Old Age Fantasies

I’m probably not alone in imagining that I’ll continue into the indefinite future with my faculties, strength, and energy more or less intact.  And then, one morning I simply won’t wake up.  That’s one imagined scenario.  Another is that I’ll suffer a quick and painless decline, after bidding a smiling farewell to my nearest and dearest and organizing my files. 

That these are fantasies, I’m well aware.  To hold on to them means that I must banish thoughts of those friends who have died from Alzheimer’s disease or are currently suffering from it. I must cast out memories of visits to friends in nursing homes in which I pass inert patients, slumped in their wheelchairs, staring ahead unseeing or asleep, waiting to die.  I must forget the bitter complaints of a very old friend whose dependency on others for his daily care was almost complete.  When such memories surface I tell myself “it can’t happen to me.”  But why not? 

These gloomy thoughts arose the other day when I learned that the reason my legs ache when I walk any distance is because I’ve become severely anemic, probably due to loss of blood after a surgical procedure but possibly also because of renal insufficiency.  It’s likely that my body will restore the requisite hemoglobin all by itself but in case it does not, medical intervention can restore my blood count to what passes for normal with me.

In the meantime, though, I have an inkling of what it might feel like to be very old, when you have to ration your energy and think about every step.   Of course, I’d have to be lucky enough to live another five years to classify myself as very old, with 85 generally accepted as the boundary for that venerable stage of life.  Actually, if this is what I’ll feel like if I reach 85, I won’t complain.  I can still read and write and listen to music; I can still kiss my wife and hug my grandchildren; I can still meet my friends for lunch.  And if I find it hard to walk to the restaurant, I’ll borrow the scooter from the little boy next door.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Falling Petals

Last Shabbat, we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a ten-minute walk from our home.  It was a warm, sunny day,and almost all the visitors to the garden were smiling with pleasure from the loveliness of the spring day and the spectacular display of flowering plants all around us.  My wife remarked that it reminded her of the public’s reaction to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “wrapping” of Central Park, “The Gates” project, which installed thousands of orange fabric sheets  through the park, several years ago in February, the year’s most dismal month, when you think spring will never return.  Walkers in the park were delighted.

There also was much to delight the crowds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden: azalea, wisteria, lilac, dogwood, crabapple, and cherry were in bloom, the bluebells had begun to blossom, and the peonies were as large as cabbages.  Most of the cherry tree varieties had passed the zenith of their colorfulness, and so we walked under a light rain of cherry blossoms, with drifts of silky petals all about.  The falling petals reminded us of the day of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.

That was in November of 1995.  We were in Oamaru, New Zealand then, conducting research for a book on Mark Twain’s world lecture tour of 1895-6.  He had performed in Oamaru 100 years before and we were staying in the same hotel.  Shocked by the news of Rabin’s assassination, my wife and I took a long walk through Oamaru’s botanic gardens, where chestnut trees were in bloom.  We walked under their falling blossoms, which increased our sense of elegy and sadness.

We felt a similar sadness the day after our visit to the Botanic Garden, at a performance of Dan LeFranc’s new play, The Big Meal.  It takes us through four generations of the same family, with the roles assumed by younger players taken by increasingly older ones.  The effect is something like that of watching a time-lapse film.  Here we see in the space of ninety minutes, young people morph into the generation of their parents, then their grandparents, and finally their great grandparents, with the actors assuming multiple roles.  At the end, the great grandmother, whom we had first seen as a young woman, declares that it all happens so fast.  

Her comment reminded me of my grandfather’s telling me more than once, “it’s all a dream.”  I didn’t understand him at the time, but now I do and all too well.  Spring succeeds winter, the blossoms fall, our children succeed us, and it all happens before we can turn around, before we know what's happened.  Still, if we’re lucky we’ll see another spring. We’ll return to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, walk under the falling blossoms, and think both of “The Gates” and that morning in Oamaru.  But we don’t have to wait for next spring to be grateful that we’ve seen so many springs until now.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Public Bench

After almost a week of walking again for exercise, following an outpatient surgical procedure, I’ve increased my stamina.  Still, the other day, having walked no more than 200 steps, my thighs began to ache.  As I approached the Grand Army Plaza, I found one of its benches irresistible.  I sat down on it heavily and basked in the sun.

“It’s come to this,” I thought to myself, “an old man sitting on a public bench in the sun.”  How long have I looked down at such men, figuring they had nothing better to do?  It had never occurred to me that they were sitting there to gather the strength to continue walking.

How could I have forgotten my own father?  He'd flown out from Boston to spend a week with us in Jerusalem.  Accompanying me on my evening walk of our dog - a Eurasian Terrier, as my late friend Bob Werman called him - Dad asked mid-way if he could sit down.  He was in his early seventies at the time, suffering from a variety of maladies, if not yet from the pancreatic cancer that would kill him a few years later.  He sat down gratefully and remained sitting for what seemed to his impatient son a long time but was probably no more than the time I spent on the Grand Army Plaza bench thirty-five years later.

I hope that in the future I’ll be more tolerant of old men sitting on public benches.  And that includes me.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Loony Bin

Most days you can find, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, a tall, thin, African-American beggar of indeterminate age.  Sitting on an upturned box opposite the entrance to the Key Foods supermarket, he jiggles a cup with a few coins on the bottom.  They’d make a pleasant sound, a bit like castanets, were not their associations so bleak.  He was sitting there last Thursday as I was making the rounds of my pre-Shabbat purchases.

I was surprised to see him because he told me the week before that he was going away for four weeks.  He’d be at the Downtown Medical Center for a psychiatric evaluation.  He needed one in order to receive a social security disability pension.  But there were no beds for him, he told me on Thursday, speaking surprisingly distinctly for a man with more gaps between his teeth than teeth.  He could have gone to the VA hospital at Ft. Hamilton, he said shuddering, but he’d never go there.  The waiting list’s for Downstate’s not long, he said. 

When he’s admitted, he told me, “I’ll say I hear voices and I’ll jump up and down and hide under tables, until they think I belong in a loony bin.”   I said nothing, thinking that his scheme was not right.  Perhaps he read my mind because he continued, “I hear my mother saying right now, ‘that’s not God’s Will. Thou shalt not steal.’  But will a few hundred dollars a month break the government?  Some of my buddies’ve done it.  I should’ve done it in 1968, when I came home from Viet Nam.”

He’s entitled to a social security pension of over $800 a month, he told me, but he’s not enrolled in the system.  Once he’s at Downstate, though, the administration there will register him, so even if the psychiatrists  see through his parody of insanity, he’ll still receive a pension.  They might not, of course, see through it, presuming that all the patients there are a bit nuts.  Besides, he probably is a bit nuts.  Service in Viet Nam left a lot of emotionally damaged vets.

So maybe his charade will not really be a charade.  But even if it is, who am I to criticize him for it?  It’s easy to feel morally superior when you’re in a superior material position, when you’re not driven to desperate straits, when you've been given every advantage, possess a private income, and feel financially secure.

“Hey, that’s a nice shirt,” he said, reaching out and fingering the blue and white fabric covering my arm.  “It would match my shoes.”  He raised his right leg to show me the blue-trimmed gym shoe on his foot. “If you have one of those for me, you can leave it at Palma’s.”  That’s the drug store across the street on the next corner.  “That’s where people leave clothes for me.” 

He may or not be crazy, but there's no question he's smart.   I gave him a dollar and wished him good luck.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Sol Packer

A few weeks ago I underwent a simple prostatectomy, an outpatient procedure that’s not a big deal.  It was the third reduction, over the past twenty-one years, of my prostate, that almond-shaped organ that continues to grow even as my need for it has diminished.  According to the instructions received at the hospital, I was not to exercise or to carry anything heavier than ten pounds for two weeks.  The two weeks passed a few days ago, so the other day I ventured forth for a walk in Prospect Park.  It would be a greatly truncated version of my usual walk, I decided.  I’d walk only to the first traffic light on the West Drive and then return by a parallel path. 

The park, at the height of its spring brilliance, with flowering dogwood, azalea, magnolia, and cherry, seemed an ideal place in which resume my career as intrepid walker, but the mild inclines upward from the Grand Army Plaza that I had ignored but a month ago now appeared as formidable obstacles to my progress.  My thigh muscles began to ache and I had to stop to catch my breath.  A walk that would have taken me no more than 20 minutes a month ago, now required at least twice as much time.  I received a vivid lesson in the adage, “use it or lose it.”

Feeling slightly sorry for myself, I sat down on a bench facing the Long Meadow.  On one of the bench’s back slats was a small plaque:

In memory of Sol Packer

who played volleyball with his friends

on the Long Meadow

1982 – 2006

No more than 24 years old when he died, the young man was probably still unmarried, probably still childless, probably at only the beginning of his career.  Even today, he’d be no more than 30, still a kid.  He’d hardly lived before he was taken from those who loved him.  My self-pity vanished as I felt pity for him and his family and realized how lucky I’ve been to have lived so long, able to feel my muscles ache and my breath come short, able to admire the flowering trees on the other side of the Long Meadow.  If my walk in Prospect Park reminded me of the importance of continued exercise, it also reminded me of the unfairness of life.  I can’t do anything about the young dying prematurely, but I can keep myself vertical for a little bit longer by returning to regular exercise.  And from now on, I'll look for Sol Packer's bench as a reminder of the fragility of life and of its preciousness even at 80.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Aging Gracefully

In his review of Louis Begley’s new novel, (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/schmidt-steps-back-by-louis-begley.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=ron%20carlson&st=cse), the third in which Albert Schmidt, now 78, is the central character, Ron Carlson quotes a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks, “No such thing as graceful old age.”  Fitzgerald’s perspective was skewed, since he died at 44.  Perhaps he would have changed his mind had he been privileged to become old.

One hears often enough that an individual is (or is not) aging gracefully, but until I read Carlson’s review, I’d not thought much about what it means.  Albert Schmidt, the protagonist of Begley’s novel, has, according to the reviewer, aged gracefully.  A rich, retired lawyer who lives in the Hamptons and oversees the philanthropic foundation of an even richer friend, he’s fallen in love with the widow of a former colleague.  Schmidt is “capable of a sobering empathy,” writes the reviewer, “has a withering understanding of the recent Bush regime, knows how to prepare a martini and sends his retired cleaning ladies an annual check.”  None of these qualifications is essential for graceful aging, of course, not even being rich, although surely that helps.  The point, it seems to me, is that Schmidt fully participates in life.  What matters to him, writes the reviewer, “is love, self, gossip, philosophy, insult, rivalry, mortality and yes, kindness and grace.”

But there’s more to aging gracefully than continuing to engage in the world outside oneself.  Those who age gracefully do not rail against the limitations that age imposes.  They do not try to appear younger than they are, nor do they pretend that their strength is undiminished.  Gracefully aging women do not dress in the fashion of the young nor do they plaster their faces with makeup in an effort to conceal the ravages of age.  Gracefully aging men do not employ combovers nor do they marry women who are their daughters’ contemporaries.  Those who age gracefully, in other words, accept themselves for what they are.  This is a formula not only for graceful aging but for graceful living as well.

Joy

Last Thursday, our mussar group considered the notion of joy.  This is not a trait like humility or kindness, for which one seeks the right balance, with neither too much nor too little.  Joy is, in fact, not a character trait at all.  Rather, it’s a spontaneous outcome, unwilled, a surprise, not produced on demand.  It’s a bit like a sneeze, although capable of lasting longer. 

Our discussion last week led me to think back at my own moments of joy.  Some of these occurred at predictable moments: winning a competition to join the staff of our college newspaper, my wife’s acceptance of my proposal of marriage, the birth of each of my children, and the first time I held each of my grandchildren.  If these events had not temporarily added six inches to my height and a corresponding number of pounds, I would have floated away. 

I also remembered the joy I felt when I checked into Michigan’s Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, 100 years after Mark Twain had done so, a few days after he had began his world lecture tour of 1895/6, which I was researching for a book.  Most of the hotels that hosted Clemens and his party during their world tour and most of the auditoriums in which he performed no longer stand, destroyed by fire or the wrecking ball.  But Grand Hotel (the hotel insists on dropping the definite article) remains.  The act of checking into it 100 years to the day after Mark Twain had done so gave me an intense rush of pleasure.  “Did you know that Mark Twain stayed here exactly 100 years ago?” I breathlessly asked the startled check-in clerk, who seemed to doubt my sanity.  But perhaps she was right.  Doesn’t sanity evaporate during moments of joy?  Doesn’t it suspend the everyday, workaday world, so that one feels temporarily unmoored, untethered from reality?

If we had not been thinking about joy for the past two weeks, I might not have recognized the moments of joy that I experienced during that time.  Here are a few.  (1) My wife and I were walking towards each other down the hall of our apartment.  We stopped briefly and looked at one another and when we did so I felt joy in her presence.  (2) We met old friends for lunch and as we shmoozed I felt joy in being with them.  (3) After bumping into an acquaintance on the street, we had an impromptu conversation, in the middle of which I felt joy in our connection. 

All these examples involved my relationship to others.  Even the episode on Mackinac Island involved my connection to another, although that person had been dead since 1915.  But not all feelings of joy need involve others.  A glimpse of a cloudless sky or a patch of daffodils or the blossoming cherry tree on the corner of our street can make me joyful, if only for a few seconds.  And whenever I reflect that I’m still alive, still able to feel, to think, to see, to hear, that I love and am loved, I am, in Wordsworth’s words, "surprised by joy."  But then, joy is always a surprise.  The trick is being open to it.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Bonobo Hope

Bonobos, along with Chimpanzees, are our closest primate relatives, sharing 98% of our DNA.  Their tool-making and tool-using facilities are remarkable.  Kanzi, an adult male bonobo, employing two stones, can chip off from one of them flints similar to those made by our hominid ancestors two million years ago.  He knows how to make a fire, cook marshmallows over it, and douse it on command.  He learned elements of sign language from a film in which a gorilla was being taught it; he learned to communicate with humans via a keyboard with lexograms, by watching largely unsuccessful efforts to teach the system to his adoptive mother; he can understand about 3,000 spoken English words; and he can understand them in novel, complex structures.  He can recognize himself in a mirror. 

I learned about him from a letter requesting donations to the Bonobo Hope Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa.  The sanctuary began as the Great Ape Trust, which in 2004 brought to Des Moines a family of bonobos from George State University, where they had been studied for many years.  The trust, dedicated to “ape welfare, research and education,” was largely funded by a single individual who, for personal reasons, stopped supporting it at the end of last year.  This has precipitated a financial crisis, leading its board of trustees to convert the facility to a sanctuary that would be open to the public. 

The sanctuary needs to raise enough money to cover the salaries of a bare-bones staff and to maintain the grounds while it earns the corporate and local support that will “stabilize the center’s transition and…begin the process of opening it up to the people of Des Moines.”  After that, the center will seek grants for ape-centered research.  You can read about the Bonobo Hope Sanctuary and about some of the research that has been conducted with bonobos at http://bonobohope.org.

I was particularly moved by the assertion, in the letter requesting support, that “Kanzi and [his sister] Panbanisha have shown that, like us, they reflect on who they are and what will happen to them.”  Research with these bonobos has shown us that characteristics we once thought exclusively human are possessed by apes, if to a lesser degree, raising anew the question of what it means to be human.  If it were not too late in life to embark on a second career, I would try to become a primatologist.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Doing Nothing

Have you ever noticed those ads for insurance companies that offer you annuities for your old age?  They feature impossibly good-looking, sportily dressed men and women engaged in various leisure activities, such as fishing, playing tennis, and golfing.  I suppose that some retirees actually spend their time like that.  In fact a good friend of mine, an extremely distinguished judge (and as good-looking as the male models in the ads, if older), and his wife retired to a community known for its golf courses, and every day of the week, from Monday through Friday, they played golf.  This was their principal activity when they weren’t traveling.  I admired him greatly, but such a life in retirement would drive me mad.

I first met him and his wife on board a freighter sailing from Suva to Hong Kong, a two-week leg on what would be for them a two-month journey.  We were the only passengers.  One of the things he told me as we sailed northwest is that retirement is a career for which you have to plan and prepare.  I was only a year away from retirement and I took his advice seriously.  I began to research a book on a history of vacations, with the intention of continuing it after my retirement. For reasons that are still opaque, the project later turned to ashes in my mouth and I had to find other projects with which to occupy myself.  This I did.

But why did I feel a need to occupy myself with a serious project?  Why do I feel the same way today? Why can't I be content meeting friends for lunch, visiting art galleries and museums, spending an occasional afternoon at a film or play, reading books for more than twenty minutes at a time, and taking long, leisurely walks?  Why do I feel guilty when I have nothing to do – or, since there’s always something to do (right now my books and files are hollering at me, “put us in order!”) – why do I feel guilty when I’m doing nothing?  Why is the Protestant Ethic attacking me when I’m not even Protestant?

Doing nothing, after all, can be delicious.  Mark Twain wrote about the delights of ocean travel when “you have nothing to do but do nothing.”  Of course, when he wrote that line he was in the midst of a hideously strenuous year-long world lecture tour and besides he was suffering from boils.  Naturally, he welcomed the surcease from effort offered by his ocean journeys.  Still, I recall my own pleasure on freighter voyages, as I lounged on a chaise longue, an open book face down on my lap, and gazed at the immense sky, as the vessel gently rocked me to sleep.   Years ago, I recuperated from a major operation for several weeks on an Aegean island.  I walked along the coast, drank coffee in cafes, wandered into ancient churches, read the Greek edition of The Herald Tribune, sat on my room’s balcony with a scotch in my hand and looked out at the islands dotting the sea.  When I make up my mind to do nothing, I’m pretty good at it. 

But in both these examples, on the ocean voyages and on the Aegean island, I had an excuse to do nothing.  Now I must learn to do nothing without an excuse and without feeling guilty about it.    I suspect that I will need the rest of my life to learn.

Seders Now and Then

The scene of our family seders was bizarre, now that I think of it.  They took place in an enormous room, two stories high, added to the house by a previous owner with delusions of grandeur.  The room represented his notion of a hunting lodge, with walls and beams of wood, mullioned windows, gun racks, and a huge stone fireplace, over which the head of a supercilious moose surveyed the scene.  Our central heating never worked in that room, which we heated by lighting a fire several hours before the seder began.

My mother was one of six children whose parents had immigrated to America from Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, and it was my mother’s family who attended the seder. It was led by her father, who, with no advantages, save wit and driving ambition, had built a company that at its peak employed 3,000 people.  By rights, my father should have presided – after all, the seder was being held in his home – but he worked for my grandfather, who dominated the seder as he did the lives of all his children.  

With my grandfather, his six children, their spouses, and their sixteen children, we were twenty-nine people seated around the table.  My mother and her three sisters, who lived close by and did not work outside the home, prepared the meal.  I don’t remember a seder plate or indeed much ritual at all.  My grandfather read an abbreviated version of the prayers in a rapid Hebrew – once preceded by a joke in Yiddish, which made the grownups laugh – which was so much mumbo jumbo to us children.  It was only much later that I learned that the seder is designed to follow the commandment to teach our children of the miraculous Exodus from Egypt. 

I thought of these seders last Friday, during our own seder.  We were fifteen all together, with my brother and sister, their spouses, my brother’s son and his wife and daughter, my sister’s daughter and her significant other, and my daughter, her husband and son.  In addition, we had invited a good friend, one of many departures from the seders of my youth, which never saw an attendee outside the family.    

With the exception of the haroset – a mixture of walnuts, apples, raisins, and sweet wine, meant to remind us of the mud with which the Israelite slaves made adobe bricks – which my sister-in-law prepared, a casserole made by our friend, and some humus, which my nephew and his wife brought (unlike Sephardim, Ashkenazim prohibit chickpeas during Passover, but we have chosen to regard ourselves as Sephardim on the dubious if pleasing basis of our son’s marriage into a large and welcoming Sephardi family) my wife made the entire meal.  She devoted an entire week to the preparation of the food, unlike my mother who had the help of all three of her sisters.

Another difference was the seriousness with which the seder was held.  Although it was a “bare bones” seder, all the prayers and observances that that are required by Jewish law were included, and here and there questions, aside from the famous "four questions" were raised and considered.  The family seders of our childhood, not even bare bones, were rushed through.  Our more leisurely pace was facilitated by the revival of the ancient custom of eating hors d’oeuvres during the telling of the story. 

My parents and my aunts and uncles were too young, at the time of the family seders of my youth, to wonder how much longer they would all be able to gather together, although in fact the time was not long.  My mother and one of my uncles died before they were 50.  But at our seder on Friday, I kept thinking that each year the likelihood becomes smaller and smaller that the six senior members of our family, - my brother (76), my sister (74), and I (80), plus our septuagenarian spouses – will be alive at the time of the next seder.  Never mind next year in Jerusalem.  What I hope for is that at the seder next year, we'll all be together again.


2010-2012 Anchises: An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Looking Positively Grand

“You look very nice, Mr. Anchises, as usual.”  This was my urologist’s charming nurse, Ann Collins, last Tuesday at Memorial Sloan Kettering.  Because she always compliments me on my appearance, I feel obliged to dress my best for her.  And indeed on that day, I had chosen my clothes with particular care.  I had selected a vivid blue Harris tweed sports jacket, a pair of flannel trousers (too expensive to be called pants), a very fine cotton buttoned-down shirt in a tiny blue check, and a light blue silk square to complement my darker blue polka dot bow tie.  My shoes were my most elegant pair.

It’s said that clothes make the man, and as I walked into the waiting room I felt positively grand.  After complimenting me, Ann ushered me into an examination room, where she was to remove my catheter.  I had been wearing one for more than a week and I was eager to bid it farewell.

Carefully I hung up my tweed jacket with its light blue silk square, then my trousers.  Off came my beautiful shirt, with its bow tie.  Next I removed the shoe from my right foot along with two socks (an elastic sock to reduce swelling and a sports sock over it for warmth).  I untied my left shoe and started to remove my first sock.  It was wet!  Had I stepped into a wet spot before putting on my shoe?  The second sock was also soaked through. 

I had never locked my catheter that morning.  The urine that had been flowing into the bag attached to my leg had been dribbling out all morning through the spout tucked into my sock.  In effect I had been peeing on myself.  My catheter bag was now empty.  I no longer felt positively grand.

Folks, if you never knew what “piss elegant” means, now you know.

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Handyman

The other day my wife bought a set of baskets that move along runners in a frame, like the drawers of a bureau, and like the drawers of a bureau, the baskets are meant for storage.  There was just one little problem, the frame had to be assembled. Left to my own devices, I would never have bought something that wasn’t fully constructed.  I would have feared making a mess of it, taking all day to do so, and at the end, feeling humiliated by my klutziness.  But my wife is fearless.  She bought all the parts and came home with them in triumph.  Furthermore, she intended to assemble the frame herself.

But she was stymied by the first two of the four steps: (1) “Position the side panels, runners facing inward” and (2) “Using a plastic mallet, tap the bottom T-crossbars into the bottom of each side panel.”  Unable by herself to keep the side panels separated while attaching the T-crossbars to them, she asked for my help.  My heart sinking, I looked at the instructions, and my eyes glazed over.  Facing inward? Bottom?  Where was the bottom?

After finally determining the bottom, a minor triumph that I felt might be the last one in this endeavor, I hammered the T-crossbars into each side panel.  Another triumph!  But then my wife noticed that I had hammered the crossbars into the bottom of one panel but into the top of the other.   Tempted to throw the whole thing out, I managed to withdraw the crossbars from the top of one side panel, turn the panel around, and again hammer the crossbars into the panel.  I then followed the last two steps without incident.  My wife slid the baskets into the frame, and we placed it under the bathroom sink.  All was now well, aside from the fact that we had taken about 20 times as long to assemble the frame as we should have.

Still, the frame, with the four baskets in it, looks very handsome, as if it had been professionally put together.  Nobody will ever know how long it took us to do something that should have required no more than five minutes.

No one will ever know. Which reminds me of a scene in the film, “Urban Cowboys,” in which Billy Crystal’s character, a happily married man, is asked if he would go to bed with a beautiful woman from Venus, who would fly back to her planet right after their lovemaking and never return. "No," he said. "But nobody would ever know," he was told.  “I would know,” said Billy Crystal. 

And every time I look at that frame, I will know. 

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Terms of Address

At least since the age of forty, I’ve resented doctors and nurses and their receptionists calling me by my first name, as if I were still twelve years old and not, as was often the case, older than they.  It reveals, I’ve always thought, a basic lack of respect for the patient – for me, in other words.  And now that I’m 80, to have twenty-somethings call me by my first name, when they’ve just met me, is doubly annoying. 

But on Friday, when I was being prepared for a minor surgical procedure at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, my nurse asked me how I’d like to be addressed.  Briefly I considered “Mr. Anchises” (“Dr. Anchises” or “Professor Anchises” outside an academic setting and especially in a hospital setting would have been both confusing and absurd), but I rejected “Mr. Anchises” as somewhat pompous and asked to be addressed by my first name.  It’s one thing to be addressed by your first name when you’ve given permission for it.  It’s another when the other person assumes the right without asking if he or she may do so.  The nurse wrote down my first name on the form that asked for my preferred mode of address, but neither she, nor anyone else on the staff addressed me as other than “sir,” or “Mr. Anchises.”

And then I realized that in all my dealings with Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital over the past year, I’ve never been addressed by my first name.  It’s always been “sir” or “Mr. Anchises.”  This is another example of the scrupulous care taken to make visits to the hospital as pleasant as possible.  The carpeting is luxuriously deep.  The waiting rooms would not look out of place in a new boutique hotel.  There you can make yourself a cup of coffee or tea and nibble on graham crackers.  The current editions of popular magazines are scattered about on end tables.  The examining room gowns are substantial – they don’t look as if they’ve been worn by ten thousand patients before you or that they’re being held together by their holes -  and, before a surgical procedure, you’re given in addition a most respectable navy blue bathrobe.  The staff, from surgeon to sweeper, is unfailingly pleasant and polite. 

And no one will call you by your first name, at least not if you’re twice as old as they are. 


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved