Roger Angell

ROGER ANGELL ON LIFE AFTER NINETY

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Roger Angell and his dog Andy, January 2014. Photo courtesy of The New Yorker.

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

[The most viewed piece I ever posted was a summary of “This Old Man,” an essay written by Roger Angell. It had just been published in The New Yorker.  My post ran sixteen months ago, on February 14, 2014, But it still shows up in the stats as being read almost every day by one or more people somewhere in the world.

Initially, I credited its popularity to the fact that the TGOB post offered readers almost half of the Angell essay for free, whereas The New Yorker archives were not free then, except to subscribers. But now I think there’s something more to it than that.  As far as I know,” This Old Man” is almost unique in being written by someone with a clear and literate voice who was in the tenth decade of his life — 94 when the essay was published, 95 this year.

That may seem a long way off to most of you.  Not to me. In less than a month, I will be 84. So once in a while I go back and reread the post, to remind myself of what it may be like for me in just ten years, if I’m lucky enough still to be here then.  Of course, Angell has far more money than I do, and more connections, and more this, that and the other thing to perhaps ease his journey towards the end.  But I do believe most of the essentials about which he writes remain the same for everyone.

Of the sixteen people who clicked “like” on the post when it first appeared, I recognize the avatars of seven or eight.  But many newer readers and followers of TGOB may not have gone rummaging in the blog’s archives to find it.  Therefore, I hope those of you to whom it’s already familiar will humor me for running it once more.  It does make those of us who are only a bit younger, or even very much younger, stop and think.]

ROGER ANGELL ON LIFE IN HIS NINETIES

[A reblog]

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 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.)

Nonetheless, 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 TGOB 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.”

JOKES!

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

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

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

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

From grammar school (in the 1930’s):

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

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

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

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

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

From my father (in the 1940’s):

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

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

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

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

From French class in high school:

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

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

From my days in advertising:

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

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

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

From my days as a lawyer:

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

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

From the husband of a long-time friend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROGER ANGELL ON LIFE IN HIS NINETIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

     Small Boy:  My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.
     Teacher:  A mechanic!  Thank you, Irving.  Next?
     Small Girl:  My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer.
     Teacher:  How nice for you, Emma.  Next?
      Second Small Boy:  My name is Luke and my dad is dead.
     Teacher:  Oh, Luke, how sad for you.  We’re all very sorry about that, aren’t we class?  Luke, do you think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?
     Luke (seizes his throat): He went “N’gungghhh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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