How Is My Mother?

Because my mother is the de facto protagonist of my most recent book, some of you may be wondering how Ann is doing. Swimmingly. More specifically, though, you may be wondering how she is shouldering the burden of having been called by Oprah magazine, in their review of How to Live,  “a role model for the ages.” Shortly after the Oprah review was published in January, I reported, “It’s all muu-muu-wearing and elevated diction from Ann from here on in; don’t expect to be granted an audience unless you are bearing a tape recorder or honorarium. If you do happen upon her in the environs of a certain North Carolina retirement community or Costco and are unsure what the appropriate tone to take with her is, consider hushed awe.”

So here’s an update: Mom recently upgraded her room at her retirement community so that she could have a balcony. This balcony overlooks the reception area and parking lot. While many might hear this news and attach to it the word “busybody” or even “surveillance,” those of us who really know Ann and her Zen-like role-modeling  have a  more accurate term at hand. We call it omniscence.

Elderism #72

 “We have no excuse for self-satisfaction while we allow the atrocity of the Pina Colada to flourish unchecked in our midst.”

-Kingsley Amis, in Everyday Drinking

The Consolation of Lists

In an interview in Der Spiegel, The Name of the Rose novelist Umberto Eco talks about the show at the Louvre he’s been curating. The theme of the exhibition is lists (Eco has a new book out from Rizzoli called The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay.) When asked, Why lists, Eco first proves evasive, offering,

I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.

But pressed further, Eco opines,

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Elderism #71

“If we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.”

-Edith Wharton.

The Big Four O

What gift are you giving Sesame Street for its 40th anniversary this year? Rubies are traditional, but I’m going with felt.

Elderism #70

“You have beautiful hands.”

–Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, to a nurse who was cranking up his bed in a Naples hospital in 1994, hours before Steegmuller passed away at the age of 88.

How to Get Stuff Done

“Every few years when it’s been another five years that have passed and I haven’t made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get to work promptly.”

-Filmmaker and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, in 2003, in a conversation with Salman Rushdie published in The Believer. This reminds me of a story about Sigmund Freud that writer George Prochnik told in a great article in Cabinet two summers ago. “Sometime in the summer of 1909, not long before Sigmund Freud was due to embark on his only visit to the United States, he was enjoying a cigar in the company of his inner circle in the busy Biedermeier interior of Berggasse 19, when he suddenly announced, ‘I am going to America to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.’” Cough, cough, awkward pause… porcupine? Then Freud continued,

“‘Whenever you have some large objective in mind, it’s always good to identify a secondary, less demanding goal on which to focus your attentions in order to detract from the anxiety associated with the search for the true grail.”

(Thereafter the phrase “to find one’s porcupine,” became a recognized saying in the Freud circle.)

Elderism #69

“I started it.”

-Elizabeth Taylor, beamingly, when told in 2006 that Julia Roberts was pulling down $20 million per film.

Wisdom: Does It Exist?

The quarterly journal, In Character, has an interesting mandate: each issue is devoted to an “everyday virtue” (past issues have included “Thrift,” “Purpose,” and “Grit.”) This fall’s issue is “Wisdom,” and I was asked–along with a group of far-deeper-than-me folks like E.J. Dionne, Rabbi Smuley Boteach, Roger Scruton, and Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, among others–to weigh in on the questions,  “Is there such a thing as wisdom?” and, “If so, can it be taught?” The results are here. My only sadness is that I am not in the “Grit” issue. Loving the grit.

Elderism #68

“Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit.”

–Novelist Edmund White, as quoted in a Bloomberg.com review by Craig Seligman of White’s new memoir, City Boy. Seligman: “What a blast it must have been to be gay in New York in the 60’s and 70’s, especially if you were, like Edmund White, young and attractive and smart and talented and a major slut.”