Going with the Flow

As the old joke goes, we’re three thousand miles from the ocean, in California instead of New York. We were scheduled to fly from Burbank to JFK yesterday at noon. Before leaving our hotel, we checked the airline’s website, which reported that our flight would leave on schedule. By the time we arrived at the airport, however, our flight was listed as “delayed,” and by the time we reached the check-in counter, the flight had been cancelled. The first available flight is the red-eye on Sunday night, arriving in New York early Monday morning. The airline’s problem was not the snow in New York but the dispersion of the aircrews. The storm had put them in places from which they couldn’t reach Los Angeles in time.

We couldn’t return to our hotel, which was fully booked for the New Year’s festivities, and we were unable to rent another car from the agency to which we had returned our rental less than an hour before. Our son came to the rescue. He picked us up, loaded our heavy suitcases into his car, and took us to his home, where we will stay until Sunday night. In addition, we can use our daughter-in-law's car. She's in Israel right now attending her youngest sister, who gave birth to a daughter a few days ago.

This morning, I had to struggle to put our suitcases into our car’s trunk, and only with the help of my wife did I succeed. When we returned the car, I was unable to extract the suitcases, one of which we had jammed against the trunk’s lock. An attendant had to help me. And the driver of the shuttle van had to lift the suitcases into the bus and, when we had arrived at the airport, lift them down and place them on a luggage cart. My injured foot made it harder for me to lift the cases – I tried, without too much success, not to put pressure on it – but the main problem was my lack of upper body strength. Oh to be seventy again! But just as I could do nothing about the cancellation of the flight, I can’t do much about the decline in my strength. I try to retard the decline with strength training exercises, but I have to wait for my damaged foot to heal before I can resume them again.

I’m surprised my equanimity in all this, going with the flow rather than raging against the circumstances. But what good would it do me to fume? The Goddess Fortuna has been good to me up to now and raging against her might put me in her bad graces. Besides, she's really done us a favor. She's given us extra days with our descendants, and we won't be forced to climb over snowdrifts once we arrive in New York. By then, there should be a path through the pile of snow at the curb. It’s an ill wind, as they say.

Sports Car

In the past, whenever we visited our children in Los Angeles, I'd fantasize about the kind of car I'd buy if we lived there all year round. I'd alternate between a sturdy, sensible, dignified car, one suitable for a retired gent, and a sports car. I'd remember with nostalgic fondness a Jaguar convertible two-seater, circa 1950, black, sleek, with feminine lines. It belonged to a friend of mine, who gave me a couple of rides in it, each time a thrill, not because of the car's speed - my friend drove within the speed limits - but because of the machine's beauty.

I no longer drive, so these fantasies are moot, but as a young person and well into middle age, I would look at such vehicles with wistful longing, imagining my inner sportsman and explorer driving one along a winding mountain road, the wind in my hair, an ascot at my throat, and elegant leather driving gloves on my hands. Girls would swoon at my approach and I'd pretend I didn't understand why.

But over the past few years I've noticed a profound change in my attitude towards these cars. I now look at them with an indulgent smile, taking pleasure in their appearance but with no envy of their owners or any appetite for owning one myself, even if could drive again. For one thing, I can't imagine entering or exiting such a low vehicle gracefully at this age of my development.

My judgment was vindicated recently during our stay in Los Angeles. While seated in our rental car in a Ralph's supermarket parking lot, waiting for my wife to emerge with the Times and some organic apples, I saw an old guy unlocking the door of the light gray Porsche convertible parked next to our Dodge. The car's top was up, but this was not the case for the old man's back, bent with osteoporosis. Painfully, he inserted his right foot into the car, slowly lowered himself into its bucket seat, and then with both hands pulled his left leg into the car to join the rest of him. He probably felt relieved when he could close the door.

Years ago, a New Yorker cartoon showed a middle-aged guy in a car salesroom examining a sports car. "Are you sure," he asked the salesman, "this doesn't have mid-life crisis written all over it?" If the geezer with the Porsche ever had a mid-life crisis, he recovered well before he bought this car, for the car was relatively new and he was distinctly old. But mid-life is not the only time for age-related crises. One faces them in old age too. Perhaps the purchase of his impractical car helped this old man compensate for his feelings of diminished physical ability. True, he found it hard to get behind the wheel, but once he was there, he was, as my wife said after I had told her what I had seen, as powerful as anyone. Or perhaps he faced no crisis at all. Perhaps he was finally fulfilling the fantasy of his youth and why not? If not now, when?

Dilemma

My friend Max Harris recently presented a moral dilemma on his blog www.isitreallylikethat.blogspot.com which, in its essence, asks you to decide how to distribute an antidote for an airborne fatal plague that will soon spread throughout the world. Only enough of the antidote has been stockpiled to save ten per cent of the world's population. Without an antidote, ninety-nine per cent of the world's population will be wiped out. To prevent civil disturbance, everyone will receive a pill, but ninety per cent of the pills will be placebos. No one but you will know who receives which pill. The problem assumes that you won't give it to your family and friends and sell the rest, so that, in the words of the folksong, "the rich would live and the poor would die."

It's up to you to decide.

When asked to solve this problem, my initial reaction was "who am I to judge?" But who for that matter would be any better at it? Can you think of a committee of wise men and women to whom you would entrust responsibility for distributing the pills? Actually, what about the U. S. Senate? It we left it to them, the wrangling would consume so much time that the plague would arrive before anyone could get a pill.

But perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing. The human race would survive, along with some of the world's best and brightest, as well as some of the world's rogues and dullards. I'd want the whole range of abilities and characters, just as before. If one were choosing an orchestra, one would not select only woodwinds, for example, or strings. So with the world. A random culling of the population would leave us much as we are today. We'd have the same proportion of policemen and physicians, athletes and artists. The world's libraries and museums would still be intact, and life could continue, but this time without worrying about pollution or overpopulation or the scarcity of oil.

Is anyone more worthy to live than another? Have we learned nothing from the Final Solution? Besides, human engineering can lead to catastrophic consequences, as implied in George Bernard Shaw's famous response to the actress who suggested that they produce a child together, so that their offspring would have her face and his brains. "But what if, Madam, he had my face and your brains?" So I say throw the antidote into the sea and let chance play itself out, but with one exception. As I said to Max, let's save a pill for Santa Claus so that he can return next year.

Books

About a month ago, the Times published a long article about a woman who has spent the past 30 years or so developing her garden. But now that she's reached her early seventies, she's decided to simplify her gardening tasks. She's replacing annuals with perennials and substituting plants that require little maintenance for plants, such as roses, that demand more attention. Her husband, however, finds it hard to throw anything away. Without telling her, he sometimes takes the discarded plants and repositions them in another part of the garden. "Husbands are all very well," she said, "but a husband in the garden is a mixed blessing."

This couple represents my warring impulses with respect not to plants but to books. On the one hand, I remember with pleasure those sabbaticals at UCLA when we lived in furnished apartments. These were well furnished, with ample linens, tableware, cooking implements, and the like, and we needed to buy nothing to begin housekeeping. I liked the austere, uncluttered atmosphere of those apartments, which contained no books other than those we had brought with us. But each time we spent any time in Los Angeles, we'd accumulate a dozen or so books, few of them really necessary, yet at the end of our stay we'd ship them all home.

While I like living among minimal possessions, including books, once the books are in my home, I find it hard to give them away. The few hundred that we've accumulated during the past ten years while living in this apartment - most of that time on a part-time basis - will be swamped by the fifteen hundred to two thousand books we shipped from Jerusalem and are now sitting in a Bronx warehouse. We're now adding bookshelves to accommodate them. When we finally arrange them on our shelves, they'll provide, at least for me, an illusion of solidity and security, a kind of anchoring, the literary equivalent of a security blanket. They'll be a reassuring presence.

It's nonsense, I know. We don't need them. We live one block from the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and we can glean a wealth of information just from the internet. I'm not going to reread or even refer to most of the books from Jerusalem. Still, how can I throw them out or give them away? Each one is a friend, a witness to part of my history. I'd feel as if I were abandoning them, which of course is absurd.

Still, we should be simplifying our life, just as that gardener is trying to do, not complicating it, as will be the case when the books finally arrive at our door. By that time we will have lived without them for almost three years. Maybe by then we won't mind going through them and drastically thinning them out. But since books tend to expand to fill the available space, and since past behavior is the best single predictor of future behavior, it's not likely that we'll get very far. But if we fail to thin them out, we can at least prevent their further expansion. To this end, I plan to distribute condoms among the bookshelves.

Forgetfulness

Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-3), best-selling author, and the recipient of numerous prizes, is one of the few serious American poets whose work is accessible to the general reader. Even so, I hadn't heard of him until I stumbled upon one of his poems. I found it on the back page of an article that a New York friend had cut out from The Atlantic and mailed to us in Jerusalem. The poem is "Forgetfulness." You can find the poem in Collins's Questions about Angels (1991) and in his Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001).

In the poem's first stanza, Collins suggests that our forgetting follows a pattern. After reading a novel, you first forget the author's name, and then, in the following sequence, the title, the plot, the conclusion, until finally the book becomes one you never heard of. He's right about that. On a trip abroad, I once bought a paperback edition of a Trollope novel, read it with pleasure, and, when I returned home and put it on the shelf, I discovered that the novel was already there. Since I'm the only Trollope aficionado in the family, it was clear I had read the novel once before but had utterly forgotten it.

It's as if, Collins continues, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain / to a little fishing village where there are no phones. He's not writing about the "tip of the tongue phenomenon," when the word or name you're searching for is tantalizingly within reach. Often you know the number of the word's syllables, even some of its sounds, but you can't quite find it. Only later, after an interval ranging from a few minutes to a few hours, when you're thinking about something else, it comes to you unbidden. Collins isn't writing about that. No, he's writing about those memories - the name of a state capital, perhaps, your second cousin's married name, a poem that you once memorized - that have gone forever.

About five years ago at a bookstore, I placed an order for a book. The clerk told me that he would call me when it arrived and then asked for my phone number. He might as well have asked me what his phone number was. I had no idea, although of course I knew that I should know. Although this incident shocked me, it didn't make me wonder if it was the first sign of dementia. Nothing like that happened again until a few weeks ago, after a pleasant lunch with my niece and her significant other. When I called a car service to take my wife and me home, I gave the dispatcher the number of our street but then I couldn't remember the name of our street. I had to ask my wife where we live.

This was no worse, I suppose, then forgetting my telephone number, but unlike the incident in the bookstore, this time I felt not only shock but panic. Five years ago I didn't know that almost half of all those 85 and over suffer some degree of dementia, and of course five years ago I was not almost 80. So although I eventually recovered both my telephone number and my address, I now worry. Will the day come when I can't retrieve them or, once I recall them, can't remember them? Well, I tell myself, if I'm on the train to dementia, I haven't reached the station yet, and in the meantime, I'll do my best to enjoy the ride.

Clay

Saturday night, while gazing vacantly at my hand, I noticed with a start that my wedding ring was gone. I could not have been more dismayed had the finger disappeared along with it. A simple white gold band, with our initials and the date of our marriage engraved inside, it's graced my hand for almost 47 years. This is not the first time it's been absent though. Each time I go to the hospital I give it to my wife for safekeeping. But it's also gone AWOL.

The first time it came off my finger involuntarily was when I mailed a letter on Keren Kayemet Street in Jerusalem. Long before, to prevent terrorists from depositing time bombs in letterboxes, the postal service cemented the openings, leaving only a thin horizontal slit for mail. With my left hand I dropped a letter into the box and as I withdrew my hand I saw with horror that the ring stood in the opening. upright and alone. As carefully as I imagined a brain surgeon would operate, I slowly inserted my fourth finger into the ring and brought it out of the box, all the while imagining how I would tell a postal clerk, in my poor Hebrew, that my ring was in a postal box on Keren Kayemet Street.

The second time it unintentionally came off was during a training exercise held by my Israeli army reserve unit. I don't recall the exercise, but I think it required me throw something. Whatever it was, my ring followed it, falling somewhere into the sand about ten yards away. I despaired of finding it, but somehow, scratching about on my hands and knees, I did.

The third time was on a flight from New York to Tel Aviv, when I noticed that my ring was missing. I rooted around my seat looking for it but with no success. Once back in Israel, I phoned El Al and reported the ring missing. A few days later, the man in charge of the airline's Lost and Found Department called me to say that he had found it. He had personally searched through more than twenty plastic bags of the trash collected during the cleaning of our plane. He refused a reward, but he did recommend a charity to which I made a contribution in his honor. After that, I had a jeweler insert a guard to narrow the size of the ring.

This is the first time I've lost my ring in America, in San Diego, as a matter in fact. We're here to attend a wedding. Our hotel's plumber, who opened the trap under our sink here at my request, found nothing. I'll check the other suspects, but something tells me that this time I'm not going to find my ring. Then what will I do? Perhaps I could ask my brother to let me have my father's wedding ring. I'm sure my brother, a generous man, would do so without hesitation, although it would probably cost him a pang to part with an item associated with a father he so adored. My wife suggested that I might wear a band she inherited - she thinks it might have belonged to one of her great grandfathers. She also suggested that we might buy a new ring, as much as possible like the old one, with the same inscription. The new ring would be smaller, though, and sit more securely on my finger.

I will consider all these possibilities, but as good as I am at selling myself a bill of goods, I could not pretend that any successor was the real thing, the ring with which my wife married me and that I had worn for almost 47 years. But perhaps it's just as well that my ring finger remains unadorned. Its nakedness will remind me of the vanity of human wishes and that nothing lasts forever, nothing, that is, with the exception of love. As long as I'm alive, with or without a ring, I'm indissolubly bound to my wife, and after I die it will live on in our descendants. To quote Ira Gershwin, The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they're only made of clay, but our love is here to stay.

Bugs in the Soup

When my wife and I returned to New York after a year in Ethiopia, my employer, the Ford Foundation, treated us to a full-day's physical examination. We reported to a luxurious midtown facility, donned its white robes and slippers, and spent the day visiting various testing stations. At one of them, for example, a technician tested my vision. At another, a physician examined my prostate. When my hearing was about to be tested, my wife walked by and told the audiologist, "be sure to test his hearing carefully." The audiologist smiled and said, "that's what all the wives say."

In fact the audiologist did find a slight hearing loss in the upper registers - registers, I joked to my wife, into which her voice fell - but the deficit was too small to require intervention. I was then forty. Perhaps five years later, my wife and I attended a reception at which her mother and both grandmothers were present. Both old ladies were hard of hearing, yet neither wore hearing aids. While they were engaged in an animated conversation with each other, my wife's mother turned to us and said, "neither one of them can a word the other is saying."

I joined my wife in laughing at this remark, it never occurring to me that some day I might join my wife's grandmothers in deafness. It's not that I thought that I'd be forever young, it's just that I never thought of aging at all, at least not as applied to me. Other people were old.

But little by little, I found myself turning up the volume on the radio and asking people to repeat themselves. A few years ago, I finally acquired hearing aids, which restored about 80% of my hearing. I could hear songbirds again. But this year it seemed to me that I wasn't hearing so well, although at my annual hearing exam the other day, the audiologist told me that my hearing hadn't changed. When I told him that I felt my hearing had declined, he turned up the volume of my hearing aids. In addition, he showed me that I had not been inserting the devices far enough into my ears. (I had perhaps been reacting subconsciously to my mother's admonition, which she in turn had been told by her mother, never to put anything in your ear smaller than your elbow.) "You won't hurt yourself," the audiologist assured me, "if you push it all the way in." Now I hear sounds I had forgotten existed, like the hollow plunking of computer keys when I type. Now I realize how muffled the world was, like a city under two feet of freshly fallen snow. Today, in contrast, I seem to hear every little squeak, squeal, creak, crackle, and crunch, although I still can't distinguish among certain initial consonant sounds.

The revelation that the sounds I was hearing anew had gradually been falling away made me wonder what other abilities have atrophied so slowly that I haven't notice their lessening. Perhaps it's just as well I don't know, since it's unlikely that devices or procedures exist that can restore most of the diluted abilities. True, new hips and knees can be implanted and cataracts can be removed, but, along with hearing aids, these are exceptions. Some deficits, such as the decline in muscle mass and strength, are too obvious to miss. As for the rest, I'll take my cue from the cook who said, as she pulled a bug out of the soup, "what the eye don't see, the heart don't grieve about." So I don't worry about those declines that I haven't noticed. Instead, I'm thrilled by my improved hearing, my wife is happy that she doesn't have to tell me everything twice, and my neighbors will be pleased that my hi fi is now turned to a normal volume.

"Feeling the Love"

In response to the controversy over enhanced airport security measures, The New Yorker magazine's cover for December 6 shows a curvaceous, pony-tailed, female Transportation Security Administration agent frisking a male passenger who's about her age. He's wearing a tan suit, a striped shirt with a red tie, and horn rimmed glasses. He's passed through a metal-detecting electronic gate, and he's deposited items such as his shoes, cell phone, keys, and coins, into one of those gray plastic tubs - we see his shoes in one of them. He should also have been asked to deposit his hat, which still sits on his head.

He's standing with his legs spread far apart, and he's holding up his arms parallel to the floor and at right angles to his body. The agent is leaning over him as he bends backwards. With one hand, she's feeling his chest and with the other she's feeling his lower left arm, each hand flat against him, and she's kissing him. Another TSA agent, a male (who should have been the one to frisk him), looks on with a smile.

Mentioning the cover at dinner, I told my wife that it represented wishful thinking on the young man's part. "What are you talking about?" she said indignantly. "She's fending him off!" Incredulous, I protested. "It's perfectly clear that she's succumbed to passion. She's molesting him." My wife was adamant. "Don't you see?" she said, "She's pushing him back!" I turned to the magazine's table of contents to find the cover's title, hoping that it would justify my position. But the title, "Feeling the Love," was no help. "If she's fending him off," said I, still pursuing my point, "why is she kissing him? Why hasn't she pulled her face away?" But it was clear I was beating my gums in vain.

Our interchange made me think of the different ways in which we must be viewing the world, she from her perspective, I from mine. I always knew some differences in perception must exist. After all, our educations and backgrounds are similar, but the differences in our ages (six years), heights (seven inches), and genders, if nothing else, would create different experiences and expectations. Long ago I learned that if there are two ways of doing something, hers and mine, my way is not necessarily better. Long ago she learned that my assertions, even when delivered in my most definite, professorial, and authoritative tone, are not necessarily true.

Even so, our tastes, political positions, and values are very similar. So I was startled that we could disagree about what seemed to each of us so obvious. Are there other radical differences in perception that we haven't uncovered? Our disagreement provides a useful reminder that each of us is an individual; neither is a clone nor an appendage of the other. And it's just as well. I would find marriage to someone just like me intolerable. As it is, our compulsions nicely complement one another's, neither reinforcing nor conflicting with them, so our relations with one another are harmonious. Whether the agent is kissing the young man or he's kissing her, someone is "feeling the love." In the case of my wife and me, the love is felt by us both.

The Glory of the Everyday

Years ago, we hosted for Shabbat dinner an American couple who were visiting Jerusalem. In those days, guests would usually join us a our table on Friday evening, and sometimes these would include strangers. Perhaps a mutual friend had given them our name and telephone number. Perhaps we had acceded to the request, by one of the associations to which we belonged, to host visitors. I don't remember how this couple came to us, but we had not met them before, and we never saw them again.

This was not, however, the end of our relationship. The husband sends us a card each year for Chanukah, on which he inscribes, in careful lettering, one or more quotations. In addition, he sometimes sends excerpts from books he's reading. I respond to these in a letter of thanks, and over the years a correspondence arose between us. Eventually, we became epistolary friends.

This year his Chanukah card contains three quotations, one of which, from Garth Stein, is striking: To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live my life. This is a powerful idea and one more useful than the admonition to live each day as if it were out last. As the poet Billy Collins has pointed out, if we were to treat each day as our last, we would not bother to repair the roof, and our friends and relations would soon tire of our farewells. But if we viewed each day as stolen from death, we could hope to steal a few more and in the meantime we would savor each moment. The everyday activities and interactions that we take for granted, ordinary life, in short - preparing supper, eating it with one's family, washing the dishes - would become precious.

Our friend's quotation is poignant, because he is a rare survivor, four years after its discovery, of pancreatic cancer. Only 24% of its victims survive the first year after its diagnosis, and only 5% survive for five years. This year our friend suffered several hospitalizations, endured heroic treatments, including liver chemoembolization (don't ask), and almost died. Nonetheless, each time he's released from the hospital, he maintains as normal a routine as possible, going to his office every day and traveling frequently with his only child, a high school baseball star, to the team's playoffs all over the country. He hope now to attend his kid's high school graduation this June.

Not for our friend reclining under a palm tree or visiting exotic locales. No, he's living his everyday life. In an earlier post, I wrote of Emily Webb in Our Town. As a ghost she revisits her home on the morning of her twelfth birthday and tries to talk to her parents, who can neither see nor hear her, as they go about preparing for the day. The everyday life she so longs for, taken for granted while she was alive, now seems achingly precious. When she returns to the graveyard, she asks the Town Manager, Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute? And he replies, No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some. It's a good bet that our friend has joined the company of saints and poets in at least one respect, in experiencing the wonder and the glory of the everyday.

Detesting Old Age

I have detested old age from my infancy, Mark Twain remarked, towards the end of October 1895, and anything that removes from me even for a few moments the consciousness that I am old is gratifying to me. He was addressing a society of journalists in Melbourne at the end of an evening in which they had gathered to honor him. It was, he said, a peculiarly pleasant evening - a darling evening of my life, because during the two or three hours he had spent with them, he felt young again. In the next month, he continued, he would turn 60, but during that evening, in their company, he felt "rejuvenated."

Mark Twain cannot be trusted when he talked about himself in public, since he sometimes employed exaggeration and invention to flatter an audience or to achieve other effects. He may not have always detested old age. But in Melbourne, beset by persistent boils and financial worries, he was probably sincere when he referred to himself as old. His contemporaries, at any rate, agreed with him. He was in Melbourne at the time, because that city was one of the many stops on his year-long "lecture tour" of the English-speaking world. His "lectures" were in fact performances that appeared to be extemporaneous talks but were in fact meticulously rehearsed. Many newspaper reviews of his performances, often mentioning his gray locks, would refer to him as an old man.

Today, people in their sixties resist calling themselves old, not only because life expectancies are longer, but also because they want to appear younger. Our fetishizing of youth leads many older people to resort to plastic surgery, hair coloring, and "rejuvenating" creams in order to appear more youthful. If plastic surgery has not removed their wattles and double chins, they sometimes wear turtleneck shirts and sweaters to minimize or conceal them. The desire to remain healthy is only one motivation for their dietary and exercising regimes; they also want to retain (or regain) their youthful figures. It's not only women who try to look younger. Some aging male politicians have hair that is implausibly black, and plastic surgeons report many men among their clients.

In an e-mail to a friend, I wrote that recently I had entered my 80th year. Assuming that I had turned 80, he congratulated me for having passed that landmark. When I explained that I was only 79, and that turning 79 marked the end of my 79th year and the beginning of my 80th, he wrote back asking me why I wanted to seem older than I am.

Eighty does seem a lot older than 79, just as $10.00 seems a lot more than $9.99, although the difference is minimal. But "80th year" sounds so much more impressive than 79, and that's why I referred to myself that way. Far from detesting old age, I'm unreasonably pleased with myself for having reached such an august stage of development. I don't mind appearing old, and I enjoy the deference that it occasionally inspires.

Anyway, it's just as well that I don't mind looking old. There's no point to coloring my hair, since I'm almost bald. A wig would make me look like a superannuated Harpo Marx, and besides it would probably itch. Plastic surgery to remove my facial wrinkles, wattles, spots, and other less mentionable marks of age, besides being ridiculous, would take too much time and money, and besides it would hurt. I'm happy to be old, and I hope to become even older.

Sportsman and Explorer

As a result of breaking a bone in my right foot the other day, I now wear a "soft cast." True, it's softer than a plaster cast, but it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the steel boot that armored knights used to wear. A formidable array of leather, plastic, and Velcro straps, it both supports my foot, holding it together so to speak, and protects it from gunfire. Since my doctor doubted that my upper body strength would permit me to use crutches, I'm forced to minimize the pressure on my right foot by using a walker and pressing down on it with my arms when I move that foot.

Among the consequences of my injury is that I now have to explain it. When people first see me hobbling around, they look properly shocked. This is satisfying. But then they ask me what happened. What should I tell them? My ever-inventive niece suggested that I attribute my injury to a yachting accident, but if I didn't like that explanation, to kickboxing.

I don't know which of these is more implausible, but the yachting accident appeals to me. That's because I've long entertained a fantasy of sailing around the world in a large yacht and inviting my friends to join me on various legs of my journey. Would you care to sail with me from Papeete to Apia? No? Then what about Auckland to Sydney? Don't worry, I won't ask you to fasten ropes and swab the deck. A professional captain and crew will do all the work. The vessel will contain a respectable bar, wine cellar, and library, and of course the chef will provide sumptuous meals. (Remember, this is a fantasy.) Ah, here I am reclining on a chaise longue, sipping a rum and tonic while watching a glorious sunset. Are you sure you won't come along? But wait, the wind has come up. The captain suggests we go below. A sudden storm, unforeseen by the yacht's sophisticated electronic equipment, causes violent pitching and yawing. On the way down to my stateroom, I stumble. I fall. I break my foot. Wouldn't that be a terrific explanation? The trouble is that nobody would believe it. So when asked how I broke my foot, I shamefacedly admit that I haven't the foggiest idea. This is one of the disadvantages of my current position.

Another is the damage it's caused to my secret persona. Like Clark Kent, I have a hidden identity. Years ago, before Abercrombie and Fitch focused on the youth market, it sold me two pairs of chino pants which I planned to wear on my voyage around the world by surface transportation. A placard near the pants proclaimed that they were "the choice of sportsmen and explorers for 75 years." So as I walked along the main drag of Suva, and as I gazed at the Mongolian steppes from the window of a third-class compartment on the Trans-Siberian railroad, I would think of myself as a sportsman and explorer, one of the adventurous men who wore pants just like mine. But to be told that my upper body strength is insufficient for crutches is a cruel blow to this notion of myself.

Still another disadvantage is my feeling guilty about my wife's having to assume those of my household tasks that require my moving around, such as salad preparation, bed making, dish and laundry washing, and table setting. When I suggested to her that she is now paying me back for the time last year that I took on the menu planning, food shopping, and cooking, while she recovered from a hip replacement, she smiled. She asked me if I had forgotten my bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia, which for almost 50 years have put me out of commission, periods when she's had to nurse me and assume my domestic duties. To that list of illnesses she could have added periods of recuperation from my numerous operations ("you're a surgeon's dream," one doctor told me), but she's a kindly woman and stopped short of that. Some would consider temporary relief from such jobs as an advantage, but perhaps they've forgotten that I'm Jewish and thus prone to self-doubt and guilt.

But in the scheme of things, these difficulties are minor and best of all temporary. I can look forward to resuming in a month or two my career as a sportsman and explorer. After all, what does that doctor know?

Heath Bars and the World to Come

When I was a young man, I would buy a Heath Bar and, after opening its crinkly package, would bite into the toffee covered in milk chocolate, closing my eyes as I enjoyed its exquisite crunchiness, and then savor each subsequent bite. This is how I imagined the Olympic gods' ambrosia to taste. Okay, ambrosia doesn't your clog arteries nor promote dental decay, but when you're young you don't think about such matters. At least I didn't.

When we moved to Jerusalem, where we lived for 36 years, I stopped buying Heath Bars, which were unavailable there, and when we returned to America two years ago, I was unable to find them. I assumed they were no longer being made, until a month ago, when, dining at the home of my daughter and her family, we were served Haagen Dazs "Everything but the Kitchen Sink" premium ice cream, which includes Heath Bar chunks. Heath Bars! The ambrosia of my youth!

I started looking for them everywhere, at drug stores, supermarkets, and subway newspaper kiosks, but nowhere could I find them. When I told my daughter of my fruitless search, she said, "but they're sold everywhere." Encouraged, I continued looking for them, but I still couldn't find them. So I figured that their packaging had probably changed. After all, until we went abroad, I had watched their price rise inexorably from its original five cents, the bar shrinking all the while. Maybe their package had changed too. I was probably looking at them without seeing them. I abandoned my search until I could devote more time to examining the complete array of bars on the market.

In an earlier blog post I quoted the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who said that in the World to Come, we will be asked to account for all the pleasures that we denied ourselves in this world. So when my daughter called me the other day to announce that she had bought me a Heath Bar, I felt compelled to follow rabbinic authority. On the other hand, dietary authorities might question the wisdom of eating Heath Bars, if I want to maintain my current weight and keep my cholesterol down. When I mentioned this conflict to my daughter, she said, "Dad, a Heath Bar won't kill you." Of course, she's right, but I know that my pleasure will be tinged with guilt.

A few years back, when a popular Israeli journalist learned that he had only six months to live, he threw a party for his friends. In his valedictory talk, he said that one of the advantages of his current situation was that he no longer had to floss his teeth. I don't expect to check out in six months, but even so, hasn't the time come, now that I've reached my eightieth year, to say to hell with all those killjoy rules and to eat what I want without feeling guilty? And if not now, when? After all, I don't suppose I'll find any Heath Bars in the World to Come.

"Pop"

Last Sunday, while my brother and I were standing on a traffic island, waiting for the light to change, he turned to the boy standing next to us. The boy, who looked as if he might be about twelve, was holding the leash of a standing dog. My brother, from his considerable height, bent towards the boy and said, in a voice he reserves for children, "What kind of dog is that?" The boy answered, the light changed, and we crossed the street.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have remarked on that interchange because when my brother and I walk together, he often addresses children whom he sees on the way. The reason that it struck me was that on the previous day, as I was walking out of our building, a Fresh Direct deliveryman, a man I had never seen before, was trundling four cartons towards the building. As he approached me he called out, "Hi, Pop!" That was the second time within the past six weeks that a stranger has addressed me as "Pop."

The deliveryman felt free to address me familiarly just as my brother felt free to ask the boy what kind of dog he was walking, without prefacing his question with a polite phrase, such as "excuse me." If you were to ask strange adults for directions or to tell you the time, you would normally use such an expression in order to mitigate even that slight interference with whatever it was they were doing or thinking. In contrast, a simple assertion, such as "that's a nice dog," without any request for information, requires no mitigation because it demands no response.

Had I been twenty or even ten years younger, the deliveryman who called me "Pop" would have been unlikely to call out to me, "Hi, Mac" or "Hi, Buddy." But at this stage of my development, he viewed me in much the same way as my brother viewed the boy standing next to us on the traffic island, as a person not entitled to the deference or politeness normally accorded to strangers.

What do I have in common with the boy? For one thing, we are both physically non-threatening. A second, related characteristic is that neither of us is fully autonomous, independent, and competent. The boy is becoming so, just as I am becoming less so. I've left the workforce; my physical strength has markedly diminished, in spite of strength-training exercises - after climbing several flights of subway stairs, for example, I have to stop at the final landing until my aching thigh muscles allow me to continue walking; I've been hospitalized and visited emergency rooms more frequently in the past two years than in the previous ten; I spend much more time visiting doctors and medical labs than I used to; and I'm beginning to be dependent on others. Last weekend, for example, when I was unable to open a high kitchen window which must be reached over an unusually deep counter, I had to ask my brother, who was visiting us, to lift it for me. Unlike the boy that my brother addressed, however, I will probably become more dependent as I age further.

My wife pointed out a third feature that I may share with children - a quality that elicits a friendly response. When I encountered the deliveryman, I was wearing a red and purple cap with a pompom on top and I was probably smiling with pleasure at the beauty of the morning. Perhaps the deliveryman would have said nothing at all to me had I looked like a grouch. Even so, no matter how pleasant (or ridiculous) I may have looked, he would not have called out to me had I been younger.

When did I cross that invisible threshold, one that enables complete strangers to address me as "Pop?" And why does it bug me so? After all, I've entered my 80th year. I am old, although not as old as I hope to become. I know I should take such incidents in my stride. But they rankle. When a complete stranger calls me "Pop," it hurts, since the greeting indicates that the speaker views me as a less autonomous, more dependent person than he is. He has placed me in the same category as he would a child. The truth hurts. And I don't like it one bit.

Siblings and Other Friends

The New Yorker's Thanksgiving cover this year shows a large turkey. Superimposed on the bird's body are pieces to be carved from it, each marked with the name of the diner to whom it will be served. Among the guests are "Glutton Brother and Picky-Eater Wife," "Loudmouth-Parolee Brother-in-law," and "Brother's Klepto Wife."

The unfortunate host who carved that turkey last week may not represent a majority of turkey carvers this year, but his feelings are far from unusual. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners are notorious for reviving youthful jealousies and resentments, when siblings who live far apart come together again and often regress to childhood in their relations with one another. On Thanksgiving Day last week, the Times recounted disasters at past Thanksgiving dinners, "Insults, Breakups, Slaps, and Tears," sent in by readers. These included several screaming matches between siblings.

I'm happy to report that I'm not among the number of feuding siblings. When my brother and sister and their spouses get together with my wife and me, I'm glad to see all four of them. I not only love my brother and sister but I also like them. I feel the same way about their spouses, who've been married to my siblings so long - 51 years for one couple and 49 for the other - that they have become my brother and sister too. I enjoy being with all four of them and consider them my friends as well as my siblings.

Unlike my other friends, my brother and sister share my childhood. Now that my parents and their generation have gone, my siblings are the ones who know me longer than anyone else. Our bond is indissoluble and would remain so even if we didn't like each other. But just as my brother and sister knew me as a child, my other friends know me as an adult and have seen me in contexts unavailable to my brother and sister.

Our friends in Jerusalem served as a surrogate family while we lived there, and now that our homes are on different continents, we still keep our connection through telephone calls, e-mails, and visits when they come to New York as they almost inevitably do. Our friends in New York, in contrast, share with us a different history, for they knew us before we left for Jerusalem. Following the rule that a couple's friends reflect mostly the wife's choices, most of our New York friends are women with whom my wife went to school or to college (sometimes to both) and their husbands, with whom we quickly became friends. They attended our wedding, we attended theirs, and we watched their children grow up, marry, and start their own families in turn, just as our friends watched ours, even though these observations were made at a distance. We saw these friends briefly whenever we came to New York in summers or on breaks between semesters and more extensively during our sabbatical years. They have greatly helped our reintegration into American life, just as our Israeli friends helped our integration into Israeli life.

Now that Brooklyn has become our sole residence, we have started to make friends here as well. Whether old friends or new, based in New York or Jerusalem, our friends have enriched our lives. We couldn't ask for better friends (or siblings) and they make us thankful indeed. Taken together, our friends and our siblings have sustained us from childhood to old age. If they all joined us for Thanksgiving dinner, we'd order lots of turkeys so that we could give each one the best possible cut.