Romance at 80

Remember Helen Trent?  The heroine of a long-running soap opera, she proved "what so many women long to prove...that romance can begin at 35."  I thought of that program recently in connection with the MacBook Air, which proves that romance can begin not only at 35 but at 80.

I first saw it when our computer technician, who had come to help me install a new printer, pulled out his MacBook Air, and I fell in love.  I remembered then a similar sensation when I first saw the Jaguar XK120, a two-seater manufactured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  I was in the American army then, during the aftermath of the Korean War, stationed at Fort Totten, in Bayside, Queens.  Since I had to work staggered shifts, I often had my mornings and afternoons free, when I would travel into Manhattan.  It was there that I first saw that glorious machine, the most beautiful car, in my opinion, ever made.  It combined voluptuously feminine curves with great power (the 120 refers to its maximum speed), very much like the MacBook Air.

I had been toying with the idea of replacing my four or five-year-old PC, whose increasing slowness was beginning to annoy me and whose hard disk was continuing to fill beyond the point that I thought safe.  When I saw the technician's MacBook Air, felt its lightness and imagined the pleasure it would be to travel with it, I decided to buy one.  Our technician returned and installed and formatted it for me, transferring my files from the old computer to the new one.  I'm typing on it now for the first time.

The MacBook Air proved that romance is not dead at 80.  I'm hoping that it will also prove that an 80- has year man can learn a new system.  After all, I've been working on PCs since the 1980s, so its various shortcuts are automatic for me.  Now I hunt for keys that are not there ("page up" for example).  I don't yet know the most elementary commands, such as "print" or "move cursor to the end of the line." I don't yet know how to copy this essay and paste it onto my blog.  Perhaps my 13-year-old grandson will be kind enough to give me a tutorial.  In the meantime, I've learned, to paraphrase Johnson, that while romance has many virtues, it has also many pains.




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

Concentrating the Mind

In my last post I presented my life expectancy according to various indices.  These ranged from a 50% chance of living another ten years to only a 4%-14% chance of living that long.  The morning after posting that essay, I awoke with a fever and knew almost at once that another bronchitis attack had begun. This is not a death-defying illness.  Indeed bronchitis is literally an intimate if promiscuous bedfellow, visiting me three or four times a year.  But its appearance so soon after my post about the odds of my reaching given ages reminded me that these indices are not academic exercises.  They deal with my death, which can come at any time.

But perhaps it would be more constructive to say that they also deal with life, for even the most pessimistic of the medical indices gives me a 72%-80% chance of living for at least another four years.  “ Depend upon it, sir,” Boswell reports Johnson as asserting, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”   The certainty of death in two weeks must concentrate the mind more wonderfully than does the relatively small chance of dying within four years.  But since these odds  are scarcely negligible, I have to ask myself, as I recuperate from this damned bronchitis attack, how I want to spend the time that is left, whether it's ten years, five years, or for that matter two weeks. 

In June we’re scheduled to travel to Alaska to attend the festivities surrounding the celebration of the 41^st anniversary of a good friend’s 39^th birthday and the 60^th anniversary she and her husband will be observing.  And in July we hope to travel to Jerusalem to see old friends and to visit once again our familiar haunts.  We have no more major travel plans after that.  And to tell the truth, I think I’ve seen enough of the world already.  If I never watch the penguins on an Antarctic iceberg or observe Carnaval in Rio, I won’t feel that my life has been wasted.  The same can be said for writing another book. 

What comes to mind, when I consider what to accomplish during this last stage of my life, is similar to what I proposed twenty years ago, as I was lying on an Aegean beach following an operation to remove a colon cancer.  The first aim was the maintenance and if possible the strengthening of my relationships with family and friends.  That aim remains the same.   I will continue to do my best to listen to my family and friends and not to take them for granted.  They require conscious and continuous attention.  The second goal was the enjoyment of music, art, and literature.  Experience has taught me that this was a pious wish, and that in fact reading is more important to me.  I will do my best, when I read for pleasure, to confine myself as much as possible to great literature.  This may mean that I won’t have read most of the current best sellers, but ars longa vita brevis, and besides, truth to tell, few of the current best-sellers have given me more than moderate enjoyment.

Twenty years I also set a third goal, which was to find out what else I could do outside the academy.  If I haven't found out by now, it's not likely that I ever will.  However, I've replaced it with another goal, and that's to continue writing this blog, this personal account of the ups and downs of aging, for as long as possible.


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

Fetlocks and Tetrahedrons

The other day my brother-in-law told me that one of my blog posts contains a mistake, namely my assertion that it’s impossible to build a pyramid with a three-sided base.  “No,” he said, “it’s entirely possible.  It’s called a tetrahedron.”  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, including Wikipedia’s definition, “a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex,” I’ve included the picture  above.

I can join no less a personage than Samuel Johnson in citing the reason for my mistake.  When a woman asked him why he had defined pastern as “the knee of a horse,” a definition which describes the fetlock, when the pastern is in fact the long portion of the leg immediately below the fetlock, he replied, “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” My ignorance of tetrahedrons was ignorance of the purest kind.

But how can I explain another mistake, one that my daughter pointed out?  I had given an incorrect name to the Israeli New Year’s song, "Hashana Habaa."  It would have been bad enough had I made the mistake only once.  But no, I had repeated it throughout the post.  When I learned of my mistake, I corrected the post, too late, though, for many other readers who had already seen it but were too polite to tell me of this egregious error.   I don’t understand how I made that mistake since I knew the name of the song perfectly well.

So, readers, I regret to say that I'm not perfect.  I hope this does not shock too many of you and that you will continue to read my posts, errors and all.

2010=2012 Anchises-an Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved