At 43, I nearly ended a friendship over a hard candy.

My friend was on my couch, minding her business, working a hard peppermint with the focused dedication of someone defusing a bomb in a movie where the bomb definitely goes off. The wet click of sugar against enamel. The small pulls of air. My shoulders rose. My jaw tightened. For several long seconds I was absolutely certain that this was happening to me and that it was her fault.

Only afterward did my thoughts catch up. The explanation always comes later—the mind arriving after the fact to defend a verdict delivered somewhere else. This is fine and normal, and also slightly alarming once you notice it.

In previous decades, my anger usually had a shape. Someone crossed a line, or made a joke at my expense. Even when the cause wasn’t especially noble, I could at least locate it. I was overextended. I hadn’t slept. I had PMS, which is at least a named condition with a known schedule.

Lately it feels more like ambush. The surge arrives first; the mind catches up later, scanning the room for a target and drafting analysis. I have become, without meaning to, a system that generates conclusions and then works backward to the reasoning.

I first glimpsed this a year earlier, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.

A sore throat lingered for weeks. Two clinic visits yielded nothing. I tested negative for strep, negative for covid, negative for anything actionable. I carried on. I was in the middle of a separation, still sharing a kitchen with my ex-husband while we methodically dismantled a shared life. I was parenting and sleeping poorly and operating in a general ambient fog of grief and humiliation. Fatigue had become so constant that I’d stopped registering it. There was no baseline from which to measure decline, which is a convenient condition if you’d prefer not to know how bad things have gotten.

This is the particular uncertainty perimenopause introduces. When irritation surges, is it signal or noise? When you find yourself staring at the ceiling at 2am, is that existential dread or just progesterone dipping on schedule? The more unsettling possibility is that the distinction doesn’t hold. Chemistry isn’t distorting thought from the outside; it’s part of what produces it.

Then one morning I woke up and couldn’t swallow.

The terror was immediate. Dysphagia isn’t interpretive; it is simply the throat closing. I told my ex to get our daughter ready for school and drove myself to the emergency room, which is a sentence that contains more competence than I actually felt.

They never identified the cause of the throat pain. What they did find, through a routine blood panel, was that my hemoglobin level was six. Anything below seven triggers automatic hospitalization.

“How are you walking around right now?” the doctor asked, looking up from his phone.

Great question! Unclear! I’d been walking around, answering emails, planning my days, performing my usual this is fine routine, while the red blood cells required to sustain all of that activity quietly exited the building. Months of unusually heavy periods had done it. What I’d managed as nuisance, triaged with doubled-up tampons and the grim solidarity of women accustomed to bodily excess, had in fact been hemorrhage. My body was doing something serious while I was busy not having time for that.

They admitted me overnight for blood transfusions and IV iron. I watched dark red fluid move through the tubing into my arm with a detachment that, in retrospect, is slightly insane. If the mind were really in charge, surely it would have noticed sooner. Surely some alarm would have sounded well before a doctor had to read the numbers off his phone and ask me, with genuine bewilderment, how I was ambulatory?

At the time, I called it resilience. Only later, as perimenopause began introducing other forms of volatility, did it begin to look different.

A year later, I woke up beside my 39-year-old boyfriend, my t-shirt soaked as though I’d been pulled from a lake after nearly drowning. His body, in its late-30s equilibrium, did not do this. Acne bloomed along my jawline with the enthusiasm of a carnivorous plant. Sleep became theoretical. I began avoiding my friends who chew gum.

Three months in, my boyfriend and I took a trip to London. We were staying in an Airbnb in Shoreditch, the sort with thin walls and a toilet that struggled with basic obligations. We’d spent the day wandering and returned exhausted. I suggested we have sex. He declined. He had work in the morning, he said, and needed to sleep, which is a reasonable thing for a person to say and also, in that moment, intolerable.

I went to brush my teeth. In the mirror my face was flushed in a way that accompanies both embarrassment and homicidal ideation. He stood in the doorway while I leaned over the sink, foam gathering at the corners of my mouth.

“Well,” I said, spitting into the basin, “THAT’S not a good sign.”

The line came out sharper than I intended. Even as I said it I could feel the moment tilting toward accusation while my mind scrambled to justify it. We argued more after that. He wanted to discuss my comment; I did not. I couldn’t always tell whether we were fighting about something real or whether something in my body was simply turning the volume up on the frequencies already present. Incompatibility is hard enough to assess under normal conditions.

This is the particular uncertainty perimenopause introduces. When irritation surges, is it signal or noise? When you find yourself staring at the ceiling at 2am, is that existential dread or just progesterone dipping on schedule? The more unsettling possibility is that the distinction doesn’t hold. Chemistry isn’t distorting thought from the outside; it’s part of what produces it.

Each morning I line up my medications with my coffee: something for depression, something for anxiety, something for heartburn, birth control to manage the bleeding, hormones to correct the hormones. What I once understood as baseline functioning now looks more like peacekeeping in hostile territory.

There’s a temptation to call all of this “just hormones,” a phrase designed to both explain and dismiss simultaneously. There’s an equal and opposite temptation to treat every surge as moral clarity. Neither is accurate. The anger may be hormonally amplified and historically justified. The argument may be both real and intensified. These things coexist.

I used to think my feelings were at least proportional to their causes, even when the causes weren’t flattering. Now a big fat feeling arrives, and only afterward does my brain go looking for what it’s about. Sometimes it finds a logical object. Mostly it finds a friend noisily eating a butterscotch. The feeling doesn’t know the difference. It just shows up at full intensity, fully justified, waiting for my mind to catch up and figure out what it’s supposedly responding to.

There’s a temptation to call all of this “just hormones,” a phrase designed to both explain and dismiss simultaneously. There’s an equal and opposite temptation to treat every surge as moral clarity. Neither is accurate. The anger may be hormonally amplified and historically justified. The argument may be both real and intensified. These things coexist. They are, in fact, almost always coexisting.

What’s hardest to sit with is knowing that I’m not entirely in charge. I still want there to be a steady, rational executive at the center of the self, sorting experience with a clipboard. Perimenopause has made that fantasy harder to sustain.

The task is not to panic at that fact, nor to surrender to it, but to live inside it with something resembling patience.

Well, that, and HRT.

In April, 2019 I came home after a long season of recovery. The walls smelled of jasmine; the air tasted sweet. Life moved again—softly, like a leaf stirring in a breeze. Illness had pressed me inward, narrowed my days; I felt myself thinning, reduced to waiting. I watched neighbors stride past, their lives flowing around me, while I dragged my legs and my heart pumped reluctantly.

Now, freed from heart failure after six years through a transplant, I felt the air move again—a breath of unburdened happiness, a butterfly’s wing lifting in the breeze. The rooms carried the mingling scents of jasmine and sandalwood, old safety and new beginnings.

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Roses emerged proudly from tall, richly carved bronze vases. Gifts mounted like little peaks of celebration. At the Great Punjab Hotel, my family wrapped me in warmth with a grand dinner. At 70 I was a newborn again, and my siblings pampered me, showering me in love in its purest form, a celebration of simply being. Friends who had waited and prayed for my recovery arrived with books, blessings, and favorite dishes. My family surrounded me with quiet care. For the first time in months, I breathed freely, a sapling drinking sunlight after years of shadow.

Now, freed from heart failure after six years through a transplant, I felt the air move again—a breath of unburdened happiness, a butterfly’s wing lifting in the breeze. The rooms carried the mingling scents of jasmine and sandalwood, old safety and new beginnings…Then, COVID-19 arrived.

Weeks slipped by as I relearned the rhythm of the ordinary—reading without hurry, listening to birds through open windows, watching trees thicken with green leaves, sipping hot tea that steamed like comfort itself.

I began to love the uneventful: papayas ripening on the sill, laundry fluttering on the line, the slow orange melt of dusk, the blue night pressing gently at the balcony rails.

My body, once a battlefield of medicines and exhaustion, turned tender again—a garden after drought, blooming again after the first showers, fragile but alive. I fed it rest, sunlight, gratitude. Each day brought small proofs of return: a surer step, a longer breath, the quiet hum of life coming back.

Then, COVID-19 arrived.

The world fell into stony silence, gripped by an invisible threat. In late March, a sudden decree sealed buildings and borders. Shops shut. Streets emptied. Homes turned into islands. Just as I had begun to step out, the world stepped back in. I was all alone.

It felt as if a second silence had descended, just when the first had lifted.

My 71st birthday arrived with little promise beyond digital greetings with birthday cake emoji. I told myself it didn’t matter. Wasn’t I mature? Wasn’t I content? Yet the quiet pressed in like fog.

It felt as if a second silence had descended, just when the first had lifted. My 71st birthday arrived with little promise beyond digital greetings with birthday cake emoji. I told myself it didn’t matter. Wasn’t I mature? Wasn’t I content? Yet the quiet pressed in like fog.

At 11 a.m. that morning, my sister’s grandchildren, Harleen, 9, and Manjot, 5, called. Over the phone, their voices danced with mischief.

“What’re you doing, Gran?” they asked.

“I’m watching trees do their dance.”

“We baked you a cake!”

“You?”

“With Grandma’s help! We’re bringing it over!”

“But the gates are locked.”

“We have a plan.”

At 4 o’clock, the second call came. “Gran, come down to the fence!”

Led by curiosity, I hurried downstairs., The sun was shining, and I felt happy to be alive again. I saw them before they saw me—jumping, skipping, whooping, their energy fizzing like soda just uncapped. My sister followed, smiling, holding a box that smelled of something delicious.

“Come to the fence!” she beckoned.

I walked toward the eight-foot-high wrought-iron fence that separated our buildings. No gate could open. No arms could reach. I pushed my fingers through the narrow gaps, moving them up and down playfully.

“Kneel, and look behind the hedge,” Manjot loudly whispered, barely able to contain his secret. I bent low, parting branches like a sorcerer revealing a hidden cave. There it was: a secret hole, a tunnel of possibility. The hedge became our secret portal, our Narnia of love. “Here!” Harleen giggled, sliding the cake box through.

“Shall I pole vault, or will you?” I teased. Laughter rang out, shattering the still air in my apartment complex.

“Kneel, and look behind the hedge,” Manjot loudly whispered, barely able to contain his secret.

I bent low, parting branches like a sorcerer revealing a hidden cave. There it was: a secret hole, a tunnel of possibility. The hedge became our secret portal, our Narnia of love.

“Here!” Harleen giggled, sliding the cake box through.

My sister passed me a knife through the slats. The children’s eyes sparkled like fireflies as I sliced into their homemade treasure. I took a bite—the warmth of churned butter, a tickle of cinnamon, a whisper of nutmeg. A memory awakened. My mother’s love was baked into every crumb.

She had taught us the recipe decades ago, carefully recorded in a now-frayed notebook. We baked this cake for birthdays, for festivals, for every celebration. And now, her great-grandchildren were returning it to me—through tunnel under a hedge, beneath a wrought-iron fence.

For a few golden minutes, the fence fluttered with laughter. We were four children—aged 5 to 71—feasting on cake, mischief, and unstoppable joy. Their giggles scattered into the evening air like confetti. I felt my face muscles engage in a way they hadn’t for some time, bending into a full smile, from my eyes to my lips—a moment stitched with sugar, nutmeg, memory, and grace.

My sister clicked a photo, but no picture could adequately reflect the soft warmth we shared as the children laughed before skipping away, one knee up, one down, their giggles fading like wind chimes.

The world says age brings wisdom. But two tiny hands passing cake through a hedge taught me the greatest lesson of all. Love isn’t about wisdom or grand gestures. It shows up in small, unguarded acts, slipping through secret tunnels and sugar-dusted boxes. It hides in hedges and bursts into light through laughter. It seeps through fences like gentle rain, finding its own way to bloom, to blossom, to spread the magical fragrance of love.

That day, a fence stood between us. But love found a way.

In the language of flour, frosting, and laughter, we spoke an ancient truth: you can seal borders, lock gates, issue decrees—but you cannot quarantine love.

The world says age brings wisdom. But two tiny hands passing cake through a hedge taught me the greatest lesson of all. Love isn’t about wisdom or grand gestures. It shows up in small, unguarded acts, slipping through secret tunnels and sugar-dusted boxes. It hides in hedges and bursts into light through laughter. It seeps through fences like gentle rain, finding its own way to bloom, to blossom, to spread the magical fragrance of love.

That evening, as I sat alone at my table, I noticed the golden light falling across the table—the same light that had touched the children’s faces. My heart felt like a sapling again, stronger now, stretching toward the sun.

Because love, like life, is always finding new ground in which to grow.

I was one of many discovering this. Across the world, during the year of lockdown, people found unexpected ways to stay humanly connected.

In Chennai, a family used their children’s LEGO bricks to create tiny stories about the pandemic—turning play into awareness, and awareness into love.

Through UNICEF’s Stay Home Diaries, children in Assam and Odisha recorded their lockdown days on camera, speaking to unseen friends who watched and responded.

In Bihar, a young artist designed digital posters to help women find legal and emotional support, his art becoming a bridge between isolation and community. TV channels screened such videos showing how families were spending time in creativity, and sharing them on media to reach out to others.

That evening, as I sat alone at my table, I noticed the golden light falling across the table—the same light that had touched the children’s faces. My heart felt like a sapling again, stronger now, stretching toward the sun. Because love, like life, is always finding new ground in which to grow.

Across oceans, older people in care homes received colourful postcards from strangers through the Time Slips Project—each one carrying a “beautiful question,” like What is the most beautiful sound in the world? If happiness had a colour, what would it be? That single question became a conversation, a thread of belonging.

And in one city, a young man flew a drone carrying his phone number to a woman he had seen on a nearby rooftop, announcing to her he would like to meet her. What began as curiosity became a socially distanced romance, that went viral—proof of how connection finds even the narrowest passage.

Different countries, different gestures, one impulse: to reach, to connect, to bond, to defy separation.

Whether through a hedge, a screen, a postcard, or a drone, we found ways to bridge the distance. We learned that affection doesn’t always need proximity—it needs imagination.

Six years on, that truth remains. Love, like light, bends around corners. It seeps through cracks. It keeps inventing itself. It is eternal. It is universal. It’s poetry. It’s memory. It’s the truth—unchanging and shared.

Previously Viney Kirpal wrote “The Art of Healing” and “Reclaiming my Roti” for Oldster.

Suspended horizontally from a vertical pole, the 67-year-old holds his body perfectly still, his core strength battling gravity. A few feet away, his 71-year-old training partner squares off against someone five decades younger in a push-up challenge. Spectators pull out their phones to record. The younger competitor gives out at 41 repetitions. The septuagenarian keeps going, steady and composed, finally halting at 64.

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This is Team Strong Silvers: fitness devotees from Singapore who’ve become internet sensations. Their physical condition—sculpted abdominals, defined arms, acrobatic abilities—has generated millions of views and earned them a fresh designation: “Granfluencers.” What makes these older adults extraordinary isn’t just their athletic performance, but how their beliefs about growing older drive activities their contemporaries gave up long ago—and how those activities fundamentally alter the aging process itself.

How do our beliefs influence how we age? Can our thoughts affect not only how long we live, but how we live?

Too Good to Be True

Pop psychology is filled with studies that promise miraculous transformations through the power of thought alone. The stories are compelling, but the truth is far less magical than the headlines suggest.

In 1979, a group of older men entered what appeared to be a temporal portal—a New England facility redesigned to replicate 1959. For five days, they existed “counterclockwise,” acting as though Eisenhower still occupied the White House. The outcomes appeared revolutionary: enhanced memory, superior manual coordination, stronger hearing. Some participants even seemed to look more youthful. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s research implied that our psychological perception of age could influence our physical state.

How do our beliefs influence how we age? Can our thoughts affect not only how long we live, but how we live?

Then came more seductive promises. Hotel housekeepers who were told their cleaning counted as exercise reportedly lost weight and lowered blood pressure without changing their routines. The “Milkshake Study” found that people’s hunger hormones responded differently to the same shake depending on whether they believed it was indulgent or diet-friendly.

This is where things unravel.

Despite all the excitement, these studies haven’t withstood rigorous examination. The “Counterclockwise” research never appeared in a peer-reviewed publication. Efforts to replicate the housekeeper study couldn’t reproduce the striking changes originally claimed. The milkshake study’s findings proved far more modest than popular coverage indicated: minor, unreliable hormone fluctuations.

A clear trend appeared: The more remarkable the assertion, the weaker the supporting data.

That doesn’t mean the mind is powerless over the body. The mind does shape the body, but not in the simple, magical way these studies suggest. Belief can spark change, but it travels through deeper, more intricate pathways.

“The Lie Became The Reality”

As Serena Williams trained for Wimbledon in 2015, she found herself caught in a cycle of self-doubt. Her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, remembers: “She lost the year before, so she was struggling with her confidence.” Her anxiety particularly impacted her net game, making her second-guess her movements.

Confronting her confidence crisis with Wimbledon fast approaching, Mouratoglou chose a risky strategy. He decided to deceive her.

“I have very good news for you,” he told Williams enthusiastically. “Every time you play a match and you create a short ball, I’m super relaxed.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the stats, it’s not me, it’s the stats,” Mouratoglou replied. “I know you’re going to win 80 percent of the points.”

“I thought I sucked at the net,” Williams responded.

“Maybe you feel that way, but the stats explain exactly the opposite.”

The truth was, Williams wasn’t winning 80 percent of net points. Far from it. But her coach’s calculated fabrication had a singular objective: to convert Williams’s expectation of defeat into a belief in victory. “I lied to Serena about her stats because I knew that if she thought her stats were good, the day after, she would play 10 times better.”

What makes these older adults extraordinary isn’t just their athletic performance, but how their beliefs about growing older drive activities their contemporaries gave up long ago—and how those activities fundamentally alter the aging process itself.

And that’s exactly what happened. “From that day, she was winning 80 percent of the points at the net,” he adds. “So the lie became the reality.” Williams went on to win the tournament.

In contrast to the exaggerated mindset research, Williams’s experience demonstrates something concrete. Her coach didn’t merely alter her beliefs; he transformed her actions. Once she became convinced she would dominate at the net, she moved toward it more often and with greater assurance. Her actual performance experienced a profound shift.

Fake Steroids, Real Muscles

In 1972, fifteen young men enrolled in what they understood to be a study testing a novel “athletic steroid” formulated to boost muscle mass quickly. They consumed their capsules faithfully for four weeks while maintaining their normal training routines.

By the end of the month, the results were striking. Their bench press strength increased by an impressive 10 pounds. It looked exactly like what they’d been promised.

There was just one catch: the “athletic steroid” was merely a placebo. The pills held no active compounds whatsoever. Yet these participants had gained quantifiable strength purely because they thought they were consuming steroids.

In contrast to numerous mind-body experiments, this placebo steroid research has endured scientific scrutiny. Replication studies have confirmed identical outcomes.

But how do fake pills build muscle? The explanation isn’t found in supernatural mental powers; it’s found in something more direct: drive and exertion. The participants who thought they were consuming steroids tackled their training sessions differently—exercising with increased vigor, striving to finish additional reps, lifting heavier loads. Thinking they had chemical support led them to expect better results, which manifested as modified behavior. They simply worked harder.

The placebo wasn’t magical—it was motivational. The participants thought they were consuming performance boosters, expected enhanced strength, felt enabled to exert more effort, and validated their predictions when they witnessed genuine gains. This positive feedback loop amplified the initial belief.

The 7.5-Year Effect

Dr. Becca Levy at Yale University has pioneered revolutionary research on how beliefs influence the aging process. In a groundbreaking study, Levy tracked 660 individuals age 50 and above for almost 23 years. She found that participants holding more optimistic perspectives on aging survived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those harboring pessimistic views, even after accounting for health condition, socioeconomic status, and other factors.

This wasn’t a trivial statistical anomaly. The influence of optimistic aging beliefs on lifespan exceeded the benefits of reduced blood pressure or cholesterol (which contribute approximately 4 years), or sustaining a healthy weight, avoiding smoking, and exercising consistently (which each add roughly 1-3 years).

When scientists assessed biological markers of aging, they discovered that optimistic beliefs correlated with healthier profiles, including reduced inflammation indicators and stress hormones. But these physiological differences weren’t mystical; they arose from tangible behavioral mechanisms.

The placebo wasn’t magical—it was motivational. The participants thought they were consuming performance boosters, expected enhanced strength, felt enabled to exert more effort, and validated their predictions when they witnessed genuine gains. This positive feedback loop amplified the initial belief.

When people hold negative aging beliefs (”I might fall” or “I’m too old for this”), they avoid physical challenges. Avoiding challenges leads to physical deconditioning. The deconditioning makes activities more difficult, which reinforces avoidance. This often leads to isolation, which increases stress and depression risk. The resulting chronic stress triggers inflammatory responses and disrupts hormone regulation, accelerating biological aging.

Team Strong Silvers exemplify the reverse pattern. Their belief in ongoing adaptation drives them to train more intensely. These training sessions develop genuine physical strength, which diminishes injury fears and motivates additional training. That lowers inflammatory responses and stress hormones, reinforcing their enhanced health and confirming the original optimistic beliefs.

Levy’s research has repeatedly demonstrated that our thoughts about aging influence the aging process itself through numerous channels:

Cognitive functioning: Individuals with optimistic aging beliefs demonstrate superior memory performance and delayed cognitive deterioration.

Cardiovascular health: They display improved cardiovascular stress responses, with reduced blood pressure during demanding tasks.

Recovery from disability: After experiencing disabling health events, they recuperate more completely and rapidly.

Preventive health behaviors: They’re more inclined to participate in consistent exercise, sound nutrition, and medication compliance.

Perhaps most remarkable is how early these age beliefs form. In one study, Levy found that stereotypes about aging absorbed in early life predicted cardiovascular events up to 38 years later. Participants who had held more negative age stereotypes in young adulthood were significantly more likely to experience heart attacks or strokes in later life.

This indicates that the narratives we construct about aging carry far greater weight than we realize. When a society saturates people with messages linking aging to unavoidable deterioration, those messages materialize in biological reality. The conviction that “I’m too old for this” may appear to be a sensible evaluation of circumstances, but it’s a damaging way to exist.

Conversely, the belief that “My body is capable of growth at any age” may seem optimistically biased, but it’s an excellent tool that drives behaviors creating measurable biological benefits.

The Reality of Our Beliefs

We’ve seen how beliefs shape biology through concrete physiological and behavioral pathways. When we embrace the belief that our bodies are capable of continued adaptation and growth, we act differently.

The beliefs we hold about aging may be the most consequential of all. As years pass, these assumptions gain increasing power. Will we anticipate continual adaptation or inevitable decline? Will we interpret physical changes as signals to evolve or reasons to withdraw?

When people hold negative aging beliefs (”I might fall” or “I’m too old for this”), they avoid physical challenges. Avoiding challenges leads to physical deconditioning. The deconditioning makes activities more difficult, which reinforces avoidance. This often leads to isolation, which increases stress and depression risk. The resulting chronic stress triggers inflammatory responses and disrupts hormone regulation, accelerating biological aging.

These questions matter because beliefs shape behavior, and behavior shapes biology. The extraordinary physical feats of the Strong Silvers aren’t miracles. They’re the natural result of expecting capability to persist, training consistently based on that expectation, and letting biology respond accordingly.

Our bodies don’t merely harbor beliefs. They react to them, constantly reorganizing in alignment with what we anticipate. Grasping this relationship converts aging from something that occurs to us into something we deliberately navigate—not with unrealistic optimism or passive fatalism, but with educated agency over how we experience each phase of life.

Excerpted from Beyond Belief: The Science Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results, ©.

Prince died on April 21, 2016, three months after the death of David Bowie. Just like that I’d lost another musical and cultural hero whose sounds and visions were part of my teenage years in high school and college, my early adulthood working various jobs, and into maturity (graying hair, slower walk), all the while playing their old songs alongside new releases. Though I loved them both, it was Prince, “that skinny motherfucker with the high voice,” as he described himself on The Black Album track “Bob George,” I felt closest to.

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Living in Philadelphia, I shared a house with fellow Prince fan Sheena Lester, my former editor from RapPages. It was Sheena who introduced me to the 2004 clip of Prince participating in the George Harrison tribute at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” alongside Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison, Prince bopped on stage in a tailored suit and red hat and stole the show with a guitar solo people still talk about decades later.

On the afternoon of the 21^st, I was in the dining room surfing the web when I saw an item announcing the sad news. “Oh shit,” I mumbled. Sheena, who was in the living room, screamed, “What’s the matter?” I was speechless before finally telling her, “It says here that Prince is dead.” Though we both believed it to be a hoax, soon the news was reported from more trusted sources and we finally had to accept the truth.

The announcement was devastating. Prince wasn’t just an artist I’d worshipped from afar, but someone I’d actually met. The first time was the night he played a benefit concert in New York City, at the Palladium in 1994, and his publicist invited my girlfriend Lesley Pitts and me to the VIP room. Ironically, three years later, Lesley became his new press agent. In 1999, a month after her sudden death, I was invited to Paisley Park, his studio/residence in Minnesota to interview him.

***

Prince Rogers Nelson debuted in 1978 with For You, back when he still dressed in regular fashions while sporting an amazing Afro. He was a cute pin-up boy whose handsome looks fit perfectly with the other teen idols (The Jacksons, Switch) in the pages of Right On! magazine. Though For You was a commercial failure the following year he set off disco dance floors with “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” the first single from his self-titled 1979 second album, Prince.

I was in the dining room surfing the web when I saw an item announcing the sad news. “Oh shit,” I mumbled. Sheena, who was in the living room, screamed, “What’s the matter?” I was speechless before finally telling her, “It says here that Prince is dead.” Though we both believed it to be a hoax, soon the news was reported from more trusted sources and we finally had to accept the truth. The announcement was devastating. Prince wasn’t just an artist I’d worshipped from afar, but someone I’d actually met.

While the album’s back cover showed a nude Prince riding on the back of a Pegasus, the image projected a storybook sweetness as well as a visual introduction to the erotica that soon became a part of his persona. Released when I was a junior attending Northwestern High in Baltimore, the Pegasus picture was repurposed as a book cover given away in record shops. With the album slated to drop in October, 1979, those “back to school” covers were soon wrapped around many math, English and social studies textbooks throughout the city. One morning on the way to school, a girl on the bus was carrying a book with that picture when a male student asked her loudly, “Why you got that fruity dude on your book? Can’t you see that he’s a sissy?” Most of the guys laughed while the girl remained silent, staring out of the window.

While I hadn’t yet become a fan of the man or his music, my distaste for both had nothing to do with his perceived sexuality. Back then I was a young Black rocker who couldn’t dance and had adopted the late ‘70s “Disco Sucks” mantra, while embracing heavy metal. Still, months later I was at my cousin’s house when I decided to give the disc a spin. That was when I stumbled on the rocked-out track “Bambi,” where Prince goes electric guitar crazy, conjuring the musical mojos of Hendrix and Santana while singing about his girlfriend leaving him for another woman. In 1979 Black commercial performers had no problem singing about sex, but no one sang about lesbians.

A year later, Prince’s third joint Dirty Mind (1980), was the man’s coming out album in terms of sound, style, and sexuality. On the cover, posed in black bikini briefs and a pervert trench coat, he stared defiantly as though daring us to question him.“A lot of Prince’s flip had a lot to do with the journalists and some of the things they were saying about him and the group and where we were coming from,” bassist Andre Cymone, who toured with Prince during that era, told me in 2014. “In early 1980 when we were on the road, there was an English writer who had said something like, ‘compared to British artists, Prince was tame.’ He took that very seriously and told me, ‘Maybe we need to step things up a little bit.’ He was serious too.”

With a little help from his friends, including Dr. Fink supplying synths to the title track, Cymone plucking the bassline that would become the utopian funky wonderland of “Uptown,” Lisa Coleman’s whispered vocals on “Head,” and Morris Day’s groove on “Partyup,” Prince finished Dirty Mind in less than 12 days. For Prince, Dirty Mind was the beginning of breaking down barriers and becoming one of the most important, style-setting musical artists of his time.

I was a young Black rocker who couldn’t dance and had adopted the late ‘70s “Disco Sucks” mantra, while embracing heavy metal. Still, months later I was at my cousin’s house when I decided to give the disc a spin. That was when I stumbled on the rocked-out track “Bambi,” where Prince goes electric guitar crazy, conjuring the musical mojos of Hendrix and Santana while singing about his girlfriend leaving him for another woman. In 1979 Black commercial performers had no problem singing about sex, but no one sang about lesbians.

Some of the artists he dug and was influenced by include Joni Mitchell (especially The Hissing of Summer Lawns), Miles Davis, Nino Rota, Roxy Music and Betty Davis While the decade before the he-men recording stars—Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Barry White, and Teddy Pendergrass—all projected an Alpha male vibe in their music and images, Prince represented a change that was coming.

Four months after the record’s October, 1980 release, I was in the basement watching Saturday Night Live, when Prince surprised me by popping on screen, jamming “Partyup” with his band, featuring rhythm guitarist Dez Dickerson and bassist Cymone. Turning the volume higher, I was so amped that I stood on mom’s couch and played air guitar. After that night, there was no turning back.

In the summer of 1984, with the release of the Purple Rain album and movie, Prince reached the superstar plateau that he’d craved and worked so hard toward. His face, body, and music were now everywhere. I played the first single “When Doves Cry” so often that my grandmother, who I lived with in New York City, began singing the song one afternoon while we were riding in a taxi to Aunt Lillian’s apartment. Grandma leaned back in the leather seat and out of nowhere sang, “Maybe I’m just too demanding, maybe I’m just like my father…” Pausing for a moment, she glanced at me and we both exclaimed, “Too bold!” Like mischievous kids, we both laughed.

Catching Purple Rain at a theater on the Upper East Side on the afternoon of its release (Andy Warhol was in the audience) was an experience like no other I’d ever had in a movie house. From the first flicker to the last scene, the audience was as electrified as the instruments and performers on screen. During the “Darling Nikki” sequence when Prince is simulating sex on top of a speaker, one woman screamed, “I wish I was a speaker!” We all laughed.

Months later, I dressed like Prince for Halloween, wearing my grandmother’s lace gloves and having my friend Francine do my make-up. In the end I looked more like Blacula, but I tried. My personal favorite tune on the soundtrack was the sticky sweet ballad “The Beautiful Ones,” and when it played that night I slow danced with a fine woman named Tracey, who I tried to turn into my personal Apollonia. Unfortunately, no matter how much I whispered in her ear, she wasn’t having it.

***

As mentioned earlier, I actually got a chance to conduct an interview with Prince in 1999 at Paisley Park for Code magazine. Located in the small burg of Chanhassen, Minneapolis, the facility was Prince’s main sound factory complete with performance space and various studios. Though the interview was a bit rough considering that Prince, ever the control freak, didn’t allow writers to use tape recorders, and often spoke in parables and contradictions, I’ll always remember that August afternoon as one of the most exciting days of my pop writing life.

My favorite part of our conversation was talking about his childhood, when his love for music began. “When I was a kid I used to ride my bike over to Dee’s Record Center and buy the latest releases,” remembered Prince. “Dee weighed about 400 pounds and had hair like Al Sharpton. He would play the records for me, those little 45s with the big hole in the middle, and I would ride over there every three days. James Brown was putting out a single every three weeks, and I would buy them all. I would slide the discs on my handlebars so I could watch them spin as I rode home.”

After our interview, which was done to promote his 22^nd album Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, Prince gave me a guided tour through the multicolored musical funhouse that could’ve been designed by Salvador Dali, with its purple walls painted with fluffy clouds and cooing doves in a cage. However, as much as Paisley Park was a playful place, it was also there that he worked on music for himself and a few of his inspirations who became friends including George Clinton, Mavis Staples, Chaka Khan and Larry Graham.

I got a chance to conduct an interview with Prince in 1999 at Paisley Park for Code magazine. Located in the small burg of Chanhassen, Minneapolis, the facility was Prince’s main sound factory complete with performance space and various studios. Though the interview was a bit rough considering that Prince, ever the control freak, didn’t allow writers to use tape recorders, and often spoke in parables and contradictions, I’ll always remember that August afternoon as one of the most exciting days of my pop writing life.

“It’s not always about just getting paid, but about respect,” Prince told me. “If somebody like Babyface wanted to rent my studio, I would charge a lot of money, but what would I look like asking Chaka or Larry for any money? If I help support them, then it sets an example for others.” While I played the role of objective journalist when interviewing Prince, the truth is, I was, and remain, a devoted fan.

More than a singer, songwriter and musician, he was also an outstanding producer. Back when he was a young teen, Prince began developing studio skills that made him top-notch. Like Prince’s own production influencers, James Brown, George Martin (The Beatles), Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys), Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder, he developed into an aural auteur who was on a mission to master the studio like it was another instrument.

Prince’s initial production training began in his hometown of Minneapolis, in a studio (Moon Sound) owned by Chris Moon. After buying his first home on Lake Riley in 1980, which he painted purple, he built his own barebones home studio. It was there where he began refining his purple music that became known as the Minneapolis Sound—a hybrid of synth-pop, funk, rock, soul and new wave.

In 1981, when guitarist Jessie Johnson joined Prince’s side-group The Time, he lived at the artist’s house and had access to the studio. “What I learned from Prince about the studio was there are absolutely no rules,” Johnson told Wax Poetics in 2012. “Stuff people said about spending a million dollars on equipment and going to recording school, he flushed all that down the toilet. When I first moved in, he had garbage speakers and a 16-track board that was made for live sound; it wasn’t even a recording board. The studio itself was just a regular room, but whenever you walked in, Prince was recording some incredible stuff. He always worked in the middle of the night on some vampire shit, but dude knew how to make records.”

A sonic chameleon till the end, the massive amount of material Prince composed in his lifetime has long been recognized as superb. Though much of it was/is stored in “the vault,” an aural avalanche of unreleased music surfaced after his death that was mindboggling, exciting, and tad overwhelming. One song was “Purple Music,” a track on which Prince talked about the high he got in the studio creating music. “Don’t need no cymbals, no saxophone, just need to find me a style of my own,” he sang. “Ain’t got no theory, ain’t got no rules, I just let the purple music tell my body what to do.” The track, which served as an early self-portrait of a musical genius at work, was later placed on a deluxe reissue of 1999.

Days after Prince’s death I talked to singer Joi. Best known for her soulful funk experimental albums (The Pendulum Vibe, The Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome), she’d been listening to Prince’s music since she was a young girl. “I learnt so much from his first eleven albums, which to me are the quintessential Prince albums,” she told me. “His talent and musicianship just rippled and expanded with each project.” Other artists inspired by Prince include D’Angelo, Common, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, Janelle Monae, Childish Gambimo, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, and Questlove.

Ten years after Prince’s death, the music he made is still being played by the old school fans as well as being introduced to a youngsters who are learning about him through their elders. Having touched so many souls I truly believe Prince’s spirit continues to hover over the world like a multicolored recording angel bringing us bright light, mad joy, and a hella lot of stories, memories and music.

Check out all of Michael A. Gonzales’s contributions to Oldster Magazine. For more from him on Prince check out ”Love in the Age of Prince.”

We were once the kids in America, but now, we smell like geezer spirit. Gen X is not the first generation to be defined by youth and then have to live down the embarrassing spectacle of not dying before we got old, but we may be the first to fully embrace the irony of the situation. Since bullshit slides right off us— perhaps from all that Teflon we ingested as kids— we can’t help but recognize societal expectations around aging for what they are: another attempt to ground us for life, the hope that we’ll just peace out and pretend everything is fine, like we did when our mom and her boyfriend fought. Golden years, my ass.

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If getting older is hard for Gen X writ large, make mine a double. As an elder Gen X woman who came of age in some of the most legendary (read: seediest) rock clubs in the Northeastern U.S., I do nothing gracefully, and I’m sure as hell not approaching aging that way. The older I get, the more purple streaks I put in my hair, even if I immediately sweat them out in this never-ending hell of hot flashes. Still, I went from dancing this mess around to being one poorly-timed step away from the punk rock nursing home, with a shocking number of ailments for a woman of late middle age. “Where is my mind?” is no longer just a Pixies song, but a question I ask myself daily.

Almost as bad as dealing with aging is the fact that my status as a Gen Xer has wavered over time. I was born in December of 1962, and like many folks of early 60s vintage, have considered myself Gen X ever since reading Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. My peers and I were slacking along just fine until demographers decided to redefine the generation, casting us as Baby Boomers. Others have tried to call us Generation Jones, a moniker so dull it feels like we’re being trolled.

Now, thanks to a recent New York Times piece, we are back in the Gen X fold. But for how long? Being kicked out of Gen X and drifting generation-less for years is possibly the most Gen X thing ever, but I’m tired of begging to retain my identity.

Here’s a solution: call us Geriatric Gen X.

Please note that when I say “geriatric,” my fellow nightswimmers, it’s my attempt to reclaim the word. Boomers—the generation that widely changed previous perceptions of youth—are certainly older than we are now, but they’ve figured out a way to navigate their new identity. Hippie women, for example, have morphed into ethereal white-haired witches, like a mesmerizing fleet of Stevie Nickses. But what’s an old punk rock lady to do when she can’t even kneel down to lace her steel-toed boots?

In proposing the creation of a new sub-generation, I guess I should define it, even though the idea of “criteria” seems totally bogus to me. If you remember the Watergate hearings as the thing that knocked all your favorite reruns and game shows off the air for an entire summer; if you’re old enough to have danced in punk/new wave clubs in the 80s and early 90s; and if you’ve recently gasped after catching sight of your jowls in the mirror, you’re probably one of us. But to stave off Boomer condescension or Millennial exasperation, let me offer some more specific characteristics.

• Age: Douglas Coupland started Gen X with those born in 1960, but I’m defining Geriatric Gen X as born between 1959 and 1969. Why start at ’59? Because that’s the year Robert Smith from The Cure was born, as well as the comedian Tracey Ullman. If the man who helped invent Goth and the woman whose sketch comedy show brought us The Simpsons are not Gen X, then no one is.

I’ll admit that ending our cohort in 1969 feels a bit arbitrary to me. Why are Billy Porter and Paul Rudd, both born in 1969, Geriatric Gen X rather than garden-variety X? All I can tell you is that they feel like my people in a way that folks born in the 1970s do not. Also, my partner has given me a celebrity hall pass for Paul Rudd, so it would be weird if we were not the same generation.

• Name: There are several first names that define this cohort. For example, my name is Lisa. According to the Social Security Baby Names Database, this once-obscure name was number one with a bullet for female births in the U.S. from 1962 – 1969. Lisa is a quintessential Geriatric Gen X name, and to prove it, let me introduce you to the four other Lisas who were in my kindergarten class.

Other strongly Geriatric Gen X first names: Michelle, Jennifer (especially in the latter half of the 1960s), Michael and David. If you’re a Heather or a Jessica, a Jason or a Ryan, you are likely Gen X proper rather than a member of my sub-generation.

• Music: I’m aware that not everyone my age shares my passion for what a friend once described as “tortured white people’s music,” so I’ll just put forth one album that I think unites a wide variety of musical preferences: Prince’s Purple Rain. If you bought this album when it came out in 1984, and listened to it in your teens or twenties, you’re Geriatric Gen X.

• Health: Are you on more than three prescription medications with multiple side effects listed in print so small you can’t read it even with your glasses? Struggling with an inability to see at night, yet your optometrist says your cataracts are not yet big enough to be covered by insurance? Have you recently described yourself as having a “trick knee,” a “bad back” or any joint that can tell the weather? Do these questions sound to you like the lead-in to a 1990s infomercial? If you answered “yes” to any or all of the above, you are likely a Geriatric Gen Xer.

The 2020s have been stressful enough without having to fight for our generational identity on top of it. If you can personally relate to any of the characteristics I’ve outlined above, or if you just want to understand your dad’s weird obsession with that eyeroll Susanna Hoffs did in the “Walk Like an Egyptian” video, say it loud and say it proud: Geriatric Gen X. We may never have enough money to retire, and our feet are killing us, but when we hear “Rock Lobster” we will try our best to get “down, down”—even if that means we’ll need some help getting back up, up.

Lisa Borders is the author of three novels: Last Night at the Disco, published in 2025 and a finalist for the Foreword Indie Book of the Year in Humor; The Fifty-First State; and Cloud Cuckoo Land, chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award and a 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards honoree. A frequent humor contributor at McSweeney’s, her essays and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Oldster, The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Black Warrior Review and other journals.

My latest book, Watching the Detective, has to do with a recent time in my life when all I wanted to watch was the classic TV series Columbo. Why, out of the endless options available, was this my go-to? It had to do with comfort, sure, and the show’s sensibility, its slower pacing, its tangents. And of course, Peter Falk. But it was something more than that. And trying to figure out what it was became an investigation, of sorts. My search revealed to me that the movement of time and the process of aging – existing through and over the course of time—were central to what was going on here. The appeal of watching Columbo lay not so much in nostalgia but in the way the past relates to the present, the correspondences, the overlaps, the interdependency—on both a cultural and a personal level.

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I came into the world in the 70s, when the original run of the series was airing. The character of Columbo, whether I was totally aware of him, was always there. Unchanging and yet… changing as my perspective shifted. (Talking about Watching the Detective, a friend who is my age, said: “I think one mark of getting older is that you start to understand how weirdly hot Peter Falk was” – shifting perspectives!) Watching Columbo led me want to re-watch all the John Cassavetes movies I’d first seen in my 20s, including those starring his close friend Falk: Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence. You see new things decades later, of course. The marks of getting older are all here, but so too are the indelible impressions of our younger selves.

Here’s an excerpt from the book -

I watch Cassavetes’ Opening Night yet again, which stars Gena Rowlands as Myrtle Gordon, a beloved actress preparing to open a show called The Second Woman on Broadway. We encounter her first backstage, her warm blonde hair set and softly curled above her shoulders, wide face, pliant mouth, shadowed eyes, a cigarette resting between her lips, painted nails, glamorous and tough. Better to say toughened. She appears to have lived a bit, seen some things, a world-weariness has set in. When a young fan gets killed by a car while trying to meet Myrtle after a rehearsal, it sends the star spiraling.

She says when she was 18, she could do anything—her “emotions were so close to the surface”—but she’s now finding it harder to “stay in touch.” She refuses to state her age when asked, as though uttering it aloud would make it a fact, make it real. (Rowlands would have been around 46 or 47 when she filmed this.) She drinks heavily, she has visions of, hauntings by, the dead teenager, antagonizes the 65-year-old female playwright, worries about her looks (though in her oversize sunglasses—a defensive shield?—she has never appeared cooler), meets with Spiritualists.

Gena Rowland’s character in Opening Night refuses to state her age when asked, as though uttering it aloud would make it a fact, make it real. (Rowlands would have been around 46 or 47 when she filmed this.) She drinks heavily, she has visions of, hauntings by, the dead teenager, antagonizes the 65-year-old female playwright, worries about her looks…

She doesn’t have a husband, doesn’t have children—she tells us acting is all she’s got. And she can’t seem to play this part. She goes off-script, in both literal and figurative ways. She is late for the opening and when she finally turns up, she is fall-down drunk. Is it a spoiler to describe the ending? I won’t. I will just say that Peter Falk has a small, uncredited cameo as a tuxedoed theatergoer, smoking a cigarette in the lobby (everybody smokes) and embracing Myrtle onstage after the curtain call. And I will add that this movie is very much about aging.

There’s an echo of All About Eve (1950), in the dynamic between an older star and an aspiring, grasping young one, even if the younger one in Opening Night is a hallucination. In All About Eve, Bette Davis is Margo Channing, a Broadway diva who has recently turned 40. Anne Baxter is Eve Harrington, an obsessed young fan who becomes Channing’s assistant and proceeds to scheme her way to fame at Channing’s expense. Twenty-three years later, Anne Baxter would appear in the Columbo episode “Requiem for a Falling Star” (1973), playing—you guessed it—a “has-been movie queen” as her blackmailer/murder target puts it. The circularity in which we all—but especially actors, it seems—find ourselves.

My Opening Night rescreen happened right after experiencing, for the very first time in my life, the feeling of being patronized as an “old person.” So, this is what it’s like! I’m at the local food co-op and I sense that the cashier, with their perfect complexion (a name tag offers they/them pronouns), their undeniable youth, is treating me kindly because I register not so much as elderly or infirm but clearly no longer young and therefore not totally with it. “Hello!” with real eye contact and a smile. “Did you find everything okay??” Perhaps I’ll say the wrong thing, perhaps I won’t know how to work the credit card reader—it’s all right, they’ll be patient with me, forgiving. But look: I successfully bag my items all by myself! In the reusable cloth bags I have brought from home because I care about the planet, about the future, about the world the young will inherit and inhabit. “Have a great afternoon!” they say. “You, too!” I practically exude. I leave the store and don’t immediately understand what this sensation is. On my walk home, I begin to grasp it, and as I unload the groceries, I ask my husband, “Is this what being out in public is going to be like from now on?”

A 30-something Italian friend tells me a dubbed version of Columbo is still huge in Italy . . . among people over 60. Was Columbo always a show for older people, depending on how you define “older”? A friend, who is about seven years younger than me, who grew up in a multigenerational home in the Midwest, tells me she was “a Columbo kid because I was raised with old folks.” Another younger friend, whose father was in the Army and whose family moved around a lot—to bases in Massachusetts, Alaska, Illinois, and Washington state—was introduced to Columbo by his grandparents, who’d recorded the show on their VCR. They had just about every episode on tape, he tells me. For consecutive summers, from the age of 9 to 15, he and his sister would visit them on the South Shore of Massachusetts and watch. None of the tapes were labeled, by the way. An education, of sorts. And some of his favorite memories.

My Opening Night rescreen happened right after experiencing, for the very first time in my life, the feeling of being patronized as an “old person.” So, this is what it’s like! I’m at the local food co-op and I sense that the cashier, with their perfect complexion (a name tag offers they/them pronouns), their undeniable youth, is treating me kindly because I register not so much as elderly or infirm but clearly no longer young and therefore not totally with it. “Hello!” with real eye contact and a smile. “Did you find everything okay??”

It was never exclusively a show for older people. In 1972, introducing Falk as a guest on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson noted that Columbo was the most popular character on television, particularly among high school and college students. But when Columbo was revived in the late ’80s, there seemed to be an effort to appeal to younger viewers whose tastes and expectations had changed. Musically, this meant a score heavy on synthesizers and saxophones, evidently. The production values from this era of the show haven’t aged especially well, perhaps because they were already behind their time and not exactly of it. What still works is Columbo’s unchanging suit and raincoat. This is what remains instantly recognizable. Timeless.

A question of legibility surfaces: Has the fact that we can watch or listen to almost anything from any time at any time with minimal effort changed the way we understand what we are watching and listening to? For the better? We know that what we are taking in is an artifact of another time yet it’s right there in front of us. We didn’t have to go digging for it; we didn’t unearth anything. There is a continuum, a kind of ongoingness, and this provides a context we didn’t have before. It is, to an extent, like the opposite of a time capsule. There is continual discovery or rediscovery, but there is no burial.

When Columbo first aired, most Americans only had a handful of TV channels to choose from: the three major broadcast networks, public television, and local UHF stations. Cable networks, airing original programming, really started growing in the mid to late ’70s. There were only so many options. This is not to bemoan the death of monoculture, just to note that Columbo existed within it and would likely never have permeated our mindscape otherwise.

…

I think about the fact that Falk originally used a raincoat from his own closet to outfit Columbo. “The raincoat worked 76 episodes for almost 27 years, but in the late ’90s we became concerned,” wrote Falk in his memoir. “It started to look fragile. I did what I could. Each evening, I put out a saucer of milk for it.” In “Now You See Him” (1976), Columbo sports a new coat, darker brown, with piping on the collar and pockets, a birthday present from his wife, or so he says. A “fine-looking raincoat” says a fellow officer. “Seems a little stiff to me,” says Columbo, whose discomfort becomes too much for him. “I gotta take off this coat—I can’t think in this coat!” He tries to lose the coat for the rest of the episode. He tells his dog, Dog, “I’m gonna leave this coat in the car. If someone tries to lift it, you look the other way.” In the end, he’s back in his old favorite. But why always a raincoat, in sunny LA? William Levinson and Richard Link, the show’s creators, imagined a finale, that never came to pass, in which the raincoat is at the dry cleaner’s for the duration of the episode; when the case is closed, Columbo walks outside and it’s raining—freeze-frame on the lieutenant with his expressive hands in the air. The beat-up, brown leather high-top shoes Columbo wore throughout the initial run of the show also belonged to Falk. The raincoat, the shoes, the suit—“a symphony of brown,” Falk said on Inside the Actors Studio in 1999, “with one concession to color, that drab green tie.”

I think about Ben Gazzara detailing in his memoir how Falk wore a navy blue coat to John Cassavetes’ funeral in 1989. The same coat he’d “worn in the opening scene of Husbands, so many years before.” It would have been about 20 years. Gazzara notes that Husbands “opened with John, Peter, and me going to the funeral of our best friend—and here it was, the real thing.”

Was Columbo always a show for older people, depending on how you define “older”? A friend, who is about seven years younger than me, who grew up in a multigenerational home in the Midwest, tells me she was “a Columbo kid because I was raised with old folks.” Another younger friend, whose father was in the Army and whose family moved around a lot—to bases in Massachusetts, Alaska, Illinois, and Washington state—was introduced to Columbo by his grandparents, who’d recorded the show on their VCR. They had just about every episode on tape, he tells me.

I think about my friend Juan, who casually watched perpetual Columbo reruns as a child in South America and, years later, wound up buying a raincoat similar to—“same cut, same collar”—the lieutenant’s, almost out of some unthinking, deep-seated urge. Only eventually, he tells me, did he “delight” in the realization “that I was wearing Columbo’s coat.” A decade on: “I still have it, still love it. It has definitely grown more rumpled.” The sartorial pull of the early Columbo episodes is strong, he adds, noting the peacock aesthetic of the villains, in particular. How the show offers “a kind of amazing breadth of men’s fashion high points in the ’70s: bold but elegant patterns, lots of carefully styled and coordinated suits.”

I think about the fact that my dad has held on to so many articles of clothing from the past, which he offers now to me and my sister, my husband, and my brother-in-law. My son has inherited a couple of flannel shirts. He has sent us a pair of leather gloves which look just like the kind many a murderer has used on Columbo to leave no fingerprints. A wool sport coat he bought on a trip to Scotland when he was a young man is too moth-eaten to salvage. (He can’t dispose of it himself; he can only give it to us to get rid of while he’s not looking—recycle it, repurpose it, he doesn’t care so long as he doesn’t have to know. “Do with it as you wish.”) But he passed along a pair of brown leather penny loafers to my husband—in good shape, though to preserve them, my father had applied a few layers of Shoe Goo, an adhesive and sealant, to the soles. My husband took the Goo’d shoes to a cobbler, had them resoled, and, with a sense of accomplishment, says he’ll have them forever. And, as I write this, I’m wearing a well-kept Fair Isle sweater that once belonged to my father, from the Scotland-travel era. It’s big on me and perfect for a day when the wind blows the leaves along the sidewalk and the sky gets dark before dinnertime.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Fred Brathwaite, aka Fab 5 Freddy, started transforming from a regular city kid into a cultural chameleon who became instrumental in advancing various urban art forms—graffiti and rap—to the next level. In addition, beginning in the early 1980s, he was also involved in film, co-writing and starring in Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style; the Lower East Side/SoHo art world; and directing pioneering rap videos. A native New Yorker born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in 1959, years before gentrification lined the landscape with coffee shops, art galleries and chic restaurants, Fred’s hometown streets were full of mom-and-pop stores, old school businesses, and West Indian upstart families, much like his own, who came to America looking for a better way.

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Certainly, as Fab tells it in his recently released autobiography Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture, co-written with Vanity Fair scribe Mark Rozzo, though the bond of family was tight in his hood, as a youngster he also had to dodge street gangs and deadly drugs, sinister vices that led to the downfall of many. Hell, folks didn’t refer to the community as “Bed-Stuy, do or die” for nothing. Nevertheless, coming from a solid background where his jazz enthusiast dad was an accountant with a revolutionary streak, and his loving mom heavily endorsed education, the one criminal minded activity Fred was swayed into was graffiti, on the rise in New York City as he headed into his wild teenage years in the mid-1970s.

It was during that time that Fred began playing hooky from the smart kid school, John Dewey High, where most days he sat in class, “staring out the window, daydreaming and checking out the Coney Island train yards next door.” Instead of going to class, Fred began roaming streets, going to museums, chilling in Times Square movie houses, and tagging trains with other “writers,” as the graff kids called themselves. Yet, unlike other magic marker and/or aerosol artists who never went further than spraying their names on subway cars and city walls, Fab used his talents to transport himself and others into the worlds of art galleries, television studios, film locations, recording booths and cool clubs.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Fred Brathwaite, aka Fab 5 Freddy, started transforming from a regular city kid into a cultural chameleon who became instrumental in advancing various urban art forms—graffiti and hip-hop—to the next level.

Fab was also instrumental in bringing “the uptown sound” of rap music, which he first discovered through friends and bootleg recordings, downtown to Manhattan nightclubs Mudd Club and The Roxy. It wasn’t long before the punks and new wavers were head-nodding to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. Along the way Fred also developed real friendships with more than a few of the late-20^th Century’s artistic contributors, including writers like Glenn O’Brien, who was also the host of TV Party and Rene Ricard, artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, club promoters Michael Holman and Lady Blue, and punk-pop stars Blondie, fronted by singer Debbie Harry and bandleader Chris Stein, who became his other family.

“Fab 5 Freddy tells me everybody’s fly,” Harry raps on her group’s 1981 hit “Rapture,” the single credited with introducing rap to the mainstream. Those lyrics raised Fred’s status as well as supplied the title for a rousing account of a few decades in his life. He also helped elevate into respected spaces in NYC and Europe the “low” graffiti art of his friends Lee Quiñones—who gets much props in the book as Fab’s mentor and partner in art crimes—and Futura 2000.

Digging deep, in Everybody’s Fly Brathwaite writes about everything from the night of Martin Luther King’s murder, to drawing illustrations for his high school’s newspaper, to his brief stint as a weed dealer in the Catskills, to his obsession with watching films and studying the medium on his own. “I had the filmmaking jones,” he writes. In the fall of 1978, while working as a security guard, he encountered the production team of Bob Fosse’s masterwork All That Jazz at his job and was even more smitten.

Fab was also instrumental in bringing “the uptown sound” of rap music, which he first discovered through friends and bootleg recordings, downtown to Manhattan nightclubs Mudd Club and The Roxy. It wasn’t long before the punks and new wavers were head-nodding to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.

A few years later he served as a muse, co-producer, music supervisor and man behind director Charlie Ahearn on the 1983 film Wild Style. It starred his friend Lee as a young graffiti writer named Zorro who bombs (spray paints) throughout the city and the transit system until he is discovered by a white gallery owner, played by the lovely Patti Astor. In real life Astor was behind the Fun Gallery, the Lower East Side space that gave many young East Village artists, including Fred and Jean, their first shows. Wild Style also took the viewer into the raw world of rap, from the streets to the stage.

Wild Style showed the ingenuity of the young men and women involved in that still new movement that within a few years would rise to the top of the pop culture ladder. That film, with its cinema verite style that reminded me of The 400 Blows, has been the influence and inspiration for countless rappers and producers and their overseas bros from Brixton, England, who a few years later would be well known as producer Nellie Hooper, as well as recording angels Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead.

Along the way Fred also developed real friendships with more than a few of the late-20^th Century’s artistic contributors, including writers like Glenn O’Brien, who was also the host of TV Party and Rene Ricard, artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, club promoters Michael Holman and Lady Blue, and punk-pop stars Blondie, fronted by singer Debbie Harry and bandleader Chris Stein, who became his other family.

Less than a decade after the DIY aesthetic of punk had captured the musical imaginations of youth throughout Britain and America, hip-hop was casting a similar spell. “Movies had always portrayed Blacks and Latins as pimps, petty crooks, criminals,” Freddy writes. “We showed them there was more going on.” There were a few other hip-hop related films made in the 1980s including Breakin’ (1984), Beat Street (1984), Rappin’ (1985) and Kush Groove (1985), but none compared to the rawness of Wild Style.

“There is never going to be anything more authentic than Wild Style,” hip-hop journalist Mark Skillz told me via email. “From Grandmaster Flash rocking three turntables in his girlfriend’s apartment in the South Bronx to the Treacherous Three and the Fearless Four with Grandmaster DST on the mic with Grandmaster DST on the wheels (turntables) during the closing scene, Fab and Charlie Ahearn just had access to so much realness.”

Digging deep, in Everybody’s Fly Brathwaite writes about everything from the night of Martin Luther King’s murder, to drawing illustrations for his high school’s newspaper, to his brief stint as a weed dealer in the Catskills, to his obsession with watching films and studying the medium on his own.

Freddy and I travelled in similar circles in the mid-1980s, hanging on the Lower East Side amongst the musicians, artists, filmmakers and other talented outcasts, but we never met until the fall of 1990 when writer Havelock Nelson and I were working on the early hip-hop text Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture Our editor, Michael Pietsch, who a few years later made his mark as the man behind David Foster Wallace’s supposedly brilliant Infinite Jest and became a big deal in the world of publishing, suggested we interview someone for the foreword.

We debated recruiting various record executives, including Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, or Uptown Records homie Andre Harrell, who was also a former rapper. In the end it was decided we needed someone who’d been ingrained in various hip-hop-related scenes. Indeed, that man was Freddy, who in 1988 secured a gig as the first host of YO! MTV Raps, the music network’s first connection with the hip-hop community across the country. For someone who’d been down with several subcultures, being on MTV was seriously mainstream. However, as we soon learned, the man himself was still grounded. He maintained the ambitious edge that had already taken him so far.

Freddy and I travelled in similar circles in the mid-1980s, hanging on the Lower East Side amongst the musicians, artists, filmmakers and other talented outcasts, but we never met until the fall of 1990 when writer Havelock Nelson and I were working on the early hip-hop text Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture Our editor, Michael Pietsch, who a few years later made his mark as the man behind David Foster Wallace’s supposedly brilliant Infinite Jest and became a big deal in the world of publishing, suggested we interview someone for the foreword.

While some men would’ve been content simply being a VJ interviewing rappers and producers for the premier music station, Fab was also developing into a behind-the-camera cat, directing videos for KRS-One (“My Philosophy”) and Queen Latifah (“Ladies First”); his then-latest was the gritty “Just to Get a Rep” for Gang Starr, which 37 years later remains a favorite of mine. Fab invited us to his beautiful Manhattan Plaza apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which was about a 15-minute walk from his office at MTV.

Reminding me of the line from The Jefferson’s theme song, the former Brooklyn b-boy had snagged himself “a deluxe apartment in the sky,” where he lived there for most of the decade before moving uptown to an exquisite Harlem brownstone. After hooking us up with juice and a fruit platter, the questions began—and didn’t end until two hours later. “And through all of that I bet you didn’t even realize that you were making history,” I said. Havelock chuckled, but Fred didn’t even smile. “That’s not true,” Fab said finally, “I was always aware that we were making history.”

While some men would’ve been content simply being a VJ interviewing rappers and producers for the premier music station, Fab was also developing into a behind-the-camera cat, directing videos for KRS-One (“My Philosophy”) and Queen Latifah (“Ladies First”); his then-latest was the gritty “Just to Get a Rep” for Gang Starr, which 37 years later remains a favorite of mine. Fab invited us to his beautiful Manhattan Plaza apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which was about a 15-minute walk from his office at MTV.

In its own way, Everybody’s Fly also serves as a history book. And not just about hip-hop, but also NYC during its bankrupt and most dangerous days in the 1970s, and the 1980s post-Pop art world that he, Basquiat and Rammellzee inhabited, which helped open the door for the next generation of Black visual artists who began emerging from various art schools a few years later.

Still, as Fred reminds the reader, Basquiat might’ve made good money from the collectors, but respected art critics slaughtered him in print. Angrily he writes, “The hating ass motherfucking critics couldn’t wrap their heads around somebody this sharp, this original, this sophisticated had come from the hood and was essentially a self-taught prodigy.” The hate was piled on more when, in 1985, Basquiat teamed-up with his friend and mentor Andy Warhol on paintings for a show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. The reviews were savage and put a wedge between the two artists. Two years later Warhol died during a simple gallbladder operation, a death that led to Basquiat spiraling into a deep depression and an eventual fatal heroin overdose on August 12, 1988.

In its own way, Everybody’s Fly also serves as a history book. And not just about hip-hop, but also NYC during its bankrupt and most dangerous days in the 1970s, and the 1980s post-Pop art world that he, Basquiat and Rammellzee inhabited, which helped open the door for the next generation of Black visual artists who began emerging from various art schools a few years later.

Having followed Freddy’s career since seeing him in the pages of the East Village Eye and the Village Voice back in the 1980s, I already knew well the professional side. But it was the sections of the book about his young blood years in Brooklyn that were my favorites. In passages that reminded me of two Bed-Stuy cinematic classics, The Education of Sonny Carson and Crooklyn, he reflects lovingly on his dad debating music, politics and Black liberation with his buddies (including Fred’s godfather, jazz drummer Max Roach) in the basement while he listened at the door. He also sat with his mom in the kitchen (“her domain”) where she and her best friend Doris had their own conversations.

With an artist’s eye and a filmmaker’s perspective, Fab 5 Freddy’s Everybody’s Fly is as vivid as it is insightful. Turning back the hands of time, he takes the reader on a delightful journey through the old school memories that still sound fly today.

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Check out all of Michael A. Gonzales’s contributions to Oldster Magazine.

Introduction: For 35 years, George Bartenieff, award-winning actor on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off, the founder of Theater for the New City in downtown New York, and known for his support of new plays and playwrights, worked with Karen Malpede, playwright, director, younger by more than a decade. They also married.

Together, the two produced eleven original theater pieces, directed by Malpede, starring Bartenieff. George was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the fall of 2018, just as they were preparing the premiere of a new play, Other Than We. Immediately after the COVID-19 lockdown ended, they produced Karen’s latest play, Blue Valiant, outside at Farm Arts Collective. (Check out her four plays, with excerpts.)

Blue Valiant was written for George and the award-winning stage and screen actor Kathleen Chalfant, their frequent collaborator. Henry Chalfant put together a film crew, and the production lives on YouTube. Her memoir, Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths, is a tribute to George and several other well-known artists who also worked up until their deaths from cancer. Here, the playwright and wife recounts the final days of the actor-husband whom she had promised “would not be alone.”

These last days become strangely joyous. We are in a heightened state, staring down death as he lies in his own bed, surrounded by close friends.

George can see and hear; he can open his arms wide as if to embrace those who have come. He follows all that is said. His eyes sparkle and he shares in our laughter. We tell many stories. I sit on the big bed next to him. Others stand or sit in chairs at his side. He is propped up on pillows, beaming. We are reliving Blue Valiant’s production, with Kathy, Henry, and Sally Ann, those freezing, stormy days, just over a year ago now, outside on the farm. George’s last live performance. We are laughing at our own audacity, our refusal to give up. George relished the insane difficulty of live theater.

He loved performing outside. The driving rain on the greenhouse roof, which made it impossible to hear the lines. Our lost dress rehearsal. Yet the projections, the lights, the staging worked well. We never thought we could do it, but the rain stopped just in time, twice in two days. The second performance even better than the first. We made the film, which is stunning. (Many people have watched it on YouTube.) Kathy calls it “our miracle”; meanwhile, she has broken her arm on a vacation in Italy. She fell out of a hammock. They have come home early and are with us now. She had a torn meniscus while we rehearsed the play and was often in terrific pain. She was putting off surgery, which, eventually, she did not need in order to perform. Today, her arm is in a black sling, held against her white summer dress. She acted out a similar arm injury in the play, and had worn that same sling, then, as a costume piece. She presumed to know the horse too well so he rammed her. He taught her that we approach the aggrieved with care. The hurt are prone to lash out.

He is graciously dying. As he lived. He is present to hear from many who gather around the big bed or who phone how he is loved. Everyone has memories to share.

“The moment you said your first line, the audience was held in a trance,” Kathy, smiling, gesturing with her good arm toward the imagined crowd, reminds George. She had a long entrance through the audience. She felt their attention and what a fine way to enter a play, through a rapt audience the other actor has prepared for you. Or, why people loved to be on stage with George, his generous attention, his intensity. He is graciously dying. As he lived. He is present to hear from many who gather around the big bed or who phone how he is loved.

Everyone has memories to share. What fun we had and against what odds.

In community, creating.

All these final five days, we are up most of the night, George and I, talking, I talking to and with him, though he is mainly silent, but for sounds, and odd words. He is alert. He takes everything in. I tell him he is being “called back,” an expression I’ve learned from Black friends. I tell him he will “join the ancestors,” which I myself, an unbeliever, do not believe, and neither I think, an unbeliever like me, does he. We talk. I talk to him about our work. He is always most alert when we speak of the work we’ve done together. Whenever I speak about art or nature, he brightens.

On the morning of July 27, I write: He is still alive, odd what comfort that brings. The beautiful, resonant voice is gone, but the flesh remains. He is ever more so slightly alert at odd moments. I finish my shoddy version of a sponge bath. I give up thoughts of changing his shirt, which I cannot do alone. I was so tired all last night that I could not sleep. Every muscle and sinew ached with fatigue, too tired to rest; it was an odd sensation. Finally, I slept for several hours. We woke at sixish.

All these final five days, we are up most of the night, George and I, talking, I talking to and with him, though he is mainly silent, but for sounds, and odd words. He is alert. He takes everything in.

On the morning of July 28, I write: A quiet night, sometimes I thought, our last. We hold hands. I rub his belly. I weep. Sometimes, sleep. He breathes, heavily or lightly, refuses the offered oxygen, pulling the hose from his nose. He is, again, most engaged when I begin a riff on our work together. How important it is not to know exactly what you are doing. How in the space between the knowing and not knowing, the magic happens. How little I have ever known about anything I’ve ever done. Then, he reaches for and takes my hand. Now, once, again, we know nothing. We are on the brink.

On Friday night, July 29, after everyone has gone, George and I are alone. He manages to whisper to me, “I’m afraid.” George is an animist, and so, I suppose, am I. If we believe in anything, we believe in the sanctity of the living world. His time in the Rudolf Steiner progressive school in the midst of the Nazi horror taught him to find comfort in the Bavarian forest, where many of their classes took place, seated at the base of a tall tree on the loam of the earth. When he was still able to walk to the top of Fort Greene Park, he would spontaneously throw his arms around a particularly grand old elm on the pinnacle, planted by Fredrick Law Olmsted in this park initiated by Walt Whitman, and meld his body into its trunk, until he looked quite like a sprite emerging. He would murmur words of endearment to the tree.

At the end of his life, when he could no longer act, nor walk that far, he spent hours writing in his diary, at the table in our first-floor apartment where, if he looked through the geraniums on the windowsill and above the cars in the parking lot, he could see a stand of trees. He delighted in this view, scant though it was. His macular degeneration meant he could not see the words he wrote in his diary in his cursive script; nevertheless, he continued to write:

The number one proof of God—it is The Tree. The kindest, most loving of all creatures on earth is the tree. Trees of all kinds, both large and small give everything to support all other life, as home, as food, both fruit and its own body while alive and in decay. As shade from the heat of the sun. As hiding for creatures that can climb, burrow into its body, in death and decay it creates new soil. As home for birds, for insects, squirrels, ants, bears, and Homo sapiens. How does one creature give life to all?

Wheelchair-bound the last weeks of his life, he would make me stop to admire how a particular tree behind a building on the corner of the campus of Pratt Institute reached around the brick wall. “See,” he would say, “how it reaches toward the light.” When I pass it now, I stop. I fancy I can see George’s form inside its trunk; his arms are those branches reaching up. George’s tree, I tell Percy, the pup.

When, on the night of July 29, his last full night alive, he managed to whisper to me, “I’m afraid,” I knew we should speak of nature, or I, to him, saying many of the things we always said about the beauty of the eternal life force to which he is about to return. The glory of the natural world, whose future we fear for from climate change and war—what will happen to the spirits of all our departed should humans continue to destroy Earth’s ecosystems? I speak to George, on and off, for hours the night through, lying next to him, holding his hand—but this is a dialogue, truly. I am repeating sentiments we share, as he lies unmoving in our bed, his eyes still sparkling, somehow. The life force is eternal, I say—do I believe that myself?

When, on the night of July 29, his last full night alive, he managed to whisper to me, “I’m afraid,” I knew we should speak of nature, or I, to him, saying many of the things we always said about the beauty of the eternal life force to which he is about to return.

But we both do, I know, this is why we fight so hard for the health of the natural world. “Of life only there is no end,” I say, quoting Shaw. My own terrors to come I do not yet know. He is dying, I understand. But he lies alive, now, next to me. We are still in the midst of a conversation that began years before when we met doing a play and I asked him how he felt, and our life is not over yet. I am not alone. Never have our moments together been more precious than now. Never was our communication deeper. You will go back into life, I tell him, and the spirit that is you that, too, will manifest in a thousand ways, my darling.

So, we stay up talking all night—as we often did whenever a crisis in life or work occurred, talking things through till the light dawned, then grabbing an hour of sleep. I always relished our nighttime talks, but none more than this, when now I dare speak for us both. His words issuing through my voice. I am trying to feel what he might say if he could. He says nothing more. I say everything I can think to say about death, from a pantheistic place. You will become a part of all life. I promise, again, and as I have said for several years, you will not be alone. I love him, I tell him. I say he will be out of pain. How happy we’ve been. How divinely happy he made me. I say these things over and over. I have no words of wisdom. I do not believe in Heaven. I do not believe he will “wait for me there till I come.” I do not believe we will ever see one another again. But I believe his spirit will live even if fractured into a million pieces in wind and wave. And his spirit will live inside of me and in so many he touched with his joyous grace. Softly,

I speak into his ear, touching his flesh, kissing his face, resting my head against his chest.

As morning comes, George squeezes my hand, which has been in his all night; with the strength he has left, he says, “That was good.” His last words.

Karen Malpede is author/director of 22 plays, published and produced, the memoir Last Radiance, plus numerous essays on topics ranging from climate change and feminism to the US torture program, and of several books of theater history. She taught at Smith, NYU and CUNY. Previously she took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.

An introduction from the author: Growing up a rock fan in the last quarter of the twentieth century there was the belief that, except for blues artists who were almost expected to be elder statesmen, music was a youngster’s game. In the late ‘90s, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Mick & Keith were all in their mere 50s, and everyone wondered when they were going to hang it up.

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I was in bands for years but didn’t put out a solo album until the unthinkably mature age of 37. After my marriage broke up, I juggled single motherhood, touring, temp jobs and the stress of New York City life before deciding to move to Nashville. Being a 40 year old woman in the early stages of a music career felt impossible, but I believed I still had something worth sharing as a songwriter.

Girl To City, my first memoir, was a coming-of-age story: the artist’s journey from somewhere not-New York to Manhattan, hoping to become somebody. Below is an excerpt from the second, Girl To Country—the messy middle of an artist’s life, where I try to figure out the stuff I never worried about when I was just being pulled along by youth and desire: making a living, keeping going; falling short and starting over. -

I think Brad Jones was what you might call a mensch, if mensches could be cornfed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed boys from Iowa. He was always upbeat and positive, full of creative energy and ideas, but also hard-working and no-nonsense. He made me do vocal exercises and wouldn’t accept any of my vague, half-baked ideas for keys and arrangements. Here was one of the reasons I’d come to Nashville that I hadn’t thought through but instinctively knew: you couldn’t fake it or bluster your way through there. Even the stuff that might seem like formula—songs about Mama and tractors and front porch swings—came by their clichés honestly, with dead-serious sincerity. If you wanted to be thought of as good, you had to legitimately be good, not just “interesting” or promising that aimed for good.

Brad and Robin Eaton’s Alex The Great studio sat in the no man’s land between Franklin Road and Berry Hill. The complex was cool and rustic, with a shady courtyard that was a cross between Spanish countryside and an industrial loading dock. The large live room was filled with vintage amps and keyboards, as was the tiled kitchen. It felt like somewhere Lee Hazlewood might hang out if he were a Nashville guy: maverick but well-turned out with equipment in excellent repair; retro but homey, down to the earth-toned tiles in the kitchen. It looked like an easy place to spend many hours, and that’s exactly what I was about to do.

The control room had a cozy couch with a large window looking out over the live room. For the first time, I’d be recording in ProTools, the mixing desk digital—jagged spikes of sound on a computer screen. All the recording I’d done up to then had been committed to tape, from my early song attempts on a boombox cassette player to the first Last Roundup demos on Tascam Portastudio; eight-track reel to reel; sixteen tracks and then 24 in Los Angeles. Mixing began drifting to the digital realm during the making of my last album in 1998 and now here we were two years later, no physical tape. I wondered how it might affect the process, all this flexibility and infinite choices. Digital recording was less physical—the snap, whir and whine of tape and the hands-on faders were from a world of the past—and more visual, with all the tracks and parts and even individual notes appearing on the computer screen in a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes.

“Remember to listen,” Brad said. “Don’t just stare at the screen.”

The studio was a playground of cool instruments and players that spanned eras and scenes. Singer James Nixon, a cohort of Jimi Hendrix in his early years, arrived to layer doo wop parts for “Cynically Yours.”

It was mid-February, but spring comes early in Nashville. The air was gentle, and buds pushed up from bright green grass that rarely took a hammering from snow like up North.

I sat on the couch for many, many hours listening and looking at the computer screen. Sometimes we recorded vocals or put down an acoustic guitar right there in the control room, other times I played out in the big room with the guys. Brad seemed to be pals with every great player in the central U.S.—Ross Rice drove in from Memphis to play keyboards and Dave Jacques, who I knew mostly as John Prine’s bass player, contributed Salvation Army horn parts.

The players were all adaptable and hilarious, easy to hang out with and could roll with any ideas that presented themselves. I felt like all the work I’d done up till then prepared me for this new experience: that first Nashville recording session with Last Roundup back in 1984, when we were so out of our depth the results never saw the light of day; recording our Rounder album, Twister, in Springfield, Missouri, or harmonizing with the Shams in Brooklyn with Lenny Kaye as producer. Then putting my first solo album together from the ground up—Pie Studio on Long Island to Los Angeles. Dozens of homemade demos recorded on the Portastudio—it all added up and I didn’t question my right to be there as I might’ve in the past.

The studio was a playground of cool instruments and players that spanned eras and scenes. Singer James Nixon, a cohort of Jimi Hendrix in his early years, arrived to layer doo wop parts for “Cynically Yours.”

I was 40 years old and making my last sonic bid to create the come-hither allure of the ladies in a book called Mirror of Venus that lived on a shelf in the control room of Alex the Great. With text by Francoise Sagan and Federico Fellini and softcore black and white photos by panting prepster Wingate Paine, the women in the pages of the book offered themselves up as objects aiming to please. I spent hours looking at the photos, feeling the closing of that window fast approaching.

He was dapper and gracious, dressed in a beautiful suit. Kayton Roberts, for decades the lap steel player in Hank Snow’s band, was a little more prickly as he tried to make sense of my songs: “I don’t get what’s going on here,” he said about “Rode Hard,” and I wondered if the impressionistic lyrics I’d felt proud of were just a load of nonsense. Country singer Bobby Bare’s son, Bare Jr, came in to sing a harmony and the recording took shape then. It was verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge – nothing crazy – and I thought how Kayton was simply from a different world. What did utility man Charlie McCoy think when he played harmonica on Nashville Skyline? Or Ween’s “Piss Up A Rope,” for that matter? It’s all music and a gig is a gig.

In writing, or songs, on stage and in the recording studio, I possess way more hubris than I feel in real life. Back then, in the darkened studio with just the microphone in front of me, I could be honest and vulnerable in a way I couldn’t get to with whoever I was obsessed with or romantically curious about.

I was 40 years old and making my last sonic bid to create the come-hither allure of the ladies in a book called Mirror of Venus that lived on a shelf in the control room of Alex the Great. With text by Francoise Sagan and Federico Fellini and softcore black and white photos by panting prepster Wingate Paine, the women in the pages of the book offered themselves up as objects aiming to please. I spent hours looking at the photos, feeling the closing of that window fast approaching. From the grown woman, wife and mother themes of my first solo attempts, I’d moved on to the still-fertile (but not for much longer) terrain of a divorcée’s psyche, with lyrics that mentioned birth control, balls, wet dreams, and sex tapes.

I felt a sense of freedom...also maybe a thrill at being able to shock or catch listeners off guard. It was a way to subvert the cliché of a pretty-sounding girl with a guitar.

In writing, or songs, on stage and in the recording studio, I possess way more hubris than I feel in real life. Back then, in the darkened studio with just the microphone in front of me, I could be honest and vulnerable in a way I couldn’t get to with whoever I was obsessed with or romantically curious about.

But I still wanted to look pretty on the album cover. I’d come up with the title for the record during a Midwest run of dates. I was driving, with the three musicians I’d hired to back me for the weekend’s worth of gigs in various reclining positions around the Aerostar. The configuration changed every time I made a short run—that was the game in Nashville because road guys took work that was there and unless you were working every week, you’d lose somebody: a drummer here, a bass player there. We stopped in Springfield, where Last Roundup recorded in the ’80s, and I felt like I’d certainly come a long way from those early days. A road sign flashed by somewhere in Missouri: Sugar Tree, the phrase like a prayer to make the fruits of my labor pay off for this final disc of my record deal. Things were as big time as they were going to get professionally, but I didn’t know that. “There’s no way I’ll still be riding around in a van when I’m 40,” I’d thought when I was 28 and had only been at it for five years. I couldn’t have imagined how many more records to make, songs to write, gigs to play there were … and that I’d need to keep driving the van myself.

I envisioned The Sugar Tree cover as one of those 1960s countrypolitan LPs you’d stumble across in a thrift store, with a soft color portrait in a natural setting. Photographer Jim Herrington—who looked like James Dean’s brainy but slightly debauched older brother and had taken pic-tures of some of my heroes like Merle Haggard and Tom Petty— lived just down the street from East Nashville’s Shelby Park. A little research (pre-Google, that likely involved asking one of my music writer pals) pinpointed this bucolic setting only minutes from the liquor stores and hot chicken places of Gallatin Pike as a frequent backdrop for country album cover shoots in the past.

“There’s no way I’ll still be riding around in a van when I’m 40,” I’d thought when I was 28 and had only been at it for five years. I couldn’t have imagined how many more records to make, songs to write, gigs to play there were … and that I’d need to keep driving the van myself.

Jim recommended a makeup artist, and she met me at his house on a hot afternoon to prepare me for the shoot. The April humidity made my face pour oil and frizzed my hair. I was okay in Nashville when it wasn’t the sticky season, but since spring down south started in late February and summer lasted until about the beginning of November, I was finding there weren’t many weeks out of the year when looking well-groomed was a possibility.

“Don’t worry, we’ll fix you right up,” the gorgeous young woman said as I settled onto one of Jim’s dining chairs. I’d picked up a fitted dress on sale at the mall, not realizing until I put it on outside of the air-conditioned store that it was 100% polyester, causing me to sweat and practically break out in a rash.

I’d been happy with hair and makeup people’s work in the past, making me look like myself only better, so I relaxed as the makeup artist sponged, brushed, curled, and pencilled me. She applied lip liner and lipstick—the final touches—and stood back to assess her handiwork. Then she held up a mirror for me to admire the results.

Do all other female artists go through this? I wondered. I thought how the successful ones had those perfect attributes of womanhood—the obvious boobs and beauty—to show off, while I was stuck with the flawed human bits like greasy skin and limp hair. Why couldn’t I have just been a guy? I knew from having brothers and boyfriends, and even having been married for years to a man, that vanity and wobbly self-esteem aren’t only for women. But I think of the cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the guys clearly rolling up as they were to lounge on a beat-up old couch.

I took a deep breath, then wondered why Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was staring back at me. My brows were double their usual width, and my mouth looked like those wax lips kids used to wear at Halloween. I thought my eyes were pretty sultry but was too horrified to keep looking at myself.

Murmuring a few words of appreciation, I handed her a check and as soon as she’d driven away, went into the bathroom to scrub everything off and start over again with whatever was in my makeup bag. Maybe it’d be dark enough by the time we reached Shelby Park that my face wouldn’t really have to show in the photo.

The sun was going down as Jim and I drove into the park and there wasn’t much time to look around for a suitable spot before it turned into night. We found a wooded area above the Little League field where there was a game in full swing, the lights just coming on. I heard shouts and cheers from the young players and their parents as I sat down next to a tree. Do all other female artists go through this? I wondered. I thought how the successful ones had those perfect attributes of womanhood—the obvious boobs and beauty—to show off, while I was stuck with the flawed human bits like greasy skin and limp hair. Why couldn’t I have just been a guy? I knew from having brothers and boyfriends, and even having been married for years to a man, that vanity and wobbly self-esteem aren’t only for women. But I think of the cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the guys clearly rolling up as they were to lounge on a beat-up old couch. I aspired to self-acceptance, but for that moment just wanted to look attractive.

“Your legs look great,” said Jim. I hitched my dress up a little. The field lights shone on the gold platform shoes a friend gave me years ago, swearing they’d once belonged to a Hollywood screen goddess. I gazed off into the distance like I was searching for love, success, anything to lift me out of driving all day to play for fifteen people, a grubby road atlas clutched in my right hand. I prayed for that magical combination of luck and timing that would send my songs—this latest recording— like a Little League home run, up through the air into the ears and hearts of people, lots of them, who’d see themselves in the lyrics and find some transcendence in the music. If I wished hard enough, it almost felt possible.

A teenage denizen of CBGB who fell in love with country songwriting, Amy Rigby started the bands Last Roundup and The Shams in New York City’s East Village before launching a solo career with 90s classic concept album Diary Of A Mod Housewife. Her latest album Hang In There With Me has been called “an absolute masterpiece…a career best” (Louder Than War.) Amy’s been writing online at Diary Of Amy Rigby since before blogs were invented. Her first book Girl To City: A Memoir was published in 2019, and her second, Girl to Country: A Memoir, was published in September, 2025. She recently relocated to England from New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and sometime bandmate, Wreckless Eric, and is currently touring. Previously she took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.

I have an 11-year-old pair of crappy leggings that I won’t throw away and I don’t know why.

I removed them from the washing machine just the other morning. They are pilled, with loose threads that I don’t dare pull or cut for fear the leggings will unravel. The label says they can be tumble dried, yet I never do; I rack-dry them in the laundry room (also a pantry and powder room, I’m not that fancy) alongside my teenage daughter’s genuinely delicate items. I call them the Leggings of Doom because they remind me how hubristic I can be.

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I bought the Leggings of Doom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in September 2015. I had been invited to a classy library event, the kind where a writer gets put up in a nice hotel and maybe paid a stipend. It was a beautiful weekend, but colder than forecast, so I bought leggings in the hotel gift shop and layered them under my dress.

Before the library event, I walked along the Grand River. I could see the Gerald R. Ford Museum on the other side and my memory insists that I took photographs, but my camera roll contradicts that memory. I thought about how my husband, if he were with me, would want to visit that museum. He was such a good traveler, he always wanted to get out, see things, make memories. We both enjoyed museums and graveyards and baseball parks. In my recollection of that sunny, wind-swept afternoon, I was filled with love and admiration for my spouse.

I bought the Leggings of Doom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in September 2015. I had been invited to a classy library event. It was a beautiful weekend, but colder than forecast, so I bought leggings in the hotel gift shop and layered them under my dress. I flew to New York City the next day. After my husband and I put our daughter to bed, he told me we were separating.

I flew to New York City the next day; my husband and daughter joined me there. There was a party for his cousin’s birthday. We returned to our apartment after the party (OK, so we were fancy enough to have a New York apartment), put our daughter to bed, and he told me that we were separating. He did not feel loved or even liked. He wasn’t going to move out, but he was going to sleep apart from me. Never a modest man, he would now take pains to make sure I never saw his naked body. We could keep this arrangement secret from our then 5-year-old daughter, but this was a fiat. No discussion, no debate. The next day, I took the train back to Baltimore with our daughter, numb with shock; he flew to Poland for a film festival. Based on the emails we exchanged over the next month, he believed me to be a genuinely awful person who did not care for him. I was determined to convince him otherwise.

That happened to be the year I got crazy-thin. Well, not crazy-thin, just a little more slender than I normally was. After embracing a sensible if rigorous nutrition program, I had lost about 15 pounds. I took a lot of selfies—hey, I had an almost six-pack—but when I look back at them, all I see is the sadness/desperation of the six weeks I spent trying to get my husband to love me again. Unused to failure, I was determined to “win” him back. I did, or so I thought. We were extremely happy. Well, I was.

Less than four years later he left again, for more or less the same reasons, in more or less the same way, although this time he chose not to sleep under the same roof. I assumed I would again change his mind because, again, I am unaccustomed to failure. But I quickly saw that divorce was inevitable.

I think a lot about the 41 months between the two separations. The second one was less of a surprise, but that’s how it usually goes with sequels. Would I be better off if I had simply accepted the first break-up? I don’t think so, although that second tour of duty was pretty enervating. It was like being at a really shitty buffet and going back for extra helpings.

Back in the autumn of 2015, three weeks after my husband decreed our first separation, I went to the wedding of my trainer, Todd, whom I also consider one of my best friends. It happened to be my ninth wedding anniversary. That shared date was of great amusement to Todd and me. Todd’s marriage lasted 10 years, four months, and 17 days; his wife Liz died from breast cancer on February 20.

Last year, I wrote that I’m happier than I’ve ever been and that’s true. But sometimes I feel like a car that was in a terrible accident. I’ve been restored, there are no visible signs of damage, I function well. Still, there’s this odd little hum as if my alignment is off. I hardly cry anymore and I used to be such a softie. A lyric from The Music Man comes to mind: Just melt her down and you’ll reveal/A lump of lead as cold as steel/Here, where a woman’s heart should be.

Back in the autumn of 2015, three weeks after my husband decreed our first separation, I went to the wedding of my trainer, Todd, whom I also consider one of my best friends. It happened to be my ninth wedding anniversary. That shared date was of great amusement to Todd and me. Technically, I “celebrated” 17 anniversaries on October 3, but only because the divorce took so long. If I subtract the separations, the four years it took to divorce, and the years we were miserable, it’s nine at the most.

Todd’s marriage lasted 10 years, four months, and 17 days; his wife Liz died from breast cancer on February 20. I was always happy that someone had made a good marriage on the date that I had failed. They were a beautiful couple inside and out, with two gorgeous sons. Her death marks one of the few times I have really cried in the past year.

When Todd felt ready to return to work, he texted me and we resumed training. We met via Zoom, as is our usual practice. I asked if he wanted to talk about what was going on in his life, or if I should natter about ridiculous things in my life, of which there is never a shortage. (Sometimes I think I have misadventures in order to have material for Todd.) He opted for nattering. I chatted about my teenage daughter; I told him about the Leggings of Doom. We agreed that I was thinner in 2015, but more muscular now. He really wants me to add a set of 25-pound and 30-pound dumbbells to my hand weights.

I hope to downsize soon, leave my three-story, four-bedroom rowhouse for a much smaller place once my daughter is in college. I should be getting rid of anything I can. The Leggings of Doom don’t even work for my thrice-weekly sessions with Todd. They’re too sheer, the material doesn’t breathe. I wear them only on bitter-cold days, layering them under jeans. But I can’t let them go, not yet.

I returned to the laundry room after training and pondered the Leggings of Doom, still drying there. I hope to downsize soon, leave my three-story, four-bedroom rowhouse for a much smaller place once my daughter is in college. I should be getting rid of anything I can. The Leggings of Doom don’t even work for my thrice-weekly sessions with Todd. They’re too sheer, the material doesn’t breathe. I wear them only on bitter-cold days, layering them under jeans.

But I can’t let them go, not yet. The Leggings of Doom are a souvenir of delusion, a reminder of how wrong I can be, how hubristic. Even now, there might be a cartoon anvil waiting to fall on my head. I wonder if I’ll cry when it does.

Todd’s late wife Liz established a nonprofit to help other women with cancer. You can donate to Restore by Elizabeth here.

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Previously Laura Lippman also published an essay called Whole 60 on Oldster, and took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. She publishes the newsletter Shaved Meats, Piled High. Lady in the Lake, a miniseries based on Laura Lippman’s thriller by the same name, is currently streaming on Apple TV. Her latest novel, Murder Takes a Vacation, was published in June.

This is the second installment of a series called “What I Did For Love.” It takes its title from a song featured in the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. It’s also been the theme of the first two Oldster Variety Hours. Joan Juliet Buck performed a version of this story at the first event, in Kingston, N.Y., on October 1st, 2025.

—

We get through life not by telling ourselves stories, but by looking away from the accumulating evidence of the truth about ourselves.

A memoir puts witnesses into your past life. As if you had said, “Hey, you, I will haul you out of your today and put you squarely in my yesterday. I will make you watch what happened ten thousand days ago, twenty thousand days ago, and I will make you feel what I felt.”

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But the witnesses notice the things you avoided during the writing and the rewriting. It was only when my memoir was finally written, rewritten, rewritten, proofed, edited, and published, that I knew.

I’d failed the love test.

You pass the love test by getting married and staying married, by having children. You pass the love test through one great love, by being consistent, loyal, true. I’d been the broken-hearted teen who goes on to have a lot of adventures because when you start with a broken heart, most of the love stuff looks like play-pretend.

I had adventures. I became an arts journalist, and you know what people in the arts are like. I had adventures with men who did things in the arts.

I’d failed the love test. You pass the love test by getting married and staying married, by having children. You pass the love test through one great love, by being consistent, loyal, true. I’d been the broken-hearted teen who goes on to have a lot of adventures because when you start with a broken heart, most of the love stuff looks like play-pretend.

So the book read like a catalogue of choice scalps.

And people who’d actually read the book all asked the same question: “You’ve had a lot of men in your life, why are are you so alone?”

Sometimes I heard this as: “Poor little you who had never had real love.”

Sometimes it sounded as if they were busting me for being a slut, or distractable, inconsistent.

I heard: “You never took anyone seriously.”

“Who did you really love?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I wanted to say, leave me alone.

But I was promoting a book that had dragged readers into my life.

I didn’t feel like a loser when no one was looking, but now I’d forced strangers to look at me. Suddenly I could see myself as would one of those innumerable strangers. From the outside, I could see that I’d wasted my capacity for love on loves I did not believe in. I’d never had a child. I’d turned the gold of real love into numberless sparkling anecdotes. They were good stories, but they weren’t the real thing.

I’d been married once, I’d lived with various men, but never for real, you know?

I had never liked saying “I love you,” which always sounded like a lie.

I was 68 years old. To conserve energy, I had entirely given up on men. I’d been alone for five years, and for years before that.

But now I was promoting my memoir, my life was on show; to sell books, I talked about myself for a solid six months, after writing about myself for a solid six years.

I had adventures. I became an arts journalist, and you know what people in the arts are like. I had adventures with men who did things in the arts. So the book read like a catalogue of choice scalps. And people who’d actually read the book all asked the same question: “You’ve had a lot of men in your life, why are are you so alone?”

It was nauseating. I felt like an old woman hawking bits of myself at a street fair, waving shreds of my life in people’s faces, old satin underwear, torn lace, wrinkled nighties—shouting “Come and get it! Fresh defeats! Acid moments of self doubt! Tiny triumphs! Names you’ll recognize!”

As the six months of self-promotion was tapering down into podcasts hosted by people whose aunt I’d once met, I was asked to participate in an evening at Joe’s Pub, where I would join five other women in reading letters to The One Who Got Away.

Fine, said I. Anything to move a few more books. The tide of sales had slowed. My popularity was ebbing. I mean, five other women at Joe’s Pub?

Ok. To work.

“The One Who Got Away.”

I’d clearly been asked because I was unafraid to drop names. Names of famous men in the arts.

A week before the date at Joe’s Pub, the old lady hawking pieces of her past to strangers combed through the inventory of lost loves looking for something juicy.

Juicy for whom?

I was not going to stand on the stage at Joe’s pub and drop names at the audience, No, I thought. I have to learn from this. Who is it who got away?

Who had I loved?

I sat down to write through to an answer. Flashes of intense moments, passed, past. No, not you, not you, not you. You’re all substitutes.

For…

For…the boy who was the first kiss, when I was 16.

The boy I saw across the crowded entrance hall at school on the first day of fall term, the boy with curly brown hair and green eyes and huge lips and a long dark coat almost to his feet.

The sight of him hit me so hard that I fell back against the wall, out of breath. This boy, I learned later, was so good at math they called him ‘the genius’, the boy who made me dizzy every time I caught a glimpse of him in school or on the street, the boy who gave me my first kiss during the first math lesson in my bedroom on a Friday night when my parents were out of town.

I’d written him in the memoir, but kept him sacred: he was the only man in the book who didn’t have a name.

I had never let go of contact with him. He had a real grown-up life back home where we’d met, a wife, grown children, grandchildren, a mathematical career.

I didn’t think I missed him.

The boy who broke my heart.

Yes, that was it.

I wrote the letter.

As the six months of self-promotion was tapering down into podcasts hosted by people whose aunt I’d once met, I was asked to participate in an evening at Joe’s Pub, where I would join five other women in reading letters to The One Who Got Away. Fine, said I. Anything to move a few more books.

At Joe’s pub, the lectern was out over the audience, where the stage comes to a point.

I took my turn to face a darkness so complete it had volume and weight, a darkness that made the stage the most private place on earth, and in that private darkness, I read my letter aloud.

Aloud, the words were bigger than they were on the page.

They had weight, heft, size, as they came out of my mouth.

It was important to say them.

I said, “You are the one who got away.”

I told him what I had not been able to say that day after he’d ended it, when we walked to the park near school and sat on a bench facing the memorial. I’d had so much to tell him that day, but when I opened my mouth, there was nothing but stammer. Nothing but the beginning breath of each word, but no words.

“I love you” I said out loud to the dark in Joe’s Pub.

“I love you” I said aloud to him for the first time, though he was three thousand miles away.

I said his name three times: Nick, Nick, Nick.

I found my heart where it had been hiding, behind the words I couldn’t say that day in 1964.

I came off that stage, my head like dust and my heart firm. I knew I was consistent, and loyal, and single-minded and true.

I knew who I’d loved first, who I still loved. For so long, from the edge of childhood to the edge of old age.

I didn’t have to tell him, it was none of his business. It was what I needed to know.

When his wife died, two years later, I felt compassion for my old friend.

I sent condolences; he wrote back. There was silence for a few months.

I thought no more of it.

Until we began to speak on the phone. And behind every polite kindness were the words I didn’t say, “I love you.”

We married five years ago, in an empty town hall in the middle of a snowy field, with six masked witnesses and a judge.

I was 72. He was 74.

I had waited twenty thousand days.

What did YOU do for love?

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© 2026 Joan Juliet Buck. All rights reserved.

Joan Juliet Buck’s story The Ghost of the Rue Jacob is one of The Moth’s perennial hits. A journalist, critic, and performer, she was once the editor in chief of Paris Vogue, a story told in her memoir, The Price of Illusion. Her personal Substack is . She reviews movies and TV on her other Substack, Joan of Art. She lives in Saugerties with her husband, Nick.

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If you are lucky, when you are young, death is a hypothetical situation. One that happens only to pets and the satisfied elderly.

I am lucky in this way for so long.

Then, one of my best friends is diagnosed with a rare Stage IV cancer in the middle of a pandemic.

Then, my mother is diagnosed with a just as rare terminal brain disease.

In the middle of it all, I write a book about a woman who cannot age or die.

***

I have never taken better care of my body than when it is suddenly not my own. That is to say, when I am pregnant.

I do all the things you’re supposed to do for yourself— drink more water, ditch processed foods and booze for fruits and vegetables and whole grains, move regularly, prioritize sleep. I continue most of it postpartum because I am nursing and my body is still not entirely mine to trash.

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It takes no will power. To be good to someone else is so much easier than being good to myself.

One baby, two. They start growing into children.

The days are long but the years are short, people tell me and while I usually recoil at any advice that might be cross-stitched onto a pillow, this is something I am coming to understand deeply.

***

My friend decides to spend what is left of her brief time writing. She asks me to join her in a 1000-words-a-day accountability challenge. I am working on a novel but it has become bloated and unruly. I decide this will be a refreshing side project. It doesn’t matter what I write, just that I do it with her.

Vera VanValkunburgh hasn’t been home in one hundred and eighty-eight years, I begin, then out unfurls well over a thousand words of the start of a story about a woman immune to all disease, even death itself.

We text later. My friend says she got more than a thousand words but they were a mess.

I do not tell her what I have written because I am always private about my work in its early stages. Because this story is probably nothing. Because—

***

My friend gets an agent and begins a memoir from her literal deathbed. She publishes a beautiful essay in The New York Times.

She lives longer than any doctor thought possible and still, inevitably, at 47 she dies.

Later, when my story becomes a book, people ask me, But how do you have the time to write? referring to the hotel I run and my two small children.

I always think of her.

***

At 68 my mother has one hip replaced. At 70 another. At 72, she develops a distressing variety of other symptoms that baffle her doctors. An uneven gait, difficulty swallowing. Slowed speech and a roaring headache. It is impossible to untangle what is a correlation or a dangerous causation, what is simply “aging”.

She’s a medical anomaly! my dad keeps repeating, proudly because he can find light or humor in any situation.

If you are lucky, when you are young, death is a hypothetical situation. One that happens only to pets and the satisfied elderly. I am lucky in this way for so long. Then, one of my best friends is diagnosed with a rare Stage IV cancer in the middle of a pandemic. Then, my mother is diagnosed with a just as rare terminal brain disease. In the middle of it all, I write a book about a woman who cannot age or die.

She fools everyone for months. With her perfect lipstick and stylish outfits. Her jewelry and bright red hair. She works so hard to present her most capable self during her appointments that we have to remind her these are not tests to ace. That it would be helpful for the doctors to see exactly how she is struggling.

She laughs then grits her bright white teeth and cannot bring herself to do anything but her best. We later learn this is common. High on adrenaline, patients pull it together, often miraculously, for small stretches of essential time. But the performance costs them and the following days are often worse than the new normal which, if you are finally being honest with yourself, is probably already very bad.

***

I read famous longevity and anti-aging books, peer reviewed medical journals. The line between research for my novel and my life blurs. I learn that we as a society have gotten very good at eliminating quick deaths from infectious diseases and accidents thanks to developments like sewers and seatbelts, vaccines and pasteurized milk. That we have increased the average American’s lifespan nearly ten years since I was born in the early 80s. That hardly a hundred years ago 30% of all children in the US died before their 5th birthdays, a number which has shrunk to less than 5% and is still dwindling thank god. That despite all of these advances and trillions of dollars thrown into the longevity sector, we are still dogged by the Four Horsemen of Slow Deaths: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and brain disease.

I learn that women can lose almost half of our muscle mass between the ages of 35 and 85 if we don’t actively combat it. This means we must work out more every year just to maintain whatever muscle we have so that one day we can catch ourselves from a potentially fatal fall, can carry on tying our own shoes and lifting our own grocery bags.

A friend offhandedly offers to share her username for an online workout class subscription and I—someone who happily hasn’t had a gym membership in more than a decade—say yes.

***

I begin to invite my mother on daily walks because all her doctors agree that even just twenty minutes a day of active movement is essential. Most of the time she politely declines because it’s cold out, or windy, or there’s “too much traffic” on our dead-end road. Because her head hurts or she didn’t sleep well. Because she is, and always has been, a house cat at heart.

Because she’s dying and she doesn’t want to do what she doesn’t want to do.

I vacillate between being the “good” daughter and pushing her, then throwing my hands up in silent frustration and letting her be. It is startlingly similar to trying to force my small children to do certain things. Force never being the right strategy of course.

I feel the squeeze from both sides viscerally. The care required in both directions. I wonder if it’s because women are waiting longer to have children and that makes the grandparent generation more elderly. I wonder if it’s because we as a society have strayed so far from intergenerational living and have forgotten how normal and human caring for each other at the beginning and end of life is. I wonder how long I can keep this up.

***

I begin to run.

When I am running I tell myself to go for only as far as I want to. To walk whenever I feel the urge to slow down. That my goal is just to get my heart rate up for twenty minutes a day.

I cannot ask this of my mother if I cannot ask this of myself.

It is the opposite of everything I was trained to do as an athlete, varsity captain type back in the day. But I am trying to run my way sideways into a running habit because I don’t want to invite an old, self-punishing version of me to this party.

After a few weeks I am almost embarrassed by how much I love running now, this way. Headphones so loud I can feel the music in my teeth. Dancing when I slow down to catch my breath.

***

We finally secure a meeting with a top neurologist who hints he has a new diagnosis in mind, but he must see her to confirm.

On a beautiful October Wednesday, my mother and father drive down to New York City for the appointment and I take myself on a solo hike up the mountain in my backyard because it’s the perfect time of year for it. Because a part of me knows that nothing will be the same after today and I am in a precious limbo.

I fly up the mountain, courtesy of my new cardio habit. I inhale the trees and perfect air. On the way down I roll my ankle. It hurts but not terribly so. Just an old basketball injury that resurfaces sometimes.

Halfway down I begin to feel stiff, a little twinge up my leg. By the bottom of the mountain, my knee is a balloon and I am limping.

I am on the couch icing it with a bag of frozen berries when my dad calls to tell me the news.

***

I can no longer run. And much to my mom’s fashion chagrin, I must wear “supportive” footwear the next few weeks as I ferry her to and from her many different physical therapy and pilates and talk therapy appointments, a job I’ve taken off my dad’s plate since his is already so full caretaking the rest of the time.

I see our reflections in the mirror of a glass door, elbows linked as she does her uneven shuffle and my orthopedic sneakers look stupid and out of place with my outfit. I know she does not approve. She asks me about my ankle. Confuses it with my knee. To be fair, it was rolling my ankle that sprained my knee, but it sends me into a spiral about the symptoms she is inevitably facing with her new terminal diagnosis. Is she losing her cognitive abilities already? I don’t like her asking since it pales in comparison to her maladies. I tell her I’m fine. But alone I panic, usually at 2am when I’m awake now that I cannot exhaust myself during the day running— Will I need physical therapy? Will my shitty but excruciatingly expensive insurance cover it? Will I have time when the children are at school to drive her to her physical therapy and me to mine? Will I never fully recover from this because I am no longer young?

***

My social media knows I am of a certain age and no matter how many things I don’t click on, I am still constantly told I should be concerned about the lines on my face, the state of my neck. I am force-fed agist, misogynistic, fear mongering nonsense dressed up as “wellness”. And while I am grateful for how many people in my media sphere are finally publicly discussing perimenopause, I am also on the edge of my fertility and feeling wistful as younger friends announce their pregnancies, and I would like to go a day without worrying about what fresh terrors might be around the bend.

I take a Help! I’m a Millennial with Aging Parents! online course from a death doula I follow on Instagram and learn about the importance of designating a healthcare proxy to make decisions on your behalf when you’re unable to, of having your will in order. Most importantly I learn we expect too much of the dying.

We want them to be sage and calm and full of wisdom, she says, or something to this effect. But most people are going to die how they live.

If in life they are organized, if they deflect with humor, if they are avoidant or sentimental or private, so they will be as they face death. It is such an obvious thing to say, and yet, I find it completely illuminating.

***

Two months after her terminal diagnosis, my mother starts talking about wanting to die.

We are told by medical professionals that this is an inevitable stage in the process of accepting her diagnosis. That she will probably get angry and scared and depressed. But for the most part my mother stays eerily calm in her conviction and I am surprised to find that I am the one who is occasionally, blisteringly mad. Absolutely furious that she would rather die than squeeze every possible moment she could have out of her life with us.

But my mother knows, in a way that none of us can from the outside, that what she is looking at ahead of her—a downward slide toward a complete loss of body and brain function beyond lying in a hospital bed “alive”— is not a life.

Tentatively, I begin to run again.

***

My mother, father, husband, and I each privately destroy our search algorithms looking up what we do not yet know the proper terminology for. What feels like a dark and unthinkable thought steps into the light and becomes a conversation together, with her hospice nurse, her therapist, her neurologists, and suddenly, just five months after her diagnosis, my parents and I are on a plane to Portland, Oregon so she can participate in their Medical Aid in Dying program for the terminally ill.

A year from now Governor Hochul will sign the Medical Aid in Dying Act into law in New York and join the 11 other States/Districts that already have this in place for residents, but we do not know that yet, and besides, it will be too later for her.

And so, during an already excruciating time, we uproot.

***

In my hotel room that adjoins that of my parents, I exchange emails with my editor about final tweaks for my book, with my mother’s new hospice nurses about pain medication, with an administrator at the local medical university about their body donation program.

I have the thought, By this time next year she will have been dead for a year and my book will be out, but the future feels impossible right now.

Two weeks before her chosen death day, my husband and children fly cross-country to say goodbye and the children are frank and accidentally funny in the way that only children can be. I’m going to miss her on my birthday this year, my youngest says. Then her head tilts up hopefully with an idea. But maybe she’ll haunt me?

I tell my parents and we laugh until we cry then cry until we laugh again. Then my mother records birthday messages for my children. When my father stands to get something from another part of the room we shoo him away and she records one more for him, too.

***

I do not want my mother to live forever. Certainly not like this. I did not want my friend to live forever in her state either. And even after writing an entire novel about what a poor bargain with the devil immortality would be, I still find myself thinking: But what if—

***

At the end of the month, on the only sunny day we experience our whole time in Portland, my mother dons her red lipstick and an outrageous coat made of autumnal silk leaves, drinks her prescribed life-ending medication, and falls asleep.

Three hours later, surrounded by the love and laughter of six people who adore her, her heart slows to a stop and she leaves, forever.

Check out all the Oldster personal essays…

As a huge fan of Oldster, I was over the moon when they asked me to contribute. But I was, I confess, disappointed when I realized I was not to be the subject of my favorite Oldster feature, The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. What gives? It’s not that I am too young—Meg Stone took the questionnaire when she was, as she put it, “51 … 52 in August,” which is exactly my age, right down to the birthday month. Obviously, Oldster wanted me not because of me, but because of my latest book, a biography of a much more important oldster, Judy Blume, who turned 88 in February. So, while I still hold out hope that I’ll someday get to take the questionnaire I love so much, for now I’ll play ball and write about Judy. However, I hope I can be forgiven if I do it in questionnaire form. Below, please find my interview with myself about my new book, Judy Blume: A Life.

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How old are you?

See above.

Some other fun facts about you?

Let’s see … I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the eldest of four children. I am devoted to corduroy, the movies of John Hughes, and my friends. I play in a monthly poker game with eight other guys (we usually get six or seven per game), one of whom wrote the definitive biography of Bruce Lee. I edit a cool (I think) magazine about religion, politics, and culture. I am married to a wonderful human being, and we have four daughters and a son. Our dog, Archie, has been with us fourteen years but, alas, seems to be slowing down. I have been to 48 states—still missing Montana and Hawaii.

You’re a writer. What kind of reader were you as a child?

I liked to read, but I was not a voracious reader, not one of those kids who always had a book in his hand. Partly it was a matter of having other interests—boyhood obsessions included baseball, chess, movies, and, briefly, the long-forgotten video game console Vectrex—but partly it was a matter of not finding stuff I wanted to read. Back in the early 1980s, if you were a bookish boy, teachers and booksellers were always forcing fantasy into your little hands, Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander and the like. And I didn’t really enjoy fantasy (still don’t). I liked realism. So when, around the age of 8 or 9, I discovered Judy Blume, who was writing realism for young people, I was hooked. And I just started reading and re-reading Judy Blume.

That’s interesting. What about librarians—did you ever ask a children’s librarian to recommend other realistic fiction? Maybe they would have pointed you toward Norma Klein or Paul Zindel or S.E. Hinton.

I did discover Hinton when I was a bit older, maybe early high school, and she was great. But no, I had no wonderful children’s librarian in my life. Quite the opposite. The children’s librarian at the Forest Park branch of the Springfield (Mass.) Public Library was a terrible human being, mean and spiteful. She seemed to consider it her job to keep us away from books. If we asked for help, she’d say, “Go use the card catalogue.” If we asked for a book that had sensitive themes (maybe like a Judy Blume), she’d peer over her glasses, assess the age of the child asking, and say things like, “You’re not ready yet.” Then she’d go back to her paperwork.

I’ll tell you a story. One summer the library had some sort of reading contest; if you read a certain number of books, you got a prize, or if you read the most books, you got a big prize. Something like that. I didn’t have a lot to do that summer, so I read all the time, and I kept a list. I was determined to win the prize. Around Labor Day, I presented the list to the librarian—I had used the proper library form and everything, and gotten my mom or dad to sign the bottom—and she looked at the list, sniffed, and handed it back to me.

“There are books here that aren’t in the library’s collection,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Some of them, my parents bought for me, or they were just in the house.”

“Well I’m sorry,” she said, “but the contest was for reading library books. Most of your books don’t qualify.”

To this day, I think she made up that rule on the spot. But even if she didn’t, you’d think she’d have had an ounce of compassion for a boy who thought he had a shot at the title but had to be informed was disqualified on a technicality. But I swear she enjoyed delivering the news.

What does that have to do with Judy Blume?

Not much, except that it’s one reason I just kept re-reading the tattered Blume books I already owned, rather than taking new books out of the library. It was Judy, plus whatever I could buy with the occasional $5 bill at Edwards Books, in the downtown Baystate West mall.

Did you ever read anything else?

Oh sure, there was other stuff: Hardy Boys mysteries, and I went through a James Bond phase, the Ian Fleming originals. Around 13 or 14, I began to get curious about the world, and read some nonfiction, haphazardly: I would sometimes bike to the bookstore in the Longmeadow Shops, and I remember buying, and reading, both Tip O’Neill’s autobiography and Lee Iacocca’s. Freshman year in high school, I read Stephen Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, and sometime around then I read Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land.

I always did the reading for English class, and starting in 7^th grade I had good syllabi with good teachers. In middle school, there was William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and then a ton of great stuff in high school, from Homer to Shakespeare to Faulkner, Hemingway, all the way up through Wallace Stegner. My high school English teacher, Jane Archibald, has just published her first book.

So did you drop Judy Blume entirely?

I mean, to be honest, yes, for a time. It was years before I got to the books that teenaged me would have enjoyed, like Forever…, Wifey, and Smart Women.

So how did you come back to her?

When I was just starting graduate school, and thinking about also developing a career as a freelance writer, I didn’t know much yet about pitching stories; I thought that rather than send an idea to an editor, you should just write the whole thing and send it on (which is bad practice). Clueless, and trying to find stuff to write about, I hit on the realization that it was about the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. So I sat down at my Mac Classic and typed up a thousand words on what Blume had meant to me, especially as a boy who didn’t like sci-fi and fantasy. And then I stuffed it in an envelope and mailed it to The New York Times’s main address. And a month later I got a call from an editor at the Book Review, saying they wanted to publish it. A huge break for me.

Of course, Judy saw the piece, and she sent me a very nice note about it. She even invited me to visit her at her place on Martha’s Vineyard, which of course I did. I have a recollection of calling my mother from the landline in my guest cottage and saying, “I can see Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer’s house across the water!”—on the other side of Lake Tashmoo. (Maybe I am misremembering, but I am pretty sure I was informed by Judy that it was the Nichols/Sawyer compound.) It was a heady weekend.

Did you know then that you wanted to write her biography?

Not at all. I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I was. My main subject, I thought, was American religion: the goal was to become the religion correspondent for The New York Times (and amazingly, about a decade later, I did get a religion column for the Times). I was in grad school for religion. But I had also spent six months before grad school working at The New Yorker and reading, in back issues, the amazing profiles by people like Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, and Ian Frazier. The idea of writing a long piece about someone else’s life definitely appealed to me. But I had no sense of myself as a biographer.

Many years later, when I had already written several books, I got intrigued by the form, and for a while was doing research into the life of Evan S. Connell Jr., author of the great midcentury novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. I visited his sister, I inquired about his papers at Stanford University. But that project never got off the ground, and I didn’t really think about writing biography again until Judy asked me to write hers.

She asked you to write it?!

She did. During COVID, I got an email from her one day, suggesting we talk about it. We had stayed a little bit in touch over the years, but not at all regularly. The email was a surprise, a delightful surprise.

What was it like, writing about a literary hero?

It was fascinating, but not because she was a literary hero of mine. By the time I wrote the book, she was somebody whom my wife—who does more of the reading aloud in our family—was reading to our children. I still had a sense memory of how much I loved her work, but unlike the legions of adults who still read their childhood favorites, I don’t do that. (Nothing against adults reading children’s books! I just have different literary comfort foods now.) So I was encountering her as an important and influential American artist, one who generously granted me interviews and who had saved over a hundred boxes of her papers and correspondence, a biographer’s dream.

Did you write the book you thought you would?

That’s a great question (you really are a great interviewer!). The answer is that I am not sure what kind of biography I thought I would write. Some biographies of writers focus very closely on the works—the drafts, the editing process, the final manuscripts. Others focus on literary culture—whom the writer was associating with, what movements she was part of. I think Judy Blume: A Life ended up being focused, in a close-up way, on the daily life of the subject: her childhood, her marriages, her children, plus how she balanced her time as a writer against other commitments, like her political work on censorship. Other biographers might have taken a more wide-angle view of American culture during her lifetime, used her as a prism to write about society.

But I think I made the right choices, by and large. To read about her Jersey childhood, growing up Jewish in the shadow of the Holocaust, the mores of 1950s America (dating, chastity, “necking”), her fierce determination to make it as a writer (one who got a relatively late start), the courage it took to leave two marriages (before finding true love with the third), the inspiration she took from second-wave feminism, and her triumphant joy when her books finally started to sell—I think that is to read about a century of American life.

This is a magazine about getting older, for people of any age. What age is your biography for?

Let’s put it this way: it’s about 400 pages long (including some great photos), and it’s being published for adults, but two of my daughters, ages 12 and 15, read it, and they say they loved it. (Each of them even caught a mistake in the draft they read! Mistakes that the author, editor, and proofreader had all missed.) So, truth be told, I can see it being the perfect mother/daughter joint read. Or father/son. Though my son is 7, so we’ll hold off.

My mother had a very happy childhood—carefree, indulged, secure—starting at age 81.

That’s when my sister and I enrolled her in an assisted living facility in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside the New Haven area, our birthplace. Norma and her husband, Chip, found Whitney Center, and I split the funding of her brand-new life in a one-bedroom apartment with a lovely view there. It wasn’t cheap, but Mom deserved better than she’d had.

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As we moved her into this private school for continuing education and decorated her dorm room, she thrived. She joined the choir, and her rich soprano performed solos with other seniors who shared her love of music. She found her voice there. Frances Chartoff also wrote for the W.C. newspaper—poetry and essays. We got her a used Jetta with our inheritance from our father, and she drove to psychotherapy and Hatha Yoga.

When I’d visit, Mom and I would attend lectures by some of the other denizens, many of whom were retired educators from Yale University and the University of Southern Connecticut, where Mom had worked for many years. One octogenarian professor had studied a commune in rural China for several years while living in it, and his films and slides were illuminating. For an hour he convinced us how well communism worked for the people of Henan Province, with everyone on the massive farm assigned a purpose. The 4-year olds fed the babies and helped cook the foods, the elders taught and babysat. There was no depression on the commune, he said.

At Whitney Center it was inspiring to witness seniors discovering a new sense of purpose in their latter years.

Dr. Hesung Koh loved it there. She told us of being raised in poverty in North Korea and defecting to South Korea as a child. Well-educated, she married the American Ambassador to South Korea and they had many children and grandchildren, one of whom had worked in Obama’s administration, one who headed the Yale Medical School. She, too, taught at Yale, and was still in demand as a speaker and leader. She would hold court in the assisted living conference room and visitors would come from all over the world. She purchased a double apartment at Whitney and furnished it with Korean art. Being invited for tea was a great escape to her world.

We watched our mother mature—into her own woman rather than our abusive father’s beleaguered wife. She went through many phases—beginning with attending Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, which helped her immeasurably. Her anxiety disorder lessened. We noticed her voice changing and lowering as she moved through a new kind of puberty.

With such a diverse population, the level of conversation was heady at Whitney. Schoolgirl-like gossip gangs were profuse, and there were communities with varied interests and passions that met in the library full of the donated books and art collections of the deceased. The renowned Yale “Whiffenpoofs,” an a capella group whose various iterations began performing in New Haven in 1909, would rehearse and sing there for a grateful crowd, as would string quartets and local pop singers.

Never a dull moment. There were countless activities, two dining halls, a fully-equipped gym, a heated swimming pool, and beautiful grounds on a lake in woods with wild turkeys free-ranging around the campus. We loved to go to the garden, tended by other residents who planted plots of vegetables and flowers and composted.

Our mother made a few dear friends there, but, as they began to graduate to the next level, she preferred hanging with the younger staff, and they adored her. Management at Whitney encouraged kindness and good spirits prevailed. We should all be so lucky as to matriculate at a Whitney Center when we grow up.

We watched our mother mature—into her own woman rather than our abusive father’s beleaguered wife. She went through many phases—beginning with attending Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, which helped her immeasurably. Her anxiety disorder lessened. We noticed her voice changing and lowering as she moved through a new kind of puberty. My sister Norma and her husband Chip, who live in Brooklyn, far nearer than I in Los Angeles, told me Mom was losing her “baby teeth.” They drove her to many dentists as I paid for graduating sets of grownup teeth. I owed it to her, as I’d based my role as television’s Rugrats’ cartoon mother on her voice. She soon had a very expensive, bright grin and, as if we’d just removed her braces, she smiled more than she ever had.

She read avidly, especially biographies of comedians—Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Mike Nichols, and loved the Mike Nichols and Elaine May comedy YouTubes I sent her. She needed laughter to counter memories of the Great Depression and her own. She’d been a huge Eddie Cantor fan, and his autographed photos and notes adorned the wall. My brother-in-law got her a computer and taught her to use it. I loved receiving her newsy emails. My sister got her an iPad and taught her how to play games on it. She immersed herself in jigsaw puzzles, classical music and old movies. She would revel in her favorites showing up over and over again.

I took my Social Security early to help her as prices went up, and she outlived her savings. She felt bad, but we told her not to worry, we’d take care of her, as she did us for our first twenty years, and we did for longer than we ever thought possible, with childfree Norma and Chip reparenting her, babying her. She was the daughter they always wanted. They’d buy her playthings and classy, comfy clothes, and she never dressed better than for the many birthday parties they threw her.

As she shrank, she became childlike and spoiled. My sister and brother-in-law deserve the Nobel Prize for patience. They were hands-on and drove in often. I visited when I could and once stayed a couple of months at the Health Center with her when she had surgery and was scared. She hated hospitals, refusing to go when she fell and hit her head. She wanted to die in her apartment, she said, even fantasized about the scene, the light, the sounds, the songs.

Beginning at age 91, whenever my husband and I would leave her, she’d say, “This is the last time I’ll see you.” But she was wrong—for a full ten years. The last time I visited, in early August, she told me, “I actually died three months ago, but am acting alive for other people.” She said she felt she was already dead, just dreaming her day-to-day life, with one of her aides, Betty or Pauline, with her 24-7. She was so glad to have their company, to no longer be alone.

She romanticized her funeral, what she’d wear and what I’d wear, so glad she wouldn’t ever have to put on brassieres or dentures again. She longed for it, as her failing hearing and eyesight was making it difficult for her to read or watch television, and she was beyond bored with life. She managed to arrange it, somehow catching Covid from my cautious sister and her husband, who barely removed their masks to eat. She went on oxygen, then on hospice, then forty-eight hours later, at 101, she slept her way off this plane. We were relieved for her.

She was buried in September within sight of the University of Southern Connecticut, where she was much adored by students, one of whom spoke at her ceremony on a beautiful day.

It was a happy ending to a happy childhood—as she, and we, had so wanted.

Previously Melanie Chartoff wrote “Know Your Nonagenarians,” “Putting My Outdated Underthings Out to Pasture,” “For Better and For Worse #4: My Love, My Executioner,” and “Growth Spurts in Reverse” for Oldster.

Our relationship as sisters began this way: As I lay in my French Provincial baby bed, crying my newborn cry, four-year-old Rita came into the room, looked down on me and said, “Shut your damn mouth!”

Just then, our mother stepped out of the closet, shocking Rita so badly, she ran out of the room. Mama liked telling this story in a bemused way, as an apt example of how jealous Rita was of me, from the start. And how terrified my sister was of having gotten caught saying “damn” in earshot of our no-nonsense mother. Of course, she’d been usurped as the baby and of course Rita didn’t like that. Our mother certainly wasn’t surprised by Rita’s jealousy, but I can’t imagine she had much tolerance for it. She would say she “did for” all her children equally, so it was uncalled for. Besides, Rita never owned up to any jealousy. By the time she was well into her teens, after hearing Mama tell the story yet again to a new listener, Rita found the language to give her account of that early encounter with me. She said: “Obviously my emotional needs weren’t being met.”

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I used to shake my head and lightly chuckle when she said that. What emotional needs? She was four! But she was serious. Now I look at that moment as a freeze-frame, and what was going on outside the frame, and I suspect Rita was onto something. Mama might’ve been showering me with extra attention, beyond the fact of my newborn status. There are reasons for that. Rita was born when our parents, Fannie and John T, were struggling so bad, the only place they could afford to live was on a street called Delaware, in a cold-water flat within an over-crowded ramshackle tenement on Detroit’s dangerous side of town, with rats and roaches everywhere, fire a constant danger, and coals to heat the furnace a rare luxury. It was bad. And it went on for two years. Rita had no memory of life on Delaware Street, but her body likely remembered it, the stress of poverty.

By the time I came along the family’s fortunes had improved. Our mother had launched a small, underground Numbers business two years before, in 1958, where she took in customers’ bets on three-digit numbers, paid out their winnings when they hit, collected their wagered money when they didn’t, and profited from the difference. The enterprise was now bringing in steady, modest profits, and being a businesswoman likely did distract our mother from focusing on her four-year-old. Rita, her baby girl, was also likely the source of Fannie’s motivation—to figure out how to make a way out of no way. Success allowed our mother to, when I came along, bring a child into the world the way she’d always wanted.

Yet, here’s a fact: even though our mother never drank nor smoked nor used drugs—she lived right, as they say—I was born two months premature. And while four-eleven happens to be a lucky number in the mythology of the Numbers, my being only four pounds, 11 ounces is also a low birth weight. Long after our mother went home, I spent weeks in Henry Ford Hospital inside an incubator, keeping warm as my lungs developed. Newborn intensive care units, or NICU’s, hadn’t yet been invented. Was I showered with such affection upon my birth because I made it, because I managed to live, did not die from being born too soon?

Rita was born when our parents were struggling so bad, the only place they could afford to live was on a street called Delaware, in a cold-water flat within an over-crowded ramshackle tenement on Detroit’s dangerous side of town, with rats and roaches everywhere, fire a constant danger, and coals to heat the furnace a rare luxury. It was bad.

This is important to note because Mama had a baby girl that didn’t make it; Rita and I had a sister we didn’t know we had, and that we’d lost. I stumbled upon her death certificate on Ancestry.com. She was born at the segregated Riverside Sanitarium and Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee on February 19, 1955. She lived for one hour and fifteen minutes. Cremated that day, at the same hospital, she was unnamed. The cause of death was prematurity.

Soon after, my parents, migrated north with their daughter Deborah and son Anthony. (Their 6-year-old daughter Selena Dianne stayed in Nashville with my mother’s sister). Fourteen months after losing that baby girl, our parents had Rita. She was their first child born in Detroit, the harsh place they now called home, and our mother was just shy of 28 years old, now caring for three children between the ages of newborn and eight; she had little time to process her grief, her loss; I can only imagine the stress on her body.

The fact of our sister’s brief life is right there on Rita’s birth certificate, and mine, where the question reads: “How many other children were born alive but are now dead?” And the answer inside the little box is “1”. Not stillborn (there’s a separate box for that) but born alive, now dead.

Mama never talked about the baby she lost. Our older sisters, who were eight and six when their little sister died (our brother was 2 1/2) never talked about the loss either, about what that felt like knowing their mother was having another baby, and then seeing her come home without one. Did they feel something had been taken from them too?

More revealing is that Rita and I never talked about the lost baby girl who lived and died on the same day back in February 1955.

We didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or chose not to acknowledge what we knew: Rita was conceived and born in the shadow of another child, in the aftermath of loss. As it were, she almost didn’t make it either.

Fannie was newly pregnant when two white men in Mississippi tortured and murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till, his battered and deformed face put on view by his mother for the world to see. “I almost had a miscarriage when I saw that photo,” Mama told us, about the image published in Jet Magazine, shock and grief overcoming her as the new fetus was barely taking hold. Did she open to that page in Jet, see the image of Mamie Till looking down on her child’s brutalized face as he lay in the casket, and instantly have sharp abdominal pains? Some bleeding? Did she rush to the county hospital to get checked out? Was she treated well there, or her symptoms dismissed because she was a poor Negro woman? Was Mama beside herself, terrified of losing another baby, so soon? What was that pregnancy like for our young mother, far from her large Nashville clan, in this cold city up north where a better life might not ever work out?

After Mama saw that terrorizing image in Jet, I suspect genetic changes to her DNA began right then and there, as scientists now believe happens after a person experiences trauma. I believe she passed along those genetic markers to her unborn child. And I believe our mother’s own grandfather’s traumatic life of childhood slavery was passed down in his cells to his daughter, her mother, born in the nineteenth century and listed in the US census as a “mulatto” girl, with all the implications of violence upon the body that brings.

I imagine what got passed along in our ancestor’s eggs. And sperm. Our father experienced his own harrowing tragedy as a young man, losing two younger brothers who were drowned. Surely, he brought that early trauma to the conception.

After Mama saw that terrorizing image in Jet, I suspect genetic changes to her DNA began right then and there, as scientists now believe happens after a person experiences trauma. I believe she passed along those genetic markers to her unborn child. And I believe our mother’s own grandfather’s traumatic life of childhood slavery was passed down in his cells to his daughter, her mother, born in the nineteenth century and listed in the US census as a “mulatto” girl, with all the implications of violence upon the body that brings.

As Dutch biologist Frans De Waal reminds us: We are bodies born of other bodies.

Delivered at Trumbull County Hospital, Rita came breech, buttocks first, a difficult birth. Mama said that one was the hardest of all her deliveries, and she half-joked that after Rita was born, she never did fully straighten out her back, never walked quite the same again. Breech deliveries are rare, only three to four percent of all births. In recent decades, the accepted medical wisdom is that when a baby is breech and unlikely to turn, a Caesarean is scheduled, because babies die from vaginal breech deliveries at a rate up to three-and-a-half times more frequently than those delivered via C-section. It’s a complicated, dangerous, and risky birth. Much can go wrong, including a compressed or twisted umbilical cord depriving the baby of oxygen or harming its limbs; if babies don’t die, they could end up with spinal cord injuries, broken bones, or seizures. The mother could die. Physicians now know that only those with experience and a clear understanding of vaginal breech births should even attempt to deliver babies this way.

Thanks to research, we also now know that Black babies delivered by white doctors are up to 58% more likely to die than those delivered by Black doctors. And that includes vaginal births. Thus, what’s delicately called “implicit bias” means a white doctor works less hard to save a Black baby’s life because said doctor believes that baby is inherently less human, less valuable than a white baby, and so when the infant dies said doctor’s first thought is, “Too bad”, rather than, “Oh God, no!” Back in the 1950s, those white doctors just went for it while those Black mothers went through excruciating pain and fear, as they pushed for dear life, and hoped for the best.

Why do some babies never turn in their mother’s bellies? Why don’t they prepare to be born? No one knows exactly why. Yet research now suggests that third-trimester fetuses in the womb can learn and remember just as well as newborns, and part of what they learn, based on what their mothers go through during pregnancy, is whether the world outside the womb is safe and healthy or dangerous and toxic. Was Rita, with this knowledge already stored in her body, afraid to be born into a dangerous and toxic world? Is that why she never flipped over so she could make her determined way through the birth canal head-first? Was it a protective response to the wordless story of danger she’d already, in-vitro, been fed? Was trauma already stuck in her little body?

Mama would tell her, at a difficult moment in her life, “You can make it. You’re a fighter. Lord knows, you fought hard to get here.” I think about how hard Mama fought to get Rita here, so soon after losing a different baby girl, and how she herself survived, through such a harrowing delivery. Rita and Mama fought together to be here, which created its own special connection between them.

Scientists also believe if the fetus’s mom experiences trauma or earlier trauma causes a variety of stress hormones to get released in her body, the baby may begin life outside the womb with less of a sense of safety and coherence. I imagine baby Rita knowing intuitively that once she left her watery warm home, an unsafe and incoherent world awaited. I imagine she hesitated.

In the end, Rita pushed through.

Mama would tell her, at a difficult moment in her life, “You can make it. You’re a fighter. Lord knows, you fought hard to get here.” I think about how hard Mama fought to get Rita here, so soon after losing a different baby girl, and how she herself survived, through such a harrowing delivery. Rita and Mama fought together to be here, which created its own special connection between them.

And yet, more than once Rita said to me: “I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to come here.”

That comment takes on new meaning now that I know the exact conditions of her birth. Yes, she fought to be here, but not before she tried to stay in the safety of Mama’s womb; and once she was born, into an uncertain and possibly unsafe world with trauma already stuck in her little body, it’s like she was saying to our mother, I still need you so much. Tend to me. Tend to me. Tend to me.

Now I better understand what Rita brought into the room with her that day when she didn’t know our mother was in the room too, what she must’ve absorbed and understood as she looked down on me, the interloper. I imagine the worst-case scenario playing in her four-year-old mind before she ever opened her mouth to insist that I shut mine.

When you run into someone who’s just fallen in love, look out. They’ve got pictures. They’ve got videos. And they twist, turn and mutilate every subject until it yields yet another story about their person. They will sing the praises of their beloved’s smallest gestures and traits. It’s insufferable. . . talking to a grandparent.

I’m a grandparent. And I have been known to blubber and blabber epithets of affection and stare in wonder at the most mundane things my grandkids do. I say things like this to all five of them: “If you were any cuter, elephants would start talking and the sun would stay out all night.”

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Then I look up from my fawning, and there is my child, their parent. And I am confronted by an unwelcome thought: Did I ever love you this much?

I must have, right? I was just busy making sure you didn’t fall off the bookcase and split your head open, which you did, of course. I was just trying to keep you alive. And figure out how to make a living. And finish growing up myself.

But, there must have been these moments, where I stared at you dumbly, my brain stopped, my eyes full, marveling at your impossible cuteness, at the miracle of your dimple or the way you say a word, like I do every time I am with your children.

If I’m being honest, though, I can’t remember.

What I do know is that this love I feel can’t be explained away by all the common wisdom: that grandparental love is special because we get to give them back at the end of a visit. Or that we get all the fun and none of the responsibility. While that’s true (at least for grandparents who aren’t raising their grandkids), it doesn’t account for this thing I feel: this physical rush, this sensation of falling. I’ve felt this before. This is new love.

And new love doesn’t look back. Its job isn’t to care about first love, which is what you and I had when you came into the world 30 years ago. I loved you more than I ever thought I could love a person—until you brought me these kids.

And there’s one more thing at play here: My capacity for love is larger now. Loss will do that. So will time. When there is less future, the present becomes more important. And that’s where love thrives.

I understand love better now, too. I finally get what Shakespeare meant when he wrote in Sonnet 116, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

When you were little, I thought of love only as a verb. Now I recognize it as a state of being. And I know that it’s just bluster to measure love against the height of mountains or the width of rivers as we do in songs. Love is often smaller and quieter than I once expected. Its presence shadows you. And in between breaths, you can hear it hum.

Jim Sollisch’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and for several years he was a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition. He is the author of a new book of short essays, How donating a kidney fixed my jump shot.

Years before I knew where babies came from I asked my single mom, who was already raising me and little brother Carlos, for a baby sister. Mom laughed as though she’d been watching Redd Foxx on stage at the Apollo instead of sitting in the living room of our Harlem apartment. “You won’t be getting a sister out of me,” she said between guffaws. After asking a few more times, I realized there was no wearing her down on the subject. If I was to have a female sibling, I’d have to figure out how to create one on my own.

Afterwards I came to the realization that I was surrounded by girls who were almost sisters, and began developing deeper friendships with them, adopting them in a way.

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The first was my next-door neighbor Jackie Lawson, who, along with her brother Darryl, had been a friend since childhood. As we got older, Jackie and I both became interested in writing, reading and music. We’d talk about the books that we read, or chill in her older sister’s room listening to funk songs by War and Earth, Wind & Fire, or any number of random albums stacked beneath the stereo. Though I do recall my GI Joe having sex with her Barbie, our pre-pubescent selves remained platonic.

Having never been “a boy’s boy” who liked being out in the streets playing stickball or skelley, or throwing soda bottles at water rats on Riverside Drive like my brother, I always preferred the company of girls (and later women). They never teased me for being chubby, would rather talk than fight, and weren’t trying to watch baseball, Westerns, or war movies on television. Being around girls was comforting, but of course hanging with them led to more than a few people believed that something was “wrong” with me, or that I was a “sissy.”

In the summer of 1973, when I was 10, while visiting my grandfather’s house in Hagerstown, Maryland he snatched me by the hand one afternoon when I was in the kitchen with mom, Aunt Carrie, and Aunt Evelyn, who was my sweet step-grandmother. They would sit in that room sipping iced tea or lemonade while talking about this and that. “Why you always hanging around your mother like that?” Granddaddy asked as he pulled me towards the side door. “Come outside with me.”

Having never been “a boy’s boy” who liked being out in the streets playing stickball or skelley, or throwing soda bottles at water rats on Riverside Drive like my brother, I always preferred the company of girls (and later women). They never teased me for being chubby, would rather talk than fight, and weren’t trying to watch baseball, Westerns, or war movies on television.

We stood on the lawn watching the cars drive by while across the street a few girls jumped double-dutch. Minutes later my mother’s cousin Jackie, the one out gay guy in the community, walked by the fence. “Hi, Mr. Mosby,” he said in his high-pitched voice. Granddad growled a greeting and when Jackie was out of earshot he yanked me. “See him? He used to be up under his mother all the time too.”

Eight years later, while attending Long Island University/Brooklyn Campus in the early 1980s, I became good friends with Sylvia Rodriguez, the older sibling of my best friend Jerry. The three of us hung out at school and later at the massive apartment she shared with her older sister Jeanette and their children. Six years older than me, she was a Puerto Rican cutie with naturally curly hair and a soft voice.

Freshman year I was dating my first girlfriend while Sylvia had already been married, divorced, and was raising children while going to school full-time. I loved her kids—a wild but sweet boy named Akil, and his darling sister Aisha—as though they were my own. One time when Sylvia recruited me to babysit them at Jerry’s apartment, a one-bedroom crib within walking distance of her own, Akil somehow stuffed Lumet, Jerry’s cat named after the famed film director, into an empty bamboo birdcage. Though I was able to get him out without incident, the poor animal was skittish for a week.

Sylvia was a serious person who had no problem being silly. One of her first excursions with me and Jerry was the three of us trawling downtown Manhattan, trying to find the Mudd Club, but instead stumbling on something more sinister. We should have thought it weird when they asked us to sign a release at the door, stating that we weren’t police.

As we went deeper into the venue we caught view of men being whipped by leather clad women, and realized we stumbled onto an underground S&M club. We didn’t participate, nor did we leave. As Flock of Seagulls and other new-wave bands blared from the sound system, we transformed into fun-loving voyeurs. Hours later, back in Brooklyn, we followed-up that night of witnessing whips, chains, and leather with burgers at George’s Diner, where we recounted our adventure and Sylvia ate fries off our plates. The three of us talked until the morning light.

Sylvia’s older sister Janette was also a L.I.U. college student with a kid. They lived on Ocean Avenue, in an apartment where I was often a guest. Both of the Rodriguez sisters could cook and dance and tell stories. Over dinner they told me tales about their teen years going to salsa clubs with their older brother Gil, who was the best dancer in the family. Afterwards, Sylvia pulled out various albums by Latin artists, introducing me to the music of Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe, Ray Barretto and Eddie Palmieri. She showed me a few salsa steps and allowed me to be clumsy with her on the dance floor that was her living-room.

The Rodriguez clan was huge and their family soon became my own. Gil, who converted to Islam years before, had changed his name to Malik. Tall and lanky, he was the king of cool. Their nerdy bro Antonio turned me on to jazzy rock albums by Steely Dan and Rickie Lee Jones. Sylvia, who was politically active, educated me on the problems of the world and schooled me in the work of filmmakers like Costa-Gavras, whose revolutionary 1969 movie Z we saw at a midnight show at the Waverly Theater in the Village.

Raised in Harlem by an apolitical mother, I rarely thought about politics outside of the headlines. But in the years before rap groups like Public Enemy and X-Klan talked about nationalism and the Black Panthers, it was Sylvia who introduced me to the writings of John Reed and Frantz Fanon. She took me to my first (and only) public demonstration where in 1982 we protested against South African apartheid in front of the United Nations.

While attending Long Island University/Brooklyn Campus in the early 1980s, I became good friends with Sylvia Rodriguez, the older sibling of my best friend Jerry. The three of us hung out at school and later at the massive apartment she shared with her older sister Jeanette and their children.

Though I was 19, my only connection to the subject was head-nodding to the jazzy funk of Gil Scott-Heron’s classic “Johannesburg” when he was on Saturday Night Live in 1975. But seven years later I learned about the brutal, racist system, as well the work of Nelson and Winnie Mandela. Holding my FREE SOUTH AFRICA hand-painted sign high, I was nervous about demonstrating, but stayed close to Sylvia and her friends. For the first time I felt as though I was a part of something that mattered.

“Thank you for getting me on an F.B.I. watch-list,” I joked at the end of the day.

“Just hanging out with me, you might already be on a list,” she quipped.

Two weeks later we went to a Greenwich Village hippie record store on 8^th Street. Looking through the bins, I saw The Byrds’ disc Preflyte, which featured a cover by Barry Windsor-Smith. I could’ve cared less about the band, but Windsor-Smith, a comic book artist who used to draw Conan the Barbarian, was one of my favorite illustrators. Sylvia, too, was a terrific artist, so I showed her the image of the band dressed as astronauts.

“You going to buy it?” she asked.

“I don’t have enough money?”

“Do you want me to steal it for you?” she went on. “I used to be good at shoplifting when I was a teenager.” Nervously, I laughed. While nothing says lifelong friendship more than someone willing to shoplift for you, I passed.

We spent many days and nights together, some of them memorable for funny reasons—like the evening I took Sylvia to Dojo’s on St. Mark’s Place for a birthday dinner, but totally forgot I was supposed to be escorting her to the surprise party Jerry and Antonio were throwing for her 30th. By the time I got her back to Brooklyn, we were two hours late. The brothers were mad with me that night, but Sylvia just thought it was hilarious.

The Rodriguez clan was huge and their family soon became my own.

Not long after that I experienced my first heartbreak. I discovered that my girlfriend had been cheating on me with a close friend. Devastated, I moped around for days until Sylvia helped me out of my funk in a Chelsea restaurant where the male bartender and the female owner both had crushes on her. Over very strong Long Island Iced Teas, she propped up my ego, gave great advice, and helped me as I staggered to the 7^th Avenue subway station.

Months later both Jerry and I dropped out of college and got jobs working at a New York City shelter. Sylvia’s sister Janette, who’d graduated in 1983, was the big boss and she hooked us up. We worked the 12am to 8am shift, and some mornings when work was over we’d call Sylvia and she’d invite us over for breakfast. She was already up, having gotten her kids ready for school. Once we got there she made us banana pancakes, eggs, and a couple pots of Café Bustelo as The Police or Prefab Sprout played in the background.

It was around this time that Jerry started a theatre group that consisted of young, talented performers from The Actor’s Studio. He and I became the company’s playwrights (Jerry was also the main director), and Sylvia was recruited as the all-purpose backstage woman. Though she took the title “stage manager,” she was much more than that, often helping with everything from rehearsals to make-up to costumes. Though I’d soon drop out (working with demanding actors drove me batty), Sylvia always stayed until the last curtain call.

From the mid-to-late 80s, like a few other friends, Sylvia was no longer around as much. She remarried very briefly, and was going to graduate school. As they say, life got in the way. But she contacted me when her father died in 1988, and we reconnected. The next few years were a transitional period for me that included taking myself more seriously as a writer and wilding out romantically before falling in love in 1991 with music publicist Lesley Pitts—a woman who most people, including Sylvia, truly liked very much. That year she moved in with Gordon, who in 1998 became husband number three, my favorite of the men in her life and the one who lasted the longest.

It’s been 45 years since we first met, and in that time the many hours we’ve spent together could supply countless stories. Of the celebrations and deaths that include my girl Lesley in 1999, her brother Malik in 2000, and her baby bro Jerry in 2008; of the many holiday seasons I’ve spent sipping the Christmas Coquito that she made the month before, and of posing for the family picture in her brother Phil’s yard oh the 4^th of July. Of that time shortly after her 50^th birthday when Sylvia decided to get her driver’s license, and I was the only person (besides her husband) who’d ride shotgun. Though we took a few wild turns and abrupt stops at red lights, I never feared that she would kill me.

Then there was that time when Jerry, who became my roommate in 2005, was in the hospital receiving cancer treatments in 2007 and I found his ferret dead in the cage. It was Sylvia who instructed me to come over and bury the furry critter in her backyard. “Just put him in a shopping bag and take a cab over.” A year later, when Jerry too died, the night before my June 23^rd birthday, it was Sylvia who phoned me from Sloan-Kettering to tell me that he was gone.

It’s been 45 years since we first met, and in that time the many hours we’ve spent together could supply countless stories. Of the celebrations and deaths that include my girl Lesley in 1999, her brother Malik in 2000, and her baby bro Jerry in 2008; of the many holiday seasons I’ve spent sipping the Christmas Coquito that she made the month before, and of posing for the family picture in her brother Phil’s yard oh the 4^th of July. Of that time shortly after her 50^th birthday when Sylvia decided to get her driver’s license, and I was the only person (besides her husband) who’d ride shotgun.

In November, 2011, when I was shot three times in a case of mistaken identity, most of my sister-friends were around my hospital bed, bringing me food, connecting the telephone, and keeping me company. But it was Sylvia who was my medical proxy, talking to the nurses and doctors, and explaining everything to me. Having spent years in the hospital with rheumatic fever when she was a child, she knew how to talk to the white coat posse as though she was one of them.

After a few weeks of couch surfing because I was scared to return home, not knowing who it was who’d tried to kill me, work was slow. Though I had paid the rent and most of my bills, I lacked a few basic necessities. One evening I got a phone call. “Come downstairs in five minutes,” Sylvia said. “I have something for you.” When she and Gordon pulled-up, the back of the car and some of the trunk were filled with groceries. I was shocked. “You didn’t have to do that,” I mumbled as I gave her a hug. “Thank you.”

In the fall of 2012, a year before I moved out of Brooklyn, I was spooked by the forthcoming doom of Hurricane Sandy. The weather people on television made it sound like the end of the world. Not wanting to die alone, I called on her. “I’m scared,” I blurted. Without missing a beat she simply replied, “Pack a bag and come over here.” As she had done many times in the past, big sis Sylvia looked out.

Check out all of Michael A. Gonzales’s contributions to Oldster Magazine.

Sam could’ve been a drill sergeant the way she shouted out what I was to feel: “Sadness! Fear! Anger! Fear! Joy! Sadness! No words!” I was supposed to let my partner know only with my eyes what was going on with me. A few decades younger—imagine thinking like that, in decades—the woman I was paired with must’ve had practice. Her eyes teared up on command. Me, not exactly. Call it body literacy. Getting out of my head would take time.

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I was participating in the second improv class of my life, the first having taken place only the week before. I’d signed up for Level One Improv because I decided that at almost 78 it was time to free my inner child. That child, Sam said, didn’t think twice before throwing imaginary balls in the air, or galloping across a field, or swimming upstream. That child didn’t second-guess herself. That child lived in the NOW.

Getting in touch with that child was going to take a lot of work, which was why I was there. To let go. As a writer, I wanted to be free of my ready editor, who stood on duty before any words even hit the page. I don’t write fiction because I’m not good at spinning stories. Improv is all about spinning stories, and quickly. How would improv impact my memoir and creative nonfiction writing?

Could I give myself over to being embarrassed? Imperfect? Characterized as emotional nudity, improv would test me beyond my expectations.

I’m not a performer. In fact, as a writer and psychologist, what I do is just the opposite—my work is done either in solitude or with one or maybe a few other people.

I was participating in the second improv class of my life, the first having taken place only the week before. I’d signed up for Level One Improv because I decided that at almost 78 it was time to free my inner child. That child, Sam said, didn’t think twice before throwing imaginary balls in the air, or galloping across a field, or swimming upstream. That child didn’t second-guess herself. That child lived in the NOW.

The premise of improv is adopting a “Yes and…” mentality. Whatever your partner offers, you accept it, then build on it. You’re in a conversation with someone else. There’s no pre-planning or thinking ahead because that would put you in your head with your thoughts, causing you to miss what they’re going to say next. Questioning is a no-no because it burdens the other person, and takes them out of the moment, spoiling the unconscious-mind immediacy vital to improv. Instead, they’re challenged with doing something, saying something, answering whatever you asked.

I broke that rule, asking questions because I was not yet oriented toward creating on the spot. It felt like instances in which I needed to make small talk, also not a strength of mine. And as a therapist I’m all about asking questions. It took me the entire first Level One workshop series to unlearn that.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Level One, Day One: We opened by sharing basic information about ourselves, including our ages. I told them, No effin way. Next we were introduced to a warm-up routine that had us flinging and flailing our bodies around the room, yelling and squeezing each other’s hands. I learned this was how every class would start.

Fortunately I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t throw herself on the floor with abandon, wasn’t the only one with a hip replacement. And there were several others with wonky knees.

The crux of the classes was the “exercises.” To illustrate, a partner and I were tasked with pretending to paint very high-end bird houses, keeping track of what had been painted and what still needed to be done. Adding tension to the bit was the notion that Oprah would be showing up within the hour to pick up the bird houses for her country estate. My “co-worker” and I were to have a conversation. We could talk about what we had for dinner or movies we’d seen or anything else—just not about bird houses or Oprah. Our only tools for communicating the story: the air and our imagination. It was kind of like the trick you did as a kid, rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. Parenthetically, I thought, Maybe at least this has the same brain health benefits as doing crossword puzzles.

After the first class I was filled with dread about the second class. After the second class I thought about going on to Level Two. Not so fast. At the end of the last session I learned I had to repeat Level One. Who knew you could “flunk” improv? I was challenging a lot of years of being cautious. And of asking questions.

Mid-September, the sun already setting earlier than I liked, I reminded myself of my goal of mental liberation, and embarked on round two of Level One.

After the first class I was filled with dread about the second class. After the second class I thought about going on to Level Two. Not so fast. At the end of the last session I learned I had to repeat Level One. Who knew you could “flunk” improv? I was challenging a lot of years of being cautious. And of asking questions.

For so much of my life, for reasons I won’t get into here, I’ve battled to be “good enough.” And now, here I was engaging in an activity where I was flagrantly not “good enough.” A friend of mine who’s known me since college (and that’s a very long time), would clarify that for me it’s actually about being more than “good enough.” Probably more like “better than,” and she’s right. By placing myself in an arena where “better than,” let alone “good enough” weren’t on the table (yet!), I was taking vulnerability to a new height.

At the beginning of each session I’d announce that I had a love-hate relationship with the experience. I’d have the same kind of anticipatory anxiety that I used to get before a school exam. But it’s the damndest thing, I laughed more once I was at improv, than anywhere else.

Readying myself for the last class of my second round of Level One, I didn’t know whether I wanted to succeed or not. If I did, that would mean four more classes to challenge me. My graduation to Level Two remained tenuous, and I was beginning to feel bad. Improv isn’t supposed to feel bad. During the last class of Level One I found myself clanging and sirening across the stage as an emergency vehicle. I really threw myself into it. Before I knew it, I’d broken out and clanged my way to Level Two.

My induction into Level Two wound up being delayed, so instead of having just a few weeks to second guess my plan to advance, I had a few months. What was I doing? Why couldn’t I be satisfied with completing Level 1? What was I proving and to whom? Maybe, I thought, there are improv people and non-improv people, and I just fall into the latter group.

Yet once I walked through the door and up the flight of stairs, I arrived back in Never-Never land. A place where we’ve given each other permission—a gift—to participate in the absurdity of life without risk.

So there I was the first night of Level Two class, charged with instantly transforming myself into an ant farmer who needs to deliver 500,000 ants to Excelsior, Vermont for a fishing convention taking place there at the end of the week. Don’t try and find the town on the map.

Moving through Level Two, the skits became more involved and interactions with other players became more interactive and demanding. On the spot songs were incorporated. I, who early-on was told I was tone deaf and to mouth the lyrics, “found my voice,” but this had nothing to do with staying on key.

The culmination of Level Two is a performance in front of a real audience. Rehearsing for our big night, for not the first time, Sam reminded the class about our inner child who’s just busting to get out. “Go back to that child,” she instructed. “She didn’t have to make sense. As kids, we went wherever our unfettered minds took us.”

Ah, but Sam, so much has happened since then.

I went to a public elementary school in New York City. My first years there I was known as “Johnny’s sister.” Johnny was a very smart boy and whether I, his younger sister, would prove to be of like mind was an unknown. Yes and no. Graduating from sixth grade (back then elementary school finished after sixth grade) the school selected a boy and girl valedictorian to represent the grade. I was selected to be the girl valedictorian. Why I was selected, even with hindsight, is unclear to me. I didn’t feel so smart. The memory that stands out is not graduation day or my appearance onstage then, but rehearsal. The discomfort I felt sitting on stage, flinging myself in the chair. I sat sprawled awkwardly, the skirt of my red shirtwaist dress in disarray.

“Nancy, sit up like a lady.” The instinct not to be seen had already taken root.

Before the final improv performance, we were sent an email with a link to a recording of our dress rehearsal. I debated whether I should watch it, whether I’d become more upset, more anxious, seeing myself. I decided to take a chance and look. It turned out to be surprisingly helpful and not utterly demoralizing. For example, I got to see that I tend to keep my arms stuck in a right angle position, as if I’m about to offer alms. And I learned that when they’re not stuck, I have a habit of repetitively swaying them from side to side. I could be soothing a baby or about to toss one out the window. In the middle of a boring song about roses that I’d created on the spot, swaying away, Sam came up to me, and took my hands mid-sway. “Tell me how you hate roses,” she said.

“I hate roses,” I began. “I hate roses. Roses are a trite gift. When I was a girl no one gave me roses. I didn’t get roses because no one loved me. Poor me. Poor poor me. Waaah.”

My induction into Level Two wound up being delayed, so instead of having just a few weeks to second guess my plan to advance, I had a few months. What was I doing? Why couldn’t I be satisfied with completing Level 1? What was I proving and to whom? Maybe, I thought, there are improv people and non-improv people, and I just fall into the latter group. Yet once I walked through the door and up the flight of stairs, I arrived back in Never-Never land. A place where we’ve given each other permission—a gift—to participate in the absurdity of life without risk.

Flip the script. Be absurd. Life is absurd so much of the time. And with improv we get to laugh at that absurdity.

And to stop thinking. Reawaken our beginner’s mind. Or, as Sam says, improv is about living in the truth. Also, I’d say, living with trust. As writes in his newsletter, Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse, “Trust defines our relationship with ourselves.” Yes, and I’d suggest that it also defines our relationships with others. When we’re young, kid-young, we don’t understand how vulnerable we are. With age and experience we become aware—and often afraid of—our vulnerability. We become all too conscious of the potential consequences for putting ourselves out there. Reverting to kid-young again—that’s improv.

I ask myself, why has improv been so destabilizing for me? As it turns out, my foray into it, though initially about fear with a little “f,” was really about fear with a big “F.” About coming to terms with how Fear has dominated so much in my life and the choices I’ve made. I hope I’m on my way to unlearning that, scene by scene. It’s time, I thought—it’s time to not give a damn. That’s what got me climbing the sharp flight of stairs on Monday and Wednesday nights, on my way to learning how to let go.

January 31, one day shy of the full moon—the snow moon—it was show time. While performing improv—I often find myself laughing, even as I feel how my body holds tension. Laughter, for the actors and the audience, is such a gift. That night I made people laugh.

“You were hilarious—a very funny pelican,” my friend said. How great is that? Flapping and croaking and slurping fish—who knew that I had pelican in my blood?

Driving home I had a sense of hope the likes of which I haven’t had in a long time. A hope that transcended my concerns about my old-ness, and the myriad other things that make me fret—a hope that gave me a sense of renewal. A sense that this was Day One of whatever might be next.

“A shout out to Samantha Jones and her partner Michael Withall at Hudson Valley Improv, who took me where I didn’t know I could go, and to my fellow players.” -

Previously Nancy Jainchill wrote “What I Learned From Doing Amateur Porn in my 20s” for Oldster.

This is the first in a new Oldster Magazine series called “What I Did For Love.” It takes its title from a song featured in the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. It’s also been the theme of the first two Oldster Variety Hours. Carolita Johnson performed a version of this story at the first event, in Kingston, N.Y., on October 1st 2025.

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When I first met and slept with Michael in New York in 2002, he was still dating, on and off, the woman he’d left his ex-wife for. This was fine with me because at the time, I was visiting from Paris where I’d become well-versed in the concept of The Lover. My French lovers were pleasant, unburdensome, polite and romantic, devoid of the possessiveness and/or meanness I learned to associate with American boyfriends or the “hookups” I’d heard about, which sounded like scary campfire stories. Not only was it wonderful to have a French lover, it was also quite a joy being one.

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Michael and I were introduced by a friend, and had seen each other a few times over the course of a week. The night before my flight home to Paris, we took a walk, kissed as we emerged from the 50th street subway station, then stopped to kiss in doorway after doorway as we walked downtown along 8th Avenue, under a drizzling rain. We kissed sensually at length in the doorway of my train until last call, scandalizing the passengers inside. And the next morning I went to his apartment on 156th street, and we slept together for the first time, just hours before my flight.

Afterwards, we went back to Penn Station, where we repeated our sexy goodbyes. “Sorry to love you and leave you,” I said, at Track 19, “but come visit me in Paris sometime!” I was being gayly insincere. I never expected to see him again, and I didn’t mind. I tousled his hair, pulled my hand back to myself as the train doors closed, and was off to Long Island to collect my bags at my parents’ house before heading to the airport, feeling very proud of myself for creating a romantic farewell, worthy of French lovers.

At first, Michael called frequently, and even exhorted me to come back and share a giant apartment he’d found in Harlem. I just smiled and accepted this absurd proposition as flattery. Then he booked a flight to Paris for April 1st (the perfect date for cartoonists to have a lover’s tryst), but cancelled just two days before, saying he had to sign a lease, borrow money for the deposit, and move in.

It sounded very plausible, but I waited until 11pm that April Fool’s Day, in case he was pranking me. He wasn’t. But from that day on, I considered April 1st our anniversary, because it marked the first time I went out on a limb emotionally for him, endured disappointment, and forgave him. He stopped calling as often, but somehow I didn’t take it personally. Five months later, when I came back to New York for good, determined to become an artist and writer, with a lover or two, I was puzzled when Michael kept brushing off my invitations for “coffee.”

Surely he knew “coffee” meant “sex”? What older, divorced man in a loosey-goosey, on and off relationship, who had already slept with me would, in their right mind say no to having me as an easy lover on the side? Not yet familiar with the concept of “ghosting” – the term might not even have been coined yet – and perhaps grossly lacking in self-esteem deficiencies, I put the difficulty of us getting back together down to his bad time management skills.

Yes, I was blissfully unaware that I was out of my league. I was 37, freshly unemployed and living with my parents: I suppose I should have been ashamed. He was 56, and unbeknownst to me, one of the most well-known and beloved staff cartoonists at The New Yorker. Me, I was merely impressed that he could pay his rent by drawing cartoons.

When we first met, he’d asked to see my sketchbook, just assumed I had one on me – which I did – and we’d talked shop happily together about pens and pencils all night. I wanted more of that. Yeah. Someone who actually took me seriously as an artist. Who would also have sex with me. In a last-ditch attempt to get his attention, I sat down and scribbled a bunch of what I can only recall and describe as hilariously bad “cartoon-like objects,” then called him to say I needed to show him some drawings and get his advice.

It worked. I wasn’t sure what to think of the fact that he’d responded to me more readily this time as an artist than as a lover. I was certainly not insulted. But I’d intentionally made my drawings so bad as to make it plain that all I really wanted was to sleep with him again.

After looking at my drawings, he told me I should try cartooning. His apparent obliviousness was intriguing.

“Do ten cartoons a week and bring them to me. If they’re good I’ll show them to my editor,” he said, “but don’t expect to sell anything.”

Which I didn’t. I decided we were both only pretending to take me seriously as a cartoonist as a pretext to see each other without actually dating. Fine with me. I didn’t know if it was the age difference or guilt over him still seeing his ex, or both, but it obviously suited him to make our relationship about my supposed interest in cartooning. I did the cartoons as Cupid’s labor. I decided it wouldn’t kill me to bring my productivity levels up and learn to meet deadlines. Also, I was thrilled to have a critique (and, eventually, sex!) every week.

“Do ten more cartoons!” he’d say each week as we parted, “See you next week!”

I can still see him standing outside of The Strand bookstore on Broadway one Monday, next to his bicycle as I turned to head for the subway, his bright white hair floating above his head like an ectoplasm, his eyes on me behind his black, Ray-Ban “Wayferers,” his signature look. He’s wearing a grey linen suit he didn’t wear much afterwards, and the old, cracked brown leather wingtip shoes that he finally threw away thirteen years later when we moved upstate to Kingston. I’m smiling at him and he’s saying, in his gently gravelly voice, “Get to work!” Making me feel so truly happy that I laugh, and I can feel that laugh in my throat now, as I remember it. I had a lover and a mentor and a friend in him. I couldn’t ask for more.

One day, he said his editor wanted to meet me. I almost said, “You’ve really been showing him my cartoons?” But I stopped myself when I realized I’d perhaps been the only one playing the game of “let’s pretend I’m doing this for the cartooning.” Had he really believed my cartoons were good? Or had he thought he had to get me into the magazine as a quid pro quo, when he really, really hadn’t had to at all?

The truth was, I didn’t care about doing cartoons in The New Yorker. I wanted to go back to Paris, and do cartoons for a French publication. But as I caught myself, it felt as if I’d almost just lost him, then clasped him back to me.

“Oh, wow! Okay,” I said, shaking invisibly.

That week, I sold a cartoon to The New Yorker.

“Oh, you poor kid,” Michael said, as he congratulated me, “five whole weeks of suffering! It took me five years to sell a cartoon!”

I said I got the impression the magazine just needed more women cartoonists.

“What? No! That’s got nothing to do with it. If a cartoon isn’t good, it doesn’t go in the magazine. You’re good,” he said, “You’re good.”

To him, I was a cartoonist. I’d never had anyone to talk to about being an artist before who didn’t dismiss me condescendingly, and inform me how hard it is to be published, or suggest that I work in a boutique instead. I’d almost begun to believe them.

When my first cartoon ran in the magazine, old classmates began resurfacing with photographs of my cartoons they’d saved from our middle school days. My father brought out a folder of my childhood cartoons that he’d proudly saved. Maybe I’d never wanted to become a cartoonist because I’d always been one, but just didn’t know it. Michael had known.

From then on, we showed each other our weekly submissions of around ten cartoons. Long ago, we did this over coffee or at the magazine while we waited our turn with our editor. Later, technology changed the submission process, and we’d look at each other’s cartoons before faxing them, and then not long afterwards, we cc’d each other on our email submissions. Some nights Michael would email me his batch from his desk at 3am, and I’d pretend to be asleep in the next room, saving my reply for the morning, my smile glowing in the light of my iPhone.

A short video from Carolita Johnson and Michael Crawford’s wedding:

Thursdays, we’d wait for an “okay” from our editor by email, or suffer through the silence that indicated no sale that week. Whoever hit gold would treat the other to dinner out. Sometimes it was both of us, and often it was neither of us.

By the time he died in 2016, we’d loved each other for fourteen years, and lived together for the last seven of them. We used to joke that we were almost envious of ourselves. We knew we loved, in each other, many of the things others found impossible to love. Our mutual love of words and images knit our lives together. We peppered Cole Porter lyrics, or lines of Film Noir, or hardboiled detective dialogue into conversations about even the most mundane subjects. We loved hearing each other talk, and by the time we moved in together, it wasn’t uncommon for Michael to stop in the middle of a conversation and say, “We should be recording ourselves! This is great stuff!”

But for all our talk, we never talked about why I’d believed, at first, that he’d lied about showing my cartoons to our editor. I never asked if he’d felt obliged, perhaps believing he was too old for me, to pretend to have more than his desire to offer. It forever remained my favorite humble-brag: how this guy who I thought was lying just to get into my pants turned out to believe in me, while I had been a little smartass pretending to be interested in cartooning when all I wanted was to feel free to fall in love with him.

What did YOU do for love?

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Check out all of Carolita Johnson’s essays for Oldster. Check out the rest of this series.

I wasn’t born with a disability. I acquired it in my 60s. That’s what made it harder to diagnose—and harder to live with.

This May, I rolled a roti for the first time in 13 years. It puffed up, and I clapped with joy.

For 13 years, I had stopped entering the kitchen after my right shoulder gave way to a full tear in the supraspinatus muscle. As the strongest in the cluster of four muscles tore, my joint stopped taking the weight of my arm.

The first sign was so ordinary, it almost went unnoticed. One May morning in 2012, as sunlight spilled into my bedroom, I reached for my hairbrush. My elbow froze mid-air. A sharp, invisible jammer clamped down on my right arm. I tried again, puzzled, then anxious. My arm refused to rise.

I’ve always hated beginning my day with my hair unkempt. For years, I brushed and tied it neatly before stepping out of the bedroom. But that morning, my arm would not obey me.

When you’ve spent a lifetime using your arms without thought, the absence of that kind of mobility feels like an amputation of ease itself. The shock isn’t momentary—it renews with every small task.

Two days later, pain arrived—deep, persistent, like a knife twisting into the shoulder muscle. Physiotherapists came and went. Nothing changed. Finally, an MRI revealed the truth: a full tear in my right rotator cuff. I was 63.

When my rotator cuff tore, I couldn’t roll a roti. That loss—perhaps small to some—broke something in me. It wasn’t just about food. It was about pride, identity, agency, and joy.

When you’ve spent a lifetime using your arms without thought, the absence of that kind of mobility feels like an amputation of ease itself. The shock isn’t momentary—it renews with every small task. You reach for your teacup, but your hand won’t obey. You sit at the table, but can’t lift food to your mouth. You try to bolt the door, but your arm stops midway. Each attempt becomes a quiet humiliation, a reminder of how deeply the body shapes freedom. The loss seems small from the outside, but inside, it is immense—a grief measured not in moments, but in every second of helplessness.

For most people, rolling a roti—an Indian flatbread—is an everyday chore. For me, it was an act of love. It gave me pleasure to cook a tasty meal for my family and friends. I owned 40 cookbooks and delighted in trying out recipes and serving a variety of dishes. I cooked over a slow fire, listening to cumin seeds crackle in ghee, letting the aroma of roasted spices and warm aroma fill the house, adjusting the seasoning by intuition.

Cooking to music never wearied me; it delighted me. Each dish was my offering. It was a sacred act, an art form—something you performed with creative imagination, adding ingredients one by one until you instinctively knew it was just right.

Last May, thirteen years after that tear, at 76, I finally rolled a roti again. I flipped it expertly on the hot pan and watched it puff like in old times. My heart swelled. I clapped for myself. I took a picture of that small, imperfectly rolled but perfectly puffed bread. To others, it was just a roti. To me, it was movement. It was partial self-sufficiency. It was returning to something I had thought I’d lost forever.

***

I was healthy then—walking, jogging, traveling, living life fully. But invisible changes were happening beneath the surface.

In 2007, I learned I had breast cancer. The doctors removed my right breast. “You’re lucky,” they said. “The treatment worked.” But radiation and chemotherapy left behind their brutal signatures. They had damaged the left ventricle of my heart forever. Its pumping power fell from 65% to a mere 40%. My body grew weaker, more fragile.

The doctor ruled out surgery for the cuff tear. “No,” my oncologist said gently. “You’re too weak to undergo rehabilitation after another surgery.” I was told to manage.

When my rotator cuff tore, I couldn’t roll a roti. That loss—perhaps small to some—broke something in me. It wasn’t just about food. It was about pride, identity, agency, and joy.

Two months later, I had to be rushed to the emergency room with heart failure. My “ejection fraction” was 16%. (Normal is 50% to 70%.) I didn’t know what that meant then. I only knew I could no longer climb stairs. I needed help to bathe. The kitchen I once loved now felt like a war field laid with mines.

I left my job as a corporate trainer. My right shoulder was immobile; my breath was short; my world was shrinking.

When my heart stabilized a little, I relearned how to use my right hand. I propped it up with pillows, practiced moving it bit by bit. Every small note I wrote felt like climbing a mountain. Writing wasn’t just communication—it was defiance.

When I could, I returned to my non-profit work, guiding my team to help students prepare for competitive exams. I could no longer stand for hours, but I could still plan, think, guide. That mattered.

Still, my heart was failing. My arm lay forgotten. Modern medicine had saved me—but also betrayed me, refusing to look beyond the surface of its own side effects.

Then came 2018: my heart transplant. A miracle, yes—but my arm remained frozen in its old pain.

A year later, I tried again. Manipulation therapy improved mobility slightly, and I cried with relief. Then, just when I could lift my hand again, my left rotator cuff tore.

COVID-19 arrived. Hospitals closed. I lived with relentless pain. I couldn’t sleep on either side. Lifting a cup of tea required effort. Pulling a blanket at night needed help.

In late 2023, I fell in my home. My body lacked upper-body stability from both torn shoulders. A casual turn mid-conversation ended with a scary thud—the sound of bone meeting floor, breath knocked out, pain raged like fire. I had hurt my tailbone.

I fractured my wrist and a vertebra. But worse, I fractured my confidence. For the first time, I feared my home. I feared being alone. I feared being erased. That was the lowest point in my life—but also the beginning of change.

Desperation gave me courage. I found a physiotherapist and a chiropractor who treated me with gentleness and resolve. Slowly, I stood up again—literally and metaphorically.

I also joined an online yoga class led by a young engineer who teaches older women—mothers and grandmothers—how to rebuild strength and balance. I didn’t expect joy. But joy came quietly, in the rhythm of daily practice.

My trainer often tells us, “Do as much as you can. Yoga is about continuity, not performance.” His words are a balm. I believe him.

I also joined an online yoga class led by a young engineer who teaches older women—mothers and grandmothers—how to rebuild strength and balance. I didn’t expect joy. But joy came quietly, in the rhythm of daily practice.

I still can’t raise my arms fully or comb my hair skillfully. But I can do gentle squats. I can balance on one foot with support. I can stretch. I can get up from a chair on my own. I can bathe on my own and take the towel off the towel stand. These may sound small—but they are everything.

The hallmark of my success? Rolling a roti.

This is not a small win. Small successful actions feel like triumphs.

Both my shoulders are permanently torn. They will never be whole. The pain remains. But I am not just shoulders. I am breath. I am effort. I am persistence. I am a woman who shows up.

My osteopath has asked me to set a functional goal for the next year. Mine is simple: to do as many everyday tasks as I can that define my independence.

Writing is part of that independence. It reminds me I am not just a body marked by mastectomy scars, torn muscles, and a donor heart—but a woman with a voice. Writing helps me assert identity beyond illness.

People call me strong. I don’t feel strong. I feel stubborn. Defiant. Angry. Grateful.

My body has been broken many times. But it has rebuilt itself slowly, painfully, powerfully. Yoga gives me structure. My osteopath has given me an aim, a direction. Writing gives me freedom.

This is not a story of a cure. It is not a story of going back. It is a story of reclamation.

My shoulders may never move as they once did. But my spirit moves forward every day, millimeter by millimeter. And that, to me, is a new definition of wholeness.

Healing isn’t about returning. Healing is about becoming.

Previously Viney Kirpal wrote “The Art of Healing” for Oldster.