Forgetting It All

I keep hearing ads for these brain training programs that are designed to 'increase mental acuity by calculating baseline scores' as they put it, but in my world a baseline score is what your doctor uses to measure the relative swiftness of your decline.And yet, and yet:  If I don't do these mental calisthenics, will I start losing it? Forget how to flush, or make change? Inadvertently turn into the funniest person standing in line... at the wake? I look at what's out there and then I look at my life. I don't do Lumosity. Or Sudoku. Or Words With Friends, which is basically just Scrabble over the Internet.  But the way I look at it, people old enough to worry about getting sharper are already less sharp. Just look up the statistics on how fast your synapses are firing now compared to how they fired when you were 12. You're slower than you were and that’s a fact, so now you want to start measuring how much slower? You might as well make little marks on your kitchen wall the way people do with their growing children - only you’d be doing it so you could watch yourself shrink.But back to mental acuity: When I was young, I could memorize anything, historical dates from the 1500s, the license plate numbers on my friends’ parents’ cars, the poems our teachers used to make us stand beside our desks to stammer out. Now all I have stored here in this head is a single credit card number, and even then I have to get a running start with, the way you do with the 23rd Psalm, say.As for poetry, every time I try to recite those bits of verse from my schooldays sonnets, they all mysteriously become, three lines, in, “Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know," but seriously: What are you gonna do?  Mark Twain famously wrote that when he was younger, he could remember anything, whether it happened or not.’ But as his faculties began decaying, as he put its, he got so he could only remember the latter. He could only remember what didn’t happen in other words.  If I get like this, I won’t be any kind of authority on the facts but hey, stick around anyway: It’s a good bet my stories will become a lot more entertaining. And now, this great clip from Men in Black, where the memory-erasing Neuralyzer is put to use... which leads me wonder: Have Agents J and K been around HERE lately?[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqlFiTOi6QQ[/embed]

Silliest Come on Yet

The surgical department here named is one of the best. They dug a basal cell carcinoma out of my own little shin two autumns ago and within the year, the wound was almost invisible.  What looked like an elliptical scoop- mark, made as if by an oversized grapefruit spoon, is now a faint and slender line, scarce visible even to me, never mind casual observers.They're the ones who sent me this promotion  last week.The lady is pretty and I guess I get the sentiment but when you say that aging simply won't do you might as well say you're ready to reach for the hemlock.We age. Period. You can suck out and pin up all you want but look around the whole perimeter: Are your two feet the smooth little darlings they once were? Are the backs of your hands freckle-free? Don't look now, but something is sure happening to the skin at the base of your glutes and I'm not talking about cellulite.It's gravity, baby. Gravity and wear-and-tear. When Aging Simply Won't Do: Hah! What really won't do is acting like you can beat the House when everyone who’s honest knows it: the House always wins in the end.

Bring on the Workweek

Took the weekend off. Did no work at all. Acted like a 12-year-old in that I pretty much just listened to my i-Pod, wrote in my diary and gave my feet the critical eye.I also broke precedent and looked in the mirror for a full seven minutes, which made me stand appalled by what has become of me. I have wrinkles galore, a furrow deep enough to plant carrots in and this new weird thing where my spine snakes over to the left, then doubles back on itself and snakes over to the right. Most people don't notice it until I mention it but then they see it all right. When I pointed it out to my friend Ahmad he said in his mild way, "Oh yeah! Your pants are here and your shirt is over here!"Also I'm getting these dark things on my face, like Morgan Freeman has. They're like pigmented freckles only I've never had freckles.Plus my eyes, which were always too close together, seem now to be heading for opposite corners of the room.My teeth look like kernels on the corncob you split open and then toss back in the bin. (WHY WASN'T I MADE TO WEAR BRACES EVER?) Also my bangs are too short - they make me look like Imogene Coca if anyone remembers her.And my eyebrows are disappearing.I was examining the Nike Swoosh of my spine when my man sauntered into the bathroom. I had this flannel shirt on that I found in our son’s high school bedroom.“It’s a men’s small but it’s not quite makin’ it in the buttoning shut department."Get a breast reduction,” he quipped.He was kidding of course. The real problem was about a foot further down, but maybe I should anyway. I mean, it’s too late for braces, right?Maybe I can enter these years like a sort of sprightly un-busty Mary Lou Retton. Hey, it would take my mind off the rest of me. What does a thing like that cost anyway? And why go around looking like this sadsack..... When I could go around looking like this:Well. Such are the thoughts of a person with WAY too much time on her hands. Bring on the workweek! 

Antidote to Loneliness

During my week alone I cleaned and sorted and filed all kinds of things and came upon this poem that our Uncle Ed had saved among his papers.He lived alone for 20 years - more  even.Ever since 1991, when his beloved wife Fran had to go into a nursing home with her Alzheimer's, and then for the 12 years after she died and before he followed her into death this past April.I remember sending him it.My daughter had sent it to me.Between me and other family members, we saw him four days a week but I suspect the other days were long indeed.I hope that it comforted him and that he believed its message. Anyway here it is.It's called 'Everything is Waiting for You' and it's by David Whyte.

Your great mistake is to act the dramaas if you were alone. As if lifewere a progressive and cunning crimewith no witness to the tiny hiddentransgressions. To feel abandoned is to denythe intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,even you, at times, have felt the grand array;the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowdingout your solo voice. You must notethe way the soap dish enables you,or the window latch grants you freedom.Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.The stairs are your mentor of thingsto come, the doors have always been thereto frighten you and invite you,and the tiny speaker in the phoneis your dream-ladder to divinity.Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease intothe conversation. The kettle is singingeven as it pours you a drink, the cooking potshave left their arrogant aloofness andseen the good in you at last. All the birdsand creatures of the world are unutterablythemselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Buried Alive

Grey Gardens boy: I bet I've watched both the HBO dramatization and the original documentary about that sad old story a dozen times. There's something so haunting about the relationship between Edie the elder and her daughter. Poor Edie Jr., 40 years after this picture was taken, walking around with one skirt functioning as a head scarf to hide her baldness and a second upside-down skirt pinned around her torso. Poor both of them, hiding in that bewitched Sleeping Beauty castle of a house, holed up in a single room on bare filthy mattresses surrounded with cat waste. It's like some nightmare about the future that could fill you with stark terror as you slept.At one point in the documentary the two are talking of marriage and Edie Jr.’s unmarried state, she who said she could have married any number of men if she hadn’t been prevented by her various dark forces including her abandoning father; could even have married Joe Kennedy and been First Lady like her beautiful cousin Jacqueline. That abandoning father and husband, that Phelan Beale:  listen to what gets said about him by the two and about marriage in general. This is what I copied down from the 1974 documentary and not HBO’s re-creation. It's Edie Jr. speaking first, in that hoity-toity accent she assumes when she dwells on lost glories.“My father believed in ruining his children’s lives,” she says. Then, in an odd non-sequitur, “He wanted me to get a Masters Degree.”“You were scared of your father,” says Edie Senior who with her wispy hair and her ruined partly nude  body seems much more down-to earth. Back to Edie Jr now: “He said the only thing to BE was a professional woman. He did say that, didn’t he, mother? He didn’t want me to get married.”And the mother says, "I don’t think it’s important for people to get married. I don’t believe that at all. Don’t you want some of this butter pecan?[eating ice cream straight from the carton] "Mmmmm!”“If you can’t get a man to propose to you you might as well be dead,” says Edie Jr. “These women who don’t marry, what are they proving? I think it’s disgusting! They have to go around with dogs or other women… It’s disgusting!"But dogs are lovely!” says her mother. “I’ll take a dog any day!” She could have been saying all that in this shot here:Only the whole time neither is looking at the other, or at the camera. The surviving Maysles brothers says in the commentary on the Grey gardens DVD that they often didn’t seem to be even thinking about what they were saying much less listening to each other. It harrows me. When people get marooned and sealed away as the old and the forgotten often do: the thought just harrows me.

 the real Maysles with their real subjects

and below here, the real Edie I think, and not Drew Barrymore playing her

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG5baCxTtgw]

Losing Battle Department

The picture of Robert Redford here is from the online version of the  Q & ATime Magazine recently  did, tying it to his latest directorial work  The Conspirator which comes out today. I look at his face and suppose that even the Pope would recognize it. I guess by most standards he looks great - for the fact that he’s still wearing his hair like it’s 1969 and oh those giant white teeth.It’s mostly the teeth I find jarring because teeth actually get less white the longer you trot them around in the world, not more white. Sure, lots of celebrities try to fight that fact what with veneers and all but to me they just end up looking silly.In this Time interview, the person posing the questions asks Redford if it was limiting during his early years in Hollywood to be perceived as so good-looking. He said yes.  “because when I started [in TV], that's not the way I was seen. I played all kinds of parts - killers, psychos. They were fun, real character roles. Then, when I went into film, it suddenly shifted. You're not given freedom to move out of that.”Well if he REALLY wants to ‘move out of that’ he could be more like Clint Eastwood and just let nature take its course? As it is, with that mop of Sundance Kid hair and those teeth like bathroom tiles you look at him and think only along Young vs. Old lines which is never the best way to think about  people. The way I like to think about them is "Are they still in the world  where I can write them a letter or are they gone beyond to where zip codes just can’t reach?""Are they dead or are they alive?"  is all I ask myself. And the paradox is that even with his slight stoop and his no-longer super-white teeth, Clint strikes me as a more 'alive' than Bob.and now because it's so nice to see a great director act, a clip of Clint as Walt Kowalski  in Gran Torino[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVYWxEF49PQ]

What Could Be Nicer Than This?

People have written me such great letters over the years. One I could never forget came from the person who wrote to say she laughed so hard reading one of my columns that the coffee she was drinking shot out her nose and across the room.But even better are  the messages that have heart – like the one I received some five or six years ago: ““Why am I writing to Terry Marotta?” it began. “It must be because of this sentence: ‘Wasn’t I once a person who refinished AND reupholstered all her furniture? Now I look at that pound of raw chicken and think ‘Who could I PAY to turn this into dinner?’ Yes it’s just a sentence from a newspaper clip saved among many in my desk. But the column it was from struck a chord for 86-year-old Me in my Old Folks Home. I think we were in a writing group years ago. I used to come with Charity Wetzler who died early last year. We met in someone's apartment on Whitney Avenue. Was that you?”Well no, it wasn’t. But I found this letter so wonderfully personal I could never throw it out, even after answering it. And she saved the best part for last: “Speaking of change being the essence of our lives here, getting old has been and remains a great education - and NOT an entirely negative one!”She closed by sending me best wishes and adding an original sketch of a person’s nose in profile with two legs and two sneakered feet emerging from the nostrils. The wry caption: “Running nose.”I came upon this note just yesterday and it was all I could do not to drop everything and search for its author, who would be 91 or even 92 by now. Maybe I will do that: Just find her somehow. Just reach out.I reached out immediately to a new friend who wrote me last January.She was referring to a column I had done about the traces of former inhabitants we sometimes come upon in our houses: “Your subject on Friday about finding unexpected treasures in the houses you have lived in reminded me of the inscription my husband wrote when he built an addition onto our former house,” her letter began.“Before he had installed the inside wall paneling, he wrote on the bare wood wall: ‘Built by (her husband’s name) on (the date) for the comfort of his wife.’“I liked that inscription, and I anticipated some future owner replacing the paneling and seeing it, sort of like something an old pioneer might have written.”I know I would have loved to come upon such an inscription, courtly as it is. When I got back to her to say how touching I found her note and to ask if I might share it, she wrote again, sending more words, also well worth saving and passing on.She said, “I sent this story to the paper and included in it mention of the inscription I have passed on to you. You are welcome to use it for it must have been at least 40 years ago that it appeared in the newspaper and now my husband is deceased, and I am an old person of 84 blessed with wonderful memories of a long and happy life.”I have read these words and the ones above them again and again, written as they were by two people who know – just know in their hearts - that at every stage of life we are meant to bless this life and call it good.

Doing It My Way

I grew up next door to a breathtakingly beautiful girl who at age 20 sat for a formal portrait I can still see in my mind's eye: how the light played on those lovely bare shoulders; how the dress billowed at those generous hips. That same year she married and moved away, and the next time I saw her she was hatted and high-necked with a torso encased in the tight rubber hug of a corset.It’s what was expected of women back then; they married and overnight they turned into matrons. And though expectations for women may be subtler today, they’re still present.Take hair color for example. Women are simply expected to color their hair at a certain point.I always had black hair, but when some white began appearing, I thought, “OK fine.”“But … you’re going to look old!” said my hair stylist in grave and disapproving tones.So for a while there I had hair the color of cow’s liver – chicken gizzards maybe. My hair stylist thought it made me look young, but I hated it.I mean you CARE about you appearance. You WANT to fit in, only … not that much, you know what I mean? I think of something former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said once in an interview. She said sometimes she dresses up, sure. “But when I work, I really work: I rub my eyes and my makeup comes off and I stick pencils in my hair.” I think that’s great.Of course these days the pressure doesn’t stop with your hair. These days it’s not unusual for women to have the skin of their very faces sanded down, or injected with some fluffing-up drug or pried up like so much wall-to-wall carpeting and tacked down tighter.“Stay attractive!” is the message the world sends women generally. “Slim, too! Buy great scarves if you can’t stay slim, but please: Go easy on our eyes!”It’s what this youth-centered culture tells us. And it’s making me feel a tad rebellious.Example: I’ve always hated pocketbooks, and the sundress I had on the other day didn’t have a belt, so I had my phone sort of hooked to my left bra strap just under the fabric.As I chatted with the proprietor of a shop I visit every day, the phone rang, causing me to glance down at the small boxy bulge it made under the cloth.“Does this look like a pacemaker?” I asked, suddenly wondering.“Yup,” said my friend.So I quick undid a key button farther down, hooked it onto the waistband of my underpants and rebuttoned. “Better?”“Now it looks like a colostomy bag,” he said dryly.Pacemakers, colostomy bags: the parts of our little machines do wear down over time and we’re bound to age, sure enough. I guess I’d just like to do it my way.

Here Ya Go Granny

Catalog called As We Change comes in the mail that turns out to have such an array of fascinating  items it feels like Anthropology to study it. I'm taking about things like  (1) this whisker remover, to keep  you from turning completely into the witch from Sleeping Beauty, (2) "The Bra Extender" for gals that haven’t in truth been a 34-B for one very long time but like preserving that fiction, and (3)  "Comfy Straps" to ease the pain of having inch-deep dents worked into the tops of your shoulders from the weight of those darn breasts you’ve had carry around all these years. It" also has: (4) these nifty little bootleg shoulder-pads that attach to your bra straps to help you get past the sad fact that you can't BUY clothes with shoulder-pads in them  anymore and here you are looking like a total pear these days with hips hour-glassing out so much farther than they used to do; (5) silky little doodads called "Winkies," small spans of cloth that modest you can stick inside the plunging necklines clothes all have these days so, and finally  (6) the Super Primal Pheromone Concentrate," (an 'unscented elixir containing highly concentrated human sex pheromones, the natural hormonal secretions of the body that attract the opposite sex. Spike your favorite perfume or lotion with Super Primal or apply it directly to pulse points and get ready for a romantic response.')Ha ha, putting on sex hormones like perfume! I laughed in such superior fashion reading this whole catalog as I did from over to cover. Laughed ‘til I cried in fact; then abruptly stopped, called the 8oo number and ordered about ten things - because as the poet said once Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Girl; It Tolls For Thee! :-)

Who's Old? (With a Tip o' the Hat to Michael)

I got the message I was old 3 times in 30 seconds when I picked up my young friend Angie the other day. She hopped in the car, shot me a quick a look and asked if my hair was really long enough to be gathered at the back of my neck. “Nah, it’s fake, They call it the Fun Bun,” I said, yanking it off to show her.“O-KAY,” she said in that certain young way that always makes me feel a tad defensive.“Hey what’s the point of being old if you can’t have fun? If you can’t wear a thing like this?” I said, pointing now to the pouch at my waist.“A fannypack?” she said, actively working to suppress a smile.“But I need it!” I cried, pulling from it that tiny device with the white ear buds that has made so much money for the good people at Apple. “How else would I carry my.... my ... my Walkman here?”Which prompted an even MORE indulgent smile -  and this from someone who still wasn’t alive five years after “Bad” came out.But you know studying the pictures from that famous video I see now that my hairstyle then was exactly like Michael’s hair back then. In fact I really LOOKED like him - only I never learned to snarl and look all mad like he did in these clips. I was taught to just smile and act all sweet and that was probably just as well, because I have a hunch the young are gonna let us live only if we DO smile, and stay twinkly, and keep on furnishing them so much amusement.And now  .....Michael, an angel even then:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsUXAEzaC3Q&feature=avmsc2]

Hello SUNSHINE!

Sure NOW wherever you look you see ads for creams and spackles to fill the cracks opening up all over your body. Bet they even sell sun-repellent sheets of Glad Wrap to keep your skin from looking even more like the speckled egg of the world’s ugliest bird. So where was all this stuff when I was  20 and lying out in the sun holding sheets of aluminum foil to focus the rays directly ON This Old Face?

Here’s that video homage to Beyoncé  which is funny and great all on its own. Come the day when I look like a laundry bag stuffed full with tennis balls let me throw on a leotard and step on the dance floor too. Because seriously what are you gonna do? And Sarah Renfroe's right: when it comes to wrinkles you sure are gonna grow some of your own, and before you know it too.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaruNs_7okY]

Let's Get Physicals

I actually like going for my annual physical because my Primary Care doctor is so awesome – plus I’ve been going to her so long it feels like we’re pals. Yesterday, for example,  she so patiently went over all my boring issues writing it all down. Of course being such a GIRL, I went right into apology mode the second she stepped close for the looking down your throat and up your nostrils part “Look at these lines coming around my mouth!” I yipped in self-castigation. “Hey come on, you look great” she said (She’s my same age so we’re talkin’ relative here.) “I have those lines too, see? A few more years and our lipstick will start bleeding down into them!”“So you don’t think we should go get face-lifts?” I said half in jest.“Facelifts, God no! The women I know who with face-lifts look weird. Listen, it’s better to just age. We look a little crappy for a few years but then it all changes and we turn into these beautiful old women in our 70s and 80s.”See why I like her? Beautiful old women in our 70s and 80s! She meant all women in their 70 and 80s are beautiful, and not in spite of being old but because they are old. Like these two bold babes, cigars and flowery caps and all.