Up the River

***** 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...