Senior Moments

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  To the memory of Peggy Amsterdam, Michael Harris, Carolyn Horchow, and everyone else who left the party much too soon;

  and for Ken, from start to finish

  We think the purpose of a child is to grow up, because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look at the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.

  —ALEXANDER HERZEN

  Prepare for death. But how can you prepare

  For death? Suppose it isn’t an exam,

  But more like the Tavern Scene in Henry IV,

  Or that other big drunk, the Symposium?

  Remember, everybody will be there,

  Sooner or later at first, then all at once.

  —HOWARD NEMEROV, “SPECULATION”

  … all human beings are divided

  into those who wish to move forward

  and those who wish to go back.

  —LOUISE GLÜCK, “FAITHFUL AND VIRTUOUS NIGHT”

  PREFACE

  First comes the acknowledgment, then the preparation.

  We all know what our end will be, but few of us can predict when we will meet it, or when it will surprise us. Or how. We come into the world alone—with a mother there, of course, and in most cases some attendants—and we leave it alone, often with different attendants to bear witness.

  And the preparation? I place myself in the skeptical camp of the wry, witty, sage Howard Nemerov: “How can you prepare for death?” The Renaissance offered lessons in the art of dying well, on the theory that another, eternal world awaited. A secular man who believes in life’s finitude, a world that comes to an end when he does, gains little hope from the consolations of traditional religion. Life has not been a dress rehearsal. It is what we have, and all that we will have had.

  If I can pin wishful hopes on a metaphor for something beyond, I shall stay with Nemerov: What could be better than the raucous company of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, that exuberant, bloated, Rabelaisian figure of excess and wisdom? Perhaps the more high-minded tipsiness of Plato’s Symposium, with Socrates as the presiding deity of rational hedonism. A heaven consisting of intelligent discourse among friends who share food and drink, conversation, teasing, warmth, flirting, and laughter: I can imagine none better. To a nonreligious nonbeliever like me, any image of an orthodox afterlife, one based on rewards and punishments, seems implausible. I’ll give my vote instead to Charles Lamb, who asked, “Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candlelight, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?” Alas, they probably do, although the temptation to believe otherwise is strong. Lamb’s contemporary John Keats had an even more benevolent, generous view. To his friend Benjamin Bailey, he mentioned one of his favorite speculations: “that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated.” Like Nemerov and Keats, we can merely speculate; we never know.

  I also find it difficult to know how to label the following pages. Some years ago, I wrote a book called Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness. I learned from friends across the country that the personnel in some bookstores, not quite knowing how to classify it, had placed it on the “Self-Help” shelves. At first the news troubled me. I felt I had been misunderstood and undervalued. Those clueless clerks had ignored my true literary value. Then I took a more sanguine view. If my writing could help some readers, I thought, I would have provided a noble service. And if putting my book in a place where it might actually sell, rather than leaving it to sit on the shelf forbiddingly called “Essays,” then so much the better.

  The following pages are essays. They are also a memoir, in the form of backward and forward glances by a senior citizen who has reached his biblical allotment of threescore years and ten and who anticipates more years of pleasure, if luck and health hold out. They glance at paths I have followed and others I have not taken.

  And they acknowledge the fact that, as the literary critic William Empson observed, even a life rich in intimacy retains an essential isolation. I have a partner of many years’ standing. I have friends. I have family. I have had a career. I think hard about two lines from one of Wordsworth’s early poems: “And many love me, but by none / Am I enough beloved.” Does Wordsworth’s speaker, Matthew the schoolmaster, mean that no single person has given him the special all-consuming, all-nurturing love he needs? Perhaps. A still more powerful, cogent understanding of the lines would have it that all the love in the world will not make up for our abiding, primitive solitude. We come into the world alone, with a cry. We exit alone, to confront the final eternal silence. The fun, all the pleasure and adventure, lies in between.

  TALK

  It began, like so much else, with my mother. One of her quick and piercing put-downs of a person—usually a woman—of whom she disapproved was “She’s got a mouth on her, that one.”

  My mother had a mouth on her. She was hardly the only one with such a mouth, on either side of a large extended family, but hers was the first voice I heard, the one that summoned me and then my younger brothers to strict obedience, sent us fleeing or cowering from her irritation or disapproval, and set us on the edge of embarrassment when it expressed clear, usually negative assessments of, and verdicts about, other people in public places. My mother had strong opinions and was never timid about sharing them, at times inopportunely. Annoyance was her basic humor. It was not until I was twenty-five or so that I learned that “aggravation,” like “nauseous” and “anxious” (I’ll include “gorgeous” just to add a positive note), was not a Yiddish word, but rather, ordinary English. “If I didn’t play golf,” she once said, “what would I do for aggravation?”

  My mother had no internal censor. To think before she spoke never occurred to her. Whatever went through her mind came out of her mouth. She was not a nonstop talker, a babbler, a nervous monologuist; instead, her speech had an explosive force. You never knew what might provoke one of her stealth attacks. She favored two modes: the command and the surprising judgment. Examples of the former: “Billy, sit up straight”; “Richie, you look awful: get a haircut.” Many mothers traditionally think of themselves as helpful domestic disciplinarians. Commands come naturally from them, like sunshine or rain.

  My mother’s opinions were more unanticipated than her orders, in part because she issued these obiter dicta as definitive pronouncements. On Shakespeare: “He’s much too talky.” About the French horn: “It’s not a solo instrument.” She was sensitive to the visual arts as well. Of her first trip to Italy: “Everything is old and broken and dirty, but the table settings were impeccable.” She made her trek through the museums and galleries: “If I had to see one more Madonna and Child, I thought I would plotz.” Encountering the
Ghiberti Gates of Paradise at the Baptistery in Florence: “If the Church just sold those doors, they could solve world hunger.”

  Neighbors and relatives inspired ethical and practical as well as aesthetic judgments. Of an uncle who had dropped us from his will: “The weasel should rot in hell.” About a social-climbing woman who lived around the corner and who always thought herself better than her neighbors and her surroundings: “The next time I see her, I won’t know who she is before she doesn’t know who I am.” In her youth, my mother looked like Vivien Leigh, a diminutive dark-haired beauty. Petiteness meant a lot to her; size offended her, as did facial hair on men and showy makeup on women. No makeup was almost as bad as too much. Excess weight she considered close to a sin for both genders. To a niece, home from college: “You’re getting fat.” To my brother, either before or after serving him a piece of chocolate cake: “You’re getting too fat.” This was an all-purpose accusatory observation disguised as aesthetic-moral diagnosis. She had her fixations. We could never figure out their cause, but they had a kind of eternal permanence in her life. Like many obsessions, they deepened and hardened as she aged. And she never relented in her efforts to articulate them.

  To my longtime boyfriend, whom she had not seen in several years, in a hotel lobby before a family dinner: “Ooh! What happened to you?” (His hair had turned gray.) She never hesitated to remind us that our hair was too long, our clothes inappropriate, our posture too slouchy. If she had ever had a daughter, one of them would have long ago killed the other. Sons were in some ways a disappointment to her but also a considerable relief.

  A steward of domestic order, she never stinted with her helpful household hints: “If you keep your kitchen drawers closed, crumbs won’t fall in,” or “Eat over the sink so I won’t have to sweep the floor.” Crumbs had no chance in our house. Neither had insects. She did not take kindly to animals. “I don’t need a dog,” she said. “I have three children.” Her aversion to all nonhuman creatures, great and small, was so strong that my mother took what seemed to be considerable, even manic pleasure in drowning ants in our driveway with boiling water. When asked whether she thought they might attack us indoors, she said, “You can never be too careful.” Had she known any Jains, she would have felt no sympathy for, no understanding of, their belief in the sanctity of all life. And she certainly would not have been able to hide her disdain.

  Unlike Shakespeare’s Cordelia, whose voice was “ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman,” my mother’s was loud, grating, often shrill, and always capable of penetrating the bowels of any department store when she was trying to locate a wayward child. She uttered suggestions and requests in the same tone as reprimands and commands. When I hear a Philadelphia accent, I hear her. She recognized no difference between the Normandy invasion and a trip to the supermarket. She handled everything with peremptory force and at top volume. Going out for our painful weekly Sunday dinner, she more than suggested: “Drink a glass of milk now so we won’t have to buy one for you at the restaurant.” Waking up my youngest brother, home from college for spring vacation, one Saturday morning at eight: “You can stay in bed, but I need those sheets now.” When I once suggested that she seemed to harbor some anger—always directed outward to the world but with no discernible cause—she barked, “I’m entitled to my feelings.” Self-reflection never led to moments of hesitation, if only because self-reflection did not have a place in her ways of dealing with the world. Neither did silence. For my mother, a room without a radio or a television turned on was a room that lacked vitality. Noise and life were synonymous.

  Before her memorial service, the presiding rabbi went on a fact-finding mission with her sons. “Would you say that your mother had a pleasing, quiet manner?” he asked. I knew I had the opening line for my remarks to friends and family at the funeral chapel. I repeated his question; the audience roared. I struck exactly the right tone; I knew I had said the right thing.

  My mother often did not say the right thing. At least her sons thought so. But at the same time, she was never manipulative or guilt inducing. She meant well. Although her openness with strangers—she always talked, to everyone, everywhere, in restaurants and supermarkets—was well intended, it struck her sons as embarrassingly aggressive, even threatening. She performed an early version of what we now call networking. No one was safe. Once we all were lined up at a restaurant. My mother could never stand patiently in silence. She began chatting up the people in front of us. “You’re from Cleveland? I have cousins in Cleveland.” My brothers and I were rolling our eyes, hoping that perhaps the ground would open up. The family in front not only knew her Ohio first cousins; they lived next door to them. She made the world a smaller place. She always connected with fewer than six degrees of separation.

  Conversation—an exchange of ideas and opinions with something like forward motion—did not figure in her repertoire. I had to learn from others how to perform conversational give-and-take. But when I think of how I turned instinctively away from my mother’s habits and mannerisms, I have to acknowledge, reluctantly and late, that I also inherited many of them. All children, especially in adolescence, find their parents embarrassing. Most of us outgrow the itchy need to disown these creatures from another planet as we start making our own mistakes and recognizing that we have inherited more than our looks from Mom and Dad. We have become them. We are from the same planet. I always sit up straight. I consider a well-made bed a symbol of both domestic and inner discipline. Nothing, neither fever nor backache, has ever prevented me from making my bed thirty minutes after I have left it. Often when I am alone, I eat over the kitchen sink. The crumbs go right down the drain. I, too, have a mouth on me. Sometimes I speak too quickly, unthinkingly, or sharply. I often talk to strangers, in line or at parties, and establish social contacts. And when I do, I can hear Edith, my mother. After all, we call our native language the mother tongue. I accept the resemblance and I move on.

  It was not only my mother who got me talking. It was an entire extended family. I can’t remember anyone who was silent, with the exception of my paternal grandfather, an innately soft-spoken, modest man with a commanding wife who ran his life. Several small strokes had deepened his natural reticence by the time I came on the scene. Some of my relatives talked with greater speed and volume than others. I was the only child around. I imitated my elders. I walked, and I talked in sentences, before my first birthday. Enthusiastic and hyperactive, rather than precocious, I listened, and then I imitated. My large family made its impression on me through language. We had no athletes; no one who earned a living by physical labor; no workers, mechanics, or outdoorsmen. A day on the golf course was about as rough-and-tumble as it got. The men were all businessmen and salesmen, of varying degrees of success, or doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists. The women did not work outside the house. They were mothers and homebodies, with the exception of my great-aunt Annie, who, widowed young, ran the cigar stand at her Atlantic City residential hotel. She knew tobacco; she also knew which of her gentlemen customers, some of whom became gentlemen callers, preferred which kind of whiskey. The very fact that she worked made her exotic to her great-nephews.

  Many of my other relatives had names that now seem caught in amber. Names, like all kinds of fashion, go in and out of style. They change. You might have thought that many American Jews born between 1900 and 1940 belonged—if you saw their first names in print—in a manor house. Their names, but not their voices, were quasi-English. Few of them actually cut a figure from a 1930s black-and-white comedy of manners, whether English or American, when they spoke. They might have dressed like William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, but their voices, their accents, told a different story. The men did not sound like Leslie Howard and Cary Grant, nor the women like Katharine Hepburn, Gladys Cooper, or Billie Burke. Where are those names now: Alfred, Bernice, Clifford, Edith, Evelyn, Gladys, Hortense, Maxwell, Mildred, Myra and Myron, Norma and Norman, Sylvia and Sylvan? They were never
plucked from the Old Testament.

  All of my great-aunts and great-uncles were but one generation removed from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Their parents had made the voyage out; my grandparents and their siblings became Americans. The habits and customs of the Old World, all the stuff of family legend, inflected with an American effort to “make it new,” filtered into my consciousness like Ovidian myths or Kipling’s Just So Stories. Whatever differences separated them, these people were all talkers. Some had accents as memorable as the cigars the men smoked and the perfumes and dusting powders the women wore. My grandmother’s older brother Manny married a woman from Boston whom everyone considered hoity-toity. To me, they were both colorful rare birds. They lived in Greenwich Village, where Manny, who sported a beret, played chess in Washington Square Park on Sunday afternoons. Aunt Gert wore her white hair in a chignon and accessorized with long dangling earrings. Uncle Manny ran a suspenders factory, which switched to belts just in the nick of time, but regardless of their status as manufacturing tradespeople, he and Gert qualified as my family’s sophisticated bohemians, a delectable hybrid, both familiar and exotic. They encouraged in me hope for the possibility of escape.

  Few of the Philadelphia relatives were like this. Several, like my father’s mysteriously named uncle Foots-and-a-Half, and my mother’s first cousins Will and Grace (Grace was Aunt Annie’s elder daughter), had shady, Runyonesque connections. Reckless danger, or even misdemeanors, had no part in my immediate family, so these outliers cut a peculiarly enticing figure. Modest bootlegging, usually around Passover, was said to have occurred during the 1920s, well before my time. Prohibition did not stop domestic routine. The family justified home brew on the theory that bathtub wine was at least kosher even if bathtub gin was probably not.