Up the River

In my adult life, I’ve mostly followed, without examination, the rule that four-letter words were the “bad” ones and should be eschewed. But I’ve begun to realize that five-letter words, at least when you’re making mini crosswords, can be villains too.  A year or so ago, I started constructing 5X5 crosswords for a friend who was recovering from heart surgery and, I presumed, needed entertainment as she convalesced. I solved the Wordle and used that word as the anchor each day. I have a couple of cruciverbalist apps that suggest five-letter candidates to fill gaps.  But lately I’ve found myself wallowing in unacceptable suggestions, ones that would fail the so-called breakfast test of crossword construction, words or names people can’t face before their first cup of coffee. For example: Adolf, bimbo, boner, bowel, dildo, enema, farts, feces, gonad, G-spot, hymen, kegel, labia, mucus, Nazis, ozena (disease of the nose in which the bony ridges and mucous membranes waste away), pe...

 Getting old. Not since my teens have I felt such angst. At my age, though, I suppose it’s called agita. And whereas people care about adolescent angst and write novels exploring it, old-age agita is a bore for everyone, including the sufferer. There’s the stress of doctor’s appointments and tests, which fill your calendar, as workdays and social events once did, and any of them may foretell the cause of your death. There’s the lost word or name that signals dementia. There’s the anguish over friends who have died and the sorely missed opportunities to be with them. There’s the horrifying knowledge that if you compliment a baby or dog on the street, the owner of that baby or dog receives your words with dread, fearing you may prolong the encounter. There’s the even more horrifying sense that when you talk to your children, whom you love beyond measure and desperately want to connect with, they subtly steel themselves for your inevitably irrelevant or trite or tedious or, worse, ove...

***** leth·o·log·i·ca / ˌ lēTHə ˈ läjəkə/ noun RARE the inability to remember a particular word or name ***** The dictionary got it wrong. Lethologica is NOT rare—at least not in my personal experience. Meaning I personally experience it daily, hourly. It means that every single night when I watch the NBC Nightly News, I struggle to remember the name of its war correspondent before he’s identified. There, I just googled it. It’s Richard Engel. And I think he’s going to have serious PTSD. He’s been on the news every night for years reporting on grotesque carnage in wars all over the world. It means I lie awake at night trying to figure out what a Kirby is. I finally decide it’s a kind of clementine and drift off to sleep. When I get up in the morning, it doesn’t seem quite right though, so I google it. A Kirby is one of those dwarf cucumbers. I’ve eaten a million of them. It means that for the life of me, I cannot recall the name of a friend’s stepson, so until the child’s name comes ou...

You may be able to quit going to the office when you retire, but the toxicity of work lasts long after the paychecks stop. Last night I dreamed I had to copyedit an eight-page paper for Vladimir Putin. He was sitting at a long table lined with uniformed men. As I leaned over his right shoulder to show him the manuscript, I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid held in place with an American dime. But the most vivid thing was the nauseating deja vu that overwhelmed me—the humiliation of being forced into fawning servility, which infused my working days as a female copy editor and reporter in an old-school corporation with a set-in-stone hierarchy. And there’s something about behaving like a no-good, scum-sucking, nose-picking, boot-licking, sniveling, groveling, worthless hunk of slime* that does something to your self-confidence. *Thanks, Al Yankovich

For the past 10 days, I’ve awakened to my own mad mutterings of a number—“one hundred twenty-five thousand”—repeated over and over. And all night long, that number has intruded in my dreams, and all day long, formed the backdrop to errands, walks, conversations. That’s a roundup of the figure on a bill that dropped into my MyChart account late last month for an emergency ablation for palpitations in August: “Amount Due on 11/28/21: $124,323.06.” When I saw the bill, I repalpitated on the spot.  Trouble is, the billing company is a separate entity from the Manhattan emergency room where I was treated, and further, the number on the bill is for a call center, which is itself separate from the billing company, which is in Boston, so there was no one I could actually talk to about the bill. When I made a second call to the call center to see if my inquiry could be expedited because I was afraid the trauma of owing that sum was going to send me back into a-fib, and that I would be afrai...

People have been asking me how I like retirement. Honestly, it sucks so far. But I think that’s circumstantial, and it might get better. First I had my flutter with mortality. Then two close friends had health crises—a severe pneumonia and a serious heart procedure. The trouble with health crises in the seventh decade is that they take place at an age when people often die. And people do die from pneumonia and heart disease. It seems as if we’re old enough that we shouldn’t care so much about death—but it’s actually terrifying to be continually confronted with the possibility.

The trouble with hypochondria is that your wildest fears are confirmed randomly and just frequently enough to keep your anxiety going. In animal studies, this so-called intermittent reinforcement—rewards at irregular intervals—is powerfully addictive. I’m addicted to hypochondria as a result of the fact that occasionally a condition I’ve worried about actually turns out to be real. I fight this hypochondria, but truthfully I’d like to move into my doctor’s office so that she could monitor me continuously throughout the day. I try to be brave and soldier on against my crazy fears. But sometimes this backfires.   A few weeks ago, I felt a peculiar flutter in the left side of my chest. My chest often flutters—anxiety, panic attacks, a sloppy tricuspid—but this time I happened to be wearing my daughter’s Apple Watch. She had bought it on a whim a year ago and then gave it to me so I could count steps. It didn’t work for counting steps, but I was still hopeful I could find some use for ...

Today I spent a few minutes organizing my underwear drawer—or my drawers drawer, you might say. I wasn’t organizing it to make it neater. I was organizing it to help me remember which day to wash my hair.  You see, I wash my hair every other day, which you’d think would be simple. But since my hair is basically pretty clean, I can’t tell by just looking at it whether it’s a hair-wash day.  I mentioned this to my husband. And amazingly he used to have the same problem—until he came up with a solution. If he’s wearing a dark-colored pair of undershorts, he washes his hair. If he’s wearing a light-colored pair, he doesn’t. And because he gets dressed after he showers, he always know what shade of underwear to put on, which twigs him the next day whether to shampoo or not. I decided to make this solution even more mindless by alternating and restacking my briefs—light, dark, light ... It’s embarrassing how big a breakthrough this is for me. What other wisdom has my husband been hu...

 It says so in the Bible (sort of): “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became [a really old woman], I put away childish things.” And so it has come to pass. When I moved to the Upper West Side four years ago to an apartment just steps from the bike path, I bought a fire-engine-red bike, and I started pedaling like a 10-year-old. Riding my bike was an unexpected late-life pleasure that gave me intimate views of my new neighborhood and beyond. It gave me access to places I couldn’t reach by other means, like the little red lighthouse and the great gray bridge of storybook fame: “Once upon a time a little lighthouse was built on a sharp point of the shore by the Hudson River. It was round and fat and red. It was fat and red and jolly. And it was VERY, VERY PROUD. [Then a great gray bridge was built, dwarfing the little red lighthouse and causing a crisis of confidence. But all’s well that ends well.] Beside the towering g...

Like the spiked sphere that has become its symbol, COVID-19 is multidimensional and multipronged. It fucks with your body, and it fucks with your mind. Lately we have come full circle with the mind-fuck part. In the beginning, more than a year ago, there was an eeriness to the virus. No one (and let’s be honest here, not even scientists) knew how you got it—or how you blocked it. Would masks protect you? The answer seemed obvious: Of course. But the CDC said No. But then it said Yes. Could you get it from fomites? Yes. Scour surfaces with bleach and alcohol. Even your food. But then No. Fomites were a trivial source of transmission. Jogger and bike-rider breath? Yes. Then no. Could you get it from your dog? Yes. Is it still yes? Who knows?   The uncertainty bred paranoia. The enemy was invisible—but all around us and strong enough to kill us. Then came a rational phase. Get the vaccine. Get it twice. Safety is 99% guaranteed. No mask required. But now the killer-zombie-movie sequel...

 

My husband and I sometimes have conversations that others might consider morbid, but really they’re a kind of love talk. My husband will tell me that actuarily he knows he’ll die first, since he’s a man and older than I am, so he wants me to know how to do such-and-such. And I’ll protest, saying I know I’ll die first because of my history of cancer and its treatment, so I want to make sure he knows where I put this or that. Needless to say, our daughter freaks out when she hears us talk this way, so we try not to do it in front of her. Truthfully, I’d have been grossed out if my parents talked like this. A couple years ago, that same daughter got a cat. And since she often travels for work or pleasure, she often needs a cat sitter, and she often asks me. If I’m free, I pack a suitcase and take the subway from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live, to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, where she lives. I don’t have many friends in Brooklyn, but I make dates with those I do. Mostly I r...

I love my family above all else but have weirdly always put my job first. No matter how dire my domestic circumstances, for nigh on 45 years I’ve dragged myself to work. When I was slogging through a brutal regimen of surgery-chemotherapy-radiation, a substitute was hired to fill in for me on days I was too sick to come in—but the sub was never needed. A senior colleague rebuked me for that extreme work ethic: “You don’t have to be Ms. Cancer Super Star, you know.” I’ve had many jobs at Time magazine—proofreading, reporting, writing—but toward the end of my career, I asked to be reassigned to the copy desk so I could have a regular schedule and spend less time traveling. The regularity helped, but it’s been a while since I looked forward to going to work.   My current job is not difficult, and since I turned 67, I’ve worked just a day or two a week, but understaffing has made it stressful. So at the end of a close, I’ve felt no sense of accomplishment—but a big sense of shame about...

A couple nights ago I dreamed that I could carry a tune—and all night long I warbled happily to myself. Then I woke up to the truth—that I cannot now nor have I ever been able to sing.  Last night I dreamed one of my regular panhandlers asked me for my phone number. No, he wasn’t making a pass. He wanted to remind me to put cash in my pocket so I’d have it when he asked for it. Addendum: And a few days after I posted these dreams, I had another good one. Michelle Obama and I took our rifles and went to a shooting range to do target practice together. She’s a crack shot!

I do not want trivialize LGBTQ issues--or commit cultural appropriation. But. Sometimes people address me as a man. And sometimes they eye me with perplexity as if trying to figure out what the hell I am. I get it. Though it's none of my business, I too try to attach a gender to people I meet. And I am tall with short gray hair and an unreconstructed mastectomy, and I wear jeans and T-shirts. So who can blame people for wondering? It's just that 10 years ago I had no idea what "trans" meant. And now I feel like I have some idea of what it feels like--from personal experience. The other day, I bought a tote bag with bright rainbow-striped straps, and on the outside pocket is a children's-book rainbow arcing over a little red heart. It looks like a mom bag, but also like a pride statement. Now when people look at me with inquiring eyes, I can't tell if the answers are clearer or murkier.

 I’ve gained access to a secret garden not far from where I live. It’s on the roof of a garage and it’s absolutely packed with flowering plants and tiny water features. I am torn between telling everyone I know about this wonder and keeping it entirely to myself.

The organ recital has been an important part of my social interactions for a while now. When I get together with old friends—meaning friends who are old—we cheerfully recount our diseases and conditions. Some might call us morbid. But I have learned a lot about the human body, how it works, what can go wrong with it, how to fix it. These conversations are generally more enlightening than depressing, because most of us still have pretty good health overall—or realistic hopes of regaining it. And I know volumes now about heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, various kind of injuries. Lately, though, a new, more ominous, note has crept into the discourse. A friend who once had an unerring mental compass arrives late because she lost her way to the restaurant where we had arranged to meet. It’s the second time in a row she’s done this. The first time I was surprised. The second time got me worried. When another friend, whose mop of curls gives her the kooky glamour of a screwball-c...

During the pandemic and perhaps for a while before, the focus of my mean-girl vanity has centered on the withered skin of my arms and legs. I have suddenly turned into a crepery—producing thin, papery, wrinkled, sagging dermage. The creepy sight of my crepe has made me consider actual exercise—not yoga or walking, but something hard like weight lifting. The thought that I might force myself to undertake a painstaking and possibly painful regimen has given me a sense of foreboding.  The other day, I had a revelation. I don’t have to do anything about the crepe. I can just live with it. It’s not a health hazard. It’s just crepe. Instead of fixing it, I can just get used to it. What a relief!

 We New Yorkers have our masks in a twist these days over electoral primaries that for the first time use ranked voting—which means marking our ballots with up to five candidates for, say, mayor, in the order of our preference. I’ve gotten more than one panicky phone call from an early-voting friend at the polls seeking advice on which candidates to prioritize. Frankly, I don’t really know either. I’ve ended up trolling through endorsements from office holders I respect, like AOC. I hope she’s on the ball here. I know ranked voting is supposed to more truly reflect voters’ desires. But I think there’s a better way. Rank one or two candidates you like or can tolerate, and then negative-rank the ones who turn your stomach. Leave the rest unmarked. That would truly express my feelings. It might mean that someone like Paperboy Love Prince, who’s rapping his speeches and running on a love platform, would become mayor. Given the other clowns on the ballot, there are worse outcomes.

Last week I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Ten days ago, my dermatologist did a shave biopsy of a growth on my scalp. By “shave biopsy,” I mean she shaved part of my scalp along with the growth. I already struggle with my appearance—I’m extremely tall, and cancer treatment left me flat-chested with short, thin, gray hair. But having a gross scab on my scalp was a new blow. I texted a pic of the disaster site to my daughter, who revealed her mastery of empathy. Me: For your eyes only: as if getting old weren’t humiliating enough Daughter: Aw, mom. What was it? Cute mask and jacket! Me: Just a keratosis that had gotten alarmingly big—not even a cancer. But she had to shave part of my scalp. I’m mortified. And then when I was trying to buy a hat to cover it up, the clerk said, Hey, old man, can I help you? I’m never leaving the house again  Daughter: Ugh, mom. That clerk is dumb. Did you get the hat? Me: Yes, but it makes me look like Bozo. I’m having a really ba...