventy were going off to a small Greek island for a romantic tryst?

Privately, however, as August grew closer, she became less sure she was doing the right thing. Could three weeks away be a professional mistake? She needed this job. If only she could just quit — and play the piano, travel, cook, maybe write, not always be hurrying to make deadlines, attend meetings, defend depositions. The practice of law took a lot out of you. Even with a four-day work week, she always felt tired, and usually spent most of Friday just resting up.

But if she quit, what would she live on? Sarah had come late to the law, after marriages to two impecunious husbands who had nothing to share at divorce time. Social Security would barely cover her monthly mortgage and condo association payments. And she certainly couldn’t count on Jake’s contribution as a basis for retirement when — if she were honest with herself — they didn’t really know each other that well. Not the way she knew her husbands by the time they had parted.

Then it became too late to cancel without losing a lot of money. And Jake would never forgive her if she put the firm before him. (“The firm?” she could hear him saying.) She would just have to apply herself seriously when she came back, and people would soon forget she’d been away for nearly a month, and then everything would be all right.

“So. How does it feel to go away for three weeks with this man?” asked Feldman, long, thin and wrinkled. She had been seeing Feldman before work on Wednesdays for fifteen years. No one who knew about this could understand why she was still forking out good money for talk therapy now that she was long divorced.

“I don’t fork out anymore,” she would say. “It’s Medicare’s turn.” Or: “I can’t leave a husband until I have a shrink, and I can’t leave a shrink until I have a husband.” Or (sometimes): “You know how Catholics go to confession once a week and feel better afterwards? Well, here’s a place where I can go once a week and say absolutely anything and it’s okay. I can just unload. Where else in the world can you do that?”

That didn’t mean Feldman wasn’t often annoying. His reluctance to say anything substantive, for instance. (Was he just going to sit there? “Of course,” he always replied.) And his questions — straight out of some How To Be A Shrink book. (“How does that make you feel?”) Once, during the long lonely period preceding the arrival of Jake in her life, she had begun a session by exclaiming, without being asked, that she felt like shit. He regarded her impassively. “How does it feel to say that?” he asked.

“How does it feel to say I feel like shit? Come on, Feldman!”

“How does it feel?” (Without even a smile.)

And now he was at it again. “Jake,” she said. “His name is Jake. Why are you calling him ‘this man?'”

“There have been other men, no? The two husbands? Two old boyfriends, recycled? So when I ask today, my question is about this man.”

But Sarah already knew Feldman couldn’t admit he might be wrong. “It feels fine to go away with Jake for three weeks, thank you for asking.”

“You have been very picky about your previous suitors,” he persisted. “You go fishing for a new man from time to time, reel him into the boat, inspect him as he dangles at the end of your line, then flip him back into the sea. How is this one different?”

Suitors? What suitors? Those few pitiful specimens who had answered her previous ads? The one seeking a woman willing to encase herself in soft rubber garments at bedtime? The one whose wife had mid-stage Alzheimers, but was safely out of the way on Gardiners’ Island under the care of a round-the-clock nurse’s aide? The one with an ileostomy bag and an adult daughter in a state psychiatric hospital?

“Oh, Feldman,” said Sarah, “stop already. If there’s any problem, it’s not with the man, it’s with the three weeks away from the office.”

Feldman took her mention of “three weeks” as an opportunity to change the subject. “You understand the time you will be taking off, the three hours we will not meet during your weeks away — those are your hours, and you will be responsible for them,” he said. He meant that he expected her to pay for the three sessions she would miss. They had had this conversation every year she had gone on vacation. Usually, it had been for only a week at a time; needy, and therefore in a weak bargaining position, she had always paid. The two Greek tours had taken longer, and each of those years she had paid for two missed sessions, resentfully but without any sense that arguing would do any good. This time she dug her heels in. She was on a tight budget for the vacation as it was.

“How come you don’t give me make-up sessions when you go away on vacation?” she demanded.

He looked surprised. “That is a separate issue entirely,” he said. “When I go away, you are of course free to go away yourself.”

Now there’s a dumb argument, she thought. “It isn’t a separate issue at all. If you’re entitled to a vacation from me, with the result that I lose out on therapy, then I’m entitled to a vacation from you, even though you lose out on income. Fair is fair, Feldman.”

“Are you saying you won’t pay?” His voice quavered a little.

“I don’t pay anyway,” said Sarah. “Not any more. Maybe Medicare can pay for the missed sessions.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Feldman. “Medicare pays for treatment, not absence from treatment.”

“Then why should I pay for missed sessions if Medicare won’t? Tell you what, Feldman.” She had him now, she was sure of it. “Let’s leave it up to you, not me. If, as you say, the missed hours are ‘mine,’ I won’t rat on you if you bill Medicare for them. And if you decide you’re not entitled to Medicare payments for treatment you didn’t provide, that’s obviously okay with me, too.”

Aha! He was slowly nodding agreement. Had she just connived in an act of insurance fraud? Not really, she decided. Not by merely making the suggestion. After all, she didn’t know what he was actually going to do.

“Of course he’s going to bill for his time!” said Jake that night at dinner. A piece of eggplant from the ratatouille they were eating fell on the tablemat as he waved his fork in the air for emphasis. Jake’s table manners had deteriorated since he had begun to feel at home in her condo.

Sarah reached over to pick up the eggplant — she hated mess — and put it in her mouth. The mat now had a stain. She sighed. Neither of her husbands had been neat eaters either. “How do you know that? Why can’t you admit he might do the right thing?”

“He needs the money.”

“He can’t be that hard up,” said Sarah. “He’s one of the two best psychiatrists in all of New England!”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jake.

“No, really. I asked around before I started with him. And I can never change the time of the appointment. He’s always full up.”

Jake laid his dirty knife on the mat to explain. “I don’t care how busy he is. Psychiatrists aren’t like orthopedists or dermatologists. Those guys have a revolving door: patient in, patient out, new patient in, etcetera. But Feldman sees a fixed number of patients for years, including you. He can’t start with someone new for the three weeks you’re away, because when you return he has to give you back your hour. And then what’s he supposed to do with the extra patient? So a loss of income when you’re on vacation is just that. A dead loss.”

Sarah hated not to win arguments. “He shouldn’t count on it then. Why can’t he assume each of his patients will be away a certain amount of time and average his income over the year, instead of anticipating a specific accounts receivable every month?”

“Why didn’t you ask him that?” said Jake. “While you were at it, you might also have explained to the poor bastard what he was supposed to do about his monthly checks to her?” He jabbed his finger in the direction of the floor.

(The ex-Mrs. Feldman lived beneath Sarah. They did not get on. She objected repeatedly to Sarah playing the phonograph. She complained loudly about Sarah practicing the piano in the evening. They had eventually worked out their differences with the help of the condo trustees, but accidental meetings in the stairwell or the laundry room remained chilly. Such being the case, Sarah welcomed those occasional instances when the mailman mixed up their mail, thus affording her the opportunity to inspect the outside of the ex-Mrs. Feldman’s correspondence. In the days before Medicare began paying for her therapy, she had once even found in her mailbox an envelope addressed to Linda Feldman in the familiar, and highly idiosyncratic, handwriting which appeared on her monthly invoices for professional services rendered by Martin Feldman, M.D. She couldn’t resist holding it up to the light before putting it on the ledge below the mailbox labeled Ms. Linda Feldman. There was a check inside. Alimony! Her money was leaving the building only to come right back again. She was personally supporting that odious woman. She couldn’t read the amount of the check, though.)

“Ah yes, that,” said Sarah.

“He’ll be working till she drops,” said Jake. “Or he does. How old is she? How old is he? Over seventy-five?”

“Why are you so sympathetic to him all of a sudden?” asked Sarah. “I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I don’t not like him,” said Jake. “I just don’t like his method. This silent Freudian business. Besides, what do you need him for, now you have me?”

Sarah did not want to go there. “Must we discuss Feldman’s financial difficulties?” She pushed her chair back to clear the table. His place mat would have to go to the cleaners. She should probably get the kind you could just wipe down. “Dessert is frozen yogurt or grapes. Which?”

[…to be concluded tomorrow….]

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN, PART I

[Bill and I met in April 2001. I was by then already committed to a fifteen-day summer tour of the Greek mainland, plus Corfu, with a woman friend. So Bill and I didn’t begin to travel together until the following summer. We thought we might go back to Greece. I had enjoyed my 2001 mainland tour, and he had a twenty-year history of summer vacations on Lesbos with his second wife and his two children from that marriage. Obviously, Lesbos was out. (At least as far as I was concerned.) But we found a tiny island in the Dodecanese — the smallest of the twelve — and booked an exploratory room for a week, to be followed by a two-week tour of Turkey. The outcome of the Greek week was that we returned to that little out-of-the-way island for chunks of four more summers. The year I was on sabbatical, we even stayed for a two-and-a-half month chunk.

During that time, I began writing a novella about our visits there. It was going to be called “An Island of Their Own.” I never got past the first chapter. Bill and I learned a lot about each other during those summers, since we were together all the time, without the distractions of work and connections to other people and family. As a result, I was then really too close to what was going on with us to write about it with any understanding. Now I’m too far away: the Jake and Sarah in the novella have gone on to another stage of their life together and I’m no longer interested in the early stages of their relationship. However, I still have some nearly illegible notes. Some not very good photographs. Some ouzo-fueled observations. And that first chapter. Which may just be too fun to throw away.

So I’m starting there. “Island of Their Own” will run in three parts: today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. But I’m not changing it back to the first person. It reads better the way it is. Just know that there won’t be any more of Jake and Sarah after their opening chapter. Jake and Sarah are geriatric chick lit. And although I can mimic the tone for a while, I’m not really into chick lit. If I go on with my recollections of the island from time to time, and I may, you’ll get it straight after this first bit, the way Bill and I experienced it, without fuzzing the line between what really happened and what didn’t by telling you about two other people who exist only in the words I used to conjure them up.]

*************************

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN

When Sarah met Jake for the first time in the Rialto bar at the Charles Hotel, she was sixty-nine and three-quarters and he was seventy-three. He said later that he had sized her up as not over sixty and was surprised when she told him the truth. (“Why should I lie?” she had asked. “You’d find out sooner or later.”) The truth made no difference. As soon he saw her walk in, looking slender and French in her well-cut black pants and little black velvet beret, he said to himself, “That’s for me!”

For her part, she thought he was probably younger than she was. He was slim, had nice shoulders and a full head of dark hair, and his skin was smooth and relatively unlined, except on the neck (which usually went first). When he confessed to seventy-three, she was disappointed. Any number that started with “seventy-” sounded old to her. She did not feel, and knew she did not look, her age, and had been hoping to meet someone no older than sixty-five. (She was still thinking about sex.). But everything else seemed promising. He was well educated, had spent many years in Europe, was still working — as a psychiatrist — and lived only five minutes away from her condo. And she liked his voice. Although he’d been born in Bridgeport, when he answered her ad on the phone she heard New York. She’d been away from New York for a long time. He sounded like home.

Besides, it wasn’t as if she were committing to anything if she agreed to see him again.

He wiggled in on the second date.

In her ad, she had said she wanted someone for “a long hurrah.” She meant a very close man friend with whom to spend weekends and holidays, and to share things with. Not someone to live with. He said he wasn’t really interested in living alone. But he didn’t make a big point of it. He just kept spending the night, and spending the night, and within a few weeks, it began to look as if he were paying rent on his apartment principally to electrically heat his books and extra clothing. After a while, he introduced her to his adult children. So she had to introduce him to her adult children. With some hesitation (it was not a good idea to show up with someone who might not be in her life next year), she brought him to the office Christmas party. At tax time, she agreed to help him with his returns. (She was better at dealing with paper than he was; she was a lawyer.) Finally, when his lease was up at the end of the year, she had to concede that it made economic sense for both of them if he moved into her condo, sharing all the expenses, of course.

It seems they had become a couple.

They decided to spend part of their first summer holiday together in Greece. Sarah had been to Greece only twice. The first time she had gone alone on an expensive last-minute trip she discovered in the back pages of The New Yorker after a sometime boyfriend who had moved to the West Coast suddenly backed out of a tour of Scandinavia they had been planning together, claiming he was too old for such an energetic junket. He was only two years older than Sarah, but was overweight and suffered from sleep apnea; as a result, he had had to retire from practice after he repeatedly fell asleep while representing his clients in court. Now he was sleeping with a machine that forced air into his lungs when he stopped breathing during the night. If they went traipsing from place to place in Scandinavia, he explained, the machine — which was heavy — would have to come, too. And he couldn’t deal with that. Maybe she could come spend her vacation at his new place in Rancho Mirage? There were some terrific restaurants in Palm Desert.

“Why didn’t you bring this up before?” Sarah asked. “We only have two days to cancel or we lose our deposits.”

“I just thought of it,” he said, sounding not at all apologetic. “So do you want to come out here instead, or not?”

“A gated community in Rancho Mirage? No, thank you,” she said. “I’m not ready for that.”

The long distance line crackled. “We have a bad connection,” he announced happily. “Talk to you later.”

That first trip to Greece had been worth every penny. A vigorous tour guide named Vicky had shown Sarah and two married couples from the midwest the antiquities of Athens, Leros, Patmos, Rhodes, Crete and Santorini — all in twelve days. They traveled from island to island by boat and plane, slept in accommodations that to Sarah were extremely luxurious, and ate delicious copious meals at restaurants where the owner seemed to turn out onto the table the entire contents of his kitchen for the six of them. It was a little lonely; Sarah had almost nothing in common with either of the married couples, and Vicky spent much of the “free” time on the schedule preparing her lecture for the following day. But the experience was enjoyable enough for Sarah to commit to a second, less expensive Greek tour the following June — of the mainland plus Corfu this time, and with a recently widowed woman friend from Washington, D.C.

Sarah liked standing in the warm sun among the tumbled ruins of small cities that had flourished thousands of years ago and imagining what it might have been like to be a woman then. She liked pressing her nose against glass protecting artifacts of another time and place and culture. (How would she have looked in that heavy gold necklace? What kind of perfume was kept in that delicate glass flacon?) The second tour ended in Athens, where Sarah and her friend stayed on alone for three more days, perspiring their way along hot paved streets according to cultural itineraries prepared by Sarah.

“We can do it!” she insisted.

“It’s the Bataan death march,” cried her friend. She wanted to go back to their cool hotel room and read a mystery.

“We may never be here again,” said Sarah. “And there’s so much to see! Don’t you want to live, really live, before you die?”

Jake was already familiar with Greece. For six weeks every summer he and his now detested second wife had gone to Lesbos — first with one and then two children — until their long wretched union finally crumbled. “Lesbos was the best part of the marriage,” he would reminisce. “I was almost happy there. The kids stopped fighting. She was less mean. Once she even let herself be kissed. Although she wasn’t much of a kisser, so I don’t know why I remember that.”

By then Sarah had heard enough about what was wrong with the second wife. “If you loved going to Greece so much why did you stop going once you were on your own?”

Jake shrugged. “I was depressed after the divorce. And the kids said she was still going. What I didn’t need was to see her ass spread out on the beach in a bikini one more time.” He smiled engagingly.

“But there are a gazillion Greek islands!” Sarah exclaimed. “You didn’t have to go back to Lesbos!”

That’s right!” he agreed. “How did you get so smart? Let’s find an island of our own.”

Jake had many travel books on Greece. Sarah was content for him to do the preliminary searching. “Just not Corfu,” she cautioned. “Too many green flies and mosquitoes.” Sarah was appetizing to summer insects of all kinds; since childhood, they had singled her out frequently and savagely (multiple bites per body part) — leaving parents, and then friends and husbands, unbitten. She was also allergic to the bites, each of which itched viciously until the bitten parts of her were all well covered in scabs.

“There are no bugs in Greece,” said Jake authoritatively. “It’s mountainous and stony and dry.”

“Have you ever been to Corfu?” asked Sarah. “It’s green, and humid and buggy. Too close to Italy is why. Let’s skip the Ionian islands. What about the Aegean? Almost all the islands on my first trip were in the Aegean. I didn’t get a single bite!”

Jake didn’t mind turning the page on Corfu. If he could have afforded it, and Sarah had been willing, he would gladly have spent the rest of his life exploring any and all beautiful corners of the world — as long as they weren’t American. (He was much given to delivering himself of speeches that began, “The trouble with this country is….”) His investment portfolio being too small for him even to contemplate retirement and extensive travel (he had had a really awful divorce lawyer, said Sarah), he had developed the habit of satisfying his wanderlusts in his study. He loved looking at large color photographs of small white villages nestled at the foot of rocky promontories and fronting brilliantly blue curved bays and harbors where he had not been. “Oh, this is so gorgeous!” he would exclaim.

Sarah, sitting at the computer (Jake didn’t know from computers), cared less about “gorgeous” and more about nailing down something promising and available before summer was upon them. “Honey, we can’t take months salivating over pictures of islands,” she would reply. “We have to pick one.” (More than half a year of togetherness had already taught her it was better to preface remarks of this kind with “Sweetheart” or “Lovey” or “Honey.”)

The second wife had never called Jake “Honey.”

He picked one.

Very small, and without an airport. You reached it by ferry, or catamaran, or Flying Dolphin, or private boat. It was in the Dodecanese, near Turkey not Italy, and therefore probably bugless. The woman Jake spoke with at the Greek National Tourist Office in New York had never heard of it. (She said she would have to call him back.) “Just what we’re looking for!” he told Sarah.

It was spring 2002 and the exchange rate was averaging $1.10 to the euro. They booked sleeping accommodations for a week at 28 euros a night through the only English-language website for the island that Sarah could find. Only a week because, as Sarah said, “What if it’s a bust?” To justify the airfare, they also arranged a two-week bus tour of Turkey for the rest of the vacation. Jake was against bus tours in principle, but agreed with Sarah that if they wanted to cover all the high points — Istanbul, Gallipoli, Izmir, Ephesus, Pammulkali, Aphrodisias, Antalya, Cappacodia, Ankara, and Bursa — they probably wouldn’t be able to manage by themselves, even in a rented car, without speaking the language.

The e-mail confirmation for their Greek accommodations arrived in perfect English. It even had semicolons, in the right places. Sarah went online to look again at the amateurish color photographs of the place; they still did not really inspire confidence. “Don’t you think such a tiny island will be boring?” she asked Jake.

“Boring? How can you even think such a thing?” He sighed with anticipatory happiness. “It’s going to be our honeymoon!”

[…to be continued tomorrow….]

EXPERIMENT IN THE THIRD PERSON

(after reading too much Lydia Davis)

When the doctor confirmed the woman was pregnant, the man decided they would name the baby Victor. Labor took thirty-six hours. The baby was lazy and refused to come out. The doctor had to use forceps.

It was a girl. The man let the woman choose the name. He said he didn’t care. The woman named the baby after the female patron saint of Georgia. (Even though the man and woman were Jewish.)

In the hospital, the woman worried about the indented forceps marks on the baby’s face. The doctor said they would go away, but she worried anyway. She did not want a baby that was scarred.

The indentations did go away, but the baby continued to cause the woman to worry. Once she left the baby in the middle of the double bed for just a minute while she went away to get a cigarette from her pocketbook in the kitchen. Suddenly she heard a thud that made her heart stop. The baby had rolled off the edge of the bed and was lying on the floor. Had the baby damaged itself permanently? The doctor came to the house, examined the baby, and said no. But for a long time, the woman worried anyway.

The baby was also troublesome. She peed through her diaper on the woman’s velvet sofa. Then the woman had to keep that sofa cushion turned over because the spot wouldn’t come out. Every time she vacuumed the sofa, she wondered what would have happened if the baby had been a boy. Maybe his pee would have stayed in the front part of the diaper and not wet the sofa.

When the baby became a child and went to school, she wrote a story for her third-grade teacher about the lazy scarred baby who was supposed to be a boy but wasn’t and caused her mother so much worry and trouble. She wrote it as if it were funny, hahaha, and her teacher gave her an A.

She was able to write these things because her mother had told her about them. (It was her mother’s way of reminiscing.) That’s how she knew about Victor, and the thirty-six hours of labor because she was lazy, and the forceps, and the ugly blue indentations, and the father wanting her to be a boy, and rolling off the bed to worry her mother, and ruining the velvet sofa.

Much later, when she had become a woman and mother herself, she would ask herself what kind of unthinking mother would tell a little girl that her father wanted a boy, or that she was lazy and wouldn’t “come out,” or that she had been born scarred and worrisome and troublesome.

She herself never said anything like that to her own two children.

As an adult, she has occasionally tried to write again about her childhood, this time without the hahaha. Usually she tears it up or deletes it, because now it sounds too self-pitying. But what if she were to abandon the first-person voice of memoir? What if she made it sound as if she were writing about someone else?

How would that be?

JOKES!

(THEY JUST CAME OUT OF ME. BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER.)

At the age of 93, Roger Angell says he depends on jokes, including jokes about death, to help keep him going. I like to laugh at a good joke as much as the next person, and always did. It’s just that I then have trouble remembering the joke long enough to share the pleasure by passing it on. It’s not an age thing. I managed to forget dozen of laugh lines I first heard in my teens and twenties even before I reached thirty.

Nonetheless, after lying awake last night unpacking my memory for any scrap of joke that might still be buried there, punch line intact, I have discovered that I do indeed retain a very small inventory of material I at one time or another thought funny. However, only two concern death, although another could be thought of as a death-in-life joke. Most of them go tastelessly right to sex, body parts and related phenomena — and two of the three from my father that are asexual demonstrate other kinds of immorality, having to do with making money in not unimpeachable ways. What the fact that these jokes are the only ones I remember says about me — I leave to the comment section.

Anyway, that last paragraph was your spoiler alert. You’ve been warned. The baker’s dozen that follow are not Reader’s Digest type jokes. Proceed at your own risk.

From grammar school (in the 1930’s):

1. A name for a book: “The Hole in the Wall,” by Mr. Completely. (At eleven, my three girlfriends and I were rolling on the floor with this one. What did we think? That the woman stood upright and the man aimed himself at her, like a guided missile?)

2. [Passed around from Roberta F. to me to Ann D. in Mrs. Goldberg’s 8A class, with much tittering and covering of mouth with hand. We had all just got our periods.]

Question: How do you cover a hole in four strokes?

Answer: First print “hole” on piece of paper. With pencil turn “h” into “k.” [stroke 1] Cross “l” to turn it into “t.” [stroke 2] Add letter “x” at the end. [strokes 3 and 4]

[Little girls. What can you do? More to the point, what can you do with an eighty-two year old woman who still knows how to print “hole” on a piece of paper and then turn it into “kotex” with four strokes of the pencil and isn’t totally ashamed of herself?]

From my father (in the 1940’s):

[The context for all three was the New York garment district. My father never worked in the garment district. Who told him these? I never thought to ask.]

3. Two men meet in a Broadway cafeteria for lunch. One says to the other: “I hear you had a big fire at your place last Tuesday.” The other replies: “Ssssh. Next Tuesday!”

4. Business is very bad. The line isn’t selling. Bernie wants to hang on, but his partner Abe has had it and jumps out the seventeenth-floor window. He looks into the windows of all the lower floors as he falls. As he passes the fourth window, he calls up to his partner: “Bernie! Cut velvet!”

5. Two men sit together doing the hand-sewing in a men’s tailoring establishment. They take a stitch and pull the thread up. Take another stitch, pull the thread up. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Take a stitch, pull the thread up. One has a family so it’s hand to mouth, but the other is a bachelor and after ten years manages to save enough for a safari vacation. He’s gone two weeks. After he comes back, the two men sit together again. They take a stitch and pull the thread up, take a stitch and pull the thread up. The second man tells the first man all about his time in Africa as they take a stitch and pull the thread up. He was about to shoot a lion, he says, when the lion attacked. Only the intervention of the beater saved him. The first man takes a stitch, pulls the thread up, and says, “But you escaped. You’re not dead. At least you’re living.” The second man takes a stitch, pulls the thread up, and says, “You call this living?”

From French class in high school:

[Glossary: The French word for “black” is noir. The French word for “hat” is chapeau, pronounced “sha-poh.” One of the French words for “condom” is capot, pronounced “ka-poh.”]

6. An American couple is sightseeing in Paris when the wife suddenly dies. The husband has a black suit but must go to a Parisian gentlemen’s haberdashery to buy himself a black hat for the trip home with the body. He explains in broken French that his wife has just passed away, and that he will need a “capot noir.” The salesman exclaims: “Ah monsieur! Quelle delicatesse de sentiment!” [What delicacy of sentiment!]

From my days in advertising:

7. [About another Bernie, a far more successful one.] Bernie’s business is doing great. At the age of fifty, he’s made enough to retire and travel. He and his wife go to Switzerland, where they take skiing lessons and Bernie decides to do some Alpine mountain climbing. One evening he doesn’t get back. Early the next day, a search party goes out. High up ahead of them, they see a small speck in the distance, still climbing.

“Bernie,” they call. “Stop! It’s the Red Cross!”

Bernie calls back: “I gave at the office!”

From my days as a lawyer:

8. Question: When a passenger ship founders in shark-infested waters, why are the lawyers on board the only ones the sharks won’t touch? Answer: Professional courtesy.

[I omit two here from a former boyfriend, recycled in older age, who recognized no boundaries whatsoever: One joke will offend Catholics, the other Jews. He himself was a lapsed Catholic whose second wife had been Jewish. No. Absolutely not. My lips are sealed.]

From the husband of a long-time friend:

9. A flasher wearing a raincoat and nothing else is walking down the street towards the garment district. A woman comes towards him from the opposite direction. He immediately opens his coat to show her what he has. She gives him a look and sniffs: “You call that a lining?”

From a very proper and beautifully well organized legal secretary at a great big law firm who in her spare time wrote and published a book about making Victorian dolls. She made me promise not to let anyone know it was she who told it to me. I did promise, but it was a very long time ago, and I haven’t given you her name, have I?

10. Three women begin to boast about their husbands. The first says, “My husband is a world-famous surgeon. They called him when they needed someone to operate on President Reagan!” The second woman says, “My husband is a renowned attorney. He was one of the team conscripted for the defense in the O.J. Simpson trial!” The third woman thinks a moment and then says, “My husband has a very big penis. Thirteen pigeons can stand on it.” The first two women look at the third woman. Then the first woman says, “Okay, I exaggerated. My husband is a doctor, but he just works in the city ER.” The second woman says, “Well, I exaggerated too. My husband is a lawyer, but he’s really just an ambulance chaser.” They both turn to the third woman expectantly. “All right,” the third woman says. “The thirteenth pigeon can only get one foot on.”

From a colleague at a smaller law firm. She got her jokes from her former father-in-law. They always seemed to feature a Jake and a Becky:

11. Jake hears very bad news from his doctor. At best, he has only three months to live. He calls Becky to tell her right away. By the time he comes home, the delicious smell of brownies is wafting through the air from the kitchen. Brownies: his favorite! She’s trying to console him! What a wonderful wife! He hurries into the kitchen where Becky is indeed taking tray after tray of brownies out of the oven. He reaches for one, but she slaps his hand away. “Not yet!” she scolds. “After the funeral!”

12. [From an earlier period in the married life of Jake and Becky.] Becky — who weighs more than perhaps she should — takes a shower and suddenly needs to use the toilet. She sits down wet, does her business, and can’t get up again. She is stuck! She calls Jake. He pulls, and pushes, and tugs, and fails. They will have to call the plumber. But Becky is naked. She covers her breasts with her arms and Jake hastily covers her private parts with his black yarmulke. The plumber arrives, and looks, and measures. Finally, he delivers his verdict. “I can get her out all right. But I won’t be able to save the rabbi.”

From the American wife of a grizzled Israeli war hero whom I met on the roof of a Tel Aviv apartment house at a Friday night dinner under the stars in the summer of 1993. I can’t remember her name anymore, but I have never forgotten her joke. It seems to go over better with women than with men. But then I’m a woman:

13. A husband and wife go on two-week safari in Africa. They have tents, a guide, beaters, servants, the whole shebang. Money does not buy safety. In the middle of the night, the wife is abducted by an enormous gorilla who escapes with her under his arm before anyone can catch him. Many days and much laborious search later, the wife is discovered in a cave, abandoned by the gorilla after he has had his way with her. She’s airlifted to a Nairobi hospital. The husband flies in her best friend from America to sit by her bedside. The friend arrives, all ready to commiserate. “My dear, my dear,” she says, seating herself next to the wife’s bed and taking her hand. “What a terrible experience! How do you feel?” The wife lifts her shoulders and eyebrows. “How should I feel?” she asks. “He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write….”

******************

Does any of that make me feel better for being eighty-two and a half? Well, yeah. It kinda does.

WHERE I WISH I WERE RIGHT NOW

THIS IS WHERE I AM.

AND HAVE BEEN.

WITHOUT END.

SINCE FOREVER.

(IT SEEMS.)

THIS IS WHERE I’D LIKE TO BE.

IT’S IN MADEIRA.

IT’S VERY LUXURIOUS. AND ENGLISH. AND EXPENSIVE.

CHURCHILL AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ONCE STAYED THERE.

WE WERE THERE TOO.

FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO.

FOR A WEEK.

I FOUND A SPECIAL RATE FOR THE ROOMS AT THE TOP.

OUR ROOM WAS TINY.

(THAT’S WHY THE SPECIAL RATE.)

BUT DESPITE THE ROOM SIZE,

ALL THE OTHER PERKS OF THE HOTEL WERE FREE.

THERE WAS EVEN HIGH TEA.

(35 EUROS EXTRA)

WITH CLOTTED CREAM!

YOU COULD TAKE A TAXI INTO TOWN TO LOOK AROUND.

(WE DID.)

YOU COULD ALSO TAKE A HALF-DAY BUS TOUR

OF HALF THE ISLAND.

(WITH A TOUR GUIDE.)

WE DID THAT, TOO.

AND THEN ANOTHER HALF-DAY TOUR

OF THE OTHER HALF OF THE ISLAND.

(WITH ANOTHER TOUR GUIDE.)

WE ATE DINNER IN A SUPERB ITALIAN RESTAURANT THAT COST A LOT.

(BUT WHAT THE HELL.

IT’S ONLY MONEY.)

ANOTHER DAY WE WENT BACK INTO TOWN

TO BUY PRESENTS.

THEN WE RAN OUT OF THINGS TO DO.

(IT’S A VERY SMALL ISLAND.)

WE JUST HUNG OUT.

WE WERE BORED!

WE COULDN’T WAIT TO GET HOME AGAIN!

CAN YOU IMAGINE?

DO YOU SUPPOSE THEY STILL HAVE THAT SPECIAL RATE ON THOSE TEENY TINY ROOMS?

ROGER ANGELL ON LIFE IN HIS NINETIES

Roger Angell and his dog Andy, January 2014. [Photo credit: The New Yorker]

Roger Angell was born in 1920. He is the son of Katherine White, an early and renowned fiction editor at The New Yorker, and step-son of E.B. White, author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Angell himself has been associated with and written for The New Yorker nearly all of his professional life, more recently always about baseball, and still does a baseball blog for the magazine. I can take baseball or leave it (which is more than I can say for football, basketball or hockey), but mostly I leave it now that my two sons are long out of the house. So when I see something by Angell in the magazine, I’m inclined to skip it.

However, this week’s The New Yorker contains a long piece he has just written which is not about baseball. It’s called This Old Man (subtitled “Life in the Nineties”), and I could not put it down until I had read every word. Finding something good about getting old written by someone quite a bit older than me doesn’t happen every day! So I wish I could just copy out the whole thing here to show everybody. But it’s too long. (Pages 60-65 in the February 17 & 24, 2014 issue, the one with the annual Cholly Knickerbocker cover.)

However, without pushing the outer limits of bloggery too far, I can probably offer a taste from the middle (about how the rest of the world treats you when you’re old) and then the last page and a half, about which I thought, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, all the way to the tiny diamond which marks the end.

If you’re twenty-five and feel you don’t need to think about things like this right now, you probably don’t. Unless you’ve got a great-aunt or great-uncle still hanging in there, and want to know what it feels like. But your generation probably doesn’t read The Getting Old Blog much, if at all. So this post is mainly for everyone else.

Because I’ve had to cut somewhere, I’m skipping the beginning and some of the middle, in which Angell describes his present pretty-far-gone physical condition (eyes, limbs, spine, heart), his personal losses (wife Carol, daughter Callie, dog Harry, many many friends), his remaining joys, his thoughts on death and dying. You can find the magazine online (Google it if you don’t subscribe), should you want to read it all. This part is from page 63:

We elders — what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel? — we elders have learned a thing or two, including invisibility. Here I am in a conversation with some trusty friends — old friends but actually not all that old: they’re in their sixties — and we’re finishing the wine and in serious converse about global warming…or Virginia Woolf…. There’s a pause, and I chime in with a couple of sentences. The others look at me politely, then resume the talk exactly at the point where they’ve just left it. What? Hello? Didn’t I just say something? Have I left the room? Have I experienced what neurologists call a TIA — a transient ischemic attack? I didn’t expect to take over the chat but did await a word or two or response. Not tonight, though. (Women I know say that this began to happen to them when they passed fifty.) When I mention the phenomenon to anyone around my age, I get back nods and smiles. Yes, we’re invisible. Honored, respected, even loved, but not quite worth listening to anymore. You’ve had your turn, Pops; now it’s ours…..

And here are the last two columns of page 64 and all of page 65:

I get along. Now and then it comes to me that I appear to have more energy and hope than some of my coevals, but I take no credit for this. I don’t belong to a book club or a bridge club; I’m not taking up Mandarin or practicing the viola. In a sporadic effort to keep my brain from moldering, I’ve begun to memorize shorter poems — by Auden, Donne, Ogden Nash, and more — which I recite to myself some nights while walking my dog, Harry’s successor fox terrier, Andy. I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window. But shouldn’t I have something more scholarly or complex than this put away by now — late paragraphs of accomplishments, good works, some weightier-op-cits? I’m afraid not. The thoughts of age are short, short thoughts. I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

Small Boy: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.

Teacher: A mechanic! Thank you, Irving. Next?

Small Girl: My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer.

Teacher: How nice for you, Emma. Next?

Second Small Boy: My name is Luke and my dad is dead.

Teacher: Oh, Luke, how sad for you. We’re all very sorry about that, aren’t we class? Luke, do you think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?

Luke (seizes his throat): He went “N’gungghhh!”

Not bad — I’m told that fourth graders really go for this one. Let’s try another.

A man and his wife tried and tried to have a baby, but without success. Years went by and they went on trying, but no luck. They liked each other, so the work was always a pleasure, but they grew a bit sad along the way. Finally, she got pregnant, was very careful, and gave birth to a beautiful eight-pound-two-ounce baby boy. The couple were beside themselves with happiness. At the hospital that night, she told her husband to stop by the local newspaper and arrange for a birth announcement, to tell all their friends the good news. First thing next morning, she asked if he’d done the errand.

“Yes, I did,” he said, “but I had no idea those little notices in the paper were so expensive.”

“Expensive?” she said. “How much was it?”

“It was eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I have the receipt.”

“Eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars!” she cried. “But that’s impossible. You must have made some mistake. Tell me exactly what happened.”

“There was a young lady behind a counter at the paper, who gave me the form to fill out,” he said. “I put in your name and my name and little Teddy’s name and weight, and when we’d be home again and, you know, ready to see friends. I handed it back to her and she counted up the words and said, “How many insertions?” I said twice a week for fourteen years, and she gave me the bill. O.K.?”

I heard this tale more than fifty years ago, when my first wife, Evelyn, and I were invited to tea by a rather elegant older couple who were new to our little Rockland County community. They were in their seventies, at least, and very welcoming, and it was just the four of us. We barely knew them and I was surprised when he turned and asked her to tell us the joke about the couple trying to have a baby. “Oh, no,” she said, “they wouldn’t want to hear that.”

“Oh, come on, dear — they’ll love it,” he said, smiling at her. I groaned inwardly and was preparing a forced smile while she started off shyly, but then, of course, the four of us fell over laughing together.

That night, Evelyn said, “Did you see Keith’s face while Edie was telling that story? Did you see hers? Do you think it’s possible that they’re still — you know, still doing it?”

“Yes, I did– yes, I do,” I said. “I was thinking exactly the same thing. They’re amazing.”

This was news back then, but probably shouldn’t be by now. I remember a passage I came upon years later, in an Op-Ed piece in the Times, written by a man who’d just lost his wife. “We slept naked in the same bed for forty years,” it went. There was also my splendid colleague Bob Bingham, dying in his late fifties, who was asked by a friend what he’d missed or would do differently if given the chance. He thought for an instant, and said, “More venery.”

More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number or remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

This is a dodgy subject, coming as it does here from a recent widower, and I will risk further breach of code and add that this was something that Carol and I now and then idly discussed. We didn’t quite see the point of memorial fidelity. In our view, the departed spouse — we always thought it would be me — wouldn’t be around anymore but knew or had known that he or she was loved forever. Please go ahead, then, sweetheart — don’t miss a moment. Carol said this last: “If you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone I’ll come back and haunt you.”

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming at home at night. This is why we throng Match.com and OkCupid in such numbers — but not just for this surely. Rowing in Eden (in Emily Dickinson’s words: “Rowing in Eden –/ Ah — the sea”) isn’t reserved for the lithe and young, the dating or the hooked-up or the just lavishly married, or even for couples in the middle-aged mixed-doubles semifinals, thank God. No personal confession or revelation impends here, but these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret. The invisibility factor — you’ve had your turn — is back at it again. But I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.

Nothing is easy at this age, and first meetings for old lovers can be a high-risk venture. Reticence and awkwardness slip into the room. Also happiness. A wealthy old widower I knew married a nurse he met while in the hospital, but had trouble remembering her name afterward. He called her “kid.” An eighty-plus, twice-widowed lady I’d once known found still another love, a frail but vibrant Midwest professor, now close to ninety, and the pair got in two or three happy years together before he died as well. When she called his children and arranged to pick up her things at his house, she found every possession of hers lined up outside the front door.

But to hell with them and with all that, O.K.? Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you. Hook, line, and sinker; never mind the why or wherefore; somewhere in the night; love me forever, or at least until next week. For us and for anyone this unsettles, anyone who’s younger and still squirms at the vision of an old couple embracing, I’d offer John Updike’s “Sex or death: you take your pick” — a line that appears (in a slightly different form) in a late story of his, “Playing with Dynamite.”

This is a great question, an excellent insurance-plan choice, I mean. I think it’s in the Affordable Care Act somewhere. Take it from us, who know about the emptiness of loss, and are still cruising along here feeling lucky and not yet entirely alone.

You may not like the jokes. But oh, is he ever right! Here’s one more little bit to leave off with:

In the first summer after Carol had gone, a man I’d known slightly and pleasantly for decades listened while I talked about my changed routines and my doctors and dog walkers and the magazine. I paused for a moment, and he said, “Plus you have us.”

Another message — also brief, also breathtaking — came on an earlier afternoon at my longtime therapist’s, at a time when I felt I’d lost almost everything. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this,” I said at last.

A silence, then: “Neither do I. But you will.”

WHAT NEXT?

[Written yesterday. Equally applicable today.]

More godawful weather. Can’t go out. Can’t concentrate. Can’t keep pacing. All that so-called wisdom and calm that’s supposed to come with age just wasn’t able to make it to our house today. [Got snowed in somewhere else, I guess.]

So here I sit.

Home of The Getting Old Blog

Would I be better off in the tropics? Which tropics? I don’t like hot and sweaty either. And they do say nothing of scientific, intellectual or creative value comes from steamy equatorial countries. [Note: There will be no defense of that statement if anyone comes forth to challenge it. I’m just putting it out there as part of the cranky internal dialogue going on in my office on this fourteenth or fifteenth or sixteenth really and truly crappy day in a row.]

Pilates was cancelled. The last Princeton concert of the Brentano String Quartet before they decamp for Yale, and for which we had free tickets, was cancelled. Getting up bright and early in the morning was cancelled. [After looking out the window and pulling down the shade again, we both went back to bed with the cats. ]

Now it’s afternoon and I’m wearing two sweaters and my new knee-high UGGS, but no makeup because if I’m not going out and no one is able to come here to see me, I can just put on a lot of moisturizer to protect my elderly skin from the drying effects of the indoor heat and leave it at that. Of course Bill can see, since he’s already inside, but he knows very well what my face looks like naked and seems not to mind, or not to mind once in a while. Like now. And the cats certainly don’t care. They don’t make the same value judgments we do. As a matter of fact, after chasing each other up and down the stairs four or five times, they’re not making any judgments at all. They’ve just collapsed in the bedroom on top of our duvet and are now asleep again. Smart cats.

So what am I going to write about for the blog on this truly yucky afternoon? If I don’t do a piece every morning — in special circumstances like today, every afternoon — I will use up my small backlog of pre-prepared posts and freak out. Why that should happen when there’s no backlog I can’t explain, as there is nobody at all except me, myself and I who is holding me to this rigorous daily schedule. But I do. And it does. [At least until such time as I decide to make a public announcement that I’m cutting back to two pieces a week, or one a week, or something like that.] Perhaps it’s because I’ve had too much legal education late in life, which gave me notions about implied contractual obligations, such as satisfying the “entitlements” of one’s followers established by one’s “course of dealing” with them.

If I swivel my desk chair and look the other way, maybe I’ll get some ideas.

Other Side of “Getting Old” Home Base

Well yes, that was helpful. I could write about:

1. The old photograph on top of the vertical bookstand at the right near the window. It was taken in Russia, probably just before the outbreak of World War I, and shows my paternal grandfather, my father, and an uncle I never knew existed until I was middle-aged, so there’s sort of a story about the uncle;

2. The period of my life when I was fat: the why, the how, the when, and other aspects of this topic — about which there are several manuscripts on the bottom shelves of the bookcases, and also several books about being fat by other people on the shelf just above the bottom one on the right;

3. The Guatemala chicken at the very top of the bookcase and what in the world were we thinking of when we bought it for I don’t remember how many quetzals;

4. The ten-session group therapy program for overweight women I tried to launch last fall before beginning this blog — that cost me close to $500 for five consecutive ad insertions in the local newspaper (tear sheets of which are in a folder also on the bottom right shelf), but produced not a single telephone call;

5. Smoking: Where and how I learned to do it (in college, with difficulty), how much I smoked (up to two packs a day), how long I smoked (twenty years), why I stopped (to live to see my babies grow up) and when (on June 6, 1969), what it was like to stop (extraordinarily difficult), and why stopping remains, after so many years, what I still consider one of the hardest things I ever did;

6. Our last three trips abroad — to France, Greece and Portugal, the third of which was nearly five years ago, and the only three for which I have photographs on the computer, because the hard drive of my old computer died while Apple was transferring its data to my new one, so that the pictures of earlier trips Bill and I made together exist only in prints mounted in albums, which I would have to re-photograph in order to upload them here — and yes, I might do that when I get really desperate for material, but not yet;

7. Where we might travel next (before it’s too late), a thing we discuss almost daily when we’re cooped up together like this because of snow and ice: France again, where we still have two friends? Japan, where we know a former neighbor and a new “virtual” friend from this blog? England, home of both actual old friends and new “virtual” ones? Israel, where Bill has a niece and I know a woman who was in college with me sixty-four years ago? Of course, all of that is merely speculative daydreaming, unless Bill can get himself out of his favorite chair and start going to the gym fairly regularly so that travel abroad won’t just be taking taxis to restaurants and expensive shops to buy things. [Hear that, Bill?];

8. Exercise — haha! what’s that? — for those who are, ah, “old.” Patti, my Pilates instructor, is especially gung-ho on this one; she even gave me some written material about the benefits of Pilates she prepared for some other presentation but assured me I could feel free to use for the blog. She hasn’t actually ever read the blog, so her material may not be funny enough, but I suppose I could tinker with it, based on recent experience with what Pilates people call “The Reformer” and I call “The Torquemada”;

9. Personal maintenance, an endlessly fruitful subject for ladies who are getting old. [Probably not so interesting, though, to any men who might stumble upon this blog.] Could be broken down into separate posts:

hair, hairdressers and fooling the public;
eyes, God willing;
skin and your options, none of them good;
makeup, otherwise known as “putting on your face”;
feet, footwear and pain;
undergarments (Spanx or not?);
toenails (yellowing) and pedicures (what color polish?);
what to wear at the beach if you must go (a burqua?) — and must you go at all.

Oh, I’ve written 1045 words already, and haven’t even begun! I guess that’s it for today. Please do cast votes (in the form of a “Comment” below) for any subject identified above that especially strikes your fancy. Or even ones I haven’t thought of yet.

Now I’m going downstairs to sit by the fire. It’s a gas fire, but it’s powered by electricity. So I’d better take advantage of it while the power lasts. Who knows when a tree may topple a wire and leave us in the cold and dark?

See you tomorrow.

I hope.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OUR CAT SASHA!

Yesterday, Sasha — our first cat — turned five! Which meant she was in line for a present.

Unfortunately, Sasha and her younger step-cat Sophie have already been terribly spoiled — yes, spoiled IS the right word — with at least one example of practically every cat gadget and cat gizmo a capitalist society can devise. So Bill — the avid acquirer of stuff in our house — was hard pressed to find something new for Sasha’s birthday.

But Bill always comes through! After diligent research, he once again discovered a tasteful, stylish, upscale something. Specifically, something called a Hepper Pod, of which I had never before heard. Perhaps because it hasn’t been in existence for very long. (What he paid I haven’t asked.) Whether any cat, even a spoiled one, is really in need of a Hepper Pod is debatable.

However, after a few sniffs and a bit of encouragement, Sasha agreed to enter it.

She may have agreed because she’s fond of us. Or because it only holds one cat at a time, and when she’s inside with the lid down she’s safe from Sophie’s company.

However, when the lid comes down as it’s supposed to, it’s hard for us to see in. Only her tail is the tip-off.

So Bill insisted we also photograph the pod, and Sasha, without the lid. To show off the lining, as well as the cat.

You can tell from her expression that Sasha’s humoring us. And perhaps you can also tell by now who the Hepper Pod is really for.

Happy Sasha’s birthday, Bill.

Happy birthday, Sasha.

(And many more.)

You can jump out now.

ON BEING OLD

(Formerly "The Getting Old Blog")

Month: February 2014

THE HUNGARIAN’S QUESTION

“TOO GOOD FOR EVERY DAY”

A PLAYFUL POST

MARCIA ANGELL ON LIFE IN HER SEVENTIES

NOT JUST A NAME ON A CARD

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN, PART 3

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN, PART 2

AN ISLAND OF THEIR OWN, PART I

EXPERIMENT IN THE THIRD PERSON

JOKES!

(THEY JUST CAME OUT OF ME. BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER.)

WHERE I WISH I WERE RIGHT NOW

ROGER ANGELL ON LIFE IN HIS NINETIES

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OUR CAT SASHA!

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(THEY JUST CAME OUT OF ME. BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER.)

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