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.”