Happy to bore you

I am an old woman now, 65, but I’m still struggling to heal the wounds of childhood. And as I look at my friends and family members—even my 89-year-old mother—I see that they are wrestling with the same task. The variety of childhood wounds is so vast, and the injuries so often exacerbated by re-infections along the road to recovery, that sometimes it seems that the whole point of adult life is to cauterize the beginning of life. 

So when I look at my children, I fear that the annoyance they sometimes cannot conceal has its roots in some dreadful cruelty of mine that they cannot completely forgive. But then I realize, No, it’s nothing so grand. It’s just that I cannot remember what I’ve told them before and so I repeat myself, tell the same old stories so often that they jump in to stop me by providing the punch lines before I can get to them myself. 

And since the stakes are high, I feel relief that I’m just boring, not harmful.

Old people—yuck!

The elderly may sometimes slur, but more often they get slurred. These days I’m struck by the casual ageism that drops into conversations and essays without a ripple. Some examples from my notebook:

“There are quite a few semi-old people traveling with really desperately old people who are clearly their parents. Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I’ve decided; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It’s just about the only body area where you actually want more hair on older men.”
—Shipping Out, by David Foster Wallace

 “When I look at [my old paperbacks] objectively, like a child looking at the tented skin of a beloved grandparent, I must admit that they are not physically attractive.”
—The Shelf, by Phyllis Rose

“The parents are just on the other side of 40, still relatively young, still relatively attractive.”
—Modern Love, New York Times, September 24, 2015

“Hoodie … a piece of clothing that makes you look hip and cool if you are under 40 years old but that you shouldn’t be using over 40 if you don’t want to appear as a pervert and/or a slob.”
—"How to Fold Your Hoodie Into a Pillow or a Laptop Bag," Lifehacker

Moral: Being old is really, really fun, but only if you have body hair and like having people think you’re a pervert.

On mortality

My father used to call it the organ recital. That thing when you casually ask a geezer how he is and he tells you in detail. Such revelations used to seem like oversharing. But now that I’m a geezer—or a crone—I get it. I live in my body, there’s no escape. When things go wrong inside my skin (or on it) I feel more than idle curiosity. In the last third of life, in which I and many of my friends abide, a new symptom can be an answer to the question, How will I die? 

That’s the conversation’s subtext, too stark to spell out in casual conversation. So nowadays, when someone confides her latest health concern, I listen with interest—and Google it later—because I know what we’re really discussing is mortality. The organ recital now feels not like oversharing but undersharing.

Then this happened

So the other day my daughter was under the weather and I was visiting her. She asked me to get her some sanitary napkins. So I went to the bodega near her apartment. When I asked the proprietor where the sanitary napkins were, he looked me up and down, taking in my gray hair, and said, “You mean adult diapers, don’t you?” Sigh.

Impoverished art student's free canvas

Praying (and preying) mantis

Tree cozies

Another great idea

And to think I saw it on Fourth Street

Dr. Seussian vents

How do I look?

Before I head to work in the morning, I always ask Other, “How do I look?” The other day, he said, “Why do you always ask me that? You always look great.” And he’s right, in a way. He always says, “You look great.” But often there’s an “if.” “You look great—if you like pants that look like a table cloth.” “You look great—if you like clown shoes.” “You look great—if you don’t mind looking like a copy editor.” That’s why I always ask him before I head to work in the morning, “How do I look?” 

Only in San Francisco

What does the Erection company do? Why, it installs gates and doors, of course.

Menu stand at Local 92

Ooops, I did it again

The good things

My father has been dead a year and a half now, and memories of him continue to surface from time to time, startling me with their vividness. My father was a gifted wordsmith who wrote delightful letters to just about everyone he knew and some he didn’t—including editors of newspapers across the land. At the table he often scribbled in an expired pocket calendar. I always wondered what he was writing. One day I asked to see, and he handed over his journal to me: page after page of … what he ate at meals. When I asked him why, he shrugged. Peanut butter sandwich, tomato soup, frozen corn, lamb stew, chocolate ice cream—you get the drift. By the end of his life, my father didn’t have a whole lot of pleasures, and he had a lot of anxieties—about where he’d put the utility bill, what had he done to displease my mother, would his money stretch to cover—so recounting the contents of each meal may have given him a chance to reflect on the good things in his life. Peanut butter sandwiches, tomato soup, frozen corn, lamb stew, chocolate ice cream.

Before and after

Floor flower

Gertrude Stein: Petals

By Noah Scalin

Matchy matchy--Is this a thing?

Any other ideas?

Washington Square

Grace Church

Chinatown

On Forsyth Street

Like ironing, in a good way

One of the things I love about yoga is the analogies teachers use to explain it. Yesterday my teacher at Iyengar described holding and repeating a pose as being like ironing, and going over and over a wrinkled area until it smoothes out. How apt! 

New York, City of Love