Are You an Oldie?

I’m a fan of The Oldie, a hilarious English magazine that is devoted to– and mostly written by–older folks. Run by the gent who started the satirical periodical, Private Eye, this newer offering takes a fairly bracing approach to later life. Herein you’ll find a column devoted to profiles of celebrated elders that is called “Still with Us;” in another column,  funerals are reviewed. (Yes, the British may not want to talk about sex, but they are happy to slap you in the face with a dead fish.)

I recently stumbled onto a quiz on the magazine’s site that potential subscribers are meant to take to determine whether they are “oldies.” While some of the questions are ones you’d expect (“Do you write letters?,” “Do you save string?,” “Are you frightened of going to the Barbican?”), I was puzzled/amused by others, including, “Do you spend more than an average amount of time in stationery shops?” and “Are you obsessively concerned about the size and shape of spoons?”

Elderism #40

A reader from Hurst, TX named Lyn LaCava writes that her grandmother, Mama Ruey, who lived to age 87, had many Mama Ruey-isms, not the least of which was,

“I wouldn’t eat a coconut that rolled through her house.”

Hello, Kenosha

I’ll soon be polluting the airwaves with semi-abandon–Wisconsin Public Radio this morning, and Studio 360 this weekend–so I thought I’d re-post some reviews of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth)” in deference to the unitiated.

Here’s Publishers Weekly calling it one of the Best Books of 2008 (somewhat  strangely, as the book came out in January, 2009). Here’s some hearty meat-and-potatoes from Time magazine’s website, and a steaming bowl of bouilliabaise from NPR’s Book We Like. Laura Miller’s Salon.com piece makes most other reviews seem like book reports by comparison. Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time Out New York–you are all my children. The Guardian spells “marvellous” with two l’s–you’ll want to roll that second “l” as if your tongue were cradling a lychee or stray eyeball. And everybody loves a lady named Oprah.

Welcome, Milwaukee. Fond du Lac, take a load off.

How I Think Ralph Nader Will Spend His 75th Birthday Tomorrow

-Removing the candles from his birthday cake with hypoallergenic tongs

-Hoping that the selection process re the Obama family pet has been “responsible”

-Arguing for cumin’s inclusion as the third-party condiment

-Elder-blogging

-Wondering, “2012?”

How to Celebrate Your 100th

I recently had a conversation with an acquaintance about how best to celebrate one’s 100th birthday. A big question. My research has led me to a story that ran in London’s Daily Mail two summers ago; the article opened, “An iron-lunged pensioner has celebrated her 100th birthday by lighting up her 170,000th cigarette from a candle on her birthday cake.”

Apparently, “The former launderette worker said she started the habit in 1914–just weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.”

Elderism #39

Julian Barnes, in Nothing to Be Frightened Of:

“Who can teach us to die? There are, by definition, no old pros around to talk–or walk–us through it.”

L’s Bells

I only just now found this lovely column by Oliver Burkeman about my book, “How to Live” yesterday, though it ran in the Guardian last weekend: my Google Alert has not been so, uh, alert of late.

I’d like to tell you that the column’s legacy is my increased appreciation for the columnist’s grandmother or for neurobiologist Lawrence Katz, both of whom have great quotes in the piece. But, truth be told, I have mostly been fixating (admittedly narcissistically) on the fact that “How to Live” is herein called “marvellous.” There’s something about that extra “l” in the British “marvellous”  that positively unbuckles me. Indeed, I have been experimenting with putting an auxiliary representative of this high-backed consonant into other adulatory adjectives as an intensifier, to use when discussing people I feel strongly about. So far:

-fabullous

-terrlific

-nlice

NPR’s “Books We Love”

A vibrant and garlicky review of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They are Still on this Earth)”, from National Public Radio’s “Books We Love” series, can be found here.

Elderism #38

81 year-old Italian actor and comedian Oreste Lionello passed away today in a Rome hospital after a long illness. Lionello achieved his greatest fame as a dubber of voices in American movies shown in Italy.

A career as a dubber is rooted in a kind of self-deflection or self-abnegation–Lionello gave voice to, among others,  Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, and Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. So it’s a delightful  irony that in Lionello’s case, all this self-asiding  gave way to a rather bold act of self-definition. To wit, Lionello would sometimes answer his home phone,

“I am the voice of Woody Allen.”

(Chicago Tribune)

Elderism #37

Writer and professor Manfred Wolf, in his new collection of essays and aphorisms, Almost a Foreign Country:

“Many conversations are non-consensual.”