MY DARLING BILL IS DEAD

He died at the University Medical Center of Princeton on May 6, 2016.

ii.

It was sudden, and not sudden. Although this blog has candidly addressed my thoughts and feelings as I enter late life, there have been significant and purposeful omissions. The biggest is that from its inception two and a half years ago, Bill and I both knew he had a fatal disease for which there was no hope of cure.

For a long time it was a theoretical knowledge, obscuring our horizon but not imposing much practical restriction on daily life. Back in 2005, when we had been together only four years and still lived in Massachusetts, he felt unwell and checked himself into the ER of Mass. General. It turned out he had been overdosing with vitamin D, which is unwise (as he should have known, being an M.D. himself). In the course of the complete workup that hospitals are wont to do when addressing a systemic complaint, a perceived crackle in the lungs led to a scan, which led to a hospital pulmonologist showing up at his bedside to announce bluntly that, by the way, he had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and the average life expectancy for that disease was three years.

“Idiopathic” meant, in his case, no known cause. Fibrotic scarring of the delicate lung tissue can be generated by continued exposure to and/or inhalation of strong irritants, after which it continues even where there is no further exposure. Bill had never worked in an environment polluted with noxious substances, never smoked, never lived in a heavily trafficked inner city. He was a psychiatrist who sat in a chair in a comfortable and well ventilated suburban office for most of his working life and listened to unhappy people talk about their problems. “Why him?” is another of life’s unanswerable questions.

Moreover, the diagnosis was inadvertent. If he had not gone to the hospital because of the excess Vitamin D, the fibrosis would not have been discovered until one or both of the two symptoms of this hopeless disease manifested themselves: continued coughing and/or shortness of breath. Bill was symptom-free in 2005 and remained so for eight more years. That said, it’s not a diagnosis one can forget. He took a copy of the scan with us when we moved to Princeton and began a rigorous program of what he hoped would be proactive “alternative” treatment for lung issues.

These I will not describe, other than to remark that for the rest of our time together half our freezer and refrigerator were given over to expensive, time-dated and time-consuming antioxidant substances to inhale or swallow, and that one of our two linen closets contained enough supplements to open a store, plus boxes of bottled remedies to ward off any incipient cold that might develop from a sneeze or a sore throat, because even a cold could turn into a bronchitis or a pneumonia that his compromised lungs might not be able to handle.

iii.

The threat of death by suffocation was not all Bill confronted by the time he was 83 or 84. But although several of his other medical conditions were extremely painful, they were not fatal, and all but one tended to be cyclical, so there were periods of relief. He was brave, patient, not particularly complaining, and appreciative of everything he felt life still had to offer. However, these other ailments distracted me, so that I didn’t note with precision when the coughing began. Looking back without notes, I place it in the fall of 2013 — two and a half years ago, which was when I began to blog. (I don’t think there was a connection, but I must say that although he was never a demanding man, when doing all the chores around the house and tending to him began to consume much of my time, the blog was a great help to me; it could be written at home but also connected me to the world outside.)

The coughing was awful, and incessant, and utterly exhausting. It sounded like a large dog barking non-stop. If I had gone out to market or the drugstore, I could hear it coming from the front bedroom or living-room when I pulled into the driveway. One or two of the neighbors inquired. Not wanting to explain about the fibrosis, he said he was having a bad bronchitis. Perhaps he thought that was true. Somewhere he had picked up the idea that if the coughing was productive, as his was (meaning it produced phlegm), it was not a fibrosis symptom. If so, he had been misinformed. Even if productive, that kind of coughing is a sign of fibrosis. In any event, he found a medication, Gabapentin, which suppressed the cough (although not the cause) and another year went by. He could still climb the stairs in the condo without getting out of breath, and if he seemed to tire on short walks more quickly than before, that could be attributed to age. The last time we strolled the paths in Marquand Park together, in May 2014 (a visit memorialized in this blog with many photos of the trees he loved), he needed to rest on a bench halfway along.

iv.

At the end of 2014, the stairs became more difficult for him and we began the search for a pulmonologist to work with. We did not revisit a second time the full-of-himself head honcho at Columbia Presbyterian in New York who had replied to Bill’s initial question, “How long do I have?” with a shrug and the curt, “Pick a number.”

In Princeton, the kindly fellow who ran the pulmonary rehabilitation lab at the University Medical Center where Bill would die a year and a half later told him he was off the bell curve for death from pulmonary fibrosis because he was still alive nine and a half years after diagnosis. That was cheering but also wrong. As we were told by the third pulmonologist, who took over when the kindly fellow retired, the clock begins to run from manifestation of symptoms, which is usually when the disease is diagnosed, and not from the time of an inadvertent diagnosis made when there were not yet symptoms.

Oxygen entered our house. Medicare paid for a large concentrator with a fifty-foot cannula attached. (Easy to trip over.) It stood at the foot of the stairs, so the cannula would reach Bill’s side of the bed in the master bedroom. He didn’t need it for a while. He did need the seven-pound portable rechargeable oxygen concentrator that could be carried, with effort, in a shoulder bag or a backpack whenever he left the house or did anything requiring exertion. It had to be recharged every two hours or so, which meant we couldn’t stay out very long. By now, I was doing all the driving anyway.

There was also Esbriet, an obscenely costly prescription medication the FDA had just approved; in Europe it had been shown to delay the development of the fibrosis somewhat if taken at maximum dose. Bill was never able to achieve the maximum dose. Even a two-thirds dose closed his esophagus so he couldn’t swallow, made him round-the-clock nauseous, and removed all his appetite, so that he lost significant weight — for him, always trim-to-slender, not a good thing. The third pulmonologist thought his problems with it might be age-related; younger patients seemed to tolerate it better. He recommended stopping it entirely or else trying an alternative and equally costly new drug, Ofev, that similarly slowed fibrosis development but had a different, although equally undesirable, side effect: constant and urgent diarrhea. Bill rejected the alternative without trial.

At the beginning of 2016, a fourth pulmonologist arrived at the University Medical Center. She seemed empathetic and had a father with emphysema and his own oxygen concentrator at the foot of the stairs. That may not have been the best of reasons to switch, but Bill wanted to feel comfortable with his doctor, which was probably as important as anything at this point. She put him on oxygen 24/7, which meant he began using the fifty-foot cannula day and night. Essentially, he was trapped in the house. It also rubbed sores on the tops of his ears. We had to put moleskin rectangles there.

The pulmonologist at Mass. General who had said the average life expectancy was three years did not offer detailed statistics. 50% of pulmonary fibrosis patients live five years from onset of symptoms; the other 50% don’t. Since the coughing had not begun till the fall of 2013, I calculated that with some luck we might have another two or two and a half years together. Bill, tethered to his tubular lifeline, wanted to believe me but I think now probably realized it was not likely to happen. He read books about the meaning of life, listened to Baroque music, watched nature videos, and slept more. We also held hands much of the time, even as we fell asleep. I felt he was drifting into some space in his mind where I couldn’t follow, seeking to make peace with death. Someone commented on this blog that the few and sporadic pieces I managed to post in 2016 were very dark. Of course they were: It was just too hard to be lighthearted, even in a virtual world that wasn’t our real one.

vi.

Bill turned 88 on January 27. After he died, I found in the recent Google history of his iPad the question, “What percent of people live to 88?” Was he trying to comfort himself? April 13 was our fifteenth anniversary but it was raining, so we postponed celebration. A few days later, he made the effort to shower, shave and dress nicely; we went out to dinner at a local Italian restaurant. (He loved pasta to the end.) I let him out at the door with his portable oxygen, parked, and walked back to join him. Although neither of us knew it, it would be our last outing together.

Near the end of April, I came down with the worst flu I had had in forty years (despite our both having had the recommended flu and pneumonia shots the prior fall). For four days, I could hardly get up in the morning. Of course, he caught it from me. Just as I was beginning to recover, he sank fast. He fell out of bed the following afternoon, so weak I couldn’t help him off the floor. I had to call a neighbor and her teenage son; the three of us managed to hoist him onto the mattress. That night it happened again, at one in the morning. This time I called the police. They sent an ambulance and the EMTs, as well as a young police officer. The head EMT wanted to take him to the hospital, but Bill refused and signed a paper to that effect. However, the following day, his fourth pulmonologist insisted I bring him in. He had to rest several times between the door and the car. When we reached the hospital, I brought a wheelchair out and helped him and his portable oxygen into it, parked, and came back for him. I had never pushed him in a wheelchair before and was picturing in my mind that I might be doing that from now on. I still thought there would be a “now on.”

vii.

He arrived on a Friday. He died the following Friday. A nasal swab indicated that what we both had had was a viral flu, which in his case had turned into viral pneumonia with a probable overlay of bacterial pneumonia. For three days, while he remained relatively upbeat, they pumped him full of steroids, antibiotics, anti-viral medication and much more oxygen than the home concentrator could generate, but were unable to reverse the infection in his lungs. They then suggested a bi-pap mask, which would prevent him from eating. They also explained that they couldn’t leave him on it long, and the next step would be intubation (breathing on a respirator) followed, if that didn’t work, by a tracheotomy. Bill adamantly rejected the idea of tracheotomy; he refused to live connected to tubes and machines.

At first he decided against intubation as well, knowing that if it didn’t assist him in beginning to breathe on his own, he would never come off it, meaning when they removed the tubes, he would die. But then on Tuesday, he changed his mind. One of the hospital pulmonologists was encouraging intubation because with the extra time it could provide, the medication might eliminate the infection and he would have another two or three months of life. Eventually, he agreed. “Let’s give it a shot,” he said.

viii.

I spent Tuesday night at the hospital. We both knew it might be our last night together, because intubation involves so much morphine that he would be unconscious from then on. But we had time to tell each other most of what we wanted to say. When I couldn’t quite understand him through the bi-pap mask, he wrote in a little notebook I still have in my bag. I did most of the crying. He said he wasn’t afraid to die anymore, that slipping away under morphine was not a bad way to go, and that he was only sorry he was leaving me. He also said many other things I shall treasure all my life, but they are not to share.

By Friday morning, it was clear that intubation was an exercise in futility; it was not helping him breathe on his own. The doctors asked if I wanted to continue. I called Bill’s son in California, with whom I had been in daily contact. He agreed we should let him go. I had asked the attending that day how long Bill might live when removed from the respirator. He said a few hours, or even a day. They removed the tubes at 2:35 in the afternoon. He was pronounced dead at 2:52. I sat by his side, and held his hand, and watched the blood drain from his face. Although the hand remained warm for a while, his face turned yellow. Whatever was lying in the bed wasn’t Bill any more. Bill was gone.

SEX AT NINETY-ONE

Going to high school on the subway by myself at twelve and a half, I sometimes eyed women who looked to be about thirty and wondered if they could possibly still be doing “it.” Life disabused me of such naivete. By the time I myself neared thirty, I was newly separated from a three-times-a-week husband and found myself dying for it (no longer in quotation marks) after just a couple of weeks of abstinence.

The psychotherapist I was then seeing assured me these cravings were normal and that human sexual appetite continued practically into the grave. One of his patients was a ninety-year-old widower who had a weekly appointment with a prostitute he particularly liked. Once a week at ninety! Of course, the therapist didn’t specifically discuss what they were doing together. Nor did I care; at twenty-nine I had neither hands-on experience nor theoretical knowledge concerning the various kinds of disappointments and failures with which aging equipment too often needs to contend. Nonetheless, if in fact the therapist’s report was accurate –and why shouldn’t it have been? – these paid encounters must have produced positive results or the ninety-year-old patient wouldn’t have continued them.

Avid readers should of course recognize that such piggyback hearsay, from elderly client to psychotherapist to me to you, is not admissible evidence in a court of law. But as I myself grew older, which meant the applicant pool in which I could go fishing when unpartnered began to shrink for various reasons none of which need exploration here, I occasionally thought back to the ninety-year-old. Aging ladies, if you too are beginning to feel opportunity-challenged, take heart. The next part of my narrative has nothing piggyback about it. It’s cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die true, and happened not so long ago either.

But first, some back story. The separation from the three-times-a-week husband occurred early in November 1960, at which time I was working on Madison Avenue as a copywriter. A client invited me to a masked New Year’s Eve ball. We were to come as our favorite eighteenth century characters. How romantic! Sure enough, as I was wandering around in my rented empire white dress (from the Napoleonic part of the century) with a white silk mask covering my eyes, there came a loud rapping at the door. A tall Venetian doge with dark hair, black cape, black mask and black staff burst in, cased the room, and found me. As explained above, I was ripe for the picking. At midnight, the masks came off. The doge, transformed into a most attractive thirty-six-year-old Harvard graduate, kissed me and took me home to my nearly bare new one-room apartment, where we danced till three in the morning to Frank Sinatra exhorting us from my portable victrola to take it nice and easy. The next day (after I had reported back to the psychotherapist, who gave provisional approval), we crossed “Go” and 1961 was off to a great start.

He had the same first name as my first husband, but that name by then brought up such odious associations that I thought and spoke of the desirable masked man only by his family name, which also made me feel quite sophisticated. (I was a very young twenty-nine.) McDonnell (let’s call him) was a terrific lover. He cared as much about giving pleasure as getting it. “I am a good cocksman,” he crowed one night, explaining how he had learned four or five years before to hold it for a long time.

He was also extremely poor husband material. Not that I was looking to marry again just yet; it would be a while before I had fully and legally untangled myself from the first husband, not to mention the time needed to recover from the emotional battering of that first marriage. But taking the long view, it must be said that McDonnell had already been married and divorced twice, and was trying to survive in Manhattan on the $6,000 a year left to him after deductions from his salary for alimony and support of the three young children of his first marriage. A philosophy major in college, he hated his job as Personnel Director of a large insurance company. He occupied a single room in a residential hotel with a good address and wore (in rotation) three gently used Brooks Brothers suits from Gentlemen’s Resale. When we went out, we often ate $3 suppers at Original Joe’s, off Third Avenue. He liked Gibsons, which were extremely dry martinis with cocktail onions instead of olives at the bottom of the glass. He probably liked them rather too much. However, he didn’t start drinking till 5 o’clock and the Gibsons never interfered with what went on in bed, so I was probably less judgmental than I ought to have been. I even kept gin and cocktail onions in the one-room apartment for him.

About a week after we met, he also sent me the most beautiful and poetic love letter I have ever received. It was written in his office when he was supposed to be working, blue ink on three pages of closely lined yellow legal paper. All I remember of it now is that we were in the Garden of Eden, and God didn’t know about us yet, and the writer of the letter was going to chase and chase me until I could run no more and fell down. It ended, “I am your you, you are my me. I love, love, love, love, love you.”

But did he ever become my me? I think not. I was certainly somewhat in awe of him, with his haut-Wasp inflections and what I thought of as his deep knowledge of the world. And especially at the beginning, I was extremely pleased and happy he was in my life. He made me feel like a desirable woman again. However, he also caused distress and then pain, probably unintentionally, by keeping me always at arm’s length, with the result that throughout the year we spent together we really led separate lives. He didn’t want to socialize as a couple (except with a few of my friends, when it was convenient for him), or to meet my parents when they came east to visit me, or to talk seriously about anything. We never spoke on the phone, except to arrange meetings. Nor do I think he ever really loved me, despite his facility with the written word. By fall, it was clear he was developing a roving eye. He began to drift off. He called less regularly. We saw each other only every other week. When I finally worked up courage to ask what was going on, he confessed he was trying to maintain two relationships at once, the newer being with a married lady. (She eventually gave him crabs.) That was it for essentially old-fashioned me. Four months later (and crab-free), he tried to come back, but the psychotherapist helped stiffen my spine. It was time to move on.

Afterwards, I spotted him on the streets of Manhattan only once, in the late 1970’s. I was now again a wife, mother of two young boys, and walking our golden retriever along the curb of West 86^th Street on a Friday evening when suddenly a tall man strode swiftly towards me out of the dusk. My heart jumped with recognition. McDonnell. He looked just the same. By contrast, I looked awful – ten pounds heavier, bad hair, disheveled and damp from having made and cleared away dinner, with a stained apron still on under my unbuttoned coat. I swiveled to the side, hoping he wouldn’t see me, and he went right by, intent on his destination, which turned out to be an apartment house near Central Park. I was pretty sure there must have been a lady friend in that building. He had the eager look on his face I associated with Gibson-lubricated anticipation of a romantic interlude.

In the fall of 1995, my older son moved back to New York for a job after graduate school and I came down to visit from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was then living. I would be arriving before he got off work, so I needed to fill a couple of hours until we could have dinner together. Almost all my former friends had moved away, but I found McDonnell in the Manhattan phone book and called a few days before my shuttle flight. We arranged to meet for a drink at a well-known watering hole in the East 20’s. He didn’t sound especially enthusiastic, but that may be because my call came out of the blue, after (for him) about thirty-four years. However, he certainly knew my name and voice.

I was now sixty-four, he was seventy-one, and I wasn’t at all sure I would recognize him. But I knew I looked pretty good this time. I had become a well-paid lawyer, and money buys gym membership, a good hairdresser, nice clothes, tasteful makeup. I was also at liberty. Truth be told, if circumstances had been favorable I might have considered a reprise. Old friend and all that. I waited across the nearly deserted street from the appointed place until someone came along on the other side. I knew his purposeful walk at once.

Although still trim and despite his years looking otherwise not much changed except for a few grey streaks in his dark hair, he sounded petulant over our glasses of Pinot Grigio. He was living in Brooklyn Heights with a patent lawyer of Scandinavian origins about whom he couldn’t stop complaining; she had got fat during their five years together, she was sloppy, she bought too many clothes, she had no interest in art or literature, she didn’t understand boundaries. Afterwards he filled me in on what else had been going on with him during the previous thirty-four years: a third marriage, fourth child, third divorce, grungy jobs (including night word-processing at a law firm) that permitted him to write a failed novel, and then a modest family inheritance which freed him from the necessity of supporting himself, bought him a tiny studio apartment in the East 90’s just below Spanish Harlem (then being occupied by the fourth child, now grown), and permitted him to travel a bit. He had almost no curiosity about me. We each paid for our own wine and parted with pecks on the cheek and obligatory murmurs about keeping in touch.

Although often privately critical, I am almost always loyal. Now that we had, as it were, reconnected, I began to send McDonnell seasons’ greetings most years. Each was politely but minimally answered, sometimes two months late, in a familiar handwriting which had become mysteriously tiny and crabbed. In 2000, we met for another drink, at the same place, when my son became engaged and I came to New York for a lunch given by the bride’s mother for the bridesmaids, the bride and me. His “drink” was now coffee. He’d gone on the wagon when he finally left the Scandinavian and moved back into his studio apartment. I was sixty-nine, he was seventy-six. On inquiry, he declared himself to be quite fit and well. He had also become spiritual, he said. He had a Maharishi with whom he spent summers in the Berkshires. He did yoga twice a day, took a marvelous powder every morning called Green Magma, then walked around the reservoir, rain or shine. In the afternoons, he looked after his investments and meditated. Gone were the Brooks Brothers suits and cotton oxford button-down shirts; he looked a trifle shabby in a worn pullover sweater under a tweed jacket out at the elbow. But he did have a (new) lady friend in White Plains with whom he spent every weekend. Cocksman to the end, I thought. God bless.

The following year I met Bill and we began living together. We also regaled each other with tales of our respective pasts. At seventy and seventy-three, why be coy? Eventually, we came to McDonnell. “Have him to lunch if you want,” said Bill. “If he’s ever up here to see his guru.” (Neither of us are guru-minded.) And so it came to pass that McDonnell did indeed have lunch with us in Cambridge in 2004 on his way to a summer of spirituality in the western part of Massachusetts. He was still without a perceptible stoop, and retained a full head of hair, although it had become entirely grey. (Hey, he was eighty.) He also displayed excellent company manners. It was as if there had never been anything between us. We three discussed castles in the south of France, good places to stay in Tuscany, a charming little guidebook written in French in the eighteenth century he told us about, the name of which now escapes me. There was also some chat about minstrelsy. On leaving, he pronounced the meal delightful. “Come again,” we urged. “Mmmm,” he agreed noncommitally.

Then we moved to Princeton, which is much closer to New York than Cambridge. As old friends became ill and began to die, I would occasionally mentally calculate McDonnell’s age. The year he turned eighty-four, I suggested we have lunch together the next time I came to the city to visit my new grandchildren. We settled on a day, he named a favorite place in his neighborhood, and then got a cold so the lunch never came off. I abandoned desultory efforts to stay in touch. Even stopped sending holiday cards. Time marched on. Four years after that, which was three years ago, when he was eighty-eight, he inquired by email: “Weren’t we supposed to have lunch a while ago?” I reminded him about his having had a cold and added that I didn’t come in much any more, but was going to an opera matinee in the near future and if he wanted to meet at Lincoln Center for a quick lunch at the restaurant inside Avery Fisher Hall before the curtain went up at the Met, that would be fine. It was the first time he had ever initiated a get-together. In retrospect, the fact that it was three years ago was significant.

I hadn’t seen him since the Cambridge lunch eight years before, but assumed I would still be able to spot him when he showed up. I was wrong. I waited alone in the deserted lobby of Avery Fisher for some time. Then a strange figure came up an internal staircase from the basement level. He wore a clownish red knit cap with a pompom on top, a dull grey cotton padded coat, and a green wooly scarf tied clumsily around his neck. The figure wandered about uncertainly. He was tall. Although he looked nothing like any version of McDonnell I could remember, the height decided me. Who else could it be? I rose and addressed him. The responsive voice was somewhat shaky, but the haut-Wasp inflections were impeccably in place. It was indeed he.

As soon as I identified myself, he gave me a warm and intimate smile. Of course he recognized me! He had such wonderful memories of me! Wonderful memories! He leaned forward very close, as if it were 1962. I pulled a few steps back, involuntarily. I was eighty-one. I tried to picture my twenty-nine-year-old self naked and spread-eagled on her back. “I’ll bet you do,” I said, perhaps more acidly than he deserved.

He had in the past eight years become a stranger with no recognizable similarities to any of the prior McDonnells I could recollect. When we entered the restaurant, he seemed so unsure of himself I felt I shouldn’t have brought him there. He pulled off the silly knit cap to reveal a shock of thick snow white hair. His once dark eyebrows were sparse, and he had a black mole on his neck I didn’t remember. When he slipped out of his unusual coat, I noticed a large moth hole near the neckline of the old yellow merino wool sweater he had on underneath. He didn’t know what to order. I suspected most of the offerings might be too expensive for him in his currently threadbare condition and suggested the frittata, which was the most reasonably priced. He didn’t know what a frittata was, but agreed it would be all right when he heard it was essentially Italian fried eggs. When it came, he asked me how to eat it.

I tried to bring up pleasant memories. In February 1961 he had bought me a copy of John Updike’s Rabbit Run for Valentine’s Day the week it came out and written a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if inscription on the flyleaf: “For darling Nina, from the author.” He didn’t remember. For my thirtieth birthday, his gift had been the collected poems of Cavafy, of whom I had not yet heard. “Did I do that? Marvelous poet,” he said, accepting my Parker roll after he had consumed his own. And he had no recollection whatsoever of having hand-written the three-page love letter about the Garden of Eden. He said only one thing about our mutual past: “We were so happy. Why did it end?” I told him he had left me for a married woman who gave him crabs. The crabs he did remember. “Oh yes,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. Then he shook his head a few times, presumably at himself.

I paid for my own share of the lunch; he didn’t argue or resist. At my request, he walked me across Lincoln Center to the opera house. There was another opera in my matinee subscription a month later, but when I suggested we might meet again before that performance, he gave a vague smile without agreeing. I didn’t press it. He assured me he’d be fine going home on the subway by himself. It was the last time I saw him.

But not the last time I heard from him. (Yes, we have arrived at the climax of my story!) Last December he suddenly popped up in my email box, without a subject line. By now, he was 91. I quote the email in its entirety:

Woke up thinking about you! How are you? Fondly, E__.

“What do you suppose he wants?” I asked Bill.

Bill thought McDonnell must be lonely, living alone in a grim little rear room on the third floor of a brownstone in a New York City very much changed from the years of his prime. Bill is getting up in years himself, and because he doesn’t go out much anymore he welcomes company. He had pleasant memories of the Cambridge lunch and the talk about the south of France. He suggested I invite McDonnell to Princeton for another visit. So I did.

I have reviewed the email I sent this aged man who Bill and I agreed must be lonely. In light of what followed, I was clearly too warm. I said his email was synchronicity, because I had been thinking of him too. (Not entirely a falsehood; I do occasionally check the internet to learn whether those whom I know or knew continue alive.) I inquired as to whether he could still get himself to Penn Station, issued the invitation (with instructions as to how to reach us), offered my two phone numbers, and ended unwisely: “Your little email opened the door to many memories safely tucked away in the basement of my consciousness, beginning with that masked ball on December 31, 1960. Fifty-five years ago. Ball is now in your court. I’m dancing back and forth on the service line waiting for a return.” (An instance of extending a metaphor too far.) Moreover, and much to my subsequent chagrin, I signed it, “Hugs.”

His immediate response was captioned “Fire!”

(Fire?)

Thanks for your ready response. It instantly lights a fire. I’d love to be with you and will reply more fully later tonight. E___.

Another email came two hours later, captioned “Hot!”

(Hot?)

I just left word on the two phone numbers you gave me and am dying to hear from you. E___.

So I had to call him back. It was 10:30 in the evening, rather later than people of our generation are used to calling, but if he was “dying to hear from me,” so be it. The conversation was extremely peculiar. Sounding both happy and hesitant, he said he would be glad to make the trip to Princeton but had no experience with the protocol. Protocol? I explained again where to buy a round-trip ticket, which train(s) to take, and that I’d pick him up at the station. If it was a nice day, we could have a little tour of Princeton and then come back to the house for lunch with Bill. He had met Bill in Cambridge, remember? McDonnell didn’t remember. Then he inquired into my feelings about the visit. Feelings? He pressed on: “Yes, how do you feel about me?”

“Well, I feel friendly,” I began. “What did you think?”

“No, I mean what is your mood? Is it warm?”

Oh God. “My mood? What do you want me to say, E_____? I have fond memories of you. But we haven’t known each other for more than half a century.”

“Do you want us to know each other again?”

This back and forth went on for what felt like an eternity. He assured me he hadn’t been in a relationship for three years. (Which explained his getting in touch prior to our Lincoln Center meeting three years before.) He also made reference again to our supposed past happiness together. Don’t ask how I finally managed to extricate myself.

Five minutes after we hung up, a third email arrived.

Dear Nina,

What I was hoping was that you might be in the mood for having sex with me, either chez-vous in Princeton, or here on 96th Street. I hope this directness doesn’t offend you.

That’s what I meant when I asked about the “protocol” — the having of sex with another man’s wife, in the husband’s presence (or at least knowledge), which is what I suppose a visit to Princeton might entail. (Please excuse the expression.) I’ve never done that before.

Anyway what I’d like to propose for openers is: on any day you feel like it, come to town for luncheon with me where I usually have dinner when I eat out at the Corner Cafe (they serve wine) on Third Avenue and 92nd (or so) at, 1 p.m., followed by letting me show you my apartment and so forth, and then putting you in a taxi for Penn Station.

What about it? E______.

You want to know what happened next, don’t you? Although to be desired at eighty-four is nothing to sneeze at, even if the desirer has become unappealing and the suggestion is nuts, I’ve always been serially monogamous and it’s too late to teach me new tricks now, even if I had wanted to learn them, which in this instance I definitely didn’t.

E_____,

I understood perfectly what you meant on the telephone, and thought I had disabused you of your fantasies. Apparently not.

What you propose is out of the question. I am eighty-four and have no desire to “have sex” with a nearly ninety-two year old man, whatever our relatively brief relationship may have been fifty-five years ago. Nor do I have any desire to see your apartment “and so forth.” If my email suggested anything to the contrary, you misread it.

In light of your hopes, which are entirely unrealistic and disconnected from life as I know it, I must also withdraw the invitation to Princeton.

Good luck in your quest.

Nina

At two in the morning, he replied:

I’m sorry I jumped to too many conclusions, Nina. All the best. E_____.

And thus, dear readers, I cannot provide more specifics about what this ancient lover from my long-ago past might have meant by “having sex.” Was it Clintonian sex (excluding vaginal intromission)? Would it have required assiduous oral or manual assistance from me? He was certainly hot to trot, and seemed confident all would be well, assuming my assent. I conclude from this extraordinary and entirely unexpected episode in my very late life that there must be some truth in old saws. Practice does make perfect. Sow and you shall reap. You don’t lose it if you keep using it.

Also, piggyback hearsay or no, my psychotherapist told the truth.

SCARY

Although most of us nearing old old age don’t often talk about it, even to each other, it’s a time of life that necessarily brings thoughts of what could come next. As prepared as we may feel ourselves to be, both emotionally and practically — such thoughts begin to impinge more and more frequently on our consciousness because of what we see happening to our contemporaries.

“I just never thought this would happen,” exclaims a woman I know. She is two years older than I am, with a husband nearing ninety, and two sons in their fifties not living in Princeton or anywhere near it who have children of their own still to educate. Both she and her husband had been professionals throughout their working lives and seemed to me somewhat better fixed than Bill and I are. When I met her about five years ago in a reading group, they were living in a free standing, well furnished house with three bedrooms, a study and a finished basement, as well as the requisite living and dining rooms and three full bathrooms. The house had an attached two-car garage for their two cars and was beautifully landscaped by the condo association to which they belonged.

But she was already losing her vision to macular degeneration that didn’t respond to drops. Soon after we met, she became legally blind and could no longer drive. They struggled on for about a year with the husband driving wherever they needed to go. Eventually, however, they had to move to a retirement community that provides transportation to doctors, hospitals, supermarkets, shopping centers and, on notice, elsewhere in town. This was a huge downsizing — to a one bedroom apartment with den.

However, she adjusted. The other residents were educated, many of them formerly affiliated with Princeton University, and there were activities within the main building to get her out of their small apartment and keep her occupied with lectures, movies (which she could still more or less see), and a small gym with physical trainer. As for reading, first she read with a magnifying glass, and then only books she could obtain on Kindle, where you can increase the type size to 16 or 18. (It slowed down the reading, but she was determined.) Finally she needed a machine under which you slid the Kindle or iPad to magnify it still further. She could no longer see well enough to review bills or write checks. It became hard to communicate with her by email.

A year later, his emphysema took a turn for the worse and he was put on oxygen. They gave up the remaining car to a grown granddaughter. He was willing to use the oxygen at night when he slept, but not the portable one to move about the main building — which made it more and more difficult for him to reach the dining room. He had to stop to catch his breath and rest on benches strategically placed along the corridors, sometimes falling asleep while he sat there.

One Sunday afternoon, when out to lunch with one of their sons, who was visiting, the wife tripped getting out of the car. She had a heart attack and a stroke which left her mind intact but resulted in a useless left arm and leg. They took her to Philadelphia for cardiac surgery; she then went to a rehabilitation clinic where with hard work, she has managed to recover sufficient use of the left leg to walk slowly (although not too far) and to hang light bags on her left arm but not do much else with it.

She’s now back in their retirement community apartment. Because of her incapacities, she has to have home help from 9 to 3 every day. It costs $25 an hour, or about $4,500 a month over and above all their other living expenses. After an initial period when it was covered, this cost has been coming out of pocket. Three months ago, her husband’s doctor put him under hospice care. This means it was then thought he would not survive more than another six months. Hospice pays for two hours a day of home care (as well as a visit every few days by a registered nurse). However, his doctor believes he needs round-the-clock assistance, because he keeps trying to get up to reach the commode every other hour of the night and falls. His wife, obviously, can provide no physical help at all. This means another sixteen hours of home care per day at $25 an hour.

She telephoned me in despair last week. Money has been flying away at a frightening rate. She’s had to authorize their broker to liquidate funds they never thought they’d need to touch for such a circumstance — including roll-over IRA funds that are taxed after being distributed (so you have to take out more than you need to keep the amount you want after paying taxes on the whole of the withdrawal).

And the scary part is that her husband is doing well!

“What does that mean?” I asked. “He’s getting better?”

“No,” she said. “But he’s stable. His vital signs are strong. He eats. His brain seems clear when he’s awake. Three months of the six are gone, and he’s not any sicker.”

She means he’s probably not going to die in the predicted three months. The round-the-clock care may go on, and on. She is looking into the possibility of saving some money by replacing the current system of hourly home care with a live-in person; it may be slightly cheaper, but not much. (Moreover, it might not work if he keeps waking so often at night; a single live-in person would get no sleep.) Bottom line: the longer he lives, the more his home care depletes their savings, and the less is left for her own survival afterwards.

Who ever thinks the time will come when you might have to worry someone with whom you’ve lived for sixty-four years won’t die before you run out of money?

NEW YEAR’S GREETINGS FROM THE SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

If you’re too young for Social Security benefits, you may not be aware that every December the Social Security Administration (SSA) sends out a notice to benefit recipients of their “benefit amount” for the coming year. It doesn’t want us elderly Americans to be surprised when the first monthly deposit of the new “benefit amount” arrives electronically in checking accounts come January 3.

Sometimes the amount actually goes up a tiny bit. That’s because benefits for “senior citizens” are supposed to rise with the cost of living. However, when there’s no such rise, as measured in ways described below, the benefit does not go up. Or, as the SSA described it reassuringly to me and millions of other elderly citizens last month:

We review Social Security benefits each year to make sure they keep up with the cost of living. The law does not permit an increase in benefits when there is no increase in the cost of living. So your benefit will stay the same in 2016. [Italics added.] There was no increase in the cost of living during the past year based on the Consumer Prince Index (CPI) published by the Department of Labor. The CPI is the Federal government’s official measure used to calculate cost of living increases.

The Consumer Price Index used by the SSA for its periodic Cost of Living Adjustment is the CPI-W. According to Wikipedia, the CPI-W is based on the price of an alleged market basket of products used by an urban wage earner and clerical worker population consisting of clerical workers, sales workers, craft workers, operations and service workers, and laborers. Excluded from this population are professional, managerial and technical workers, the self-employed, short-term workers, the unemployed and retirees and others not in the labor force. Since retirees are excluded, it follows that their increased medical and drug expenses are not factored into the CPI-W. The CPI-W apparently did not go up in 2015.

Bill and I have just spent the past few weeks investigating several well-recommended non-profit retirement communities in our area, where I specifically asked about the estimated increase in monthly fees from year to year — the fees representing a sort of unofficial consumer price index for the elderly who might be considering a move to one of these places. These are the fees which cover the price of one hot meal a day, heat, electricity, basic television, cleaning, plant and grounds maintenance, and the like. At Pennswood, a Quaker retirement community in Newtown, Pennsylvania, I was told it is just under 3% every year, including 2015. At Stonebridge, in Montgomery, New Jersey, it was reported as between 2.6% and 2.7%. At Windrows, in Plainsboro, New Jersey, it was similar. Does it make sense for the SSA, whose beneficiaries are the old and the disabled, to base its Consumer Price Index calculations on putative expenditures by a wholly different population?

Let’s leave that one unanswered for the time being and move on to the SSA’s December message. The truth is that the SSA was jerking us around when it announced that because the cost of living did not go up in 2015 (yeah, yeah), our benefits would “stay the same” in 2016. Yes, gross benefits will remain the same. But as a practical matter, the message is a lie. The gross benefit is reduced by the monthly premium for Medicare Part B (insurance for out-of-hospital medical costs such as doctor visits, outpatient “procedures,” and the like), so that the money which reaches your bank is net of that premium. If you signed up for Medicare Part D, which covers most of the cost of prescription medication, that monthly premium also comes out of the gross. And guess what? The monthly cost of the two premiums together went up between 2015 and 2016. Which lowered the net benefit — the actual amount of money old people get to spend on the “cost of living.”

It didn’t lower it very much — only by $15.60 a month. But the average Social Security monthly benefit is $1.230.00 gross. (Again, I credit Wikipedia for this information.) Take away $209.60 — the 2016 monthly premiums for Part B and Part D together — and only $1.020.40 is left. If I were in that parlous situation, I would rather not pay the additional $15.60 in premiums and have $1,036.00 in income every month, like last year. $15.60 represents at least a couple of thrifty home-cooked dinners.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the original Social Security Act into law in 1935, the benefits were intended to be only one leg in a three-legged stool, supported on its other two sides by a private pension and by retirement savings. But according to Eduardo Porter, in “An Aging Society Changes the Story on Poverty for Retirees” (New York Times, December, 22, 2015), a recent study by the Government Accountability Office estimated that fewer than one in five retirees among the bottom 20% had any kind of defined benefit pension that pays a guaranteed monthly amount, and fewer than 1 in 10 have any retirement savings at all. Moreover, a typical low-wage retiree can expect to receive only 44% of his or her lifetime wage from Social Security.

That being the case, one could, of course, advise our “average” beneficiary to forgo prescription medication insurance in 2016. But is that really a “luxury” for the old? Are the still relatively healthy young aware of how much it’s going to cost to ride bareback — that is, uninsured — into the wilds of pharmaceutical costs awaiting them when they age, even if they’re among the relatively few who’ve always taken care to eat right, exercise, avoid stress, and be born to genetically lucky parents? Why not advise the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to forgo just a little profit instead?

LITTLE IRONIES

Bill once knew a man married to a woman who believed she loved all mankind. She always supported far left candidates politically, voted the Democratic ticket, espoused extremely liberal causes with letters to various editors, and also appeared to be color-blind, gender-blind and blind to ethnic and religious differences. At Christmas time, likely with a warm glow of good feeling in her heart, she wrote out small checks (representing money her husband had earned) to fifty or more charitable organizations of all kinds.

Yet everyone in their social circle disliked her. She was neither kind nor generous in situations where she couldn’t play Lady Bountiful. A colleague with whom she had worked closely and productively asked her to write a letter of recommendation supporting his application for another, better job. She didn’t say she would prefer not to. She agreed to do it and then proceeded to send a letter trashing his job performance and inter-personal relationships at work. He found out only when he inquired why he had not gotten the job. Her husband invited to dinner a colleague of his own, of whom he was fond; she instructed him at the end of the evening she did not want this man in her house again because he was a messy eater and left crumbs around his dining-room chair. Although he was a college professor, she didn’t like his Brooklyn diction either. Her brother, and only sibling, broke off relations with her thirty years ago after she hounded him, over and over, about the alleged psychological imperfections of one of his sons. (The boy grew up just fine in the end, without the interventions of his aunt.) This woman, who her husband has now divorced, apparently continues to love all mankind in general, but ironically has difficulty cutting specific individuals any slack.

ii.

I recently met a journalist with strong views about what is wrong with the bottom-line driven, impersonal and inhuman first-world society we live in. At the time of our meeting, which was by appointment, he was particularly irate about the scripted use of expressions of human warmth in coldly commercial transactions, a context in which they are meaningless. Examples: “Have a good day” from the checkout clerk when you leave the checkout line in a supermarket, even at nine o’clock at night. “Welcome to Bank of America,” from a greeter whose job it is to welcome you to an institution interested only in your money and how much they can make from your patronage. “Are you still working on that?” from the apparently solicitous waiter who really only wants to clear you out of the restaurant so as to turn over the table to another customer.

Wishing these patently insincere remarks removed from the context of the marketplace, where they are neither expected nor wanted, the journalist had apparently also expunged them, and other gestures of courtesy, from the context of more personal discourse where expressions of human warmth might have been anticipated. No “Hi, how are you?” No “Nice to meet you.” No offer to clear a chair, covered with his coat and hat, for me to sit down. No offer to shake hands (although he did briefly take mine, as if reminded, when I made the offer), or to summon a waitress to take my order. (He had already drunk his coffee while waiting for me.) A meeting which might have been a pleasant exchange of ideas became stiff and uncomfortable as it went on in this vein — certainly for me, and I cannot imagine not also for him. Expressions counterproductive of good feeling when present in a commercial context had ironically become counterproductive of good feeling when they were absent from a personal context.

iii.

I’m probably not overstating the case to say many of us were glued to our television screens on November 13 and the days following. We were both stunned by what had happened in Paris and avid for every scrap of information concerning how what seemed unimaginable had come about and — far more difficult to untangle — why. But as the television reporters congregating there over the weekend and into the following week began to run out of fresh data from the police investigation both in France and Belgium, they fell back (as they always do) on the “human” angle, bringing us the testimony of eyewitnesses and survivors to perhaps revive flagging viewer interest with stories of blood and bodies and rounds of shooting helpless people on the floor.

Two of these survivors were a particularly attractive and articulate young couple, separated at the time of the terrorist attack on the Bataclan. He had gone to the bathroom behind the stage, so neither knew what was happening to the other. They held hands as Anderson Cooper interviewed them on CNN. She was blonde and spoke English softly but very well. He was dark-haired and spoke mainly French, but Cooper repeated the gist of his account in English. He had barricaded himself behind a door. She pretended to be dead, beneath the bloody body of a person who really was dead. She said each time she heard the gun begin again, she thought the next round would be for her. She also kept thinking, “I love you,” because she wanted to die with love in her heart. Cooper then asked them what they have taken away from this experience. She said she had learned on that night how important it was to live, to live every day, to appreciate every day, to love every day.

And there were Bill and I, immobilized on our sofa for much of the previous three or four days, watching this lovely young woman telling us to live, when ironically, we were not really living. We were just gobbling up a news feed about horror as if it were a kind of entertainment. We were not particularly appreciating each of the days we may have left. (He is nearly 88 and I, as you know, am 84.) We were complaining that the news (read “entertainment”) wasn’t coming fast enough. We were also complaining about all the commercials — for each of which I have to press “mute” and then “unmute” — while the sun shone outside and our own lives were slipping away a day at a time. We normally are not television watchers. What were we doing on the sofa?

So we took her advice, turned off the set and got up. We can find out what happens in the world in about ten minutes every morning from the Times. There will be lessons for the West in what happened in Paris, but one of the lessons it offered us, Bill and me — not a new lesson, by the way, but one which needs reinforcing every once in a while — is that watching screens on which other people talk about living life is not living life, even though (ironically) more and more of us think it is. That is even truer if we dolly back from the television screen to include other digital screens. The virtual is not the real. But that’s a topic for another day.

******

P.S. [No irony here.] Happy Thanksgiving to all!

LOSING FIFTEEN POUNDS: PART SIX

[…continued from previous five posts.]

Gathering clouds obscured all traces of sun as I traveled north to meet my friend Emily in Ogunquit – first on a train from New York to Boston, then on another train to Portland, Maine and finally on a bus. During the long trip I mused pleasurably on what the next two days might offer. Cozy confidences while Emily’s new friend Kit was otherwise occupied? Confessions of wrongdoing? Appeals for help? Less pleasurably, I was also quite hungry by the time I reached the Ogunquit bus terminal where they were waiting to pick me up. Emily looked glad, but Kit was merely polite, which made me suspect my presence was some kind of peace offering to Emily.

The weather was both cloudy and cool; beach was out of the question. Not to worry, said Kit, there were plenty of other things to do. Since they’d already had lunch, we stopped at a grocery for two apples I could eat in the car. Then we went from art gallery to sculpture workshop to arts-and-crafts gift shop to seafood restaurant. The proprietors of all these establishments seemed to know Emily and Kit quite well; they were soon engaged in warm conversations about local people and events to which I couldn’t contribute. I smiled whenever anyone looked at me, which was now and then but not often, until I realized smiling was unproductive of anything but a return smile.

There was no private time with Emily; she participated fully in all this Ogunquit-based chitchat. After dinner at the seafood restaurant, I pleaded I really wasn’t up for anything more. By then it was actually true. Kit agreed it was probably time for bed. My mother had been wrong about the house. It was an A-frame, with an open area that served as living room, dining room and kitchen. There was only one bedroom — with a double bed, I noticed as we passed by the door. “Will I be using the sofa?” I asked when we got back after dinner.

“Oh, no. You’re going to have a place of your own,” said Kit, as if this were wonderful news. “We’ve fixed up a bed and lamp in the barn. I left an extra quilt out there, too.” What was wrong with sleeping on the sofa? Their bedroom had a door. If they were very noisy doing whatever they did, couldn’t they refrain, just for this one weekend?

I let myself be led to the barn. An oval braided rug had been laid down in a corner and a few minimal furnishings arranged on the rug. Kit lit the lamp. The light showed the rest of the barn floor to be tramped-down dirt with bits of straw scattered on it. They showed me how to bolt the barn doors from inside. “Now let’s go back so you can do whatever you need to do in the john,” said Kit. “As you can see, there isn’t one here.”

After hurrying into pajamas in the cold barn and burying myself under the blanket and quilt, I tried to imagine for a few moments what might be going on in the main house. Had I been sent out here because they preferred doing whatever they did in front of the fireplace? Just what did they do, anyway? Absent factual knowledge of such matters, my thoughts soon faded into sleep. I awoke to dim cloudy light filtering in from a skylight at the top of the barn and checked my watch. Morning. Very early to be sure, but time for the bathroom. If they weren’t up yet, I would sneak in quietly.

I scuffled into my ballet slippers and opened the barn doors. There was the A-frame, just down the path. I walked around the house in the damp grass to reach the door and set my hand on the cold doorknob. It wouldn’t turn. It definitely wouldn’t turn. It was locked. They had locked me out. How could they!

Back in the barn, I rocked on the bed, really a camp cot, holding in pee but not rage. If there’d been anything to eat within range, anything at all, I’d have gobbled it up. But the barn held nothing edible. Why should it? It belonged to Kit, who pushed food around on her plate as a prelude to smoking. An hour later, I returned to the house. The door remained locked. Now it wasn’t too early to knock, and I certainly did. Nothing. I put my ear to the door. Nothing. I knocked more forcefully. Nothing. What were they doing in there? I picked up a rock from the flowerbed by the door and pounded. Still nothing.

What choice but return to the barn? This time I found a crumpled piece of Kleenex at the bottom of my purse, took off my pajama bottoms, stepped off the rug onto the dirt of the barn floor, set my feet wide apart and let go with a vengeance. Only a little dribbled down my legs, and the Kleenex took care of that. Then I put on the pajama bottoms again and slid between the sheets to brood. If the whole barn stank of stale urine when I was gone, what did I care?

At ten o’clock, I finally heard voices outside calling “Wake up, sleepyhead.” We had brunch, prepared by Kit, who now seemed in exceptionally good spirits. Of course, she ate none of it and neither did I, since it was fried eggs and bacon, followed by pancakes with syrup – a meal that could have undone a week of fast walking up Forest Hills Boulevard and down Austin Street. Like Kit, I had only cigarettes and black coffee. Emily, who’d never dieted in her life and had apparently worked up a tremendous appetite overnight, was glad to eat my share as well as her own.

The meal over, we cleaned up and read the Sunday Times and went to a summer playhouse matinee of Harvey and had another early seafood dinner. I read more of the Times in the evening while they went through the local paper. There was no talk, except about the play and what was in the news. Before I again retired to the barn, I asked them please to leave the house door unlocked so I could get to the bathroom. They professed surprise they hadn’t done it the night before. “Force of habit,” Emily explained.

And that was the whole visit. Next morning, after more black coffee and cigarettes for me and Kit (and eggs benedict for Emily), we all three exchanged hollow thanks for how great it had been and I embarked on the long trip home. Reading furiously without remembering a word of what I read, I tried not to think how much I had wanted Emily to be my friend again, how hurt I felt and also how starved. I remembered when I reached Grand Central I could buy eight or ten candy bars to eat on the subway ride home to Kew Gardens. But it was Labor Day, and the newspaper stands were all closed.

When I returned to college a week later, the bathroom scale did indeed read 128. Despite my own subterranean (and not so subterranean) urges, I had finally managed to succeed. By anyone’s definition, I was thin. For now.

A “SENIOR CITIZEN’S” TRIVIAL THOUGHTS ON SECURITY CHECKS WHEN FLYING

As faithful followers and drop-ins who came upon my last post will be aware, I was on family-based break in Florida last week. Since I live in New Jersey, this involved flying. I have not flown for nearly two years.

At some point between my last flight and this one, the federal government decided that persons over 75 do not have to take off their shoes when undergoing security checks prior to boarding. It’s a development that’s not posted anywhere. A nice guard at Newark who inspected my driver’s license to be sure I was me noticed my birth date and kindly explained it to me. Very kindly explained it, as if I were in my dotage. (Would I be traveling alone in my dotage? Would I even be driving? Well, maybe.)

I wish I had known this earlier; I would have worn socks. As it is, I omitted socks to make removing sneakers and socks easier. I couldn’t remember if the socks had to come off too, and was taking no chances. Walking in sneakers without socks was a new experience for me, one I may not repeat now I know I don’t have to. (I was in sneakers rather than something more stylish because I anticipated much walking to my designated gate.) On the way back, still sockless, I checked with the Tampa guard to be sure this wasn’t a Newark airport idiosyncrasy; he assured me it was now “a federal regulation” in all United States airports.

While taking the long walk to the designated gate (I wasn’t wrong about that one), I thought about the federal government’s reasoning. What made 75 the cut-off age for the likelihood one would be planting explosives in one’s shoe? Was a 65-year-old more likely to be a shoe bomber? Or was it simple kindness for the presumably arthritic 75-year-old passenger who would hold everyone up while struggling with shoelaces? No, it couldn’t have been kindness; the federal government is not kind. It takes social security income into account when calculating income taxes owed.

On the other hand — over 75 or even 84, I still had to throw away my water bottle before entering security check. What is it that an old person who wanted to blow up a plane could do as well as a young person with a twelve-ounce bottle of Poland Springs water? Be imposed on to carry it aboard? Do I look like someone who can be imposed on after all my years of therapy? I get all hot and bothered about this because on the other side of security check I had to pay $3.00 to replace the identical bottle of water or go thirsty for over three hours.

Moreover, my age failed to exempt me from being patted down nearly everywhere by a woman guard wearing rubber gloves after a tedious explanation of what she was going to do and where she was going to do it. Since her hands went nowhere near my breasts or private parts I’m not sure why we had to go through the explanation, except perhaps that some old ladies might be upset at having their bottoms touched without prior notice. I was not spared from a gunpowder check on both palms either. Me, who hates killing a moth with moth spray?

Finally, I was free to retrieve my one permitted carry-on bag of the approved dimensions plus one “personal item” (meaning handbag), rearrange myself on a bench, and then begin the trudge — on my own elderly two feet — to the designated gate, Once there, and waiting to board after the military, people “needing extra help,” first class passengers, business class passengers, persons who had paid $40 extra to sit in the front part of economy class, I entertained many other thoughts which have nothing to do with age and everything to do with the now bare-faced greed of airlines for squeezing every possible dollar from its helpless passengers in ways that make flying not too uncomfortably for the price one paid for the e-ticket less and less likely. But that’s a post for another time, if I don’t forget about it until I need to fly again, which is entirely likely. How long can you go on aggravating yourself about old stuff when there’s something new coming down the pike every day?

WRITING SHORT: 48/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

Here’s an interesting subject: The deep-down feelings we don’t talk about — not ever, not to anyone.

It’s a no-brainer at work. “Keep your mouth shut” should be a mantra for anyone who wants to stay employed and get ahead. That doesn’t mean, of course, that one ought not offer carefully phrased, constructive suggestions for improvement of the workplace when asked, as long as one holds tight to “carefully phrased” and “constructive.” Deep-down feelings are never the first, almost never the second.

Relationships outside the office? Consciously or not, we’re all doing cost/benefit analyses all the time. Is it better to suck it up? Or spit it out? Saying “I’m sorry” afterwards doesn’t cut it. Bitter, hateful words are like winds flying from an opened bag, never again to be recaptured in the interests of negotiated calm.

And the Other? (If there is an Other.) I used to dream of transparent honesty coexisting with a lifetime of unquestioned love. I go on dreaming, but longer believe. There may be couples still so entranced with their idea of one another that they’ll declare I’m wrong. I suspect they permit themselves to see and hear the Other selectively, safely burying disruptive perceptions, then hiding the key to the vault. The rest of us shut up and make do, if it’s at all do-able, and sometimes go take a walk till the feelings pass.

What’s the alternative? Appearances to the contrary, nobody has it all. And after a while life itself begins to wind down. Then we count ourselves lucky someone’s still at our side, so we don’t face the eternal dark silence alone.

WRITING SHORT: 47/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

For some mothers, the hard part is never over.

A high-functioning daughter is on the phone. Such a nice surprise. “We’ve just rented a beach house for next August,” she says. “You’ll have to come for a weekend. The kids will be back from day camp then. Bob and I will both have off.”

It’s only October. What closely scheduled lives. But the mother knows she can’t say that. “Oh, lovely,” she replies. “Something to look forward to.”

Christmas and New Year’s come and go. Easter rolls round. The mother thinks about summer. She hardly ever sees these young grandchildren now all three are in school and then rushing to after-school sports, music lessons, playdates. At least those are the excuses.

“Which weekend should I plan on?” she asks carefully at a dinner given by her son-in-law’s mother. The daughter’s face assumes a familiar unpleasant expression. “No weekend, actually. We owe such a lot of people. We’ve invited too many as it is.”

Did the daughter forget the invitation? Or had it become inconvenient? “I thought it was a big house,” says the mother, not having learned from experience. “I could also come during the week.” She hates herself for having to beg.

The daughter is decisive. “Not such a big house. And we need the weekdays to recover from the guests.” She offers a tight smile, as if what she’d said was amusing.

The mother perseveres. “So does that mean I won’t be seeing you this summer?”

“You” could be taken as plural. But the mother really means singular “you” — the “you” who used to be her difficult, brilliant, much loved baby girl. “Looks like it,” says the daughter. “Maybe we can find time in the fall. I’ll check with Bob.”

Why be surprised? For a long time, the mother’s been on tenterhooks with this daughter. Should she have nailed down her August weekend with a confirming email last October? Who does such things with family? It’s been explained by others (counselor, doctor, childless friend) that with this disorder, the daughter can’t know how it makes the mother feel. She shouldn’t take it personally.

The mother nods. Easy for them to say.

It’s not their daughter, she thinks. Not their heart that hurts.

[Reblogged from June 23, 2015]

WRITING SHORT: 45/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

Amos Humiston was a soldier who fought in the Civil War. He died at Gettysburg in July 1863, clutching an ambrotype of his three children, through which he was later identified.

An ambrotype is an early type of photograph, made by placing a glass negative against a dark background. It was only in use for about five years. Its name comes from the Greek ambro(tos), which means “immortal.”

We don’t have Amos’s ambrotype anymore. It wasn’t immortal. But we do still have his letters from the war. This is what Amos wrote to his wife Philinda on January 2, 1863, six months before he died:

“If I ever live to get home you will not complain of being lonesome again or of sleeping cold, for I will lay as close to you as the bark to a tree.”

Ambro(tos).

[Reblogged from December 11, 2013]

WRITING SHORT: 39/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

In grade school, we memorized poems. Memorization was hard for me (it still is), but I did my best to remember the assigned passages at least long enough to recite them out loud, palms sweating, if called on. I think this practice was supposed to saturate us with uplifting and ennobling literature that would provide comfort in the tough times ahead when we became adults.

I’ve been an adult for many years now, some of them quite tough. All I could ever recall of those elementary school efforts were two lines: “By the shores of Gitchee-Goomee” (Longfellow) and “Into the valley of death rode the four hundred…” (Tennyson). Neither was particularly sustaining when encountering life’s challenges.

What did stick with me was the idea that memorizing was an approved endeavor for classy young ladies. When at the age of twelve and a half I fell in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), I therefore had to memorize some of his verse – if only to show his spirit (surely hovering over my bedroom in Queens, New York) that I cared. For some reason I chose “Ozymandias.” Because it was only fourteen lines? I have no idea. But I memorized with such diligence I remembered it long after I’d traded in Shelley for Leonard Bernstein as my love object.

Did “Ozymandias” help in getting through life? Not really. Not until recently, when I took another look with adult eyes:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear —

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Think of the many hot shits in the world you can’t stand. For all their self-importance, nothing of them will remain. They’ll be nada. Buried in bare, boundless sand.

Feel better?

WRITING SHORT: 35/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

Once upon a time, a well-respected lawyer left a large Boston law firm to open a small litigation practice of his own. He was a genial, generous boss. When he won a big case, he gave liberal year-end bonuses to all fourteen of his new employees, even the ones who weren’t lawyers.

But big trial wins are infrequent; there were occasional cash flow problems at the new firm. On several paydays he left early, ashamed or embarrassed; the young bookkeeper who did payroll would then explain everyone would be paid after the weekend because the deposit to cover salaries hadn’t yet cleared. Some non-lawyers were living paycheck to paycheck. However, in the end no one went hungry.

He was also generous with matching employee 401(k) contributions, up to 5%. In those days, the annual cap on such tax-deferred contributions was 15% of salary, but with his match, it came to 20%. All the lawyers had the full 15% withheld, and some others managed it, too.

Who regularly checks their 401(k) statement? At that firm, one lawyer did. He noticed his account had been without deposit activity for some time. The young bookkeeper explained that holding back 401(k) account deposits was the only way the firm could meet payroll just then, and the boss would make good on both the employee contributions and the firm’s as soon as he could.

Not investing employee-designated 401(k) contributions is a serious violation of federal law. All the lawyers knew it. Even the non-lawyers could recognize it as a kind of salary theft. Yet everyone held their tongues about this tricky situation. Reporting it might have put the firm out of business, the employees (lawyers included) out on the street. Mercifully, more money soon rolled in, so they could all breathe easy again.

I am reminded of this story because many aging people have cash flow problems too. They also closely monitor their retirement accounts. But not for deposit activity. It’s the taxable withdrawals — both the mandatory distributions and others for unforeseen expenses — that make them hold their breath. Talk about tricky situations: How long will the retirement account last? No federal law prohibits outliving one’s money. So there’s nobody to report it to. And no genial, generous boss, either — to make it come right in the end.

WRITING SHORT: 34/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

I want to eat everything. The whole carton of chocolate ice-cream. The whole cheesecake. The whole box of blueberry muffins. The whole family-size bag of potato chips. All the candy the kids collected in their hollowed-out pumpkin on Halloween and couldn’t finish. It doesn’t matter that it will make me sick, and later fat.

I want to buy everything I like in Vogue or at Pret-a-Porter — coats, dresses, sweaters, pants, boots, shoes, sandals, bags, scarves, hats. It doesn’t matter that I don’t need, can’t afford, wouldn’t know where or when to wear any of it.

I want to live in France, Italy, Spain, Greece — without moving away from home. I also want to see Scandinavia, Germany, Japan, South America — without moving away from France, Italy, Spain, Greece. It doesn’t matter that unless someone figures out how to access multiple parallel universes before I die, this is impossible.

I want to be young, adventurous, and sexually attractive to all men I find attractive, while retaining everything I now know about youth, adventure and sexual shenanigans and without relinquishing Bill, social security, or the privileges of age. It doesn’t matter that this would make me a dirty old lady who can work miracles.

I want to take piano lessons, relearn French, enroll in a Shakespeare course, lead a meditation workshop, tutor English as a Second Language, do Pilates, participate in two reading groups favoring long books because I like the women in them, play Scrabble once a month, pet the cats, and go to New York once in a while without giving up my blog and long luxurious afternoon naps on our new bed. It doesn’t matter that there aren’t enough hours in the day for all this or enough energy in me, doesn’t matter that I’d collapse, despite the naps.

I suppose you could say I want to be God. (God can have everything.) But I’m still asking “Is there a God?” and coming up with “No.” So it looks like I can’t have it all. Bummer.

WRITING SHORT: 33/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

An only child, I wanted an older brother. Someone who would show me the ropes, protect me if necessary, later on have friends who might date me. Now I’m gender-neutral in my preference, with a slight inclination towards a sister, older or younger. Someone who’d remember our parents with me, remember our growing up together, the places we came from and the people we knew. Someone connected with my past.

So why would anyone discard what I wanted and never had? Why haven’t Bill’s second wife and her only brother talked for over thirty years? (She does stay in touch with one of his sons.) The two of them know; no one else does. Bill’s first wife didn’t speak to her sister, ten years her senior, for decades. When the sister died at 89, only Bill’s son by that wife and his grandson went to the funeral.

Two of Bill’s three nieces don’t talk to their sister. The brother-in-law of Bill’s sister’s husband cut off all contact with his own brother, who later died still unspoken to. One of Bill’s first cousins won’t talk to his sister.

Bill says it’s not just his relatives, and not just siblings. That must be true. My second husband’s two nieces fell out over their mother’s care when she was dying fifteen years ago. Since then they haven’t spoken. The only sister of one of my daughters-in-law not only refuses to speak with their father but to be in the same room with him. That’s not between siblings, I admit. But she wouldn’t attend her own sister’s wedding because her father — also the bride’s father — would be there. Neither bride nor father have any idea why.

How common is this? Among Bill’s former patients, a distinguished professor rejects his brother; a prominent cardiologist won’t speak to his. “Let me give you more examples,” says Bill. “No, no,” I reply. “I’m writing a short piece.”

Perhaps bitter differences over the care of a dying parent are understandable. But what are the other reasons? She’s too outspoken? He doesn’t carve the turkey right? I’d take that sibling in a heartbeat. Maybe someone with siblings of their own could enlighten me.

WRITING SHORT: 24/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

When I was younger, I used to think when something didn’t work out with a husband, lover, friend, job, I could move on after a suitable period of regret, and start again.

That seemed to work for a while. Then it began not to. You can’t really clean the slate. We drag our histories with us wherever we go, and not only on our professional CVs. (Those can be doctored, but only so far). We’re just not brand new any more. Our emotional resumes color our responses to what comes next. Unsuccessful past experiences may engender mistrust, disbelief, self-doubt.

Later, when we’re older still, another problem unforeseen by the young arises. New opportunities become rarer. Is there (artfully masked) age discrimination in the workplace? You better believe it. Available new partners/lovers/friends? Fewer and farther between. If you’re still searching out a different resting place for your mind, heart or body, you can find yourself more and more sidelined.

Finally you see there’s some merit in the old saying, “Make it do, use it up, wear it out.” It’s not just about a penny saved is a penny earned. Too bad it takes some of us so long to realize it.

ON BEING OLD

(Formerly "The Getting Old Blog")

Real Life

MY DARLING BILL IS DEAD

SEX AT NINETY-ONE

SCARY

LITTLE IRONIES

LOSING FIFTEEN POUNDS: PART SIX

A “SENIOR CITIZEN’S” TRIVIAL THOUGHTS ON SECURITY CHECKS WHEN FLYING

WRITING SHORT: 48/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 47/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

[Reblogged from June 23, 2015]

WRITING SHORT: 45/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 39/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 35/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 34/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 33/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 24/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

[Reblogged from June 23, 2015]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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