Things Older People Do to Make Us More Comfortable in Their Presence

My mother, 81, is hard of hearing, and will, when seated next to new people at a gathering, turn to each in turn and say, “If any of my comments tonight seem absurdist, don’t take it personally.”

Sociologist Setsuko Nishi, 86, will tell a new acquaintance who finds himself staring at her lovely, slightly tremulous fingers, “I have benign hand tremors, so don’t worry.”

Dolly Parton, 63, will, according to Jesse Green’s story in New York this week, sometimes grab a man’s head and push it straight into her cleavage.

The Unanticipated Side Effects of Strokes

70 year-old British playwright Alan Ayckbourn–whose “The Norman Conquests” is currently on Broadway–had a stroke a few years back, at which point he started confusing the words “yes” and “no.”

He told Sarah Lyall in yesterday’s Times, “‘A very nice doctor came in and said, ‘Are you aware that when you say yes, you’re saying no?'”

Ayckbourn:    No.

Doctor:    I don’t think this conversation can continue.

Friends, and Why to Have Them

Increasingly, medical studies show us that having a lot of friends helps us live longer. An article by Tara Parker-Pope in today’s Times pointed out that some studies even show that friendships have a greater role on our health than spouses or family members do. Also:

“Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia, taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone. The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.”

I’m reminded of a British psychological study done three years ago whose results suggested that one route to happiness is to have friends who are less well-off than you (not in order to lord your superiority over them, but to appreciate more fully what you have.)

So, putting the results of the two studies together, it’s now clear to me what I should be looking for in new friends I make: people with very heavy backpacks.

Elderism #46

At the end of her life, Flannery O’Connor, her lupus ever worse, was sequestered in her mother’s house in the backwoods Georgia that the writer had once hoped to flee. She was only able to write only a few hours a day. She said on her deathbed,

“‘My my I do like to work…I eat up that one hour like it was filet mignon.'”

(New York Review of Books)

My New Role Model

It occurs to me that so many of my favorite reading experiences–Calvin Trillin’s food trilogy, David Sedaris and Joan Didion’s essays–are the product of slightly-frayed paperback editions of previously-published magazine work. And now I have a new one: Jim Harrison’s “The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand.” A typical Harrison essay might start as this 1993 one from Esquire does–

“Just this morning, at dawn in fact, I stood outside in my underpants in the dense, bitter cold, a blustery wind laden with snow out of the northwest, thinking about the new administration and the wild-duck soup looming as an obvious breakfast choice.”

Yes, here is a gentleman who is convinced that,

“many of our failures in politics, art, and domestic life come from our failure to eat vividly”

and who is thus taken to proffering wise counsel such as,

“Garlic is a vegetable and should be used in quantity.”

(It should be noted that duck soup is not the only breakfast option within the Harrison weltanschauung. No, you might also, as he does, shave white truffles over oatmeal.)

Having, earlier in his life, gotten into the habit of walking into restaurants with a notepad and dictaphone so that restauranteurs would mistake him for a food critic and give him better meals, the novelist/poet/screenwriter (born 1937, Grayling, MI) now suffers the consequences of his raging appetites: he has gout. He advocates a daily regimen of walking lest

“your dreamlife become the tormented march of dead meat.”

And he cops to the fact that the food obsessive’s passions are sometimes unmatched by those in his acquaintance:

“Several years ago, when my oldest daughter visited from New York City, I overplanned and finally drove her to tears and illness by Christmas morning (grilled woodcock and truffled eggs.)”

But, in the end, by virtue of his crackling prose and gonzo zest for life (he keeps a Deshimaru quotation over his desk that runs, “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair”), Harrison is a lodestar for those who want to grab life, or something like it, by the balls. And if the vivid consumption of vivid food is not your vivid proverbial thing, there’s another way to celebrate food, too:

“Tempers flared around the home, so early next morning we took a dozen eggs out the back door and hurled them against an immense rock formation. How wonderful the crisp crack and splatter against the morning song of the canyon wren.”

Elderism #45

Joyce Carol Oates:

“I go into a very happy state of mind when I’m vacuuming. I think some of my male colleagues, like Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, are completely denied this pleasure.”

Cognoscenti and trackers of the domestic arts may be reminded of a certain  immortal line from “What’s My Line” panelist Orson Bean’s  autobiography of the early 1990’s:

“Vacuuming was my thing.”

The Eternal Appeal of Hairlessness, Part Deux

In Chip McGrath’s profile of Mike Nichols in the Times this past Sunday, we learn that the director of the cinema landmark, “The Graduate,”

“wakes up every morning…, collects himself and, wearing a wig and paste-on eyebrows, plays a character called Mike Nichols.”

Apparently Nichols’s permanent hairlessness stems from a childhood reaction to whooping cough vaccine. But being undowny has  not impeded the hawkishly good-looking Nichols’s loveability, even when he was a child: when Nichols arrived to the States from Berlin at the age of 7 in 1939, he was armed with only two sentences in English–“I do not speak English, ” and “Please do not kiss me.”

Got Goat?

If you look at the Dining section of today’s New York Times, you’ll find a story I wrote about how I learned to love eating goat. (It is here.) Everyone has had a bad goat experience, it seems–either the meat was tough or barn-smelling. But if the goat you munch upon is very, very young, it is truly delicious–it’s Lamb, Plus. If you’ve had a tough piece of goat, it’s probably because it was from an animal more than a year or so old. (During the reporting of the piece, I told my boyfriend, Greg, “Old lamb is called mutton. But there’s not really a name for old goat.” Greg said, “Milton.”)

UPDATE: Readers lash back! I have apparently opened a can of worms. Two of the more interesting readers’ comments on the Times’s website are from Pat in Brooklyn, and Mohammed in the USA.

The New Old Age

There’s an article about my book, “How to Live,” on the New York Times’s website today. (Read it here.)

The writer, Anne C. Roark, asked me a lot of questions about the best ways to interview older folks or parents. (The wonderful irony here, of course, is that my interview of my mother and stepfather for “How to Live” resulted in their divorce.) Knowing that a lot of people are reluctant to submit their loved ones to the rigors of the tape recorder, Roark mentions my citation of the old African saying, “The death of an old person is like the burning of a library,” and adds, “Many people have complicated relationships with parents, but all of us love libraries.”

Elderism #44

A father to his son in Wells Towers’ funny and slightly terrifying new short story collection, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”:

“‘Burt, fight to death before you let somebody put you in his car. Either way, you’re probably dead, and believe me, it’s better to check out before they get creative on you.'”