Tag Archives: The Write Side of 50

My “Youth-of-Old-Age” Days are Numbered

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by in Concepts, Men

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BY BOB SMITH

At the gym the other day, I overheard a woman complaining that it was her birthday again, and that it seemed as if she had just turned 40 six months ago.  I assume this meant she was turning 50, which was confirmed when her male friend offered this consolation:

“They say 40 is the old age of youth, but 50 is the youth of old age.”

The quote is attributed to the famous French writer Victor Hugo, but I don’t think the guy at the gym had any idea of its source.  He just liked the way it sounded, and thought it would comfort his friend as she turned 50.

The logic of the Hugo quote seems completely accurate, and it even seems to apply to the rest of your life. Let’s ignore the years from 0 to 20 as “childhood.” (You might break it down to “infancy” from 0 – 3, “childhood” from 3 – 11, and “young adulthood” from 12 – 20, but all that’s so far in the past, does it really matter?)

Most of us would agree that in your 20s, you’re enjoying “youth.” Anything is possible. You have limitless energy, and your career and life could go in any direction you choose. The decade flies by and you make whatever choices you make – maybe commit to a partner and/or job, and settle down a bit.  But you’re barely a full-fledged adult – after all, you can still vividly recall your teens.

Then come your 30s – the middle age of youth, when you still feel like you’re 20-something, but you’ve acquired added responsibilities, and a propensity for gaining weight, that belie that. Then you turn 40, still feeling like you’re in your mid-30s, but aches and pains creep in here and there, and that propensity for gaining weight you’d noted in your 30s has turned into a 15-pound bulge that stubbornly clings to your waistline, butt, and/or thighs that won’t budge without a serious commitment to eating less, and exercising more. A lot less. And a lot more. You’re still considered young, but you’re pushing the boundary – you’re in the old age of youth.

Then come the 50s. Whatever was going wrong in your 40s, if you didn’t fix it somehow before turning 50, becomes institutionalized.  If you were fat, you get a little fatter.  If you had aches and pains occasionally, they become chronic.  White hair gets whiter, sparse hair sparser, ear and nose hair coarser. You can still do pretty much everything you used to do, only more slowly and less often. It’s the youth of old age because you’re not really old, and hey, for your age, you look pretty good!

But as I approach 60 this September, the quote is ominous because if my 50s were the youth of my old age, my 60s will be the middle age of old age.  And then at 70, I’ll be just plain old. And suppose I live into my 80s or beyond? What’s that – advanced old age?

So the end of the youth of my old age feels significant because it’s the last time I’ll be able to describe myself as any form of “youth.”

But what’s the big deal?  Part of the beauty of getting older is that, out of necessity, you learn how to roll with the punches. I’ll take it in stride, just as I have every other milestone year until now. 

Like Francis Bacon, “I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”

And as Mark Twain said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

As long as I’m reasonably cogent and ambulatory, I really don’t mind at all.

Spring Annuals: Warblers, Daffodils, Haircuts

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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MH before

Winter.

MH after

Spring.

BY MARGO D. BELLER

It’s April. The first warblers are back, the skunk cabbage has popped up, the daffodils are beautiful (until hit with an unexpected return of cold, cruel New Jersey winter), and my husband is getting his annual haircut.

Yes, I said annual.

When I met him in college, in 1977, his hair was longer than mine. When we moved in together, and later married, I cut his hair. It was very simple to do – just follow an imaginary line. No layering or fancy stuff.

However, a few years ago he decided that. No offense – he wanted a professional to do it.

I was not upset. I was glad he wanted to neaten his appearance. He has a beard that tends to get wide and bushy unless he trims, which he doesn’t do in winter. (At least once someone will yell out “Hey, Santa!” at him, and if you saw him you’d understand why.)

He is philosophical about his bald spot, and figures leaving his hair to run long in back for a good hunk of the year balances everything out. Same with the gray in his temples and beard. At least he has hair.

When he decides he’s ready, he starts trimming his beard heavily. A day or so later, he goes to a local barber shop. He doesn’t wait long, and listens to the regulars (including the two women who cut the hair and the male owner) gossip around him with the customers. Maybe a TV is on, maybe not.

I, meanwhile, stopped pulling out the gray hairs when they got too numerous. I go to a cut-rate chain (pun intended) where, usually after a long wait, I have rarely had the same haircutter twice. Music blares, and it is hard to make conversation, presuming I wanted to, much less hear others. I am never sure I am correctly telling the young woman (or occasional man) what I want. Sometimes the result is less than great.

I think of getting my hair cut the way I think of the hospital – a place I want to avoid unless absolutely necessary.

That’s why for the last two winters I have skipped the haircut and let my hair grow. Maybe I’ll trim my bangs. MH is the only one who sees me every day now, and he accepts me as I am. Like him, I know when to finally get that haircut, usually when I start looking like my 1974 high school yearbook photo – long, straight hair, parted down the middle.

MH is fine with whatever I do, or don’t do, because after so many decades together, we know what’s important is not how we look, but being with each other. The whole package, including good and bad hair days. Our friends are now like that, too, because we are all over 50, and are tired of working to impress anyone – either on the job or in the bedroom.

We can be real, and ourselves, at last.

Hallelujah.

Easter Recap: The Chicken Came Before the Egg

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Food

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hot chicken

Hot stuff (kinda).

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Yesterday, I tried to take chicken to the other side.

For decades, my Easter-dinner tradition has been to make a different deviled egg. It’s the first thing I do. I’ve taken the traditional route (mushy yolk in egg white), the non-traditional (pieces of egg white on top of a molded mound of yolk), topped them with nuts and raisins, and sprinkled throughout with shrimp and garlic. Everybody expects them.

But since traditional to me also means behaving non-traditionally, and since I am also hot – as in spicy – as in nothing can be too peppery, piquant or throat-closing for me (Make my nose run! Flood my eyes!), this year, I had to put my eggs aside, because I spent two days, and most of Easter morning, making, and ultimately, tweaking, Peaches Hothouse Extra Hot Chicken from the “notoriously spicy” Peaches Hothouse in Brooklyn.

Brine martini

Tastes like chicken.

The recipe is a hat trick for me. It has salt (homemade brine), crunch (it’s fried), and a challenge – smoked ghost chili powder. (Warning: DO NOT do what I did, and think, ooh brine! what a great martini this would make. It doesn’t.)

Ghost-chili powder is made from the Bhut Jolokia pepper which, until 2011, when it was trumped by the Trinidad Scorpion pepper, was the hottest pepper in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Pepper hotness is rated on Scoville Heat Units. Tabasco – 5,000 units. Jalapeno – 8,000 units. Habanero – 350,000 units. Ghost Chili – over 1 million units. (There’s a skull on the bottle.)

What’s not to love?

But ghost chili is as elusive as it is fiery. Apparently, I would have to head south – Nashville; east – Brooklyn; southeast – India; or to Amazon (.com) to find it.

So the Hothouse recipe, which was a secret until The New York Times ran it on March 19, has remained a secret in my house because, given my short, prep-window, I had to tweak.

I substituted a combo of smoked hot paprika (The Times recommended this) and extra cayenne. The cayenne and hot paprika throat-sizzle was not the skull-and-crossbones Easter Sunday dinner I had hoped for, but no doubt, some secret “Hallelujahs!” were whispered by my always-open-to-my-culinary-whims family, who range from 0 (my mom) to 1 million (my son, who douses all his food with hot sauce) on the hotness scale. Next year.

And I was tweaked by guilt. After the chicken, came some deviled eggs. I did a last-minute scramble and put together a tame, traditional, batch, which made for a superb, non-traditional, after-Easter, breakfast-parade of chicken and eggs.An After-Easter Parade.

Spring to Life, Persephone!

18 Friday Apr 2014

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yellow sunflower

BY JULIE SEYLER

It’s spring. At least the vernal equinox announcing the change of seasons arrived on March 20. Despite the frost and snow that hit us in New York and New Jersey a few days ago, I have faith spring is about to pop in full blast. Hopefully, it will hang long enough before we are slam-dunked into a 100- degree heat wave. (The ironic joke of this obstreperous winter.)

Meanwhile, according to Greek mythology, the only reason we have spring is due to devoted mother love. One day, the goddess Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of corn, grain and the harvest, was playing with her Nymph pals in a field. Hades, the god that ruled the underworld, abducted her.

Bernini’s sculpture “The Rape of Persephone,” in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, depicts the massive strength of Hades, known as Pluto in Roman mythology, as he digs his hands into the goddess’s flesh. (Even in the hard marble, you can see the tenderness of her skin.):

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, "The Rape of Persephone", 1621-22.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, “The Rape of Persephone” 1621-22.

After Persephone is carried off, her mother searches all the world for her, but to no avail, and in so doing, neglects her duties:

‘Ungrateful soil, said she, ‘which I have endowed with fertility and clothed with herbage and nourishing grain, no more shall you enjoy my favours.’ Then the cattle died, the plough broke in the furrow, the seed failed to come up, there was too much sun, there was too much rain, the birds stole the seeds-thistles and brambles were the only growth.
~ The Age of Fable in Bulfinch’s Mythology.

Demeter finally learns that Persephone is alive but stuck down below. She begs Zeus, the most powerful god on Mount Olympus, to allow Persephone to return to the earth. He agrees on one condition. Her daughter must not consume a single morsel of food. But Hades is a trickster, and through wily self-preservation presents his wife with a delectable piece of fruit – the pomegranate. She eats a few of the seeds, and as a result, can never be completely free.pomegrante

Instead she is allowed to return for six months of the year, and as her daughter comes back, Demeter does her job. Flowers bloom and vegetables grow, and we revel in the beauty of spring.

So let’s tell Perspehone to stop playing hide and seek. We are so ready for her!

The Pursuit of the Perfect Easter Egg Hunt

17 Thursday Apr 2014

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Easter Bob

All the eggs in one basket.

BY BOB SMITH

When our kids were little – like 7, 5, and 1 – we started a tradition of hiding eggs for them to find on Easter morning. Vincent was too small to participate that year, but Bobby and Abby happily ran around the living room, dining room, and family room ferreting out the colored hard-boiled eggs Maria and I had hidden the night before under sofa cushions, on top of picture frames, and on the windowsills behind the drapes.

But trouble quickly developed. Bobby, older and by nature more competitive, discovered twice as many as Abby, and quickly exhausted the cache of eggs to be found. He proudly displayed the eight eggs that were “his” as Abby mournfully moped over her paltry three. And to top it off, Abby had found the “rotten egg” – the one egg we deliberately made ugly by dipping it repeatedly into each of the red, green, yellow, and blue dye cups until it was a nauseating, mottled gray-brown. Finding that egg was not a good thing.

We quickly moved on from real eggs to fake eggs for the Easter morning hunt, and relegated the “rotten egg” to a place of shame in the center of the communal Easter basket on the dining room table. The “eggs” we now hid were plastic, and came in festive spring colors. Approximately the size of real eggs, they snapped apart into two pieces at the middle so you could fill them with jelly beans, M&M’s, or Hershey’s Kisses. These were immensely popular with the kids, because whoever found the most eggs got the most candy.

And again, the two older kids (now 9 and 7 to Vincent’s 3) dominated the finding-game, with Bobby edging out Abby by a fairly wide margin. Because Vincent was so small we convinced the older two to leave a few eggs behind for him, lest he be left with nothing.

But the system was still flawed.

After only one season using that model, we started labeling the plastic eggs with a dot of masking tape on each with a handwritten “B,” “A,” or “V” so each kid would know whose eggs were whose. If you found someone else’s egg, you left it in place and could taunt your sibling when they had a hard time finding it. Anyone unlucky enough to have eggs still hidden when the other two had found all theirs had to endure the “you’re getting warm … warmer … now cooler, etc.” game to locate their final eggs.

As the kids got a little older, mere candy in the eggs wasn’t sufficient inducement for the hunt, so we started loading the eggs with money. Because of fierce sibling rivalry, we strictly counted out the same number of eggs for each kid and distributed the same amount of money among their eggs. I think we started with a total of $20 per kid when they were smaller, and progressed to a total of $50 in each kid’s eggs every year.

But shortly after we started with the plastic eggs, there was a year when even Maria and I couldn’t remember where we had hidden them all, resulting in a frustrating 15 minutes that Easter morning with the whole family poking around under the furniture.

The next year we kept a detailed list. Late on Easter Eve, Maria and I filled the plastic eggs with cash and candy and then walked around the house together, one of us with a basket of labeled eggs for hiding, and the other following with a legal pad and pen, noting the location of every egg in each room.

It had taken us a number of years, but at last we had a foolproof egg-hiding system. It was fair, because the kids all got the same number of eggs and quantity of cash, and their eggs were labeled so no one could poach. And because of our master list, no one got shorted even if Maria and I were too muddled to remember where the heck we’d squirreled away all those eggs.

Soon the kids were all teenagers, going through the motions of enjoying the Easter morning egg hunt just to please us. They were in it only for the cash. Sometimes one or all of them wouldn’t even roll out of bed until almost noon, leaving no time for the egg hunt before Maria and I had to start preparing Easter dinner. Eventually the tradition died away entirely, and we just gave each of them Easter cards with a little cash gift.

But should grandchildren ever appear at our house on Easter, we’ll be ready. I’m sure those plastic eggs are someplace in the basement, too. I just have to find them.

Short, Shorts

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Art

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Author Lydia Davis, in her new book, “Can’t and Won’t,” has perfected the art of the short story. The very short, short story – a story that captures a scene or a persona in a sentence or two – ala Ernest Hemingway, who created a Six Word Story.

We were intrigued. And gave it a go:

Celine knew she was the sweetest person in the world because she baked a cake every day with chili pepper.

Norbert’s life was a lie, but since he didn’t know it, it was the truth.

The minute she decided to walk down the aisle and say “I do,” she wish she had said, “I don’t!” But she didn’t, and never did, so she spent her life decluttering the aisle of his debris.

Hello! I am so delighted you took the time to call, because I am utterly miserable and hope to bring you down with me. Have a great day.

As she had for years, Jane anticipated the splendor of the Manhattan skyline as she drove her car out of the Lincoln Tunnel, only to discover it had been hijacked by a real estate developer.

A Courtroom Stop on Our Nationwide Trek

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Mockingbird pic

The courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama, which was recreated in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There are a lot of lawyer stories on television, and in movies. Most of them are not very flattering. I think of TV shows like “L.A. Law” and “The Good Wife.” Lawyers are often called upon to do the most unpleasant things for us. They sometimes have to act like monsters, so we don’t have to. It’s no wonder the public has such a poor perception of lawyers. And yet, the practice of law can be an honorable, even a noble, profession.

Exhibit A is a Southern lawyer with the unlikely name of Atticus Finch, the protagonist of Harper Lee’s book, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Now, there is no nobler lawyer in American literature than Atticus Finch. His demeanor, intelligence and ethical values are what many lawyers aspire to, but seldom match.

Atticus doesn’t want his children to have guns and doesn’t have a gun in his house, but when a rabid dog needs to be put down, the police chief calls on “deadeye” Atticus to make the shot. He accepts payment from poor farmers in produce. He is known far and wide as a fair man. That reputation gets him appointed counsel for a client that no one else would represent – a poor black man in Depression-era Alabama, who is accused of raping a white girl.

If you’ve seen the marvelous 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck, no further explanation of the story is needed. If you haven’t, I envy you the thrill of meeting Atticus Finch for the first time.

A few years ago, my wife and I were touring the Southeast as part of our decade-long plan to visit every state in the nation. We learned that the courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama was the one that was recreated in Hollywood for the movie. That’s because Monroeville is the home, to this day, of Harper Lee. She grew up just a couple of blocks away.

As we headed South on I-65 from Montgomery on our way to New Orleans, we took a slight detour to visit the old Monroe County Courthouse. It’s now a museum, full of items that lawyers of Atticus Finch’s time would have used. The museum is nice, but the star attraction is the old courtroom itself. It looks exactly like the movie, since Henry Bumstead, the art director on the film, came there, and took pictures, and made drawings, so that he could reproduce it in Hollywood.

As you walk into the courtroom, you can just imagine yourself in a scene from the movie. Fortunately, it is possible to climb the stairs up to the balcony, where the less prominent citizens, including children, could watch the proceedings.

In the story, Jem and Scout (children of Atticus), and their friend Dill (who Harper Lee based on her childhood friend Truman Capote), sit on the floor of the balcony, dangling their legs through the wooden supports that make up the balcony railing. The accused’s family sits nearby, along with their minister. Pat at Mockingbird My wife and I were able to sit and get a Scout’s-eye view of the courtroom. It was a surprisingly moving experience.

But that’s the power of good storytelling.

And they do more than just have the setting for “To Kill a Mockingbird” in Monroeville. Every summer, they actually populate the courthouse with actors, and put on a play-version of the story. The audience gets to sit in the spectator portion of the courtroom, while the actors stage the trial. It’s the hottest ticket in Alabama.

In the story, Atticus puts on a splendid defense for his client, Tom Robinson, after which, with head held high, he packs up his briefcase and heads for the door. Tom Robinson’s family waits for Atticus to gather his things and stands in silence while he walks to the exit. In a show of the depth of the respect for Atticus in the community, the minister prods the Finch children to, “Stand up. Your father’s passing.”

Can you imagine a lawyer today being that beloved?

Fixing the Sinkhole that Engulfed My Toe

14 Monday Apr 2014

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BY JULIE SEYLER

Here is the thing. I went to see a doctor about a bunion on my right foot, and emerged with a surgery date for a toe cyst. (This is why one of my oldest and dearest friends never goes to doctors! She knows they are going to tell her something she has no interest in hearing.) But this doctor had me from the word, “sinkhole.”

He said he had seen other cysts in the big toe, but nothing the size of mine. The cyst was the toe; it had eaten all but one millimeter of bone. Any minute, the flesh, tendons, and all the sinewy matter of my toe could be sucked like a, whoosh! into the sinkhole that was my toe. But he had a solution. Graft some bone from my hip onto the evaporating bone in my toe. I would be in and out of the hospital the same day, and would only need to keep my weight off that foot for six weeks. As it turns out, it’s not actually the toe, it’s my first metatarsal, the soft plushy part right under the toe. But it didn’t matter. I scheduled the surgery because had I not, I would have spent every walking moment wondering if my next step would yield a toe implosion.

So on Tuesday, April 8, I checked into the hospital at 8:30 a.m., and checked out at 4:30 p.m., with a set of crutches, a walker and a foot wrapped liked a half-opened present. I keep it elevated, and wait impatiently. Hop hop hopping like a bunny rabbit to get a glass of water is exhausting, and ultimately makes me bad company because I whine with fabulous passion:

toe cyst surgery left Jenna totally defooted

But I just need to hold out a few more days. I see the doctor this Friday, and (hopefully), he will say, “Your bone has grafted just fine. Time to put on the boot!”

Then I can ditch the devices, and at least walk on my heel, which means mobility! I’ll be ready to rock and roll by Memorial Day. Yeah!