Gotham Diary:
Not For Sissies
6 May 2014

Oh, how sorry I felt for myself this morning! Having to get dressed and go out — for two doctor’s appointments! Well, the dentist. And then the dermatologist. I had already canceled the dentist once, having been gastrically distressed, and I couldn’t cancel again; as for the dermatologist, I was scheduled for a new treatment. The dermatologist doesn’t even come into the office on Tuesdays! But she wanted to get me started, and the rep who sold her the apparatus (an array of ultra-blue lights) was going to show up to see how the first treatment went. I didn’t know about the rep, but I knew that I had to show up, too.

So I did. I showed up for both of them. The dentist wants me to have two of my wisdom teeth extracted. “Will it hurt?” “Not at all.” “Things have changed, then, since my last visit to a maxillofacial surgeon,” I said with a smirk. “That’s what they’re called, right?” “Right,” said the dentist, and then he asked, did I want to go back to that guy? I said that I didn’t think so, because that visit was a long time ago; the Nixons were in the office. Later, on the street, I realized that he must have thought that I’d said, “Nixon was in office.” But no, this was ten years after that, and the Nixons, Dick and Pat, were in the maxillofacial surgeon’s office. Pat was the one with the problems, so while the doctor oscillated between treating me and treating her, a secret service agent chitchatted with the former president in the waiting room. You could hear the agent, but not make out what he was saying. Nixon, in contrast, seemed to think that he was making a stump speech. His voice boomed into every cranny of the surgeon’s complex. At one point, we all heard him say (and this on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, mind), “Sammy Davis — he’s Jewish, isn’t he.” I also remember that the extraction was very painful.

Everyone has to go to the dentist, but I am going to the dermatologist because I am old. I am old, and my body is at last yielding to the sun damage wrought upon my scalp by the suns of childhood summers. The new treatment is supposed to kill all the pre-cancerous cells that crop up these days like corn in Iowa. The doctor is tired of taking biopsies, much less cutting bits out. Also, there is not an unlimited supply of scalp. So, let’s hope.

In the current issue of the LRB, Jenny Diski, who is only six months older than I am, reports than a correspondent in her eighties recently scolded Diski for claiming, at 66, to be old. I’m with Jenny. Might as well get it over with. Stop pretending that this is late middle age, that we have lots of spry years left. Why not be young for being so old, instead of the other way round? If, as they say, ageing isn’t for sissies, then courage must be exercised.

On top of which, I feel that my mind is finally beginning to work. What I’m getting out of reading everything by Hannah Arendt really does require all the bits and pieces of history and philosophy that I have piled up over long years. I didn’t pass the critical mass of understanding until somewhere between five and ten years ago. So, I more or less have to be as old as I am to be thinking as richly as I am.

But I had to nod with Diski about the downside.

It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death. And it can come to you in many ways, none of them alone necessarily recognisable. Things happens, this and that, which don’t in themselves mean anything, until the incremental signs pile up to the fact that there’s nothing to be done that’s worth doing. You are old, getting older, you won’t get younger, you are physically wearing out. You will die, sooner rather than later. Some things about ageing, such as whether we mind showing our wrinkled arms or living alone, are perhaps a matter of choice and decision, but then there comes the ordinary decay and breakdown of the old body. Eventually it’s out of our control and even our social and economic situation will affect only the conditions not the way in which we die.

Call it the hillside. No one ever knows how quickly the slope is going to steepen.

Diski talks a lot about being a boomer. We are both of us elder boomers; we sensed from the start a swelling phalanx of younger kids behind us, and we were both in the abyss of adolescence when the Beatles and the Stones enchanted us with their siren songs. The Beatles and the Stones were not themselves boomers, of course; nor were the Beats or the first hippies. But they got the party going just in time for us, and nobody much minded until our lot showed up. They were adults; we were still “children.” Kids today.

I did not stay for very long. For one thing, “the Sixties” took a long time fully to reach South Bend, Indiana, where we were insulated by many factors. My intense engagement with the famous decade lasted for no more than about two and a half years. I went along partly because the values to which my parents paid lip service were obviously as flawed as Henry James’s Golden Bowl. I didn’t understand until much later that what had broken was the centuries-old towrope of the rising bourgeoisie: respectability. It had begun to fray during the First World War, and had snapped by the end of the Second. In the massive recovery from all that nightmare, people just went on behaving as they had done before, but now it was mere behavior, obviously insincere. Infractions that would have been severely punished excited nothing worse than polite disapproval. (There might be an argument for explaining McCarthyism as an early panic attack at the collapse of respectability.) The history of Hollywood movies from the War to 1967 can be assessed as an onslaught against the censors, who finally gave up the ghost in the season of Bonnie and Clyde. The old rules were hollowed out, and then they were swept away.

And the new possibilities were plausible, for a while. I joined a food co-op; I considered living in a commune. I did let my hair grow — so not a good look for me. But I was a naturally monogamous sort of person, and I never cared much for real rock ‘n’ roll. Drugs — we’ll talk about that some other time. But by 1973, I was rolling my eyes whenever the “New Age” was mentioned. In fact, it was the obvious crockery of New-Age metaphysics that eventually led me to reject any and all metaphysics; flimsy, all of it.

Being an elder boomer, I came to have almost as much contempt for the bulk of the cohort as its successors. My first negative reaction to new developments occurred when course evaluations were introduced during my undergraduate years. This seemed a very bad idea to me, and it still does. Students are students because they don’t know much about anything. I was unusual in not having trouble accepting this fact. Being the smartest person in the room is still a horror on a level with being pinned under a bed.

Whenever the dentist or the dermatologist or one of their assistants asked me how I’d been, I would tell them that this winter made an old man out of me. I was never pressed for details. I myself took it only slightly more seriously than the Marschallin’s complaint to her hairdresser.