Dear Pre-Motherhood Rachel,

You were starting to doubt it would ever happen, after so many years of TTC (trying to conceive, one of many annoying but also wormhole acronyms in the fertility field), then your miscarriage at 45, but you’re finally a mom! An adorable little girl wakes up each morning and calls out “Mama,” in the sweetest voice, and it’s you she’s talking to. Yes, it’s hard to believe even when you hear it on a daily basis, but also such a normal part of your life that you no longer question it. “Mama” isn’t just four letters you sometimes wear on a necklace, but how you refer to yourself throughout the day.

Motherhood is, in many ways, everything you dreamed it would be for almost two decades. We have a morning routine, where we get up and read books and place our hands against the window if there’s condensation, one of umpteen tiny things you overlooked before that are now a major source of your daughter’s delight.

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We take leisurely walks, not the power strides of your early 40s, where you’d stay out for hours, head buried in your e-reader, trying to tone your legs and calm your anxious mind, usually only achieving the former. These two-person walks are full of exclamations and observations; midlife you is familiar with the statues and dogs of our neighborhood in ways you never noticed. You recently had to start saying “statue” to describe each one individually after our smart and observant toddler began calling all of them “Buddha,” a word you introduced her to on your daily strolls.

You were right, in some ways; you may have to Google questions all the time, but 50-year-old you now believes she was born with a nurturing temperament, and being a mother does come naturally. At some point almost every day, you tear up as you watch your daughter, whether she’s clambering up her home jungle gym or exuberantly waving both hands in the air at passing cars, accumulating honks and waves in return that make her beam. It’s incredible and awe-inspiring that she looks to you for guidance, that she looks at every part of you with such searching eyes, no judgment, just curiosity. She’s recently discovered the mole on your right cheek and likes to poke it, then look around to see if you have earrings in.

You don’t have FOMO anymore, because anything cool you might have done pre-motherhood pales in comparison to watching her shimmy to her latest musical favorite, Billy Idol, or hearing her demand you give her a book and then observing her babbling her way through its pages.

But not everything about your life has transformed at the same pace. Alas, you’re still you, just with a kid. You didn’t show up at the hospital to meet your daughter and magically become a new person who’s totally chill, always organized, and never makes mistakes. You didn’t stop caring about work even though you’d vowed to be the kind of stay-at-home mom who finally learned how to cook so you could make her nutritionally balanced meals, one protein, one carb, and one healthy fat, just like the chart on your fridge that’s long since become ignored. Anyone could have told you that would be the case, but you wouldn’t have listened. Saying yes to any potentially useful career opportunity was what consumed you in the before; you were certain that would shift in the after, making way for an easy balance, hopping onto a blank page during naptime, churning out paeans to life as a midlife mom.

Remember when you would get pangs of envy every time a friend announced a pregnancy, or you visited with their kids? Of course you must recall how the desire to become a mom was so strong, for almost 20 years, that you were sure once you claimed that role the rest of your life would fall into place.

It’s embarrassing to recall now, but when your mom friends would complain about being exhausted at the end of the day, all you could think was, I want to pass out after having chased a kid around all day. How bad could it really be?

It turns out, the chasing is the fun part; the in-between times are where doubt about what you’re supposed to be doing with your life have made themselves at home. When people ask how you are, almost two years into parenting, this is what you say: “Being a mom is amazing. It’s everything else I’m struggling with.”

You were right, in some ways; you may have to Google questions all the time, but 50-year-old you now believes she was born with a nurturing temperament, and being a mother does come naturally.

“Everything else” is doing a lot of work in that oft-repeated sentence. While you were correct that motherhood would be the most fulfilling job you’ve ever held, there’s been a gnawing desire for more that you haven’t been able to ignore. Your wildly uneven career has only gotten more jagged, with sharp spikes of creative brainstorms followed by deep lows of impostor syndrome the likes of which you’ve never experienced.

Showing up for your daughter is straightforward, for the most part (tantrums are still being sorted out on a case-by-case basis), maybe because she almost always has a smile on her face unless it’s nap time or you tell her she can’t use a dot marker on the floor, maybe because you trust yourself to figure out the best decisions for her even when you aren’t sure. She’s easy to prioritize; she needs you to make sure she doesn’t run into traffic or fall off the couch, to teach her words, to introduce her to people and animals and nature.

But showing up for the rest of your life feels like a minefield, every person or task detracting from the other. You often sit and stare at your hastily scrawled to-do lists; even once you decipher each item, you don’t know where to start. They all seem either urgent or meaningless. You often wonder whether you’ve created a new set of projects that are merely glorified busywork designed to make you feel important, rather than genuine contributions to the world of ideas, but there’s no one to ask because only you can make that call.

In the same way you were so sure that moms somehow had their lives together behind the scenes, you also thought age and experience would guide you toward the career goals that had proved elusive thus far. Right after becoming a mom at 48, you felt like a fire had been lit in you to Get Things Done. Maybe being so much older than your mom was when she had you at 26 made you think about mortality and the waning number of years you likely had left, or maybe because free time each day was so much more precious, you went for it without your usual overthinking, launching a writing conference and, recently, a podcast, ventures that had previously seemed like pie-in-the-sky wishes.

Sometimes, thinking about those accomplishments brings you pure, unfettered pride, but usually, any hints of self-congratulation are immediately followed by condemnation for not having figured out what’s next. You’re a planner; always have been, and probably always will be. But how do you plan when throughout each day you drift from big dreams to wondering whether you should quiet quit the career-that’s-more-like-a-hobby because its meager income is overshadowed by its costs?

For all those years, you placed motherhood on a pedestal. I’m here to tell you that wasn’t wrong; I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my current life at 50, it deserves to be there. It’s beautiful to be able to pause writing this very essay to rush downstairs when I hear my daughter crying. Would the nanny have been able to handle her fall if I were out or otherwise occupied? Yes, but those are the moments where I feel like a supermom, able to switch from writer to mother seamlessly.

If I could go back, I’d tell you to think a little more clearly about what you’d want your day-to-day life as a mom to look and feel like. Many people idealize their wedding day and don’t think about what marriage will be like afterward; you did that with motherhood. At 50, I now have the deep privilege of being able to choose how I spend my days, for the most part, when I’m not caring for my daughter. You thought that would be idyllic; I find myself feeling guilty for not finding it as utopian.

Mom life has set routines: music class, play date with the neighbor, story time, gym class. Being whatever combination of words now describes my work life—writer/editor/podcaster/event organizer—does not. There’s repetitive tasks, but overall, you have to constantly be on the lookout for the next story, the next guest, the next idea, the next potential sponsor, the next social media platform “everyone” is on. It’s hard to feel motivated to do all the things necessary in 2026 to look, let alone be, competent, and far easier to feel like you’re failing at most of them.

Back in late March 2021, which is only five years chronologically but feels like a lifetime ago, you signed up for an online bootcamp to teach you how to prioritize all the things you wanted to do professionally. You were asked to write a projection of how your days would unfold in your ideal future. You wrote, “I want to be a mom and write essays and op-eds.” You saw that as the perfect way to combine your lifelong love of writing with your idealized vision of parenthood.

Somewhere along the way, though, you started adding more and more items to the end of that sentence, without also adding a corresponding number of hours to your day. You had no way of knowing back then that it wasn’t just time you needed, or a system of priorities; it was a mindset shift, some tough love about how you’re spending what British author Oliver Burkeman calls a person’s lifespan of “four thousand weeks.”

You had no way of anticipating that as you aged, for each momentous feat you pulled off, you’d feel a subsequent bout of sadness, fixating not on what you achieved, but what you did wrong. You didn’t know that there’d be many days you dream of getting a book deal to explore your fascination with stuff, and others you can barely fathom writing a sentence anyone would want to read.

You didn’t know that with motherhood, these feelings come with an extra heaping of guilt, because what if, by osmosis, you’re passing them down to your daughter, who you want to believe you when you tell her she can do anything? Can you be a good mom, the kind who raises a child who’s kind and smart and ambitious, if you don’t know what kind of example you’re setting around the latter?

Motherhood, it turns out, isn’t a magic cure-all that imbues you with unlimited confidence in your abilities outside of that role. It’s not a Magic Eraser for ADHD or malaise or depression or frustration. You can be doing your best as a mom and still flail in the rest of your life. You can feel more adrift at 50 than you did half your life ago. You can tell yourself you’ll figure it out. And maybe that will be true.

Either way, you’ll go to sleep listening to your daughter’s noise machine and occasional mumbles, and wake to her asking for you. If that’s the best your 50s offer, you’re still pretty damn lucky.

With love and uncertainty,

Rachel at 50

Check out Rachel Kramer Bussel’s and her personal newsletter.

Check out the rest of Oldster’s “Letter to My Younger Self” series.

I grew up in a household with a lot of rules about food, which is why I have only one: “Eat what you want, when you want.” This includes everything in the snack drawer, the candy jar, the freezer drawer dedicated to ice cream and sorbet. There is, however, a corollary: “But if you’re going to eat a huge snack an hour before dinner, I’m taking the night off from cooking.” I don’t want to prepare a meal that no one’s going to eat.

The rules of my youth were forever changing. We had the clean-plate-club mandate for a while, then the take-one-bite-of-everything edict and even—how we loved this—the-kids-eat-in-the-kitchen-because-they’re-disgusting pronouncement. (We got to read during dinner, sheer bliss.) My sister and I could pick out any junk foods we wanted on the weekly Friday grocery-shopping trip, but once our treats were gone, they were gone, no refills until the following Friday. Unless you were my father, who often made intra-week trips to High’s Dairy Store to replenish his Cheez-its stash.

After five decades of a deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, I gave up dieting, jettisoned all rules, and tried to model sanity for my daughter. Overall, it’s been great—except for my selective amnesia, which destines me to return, again and again, to food that literally makes me sick.

Then there were the things we ate only when my grandparents visited at the Christmas holidays. Bowls of nuts in their shells—walnuts, pecans, almonds, Brazil nuts. Bags of peanuts from Hickory Farms, which came in an edible shell. I gorged on these because scarcity engenders desirability. (I still can’t believe I thought I wasn’t smart enough to take economics in college.)

At any rate, after five decades of a deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, I gave up dieting, jettisoned all rules, and tried to model sanity for my daughter. Overall, it’s been great—except for my selective amnesia, which destines me to return, again and again, to food that literally makes me sick.

I’m not talking about allergies or anything serious. But there are foods I love that make me feel as if gremlins are in my stomach, gleefully slicing up the lining with little knives. The sensation always reminds me of a passage from Goodbye, Columbus when the main character, intoxicated by the abundance of fruit in his girlfriend’s home, over-indulges and “cracked his fragile bowel.”

My first ill-advised snack is found in Central American grocery stores and known as “cacahuetes estilo japonese” (peanuts Japanese style), a Mexican staple that I discovered while living in Cuernavaca. They are uncannily like the Hickory Farms peanuts my grandfather bought, except I do not remember the Hickory Farms peanuts making me feel as if there were gremlins in my stomach, stabbing me with tiny knives. Also, the Hickory Farms peanuts did not have problematic wrappers.

My other amour fou is a neighborhood pizza slice. It is huge, greasy, and delicious—and I am doubled over in pain within two hours of eating it. Interestingly—blessedly—other pizza slices do not have this effect on me because I cannot imagine a life without pizza. Pizza will be my Death Row meal. Still, I really like this particular slice and I succumb to it every four to six months or so. The body may keep the score, but would it kill the brain to jot down some notes?

It’s not just food that I return to once I’ve forgotten how much pain it causes me. Somewhere in my draft files is an unfinished letter in which I tried to explain to someone that they were like my beloved slice of pizza. Through no fault of their own, they were bad for me and I needed to jettison them from my life. I never sent the letter because the intended recipient, per Shakespeare, exited pursued by bear, or, more accurately, exited and was kind of a bear. The details are not important. What is important is that I keep forgetting certain things are not good for me. Gremlins in my stomach, gremlins in my heart. But I’m trying to change.

In the middle of this masochistic idyll, I went to see my sister, who lives in the memory unit of an assisted living facility. She has Parkinson’s and while my sharp, funny older sibling is always present inside that frail body, she struggles more and more in conversation. She suddenly volunteered, apropos of nothing: “I went to one of those everything stores. And they had the Japanese peanuts AND Beer Nuts.”

I relapsed recently. An errand took me perilously near my favorite Central American grocery store and I picked up three cellophane sleeves of peanuts to enjoy during cocktail hour over a long weekend. Martini + cacahuetes at 5 p.m. for three blissful nights, followed by stomach aches so severe that I couldn’t eat dinner.

In the middle of this masochistic idyll, I went to see my sister, who lives in the memory unit of an assisted living facility. She has Parkinson’s and while my sharp, funny older sibling is always present inside that frail body, she struggles more and more in conversation.

She suddenly volunteered, apropos of nothing: “I went to one of those everything stores. And they had the Japanese peanuts AND Beer Nuts.” (We both adore Beer Nuts, which are increasingly scarce in Baltimore and—bonus—do not tear my stomach apart.) I tried to guess what store she had visited because I know of no paradise in Baltimore where one can score this peanut exacta, but she kept saying, “No, no, that’s not it.”

I realized later—my sister has hallucinations and, chances are, she never went to a store, never ate any peanuts. I could ask my brother-in-law if this outing happened, but I’d rather pretend that my sister did, in fact, go to an “Everything Store,” where they stocked both Beer Nuts and cacahuetes estilo japonese. It’s her best hallucination since she told me: “Laura, two men here have taken an interest in me and I do not like it.” It’s “funnier” with the visual—my 70-year-old sister, gaunt in her stained nightgown, unwashed hair standing up like a rooster’s coxcomb, her backbone curved into a C shape—fretting over her sex-bomb status.

Nothing I’ve read or seen has prepared me for my sister’s dementia. When she first entered assisted living in the fall of 2021, I clung to the belief that my sister’s good days were normal and the bad days were an aberration. I’m resigned now to not knowing which version I’ll encounter on my weekly visits. When she struggles for a word or speaks utter gibberish, I smile and nod as if I understand everything. I sort of do. It’s family canon that no one could understand a word I spoke as a toddler—except for my sister. The pediatrician told our mother that we had a secret language, like twins, and that once I went to nursery school, the other students would tease me and I would start speaking normally. He was right about the first part, but I needed a year of speech therapy in order to be understood. My sister, who increasingly gropes for common nouns, still remembers the name of my speech therapist. I do not.

Nothing I’ve read or seen has prepared me for my sister’s dementia. When she first entered assisted living in the fall of 2021, I clung to the belief that my sister’s good days were normal and the bad days were an aberration. I’m resigned now to not knowing which version I’ll encounter on my weekly visits. When she struggles for a word or speaks utter gibberish, I smile and nod as if I understand everything. I sort of do.

I’ve gone eight months now without the slice of the pizza that wrecks me; there’s a frozen pizza with a Cheez-its crust that I use as a substitute. Disgusting, but not debilitating. The peanuts are harder to resist because there’s no alternative; five months is my record for abstaining.

As for my heart—well, to echo the penultimate verse of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” the one that so many singers skip, that particular organ is downright antiseptic.

My heart is clean as a surgical suite right now. But it will eventually forget, too. Lord knows what will happen then.

So interesting, what gets forgotten, what doesn’t.

So unfair, who gets to remember, who doesn’t.

Check out the whole series.

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. The paperback edition of her latest novel, Murder Takes a Vacation, was published in May.

A black three-ring binder filled with crossword puzzles sits on my bookshelf. Fifty-two of them, one for every Sunday of 1999.

Every Sunday morning of that year, my dad photocopied the puzzle from the New York Times at my mom’s office across the yard from our house. The copier was just off the tiny Tuscan kitchen, near her secretary’s desk. It smelled like toner and paper dust. I imagine him there now in the Sunday quiet, pressing the magazine section onto the glass and lifting the warm page as it slides out. At the end of the year he stacked the puzzles together, slid them into plastic sleeves, and clipped them into a black three-ring binder he gave me for Christmas. He was a devoted puzzler, filling the squares in black ink, and at some point I’d mentioned that I wanted to learn to finish them, too. The binder was heavy in my lap when I opened it.

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It’s the clearest evidence I have that my Dad loved me. I come back to it again and again in my mind, the way you circle an object in a dim room trying to understand what it is you’re seeing. That binder has the weight of proof.

Now he’s 80 years old and alone in the house where I grew up. Last November my mother packed a bag of clothes, unplugged her Nespresso machine from the kitchen counter, and left. She’s 75. They’ve been married for 48 years. When I picture the house now I see the den first, because that was always where he was: the television on, Fox News filling the room with the constant thrum of alarm, a wine glass sweating on the coffee table in front of him. Now there’s no one else moving through the other rooms. The quiet has spread.

I’m not sure when I started grieving my father. It might have been decades ago. After school I used to drop my backpack in the hallway and go straight to my parents’ bedroom, where the television was available and the carpet was soft under my feet. I would microwave a Mama Celeste pizza and carry it carefully down the hall on a cutting board, the cheese still bubbling at the edges. My father was usually in the den with the door mostly closed. I can remember the strip of television light leaking out across the hallway floor. What I can’t seem to locate is a memory that puts us clearly in the same room together for any length of time. He was present in the house the way furniture is present.

Once, much later, he was the crossword binder. Mostly he was the closed door.

The last time I saw him was November 8, 2025, a little before noon. The living room was bright with late-morning light gliding through the front windows. He sat on the red plaid couch holding a glass of Pinot Grigio, turning the stem slowly between his fingers. His socks were loose around his ankles. My brother and I sat across from him with pieces of paper that shook every time we tried to read them. We’d written intervention letters, the kind you’re supposed to bring to a moment like this. I’d spent the night before rewriting mine, trying to get the tone right—loving but firm, the websites said, clear about the consequences.

When we started reading, my father smiled. He always smiled with pursed lips to hide his broken, wine-dark teeth. At first I thought it was nerves, but the smile stayed there, soft and almost pleased, as if I’d surprised him with a sentimental speech. I realized after a few sentences that he thought we were reminiscing. The guides to interventions say you should begin that way, with memories of the person before drinking ruined their life, to remind them who they once were. My brother and I had gotten on the phone the week before to write those openings together and discovered something we hadn’t expected: we struggled to find good memories of him. We kept circling the same small handful of moments, testing them, discarding them. What we mostly had instead were scenes in which he was present but unreachable, a drink in his hand.

My letter began with the crossword binder.

The rest was about the worst parts of having a father who drank. Watching him wake up in a pool of blood. Watching him get carried out of my brother’s wedding rehearsal dinner by three men because he was too drunk to stand. Watching him throw glass in my face after an argument.

The puzzle binder is the clearest evidence I have that my Dad loved me. I come back to it again and again in my mind, the way you circle an object in a dim room trying to understand what it is you’re seeing. It has the weight of proof.

When we finished reading, we laid out the stakes. If you don’t stop drinking, we can’t be in your life anymore. We can’t continue to watch this. We will not visit, or care for you. You will lose your family.

He took a long sip of wine and set the glass down carefully on the coffee table. He refused detox. He refused rehab. He refused the possibility of quitting entirely. He offered to cut back, though none of us could quite imagine what that meant for someone who’d been drinking day and all night for years.

By then he’d already begun to lose pieces of himself. We assumed it was alcoholic dementia, though he refused to see doctors for an official diagnosis. His short-term memory is almost gone. He carries a small white notepad through the house and writes everything down: bridge games, dentist appointments, needing bananas. He doesn’t do the puzzle anymore. He hasn’t bathed since last July. He doesn’t shave, and he forgets to get haircuts. The conversations he can sustain now tend to orbit two subjects: his childhood in the distant past, which remains strangely intact, or whatever segment he’s just watched on Fox.

Months before the intervention we were sitting at dinner when he asked if I had heard about the antisemitism at Harvard. When I answered, he looked at me with mild surprise, as though I had materialized unexpectedly during the conversation. After a moment it became clear he’d forgotten that I teach college students.

I’ve been sober for almost fifteen years. One of the first things you learn in recovery is that you can’t make another person stop drinking. Anyone who’s lived inside addiction knows how brutally practical that truth is. Alcoholism is sometimes called a family disease, which means the people around the drinker eventually have to learn the same lesson: control is an illusion. Another person’s drinking is not in your hands. The only thing you can decide is how close you’re willing to stand to it. At what cost.

I think about this often in recovery meetings, when people talk about their aging fathers. Not alcoholic, just old, just fading the way people do. They talk about flying home to help with doctor’s appointments, about sorting pills into plastic trays, about the strange slow thinning of memory. A word goes missing, then a name, then the thread of a story halfway through telling it. Eventually the roles reverse and the daughter becomes the person who steadies the father when he stands up.

I respect those people enormously. I also find myself occasionally envious of them. Their grief has an object. They’re losing fathers they once had.

A few weeks ago, with nowhere else to go, my mom moved back into their house. I’m relieved that someone will be there the next time he falls. I mourn the loss of freedom she had over the last seven months, freedom from constantly bearing witness to his self annihilation.

When I imagine going home to visit my father, the picture never settles. What I see instead is the den. The door partly closed. The television already on. That room was the center of gravity in the house when I was growing up, the place everything bent around without quite entering. Even now, when I think about the house, I don’t picture the kitchen or the yard first. I see the rectangle of television light spilling into the hallway.

My mom’s things are back in the house. The rooms upstairs are quiet. My brother and I no longer pass through the front door with overnight bags or the hopeful tone people use when they are trying, again, to have a normal conversation with him.

I never intended to keep my ultimatum, though I have for the last seven months. Not because I expected him to change his mind, but because I wanted to protect myself and my daughter from the harm of exposure to his deterioration.

Sunday is both Father’s Day and my 44th birthday. I plan on calling him. I know both that he loves me and that he’s been absent from my life for decades. When the phone rings on his end, I already know what I’ll picture: the den, the television on, the glass in his hand, him getting up slowly to answer the call. The strip of light under the door.

Previously Erin Williams published “Blood, Sweat & Tears” in Oldster, and “Heterofatalism and Me” in .

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With Father’s Day in mind, here are some other father (and father-figure) pieces from the Oldster archives:

I didn’t grow up with my cousin. He, along with his two older siblings, were raised on the east coast, while I, though born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles, where I still live. I sometimes referred to them as my overachieving east coast cousins. A bit sarcastic to be sure, though accurate because all three had reached a high level of accomplishment in their different fields. I was probably being bratty, or more likely jealous, as the odd one out on the west coast.

An adorable kid 7 years my junior, now a handsome man, we had seldom seen each other, yet we had a certain affinity, which was evident in our far-too-few meetings and in our recent phone calls. He had married, had two daughters now grown and living in New York. Both he and his wife were psychoanalysts who worked from their home in Berkeley. He often said I was responsible for his winding up in California, though I’m not quite sure why.

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I have a clear memory of being 13 and traveling on my own to visit my grandparents in New York City, then on to Long Island and my aunt and uncle’s house. My uncle was a psychoanalyst, and I slept in his basement office under a picture of Freud—which might have some relevance here, or not.

I had never been to my cousin’s Berkeley home, nor did I attend his daughter’s wedding. And the same was true for him. He didn’t attend my family events, either. There wasn’t any reason for this gap in our lives, it just happened. No fault, no blame.

A few months ago, his older brother told me that at 72, strong and vital and still working, my cousin had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of dementia. I have since learned that there are approximately ten million cases of dementia diagnosed world-wide each year. A staggering number, and currently there are close to sixty million people, along with their friends and family, living with this nightmare disease.

Although we rarely talked on the phone, I called my cousin right away. In recent years, our few communications had been through email or text, those impersonal methods we all resort to. Again, no one’s fault, just the way it was. But I knew I had to hear his voice. He sounded wonderful, laughing and chatting. Would ebullient be too strong a word? Maybe not, or maybe it wasn’t so much his voice, but my ears wanting to hear some sign of hope.

He told me he had no intention of going down the inevitable path before him, or words to that effect, and instead he planned to go to Switzerland, where he would die through compassionate assisted suicide. Strangely, I wasn’t really surprised or aghast. I understood as much as anyone on the outside could understand, and I thought, Yes, I would do the same faced with similar circumstances. How easy it was to be so cavalier from my distant position, even as the gravity of such a decision began to take hold.

A few months ago, his older brother told me that at 72, strong and vital and still working, my cousin had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of dementia. I have since learned that there are approximately ten million cases of dementia diagnosed world-wide each year. A staggering number, and currently there are close to sixty million people, along with their friends and family, living with this nightmare disease.

It was amazing to me that we could have this conversation, but we did. He also said on this first call that since he could no longer work, he would have more time and he would visit me. I was pleased, and for all the horror of the situation, when we rang off, I realized he’d given me some strange level of comfort. Bizarre, but there it was.

Two weeks later, I called again. I left a message, and he returned my call. He had a date, he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant. A “D date,” he said. My mind blurred, dulled, perhaps I hadn’t heard him correctly. What? Late October. Switzerland. And now his voice sounded different, still strong with conviction, but nevertheless, a certain distance hard to describe. When I thought about it later, I realized that for all our new-found closeness, a kind of silent wall had gone up between us. Not unlike what I’d experienced when going through chemo treatment years ago. No one else could quite understand me then, or him now.

We talked a bit more and then he put his wife on the line. It was so obvious they were in this together. And, yes, she said, it was surreal when I asked how she was doing. (How would I expect she would be doing? What a question.) She said that she felt they were fortunate to be able to take this step.

I said I would like to visit, and somewhat dazed, I hung up.

She sent me the best dates for me to go to Berkeley.

I made plans to see him the following week. Not when the rest of the family was expected, but on my own, for just a few hours, and, although I was assured I was welcome to stay, I declined. She added that he was much better one-on-one, which I was happy to hear.

In the meantime, I wandered in this other-world of melancholia I found difficult to grasp. We’ve all experienced hearing of a sudden death or of someone so ill the outcome was inevitable. I’d experienced the horror of others’ suicides, the too-young death of friends, and three years ago my husband’s illness and eventual passing. But this was unlike anything else, something I’d never imagined, mixed with the added regret that we hadn’t spent more time together. That we’d gone about our lives without making more of an effort. But regret is useless unless there is something to do about it, a way to change it for the future. But what if that future didn’t exist?

There are approximately thirty-thousand assisted suicides every year throughout the world. However, the numbers are not totally reliable, in part because there are so few countries where it’s legalized. And within the United States, only ten states and the District of Columbia have some form of end-of-life process one can choose. The rules and regulations made it impossible for my cousin to carry out his wishes in California.

It was the day before I planned to see him when, surprisingly, he called me, once again sounding wonderfully strong. He couldn’t wait to see me, telling me he’d had a crush on me since he was 8 years old. He’d said this in the past and it never failed to make me smile. We talked about what time I would arrive, when I would leave. It was a short conversation, and when we hung up, I was left alone wanting to scream to the sky, to passersby, to the world: Do you see what is happening? Don’t waste a minute.

He told me he had no intention of going down the inevitable path before him, or words to that effect, and instead he planned to go to Switzerland, where he would die through compassionate assisted suicide. Strangely, I wasn’t really surprised or aghast. I understood as much as anyone on the outside could understand, and I thought, Yes, I would do the same faced with similar circumstances.

I went to Berkeley and returned home by early evening. It took me twenty-four hours to absorb it all, although I thought it might well take the rest of my life.

I had arrived earlier than expected, but he was at the door, a huge smile on his sweet face. Still in good shape and looking well, we hugged warmly, and I knew immediately that my decision to see him alone was right. His wife was home, but working, and I didn’t see her until a few hours later, shortly before I was scheduled to leave.

He ushered me in and we quickly set upon a guided tour of the art in their expansive home, where they’d lived since 1979, a classic 1902 wonder lovingly restored and remodeled throughout the years. I never knew of my cousin’s great interest in art, and as we wandered the rooms, all of which were stylishly simple, he told me the story of every piece of art, some made by friends, others by artists who became friends, all varied and beautiful. The information came readily as he explained the way the artist had worked, expressing his admiration, along with his delight and luck at each discovery. There wasn’t one item I wouldn’t have been thrilled to have in my own home. How interesting that our sensibilities were so aligned.

He also showed me frames he had made, and how he’d found different and unique ways to display certain pieces. The whole of it felt organic to the house and utterly beautiful.

His enthusiasm was obvious and didn’t waver, and when the tour was over, we sat close in the living room, then stood in the kitchen, arms around each other, our foreheads touching, and we talked. I didn’t ask questions so much as he offered answers. How he, together with his wife, had made such a momentous decision, how he’d sat with each of his patients and explained why he could no longer see them, and how they’d expressed their overwhelming love and support. He also spoke of his older sister, who’d finally placed her husband in a care facility after he’d suffered from Alzheimer’s for many years. What his sister did was not for the benefit of her husband—that she wasn’t helping him by keeping him alive, my cousin said. And I agreed.

My cousin and his wife had also enlisted a small group of good friends who they named the “trust committee,” to help guide them, because they knew not to be alone in this, but to rely on smart people who had their best interests at heart. This was just about one of the most brilliant things I’d ever heard of and another reminder of the importance of friends and community. Before I left, the two of us sat on large rocks outside in the small front garden he’d created. It was a clear, crisp beautiful day in this unique city where I’d gone to school so long ago.

Since my trip to Berkeley, I have talked to him several times. Our conversations are like a sweet breeze, his voice soft and gentle. As someone who spent his life listening to people, deciphering their mysteries, he is a man who measures his words; there is a calmness about him and I listen intently. Because he truly has something to say and I don’t want to miss any of it. Each time, after I hang up, I sit with the sound of his voice, sit with him as a meditative feeling comes over me.

When I call and don’t hear back for a couple of days, I try not to be anxious. I knew they would be traveling to New York, although I wasn’t sure when. And then he called me. And yes, they were in Brooklyn visiting one of his daughters, and friends were coming down from Connecticut to visit; there was a show to see, and a trip to Beacon, because he was interested in the art. Who knew it was a place we both wanted to go? We talk about Dia at Beacon and he tells me he is reading my second novel and, “liking the hell out of it.” My head swims. That he is reading any book, but my book? If he were my only reader, it would be enough.

I’m on my early morning solo walk, and he calls. Not a return call, but out of the blue, a call he has initiated. He tells me about a friend who came to see him and brought his guitar and about the song his friend sang, which was about moss, and he speaks of the famous moss garden in Japan with the significance of endurance and the passage of time. I don’t ask if he’s been, and only hope he has. This time I tell him more than I have before. Beyond how I admire him, I tell him what he has given me and what I have learned in this short time. That there hasn’t been a day I don’t think of him and that will never stop. I know I will add him to the daylight dreams of my late husband.

In the background, I hear his wife’s voice, and he tells me she sends her love and I do the same. I tell him that I’ve not contacted her now, (I know she is amazingly capable and has many people around her, including, of course, her daughters), but that I will always be available to her. There will be a time. A smart and sensitive woman, the circumstances under which our connection might deepen couldn’t be more poignant. And when I tell him I hope to reach out to his daughters as well, he responds by saying that it makes him happy to know.

Invariably, I had questions that I didn’t ask. Why would he take this action so soon? Too soon, was what I first thought. But when we were together, he told me the doctors said he had a four-month window. That was it. After that point, he would not be aware enough, and he had to be completely cognizant of what he was doing. The doctors also told him: you will think you’re fine, but you’re not, and I tried to imagine sitting across a desk and hearing those words.

I’ve realized, too, that this course of action wasn’t something you might write into your will or health directive and appoint someone to fulfill. It doesn’t work like that. In California, one of the few right-to-die states, you must be within six months of death to opt in. But dementia or Alzheimer’s doesn’t have an end date. And the prognosis is different for every individual, depending upon the age at which it was diagnosed. On average, a person between 65 and 84 has a projected lifespan of four to eight ever-declining years. Faced with overwhelming evidence, and with such a profound finality, what my cousin was doing was, to me, a supreme act of bravery that was almost impossible to comprehend.

I’m out of town when he and his wife return to Berkeley, so I call him from the countryside in upstate New York. He has seen art, a Broadway show, his sister, his nieces, his daughters, and friends. He tells me what each of his daughters plan to do on the day he will die and the amazing words they have said to him. And about the friends who gather to honor him, and how he was the one who determined the way it would play out, not with a collection of maudlin words, but with singing to a friend’s music, and animated conversation. I feel privileged to hear it all.

We have never used the word goodbye at the end of a call. Talk to you soon, I would say. One more time, and then one more. Please.

I know I will think of him every day until the day and beyond, forever grateful to him for opening up his home and his heart, and for all the things he has said to me; for giving me the gift of reconnection, and teaching me a new lesson. Not on how to die, but how to live.

Originally from New York, Janet Clare grew up in Los Angeles, and attended UC Berkeley. She created and ran a children’s apparel business for thirteen years until escaping to write her first novel. Time Is the Longest Distance was published in 2018 by Vine Leaves Press, and her second novel, True Home, was published in 2025. She is currently completing her third novel.

This is the third 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. Joyce Wadler performed a version of this story at the second event at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan on March 4th, 2026.

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I grew up in a Jewish resort town in the Catskills called Fleischmanns. Towns have personalities. Woodstock, which was forty minutes east of us, was arty, Phoenicia, midway, was outdoorsy. Fleischmanns, in the summer, when the hotels were open, was rude.

It was like there was a sign on the highway, “Welcome to Fleischmanns. Say anything you want.”

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And the person with the biggest, rudest, mouth was my mother, Milly.

We had a big old house with a lot of extra rooms and naturally we’d get a lot of family from the city, dropping in, often unannounced.

One day, one of my father’s cousins shows up—my mother’s least favorite relative, Marvin. My mother greets him at the door and says, “Marvin, I plain can’t stand you and nobody in the family can stand you, Go to a motel.”

I also had a beautiful cousin named Roberta—we called her Gorgeous Roberta—who had been a Miss Yonkers. That was a title that impressed them in my family. Roberta came up to the country with a series of boyfriends. They didn’t stay with us, they’d find a hotel where they could have some privacy. My mother seemed fine with that, she’d say “Your cousin Roberta changes boyfriends like other women change their underwear.’

My relationship with my mother, as a teenager, is awful. But there is a lot that, even as a teenager, I can appreciate about her: She’s funny when the person she’s attacking isn’t you. She’s creative. She’s a feminist before feminism. Fleischmanns has a volunteer fire department, all male, with a ladies auxiliary, that she refuses to join. “Why should I make coffee for some man?” she says, which I realize, years later, is a template for my career.

Then one day my mother gets a call and finds out her brother down in Yonkers, Roberta’s father, has had a massive heart attack and died. She has to track down Roberta, who’s maybe 19, and break the news to her he is gone. It takes a lot of calls, but my mother finally tracks her down and I hear her holler.

“Roberta, you tramp! Your father is dead and you killed him.”

Pretty impressive huh? You didn’t have to wonder, “Did I do something to annoy Milli?’ ‘Could I have hurt Milly’s feelings and she’s too shy to tell me.”

My relationship with my mother, as a teenager, is awful. We have screaming fights. I see movies, like the one where Elizabeth Taylor is a rich girl messing around with Montgomery Clift and the mothers and daughters called each other ‘Darling’ and I am stupefied. Elizabeth Taylor, in an evening dress with a tulle skirt, comes downstairs and kisses her mother and her mother kisses her back.

Kiss, kiss. “Hello darling.” “Hello, darling.”

I can’t get over it. It’s like seeing a life form from another planet. I figure it’s a gentile thing.

There is a lot that, even as a teenager, I can appreciate about my mother: She’s funny when the person she’s attacking isn’t you. She’s creative. She’s a feminist before feminism. Fleischmanns has a volunteer fire department, all male, with a ladies auxiliary, which held bake sales, and she refused of course to join.

“Why should I make coffee for some man?” she says, which I realize, years later, is a template for my career. When I go into newspapers, I never take a job as a secretary or researcher.

“Why should I make coffee for some man?”

Our relationship improves after I leave home and my parents move to Florida. My mother makes a Golden Girl group of friends. After my father dies, she starts playing the stock market and turns out to be one of those brilliant, instinctive investors. She’s generous. When I get breast cancer and need surgery, she’s on the next plane with what she calls “three big ones”—that’s $3,000—pinned to the inside of her bra. She’s still not a diplomat. She’s likely to start a conversation with, ‘Your brother, who doesn’t have a brain in his head…’, but what are you gonna do?

Watch Joyce Wadler tell this story onstage at the March 4th Oldster Variety Hour at Joe’s Pub:

Then, when’s she 87, my mother has a major stroke—she can’t walk, she’s confused about who’s alive and who’s dead, she doesn’t understand distance. And this amazing thing happens: My mother becomes nice.

My brothers and I move her from Florida to a nursing home in Westchester. When we arrive, she says, “Ahh, Light of my life! You’re here! I’m so happy.”

How’s your day going, Ma?

“Now that you’re here, it’s wonderful! Couldn’t be any better.”

Other parts of her personality are still there: She still thinks she’s the most fascinating person in the room, she still thinks she’s irresistible to men. She strikes up a relationship with the one guy in her unit, who, like her is in a wheelchair. She asks me to find them a cheap hotel in New York. This is complete fantasy land. I send out a panicked text to my friend, Lew: My mother is trying to get into some guy’s diapers.”

Eventually, the guy gets transferred to another unit and my mother moves on. I go in one day and she says, “I want a baby.”

I’m stunned.

I say, “Ma, you hated babies. You told me my whole life you expected me to be like a little doll and I screamed all the time.”

“I want a baby.”

I say, “Ma, you’re 89. You’re too old to have babies.”

“I want a baby.”

This in not a three-day obsession. This goes on for weeks and finally Terri, my mother’s aide, tells me this sometimes happens after strokes. The nursing home has very lifelike baby dolls and she’ll she if she can get one for my mother.

I go in one day and she says, “I want a baby.” I’m stunned. I say, “Ma, you hated babies. You told me my whole life you expected me to be like a little doll and I screamed all the time.” “I want a baby.” I say, “Ma, you’re 89. You’re too old to have babies.” “I want a baby.”

The next time I come in to visit, my mother is clutching this very lifelike doll baby. I don’t want to sound like I’m having sibling rivalry with a doll, but this doll doesn’t look quite right mentally. It looks like it has a developmental problems because its mother did crack. It’s got a pushed-in face, its eyes look a little crossed. It’s wearing a tacky, pink dress in a thin, chintzy fabric. Like the designer went to the garment district and said, ‘Whadaya have that’ll burst into flames?’

And my mother loves this doll. She tells me its name is Beth. She takes it with her in her wheelchair and shows it off to everybody, which is very upsetting to me. This is the woman who parlayed $150,000 into over a million and now she is playing with dolls.

I try to be nice to this smug little shit of a doll. I go to Gap Baby and pick up a dress and sweater for it, which turns out to be much too big, and makes the doll look like that starving kid from Les Miserables. I wheel my mother around the nursing home with the doll, I try to smile when other daughters, wheeling their mothers, say to mine, “Oh, you’ve got a baby,” but I hate Beth.

One morning I come the the nursing home and my mother is holding the doll and she says to me, “She likes to be kissed in the morning.”

I say, “Who doesn’t?”

“Give her a little kiss.”

“I’m not kissing a doll.”

I try to be nice to this smug little shit of a doll. I go to Gap Baby and pick up a dress and sweater for it, which turns out to be much too big, and makes the doll look like that starving kid from Les Miserables. I wheel my mother around the nursing home with the doll, I try to smile when other daughters, wheeling their mothers, say to mine, “Oh, you’ve got a baby,” but I hate Beth.

Then one day my brother Martin says to me, “I notice when you’re with Ma, you never look at the doll. It’s like you don’t want it to be there.”

This surprises me because with the exception of refusing to kiss the doll, I feel I have been very accepting of the little shit. I didn’t realize how obvious it was that I hated it. And I realize that if my brother picked up on it, my mother, even in this damaged state, has probably picked up on it, and that has to be painful for her. You love something, you don’t want the people around you holding their noses when they see it. You want them to love it, too.

So I go back to Baby Gap. I find a very pretty cotton pink onesie and make sure that this time I get the right size. I take it up to the nursing home and say to my mother, ‘Look what I got for Beth.” I help her get the doll dressed and when we go to the snack bar, I prop it up so it can sit with us. I accept Beth into the family.

And that’s what I did for love.

Joyce Wadler wrote the “I Was Misinformed” humor column for The New York Times, where she was a reporter for 15 years. She's been a reporter for The Washington Post, New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. She wishes she'd gone into television.

A while back she took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. She writes a hilarious newsletter here on Substack. Check out her novel, The Satyr in Bungalow D, which is semi-autobiographical.

My physical condition has always been above average—not an NBA player’s or marathoner’s condition but, having lived in backwoods countryside for ages now, for over sixty years I’ve hiked hard at least an hour a day, up steep ridges and down. I know every tree, rock, and cellar-hole for miles around. I’d celebrate if I could see any of these markers today.

In bad weather, I’ve ridden a stationary bike or used a rowing machine. In the warmer months, close as we are to the beautiful Connecticut River, I’ve rowed or paddled at speed for the same hour-plus. Until my 80^th year (I’m now 83), I competed in flatwater kayak races and always found myself at the head of the pack, occasionally winning even in events without age classes. I long to watch the cottonwood-studded banks roll by as I pull my way along that stretch of water.

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Two winters ago, however, in a rush, everything seemed to crumble. I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and given a pacemaker. Sinus arrhythmia persisting, I’m to be scheduled sometime in the coming months for an ablation, the removal of heart tissue that is causing that condition.

Late last winter, a cystoscopy revealed a tiny malignant tumor in my bladder. It was scraped off in an outpatient procedure, and further probing showed no spread. I went on to immunotherapy treatments—not chemo, thank fortune—but the introduction to my bladder, once a week, of tuberculosis cells. (How do researchers discover such remedies?) These were administered for six consecutive Thursdays.

Further treatments will only be three weeks at a time, the aim now “preventative, not curative,” according to my very terse Icelandic oncologist. Last week, after a welcome month’s lull, yet another cystoscopy gave me a clean bill of health. These sessions must continue, though at mercifully greater intervals, for three more years, unfortunately, assuming I still tread the earth that long. Of course, I know I’m lucky to have them if I want to keep treading it.

My physical condition has always been above average. Two winters ago, however, in a rush, everything seemed to crumble. I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and given a pacemaker. Sinus arrhythmia persisting, I’m to be scheduled sometime in the coming months for an ablation, the removal of heart tissue that is causing that condition. Late last winter, a cystoscopy revealed a tiny malignant tumor in my bladder.

Mine is hardly a difficult or painful regimen anyhow. In fact, I’m half ashamed to describe such penny-ante stuff when I think of what a beloved sister-in-law endures as she deals with metastatic breast cancer, or of a fellow-poet friend who’s long been cursed with Parkinson’s disease. At my age, sadly, I could provide more examples.

My cancer treatments’ only side effect is deep fatigue. But to my frustration, fatigue severely cuts into my exercise. I walk a mile or less these days before I begin to play out. As a writer, I’m already quite sedentary, but for too long, unable to push my body, I’ve witnessed its degeneration and undergone the consequent emotional effects. I pause in my walks, look up at the hills I used to scale, and am astounded by my diminished capacities.

A principal cause of my gloominess, however, has less to do with my torpor than with the sheer number of medical visits I must pay—to my cardiologist or my urologist or my general practitioner, or random others.

So many additional bothers have lately piled up that they’re almost comical. (I conjure those old Laurel and Hardy films, which inevitably conclude with a panoramic shot of mass dilapidation.) I’ve worn a partial denture since my youthful hockey-playing days, when we used no helmets, let alone face masks. A week back, it fell apart. Almost simultaneously, both hearing aids did the same. I’m barely able to hear the phone, so as we wait out these devices’ repair, my wife has communicated by shouting and/or by self-repetition. Enough teeth remain, at least, that I need no soft diet.

So here I sit, a gap-toothed, almost stone-deaf old man—who ten or so days ago barked his shin...on something. I don’t remember the event but it left me with a painful hematoma, which has been slow to heal, partly because, as I haven’t mentioned, my daily pharmacy’s worth of pills includes a blood thinner.

One brief coda to this organ recital, as my late surgeon-writer friend Richard Selzer described it: Last week, I woke up with a painful ankle. I assumed I’d traumatized myself again without knowing how or where or when. The pain migrated to my toes, and when it worsened, I went to my GP. She diagnosed cellulitis, infection having entered the leg via that injured shin. Her remedy? Antibiotics and compression stockings, which are irksome to get on or off and even to wear.

Why do I write all this down? Well, mostly because “all this” has so preoccupied me that I’ve done little other writing. On the cusp of publishing my 27^th book, still I feel my mood darken if I don’t have some writing project going.

Perhaps later than a laboratory rat might have done as much, I concluded that my deterioration and depression should be, in part, my subject matter. If illnesses and weakening had depressed me and curtailed my desire to write, to write about that deprivation might offer a way out of it. The remedy already seems to be working.

I’m only following my own advice over the forty years I taught “creative writing,” if one can teach such a thing at all. In those days, I regarded myself less as an instructor than as a co-conspirator because I had no prescriptive advice. Every time I heard some alleged authority propose a rule for writing, I’d think of an author who’d violated it—and earned my deep admiration.

Why do I write all this down? Well, mostly because “all this” has so preoccupied me that I’ve done little other writing. On the cusp of publishing my 27^th book, still I feel my mood darken if I don’t have some writing project going. Perhaps later than a laboratory rat might have done as much, I concluded that my deterioration and depression should be, in part, my subject matter.

When students were stuck, I would tell them, “Just go notice something and start writing about it.” If that something had caught their attention, I suggested, there must have been something about it that occasioned the reaction, one which they themselves would likely not understand prior to the act of writing itself.

That counsel put me at odds with workshop mentors who advise aspirant authors to “write what you know” (a mantra as absurdly reductive as “show, don’t tell,” but that’s a separate issue). I myself write to discover things I didn’t know I knew. Often, having noticed my own something, I start writing about it in the faith that the process will lead me to my themes.

This approach takes me to connections I’d never have made otherwise. I’m reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s remarks on “Good Country People.” During that narrative, an itinerant Bible salesman meets a farm owner’s daughter, a deeply secular young woman with a wooden leg. According to O’Connor, she had no idea when she started that the contemptible con artist would have a sexual interlude with this daughter, much less that he’d steal her wooden leg. O’Connor just remembered a sketchy Bible salesman she’d observed somewhere and let the narrative carry her forward.

I’m less often prompted by things or people I’ve seen than by something I’ve heard or read, maybe in childhood, maybe yesterday: a snatch of text or conversation, a jazz lick, a sound from the natural world, something on the radio. I could go on. Then I trust my written language to lead me to why that sound or utterance struck me in the first place.

When I’m asked what still keeps me writing in my 80s, I reply that it’s the same thing that has impelled me for sixty-plus years: the joy of discovery. If I know too clearly where I’m going a priori, if I have what students call an “idea,” there will be no such discovery, which means my writing will be toneless. As my Vermont forefather Robert Frost said, “no surprise in the writer, none in the reader.”

In my classes and tutorials, I often adapted noted architect Louis Kahn’s counsel to his students, several of them friends of mine. Kahn said they must determine “what the building wants to be.” To beginning poets especially, I suggested that their own noticing and the written language it engendered might indicate what their written work wanted to be. If early versions were crude, they could try as many revisions as necessary.

In my own instance, I’ve just reconsidered a passage by an author named Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi that caught my attention on a Substack. His book is Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory: “We ourselves are periodically aware that memory is among the most fragile and capricious of our faculties.”

When I’m asked what still keeps me writing in my 80s, I reply that it’s the same thing that has impelled me for sixty-plus years: the joy of discovery. If I know too clearly where I’m going a priori, if I have what students call an “idea,” there will be no such discovery, which means my writing will be toneless. As my Vermont forefather Robert Frost said, “no surprise in the writer, none in the reader.”

Why did I transcribe those words and what might they have to do with matters I’ve been addressing here, even including reports on my health? I couldn’t answer neatly when I began and still can’t. All I can say is that this morning I read that passage and started writing. In fact, I’ll now reveal, that’s where these reflections started. After my crude beginning, the shape of this essay has changed more than once, its structure in particular molded to my own purposes, whatever these are in the end—assuming they find an end.

In any case, having read that passage, I wondered if I could recall a time when I felt debilitation akin to mine now. A tenacious case of childhood flu leapt instantly to mind, one that kept me away from 5^th grade classes for two weeks. That’s a span I can easily reconstruct in my head, even summoning the odor and taste that the illness summoned. But the clearest memory is that for the first time in my life, I read a book—a grownup’s book—all at once, cover to cover. My way through it had felt like a dream, such that I was genuinely surprised when I saw that I’d done so.

The novel was Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, whose final line reads, “But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.” I have known those words by heart for 73 years. They moved me as little else had in my small decade on earth. Wang’s sons hold the old man up, assuring him they’d never sell the family farm, but secretly signaling to one another their intention to do just that.

Why this should have seemed so poignant to a 10-year-old remains a bit mysterious, but yes, I remember that whole moment perfectly. Or at least I remember my version of it. I’m acutely conscious, that is, of how accurate is Yerushalmi’s description of memory as fragile and capricious. My likening of the two periods of convalescence seems...interesting. But has memory edited the experience? Am I even sure that my account of this morning is precise?

My wife and I greatly respect and like our general practitioner. In our new patient interview, after asking predictable questions about our health, physical and mental, she inquired about our end-of-life preferences. We answered quite differently. At meeting’s end, a twinkle in her eye, she pointed at my wife and said “Tigger,” then at me, “Eeyore.”

And it’s true, my wife inclines to optimism and I incline the opposite way. So it’s strange, as she points out, that I often recall physical or psychological setbacks in a rather lily-gilding way. Thirty-two years ago, for instance, I cut myself badly with a chainsaw, but my account of that misfortune to others always leaves out any pain I felt. My memory simply doesn’t include much pain, yet my partner, who drove me, and whose thoughts I’ve trusted for 45 years, says I whimpered about how I hurt the whole way to the emergency room.

Do I allow even recent recollection to edit and thus to mislead me? No doubt. The very altering of my tale’s progression, my “literary” strategy, casts some doubt on any claim I might make to straightforwardness.

But that may be the subject of another essay, one longer, I suspect, than I’m allowing myself here in my diminished condition.

Check out all of Sydney Lea’s contributions to Oldster Magazine.

My mother used to draw these pictures when I was little and she was high.

My sister and I would sit there with her and draw, too. My mother loved to be around my sister but my mother couldn’t not use drugs. It created lovely long lunches like this.

My mother had an autograph show in September. At just 62 she can no longer read or write, but she can sign her name—the celebrity part of her brain remains relatively untouched. She’s still Tatum O’Neal, the actress, after all, which is how she used to introduce herself when she made reservations. She still gets her nails done bi-weekly, by a woman who comes to her, who I have to Venmo. She gets her hair done at the fanciest place in West Hollywood, sometimes near Rihanna. When she gets nervous she needs to be more blonde. She vapes in the Uber, even when they ask her not to. She wants what she wants when she wants it, and she makes “no” feel impossible.

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In certain respects, my mother’s stroke, caused by a drug overdose—most of which was prescribed, everything except the meth—has made her the mother I always hoped for. She’s relatively reliable, and accountable. She’s full of love—she’s a fan. I know where she is, and what she’s doing. She cares and she listens, and sometimes she asks how you’re doing, too, and not because she knows she’s supposed to, and not because if she queries then you might be more willing to ask her.

Because she wants to know. I always knew that was in there—in her. I remember it from when I was a kid, before drugs were prescribed by doctors, and so there was using, or there wasn’t using, and there was clean time, and some of those times were mom times. These usually coincided with periods where she seemed to forget to blonde her hair. And she always, with her kiddos, looks so happy.

And she’s safe. Most importantly, she’s safe. My whole life I thought if I wasn’t around then something bad would happen, because it usually did. Once, I was supposed to visit her over spring break or something, but I had just fallen for a girl and I wanted to take her on a trip. When I got back my mother had overdosed, again, and was in the hospital, and she told me it was my fault. If I had only visited, then this wouldn’t have happened.

My mother had an autograph show in September. At just 62 she can no longer read or write, but she can sign her name—the celebrity part of her brain remains relatively untouched. She’s still Tatum O’Neal, the actress, after all, which is how she used to introduce herself when she made reservations.

People used to ask me about codependency, and I would say I don’t think you know what that means. I don’t think I’m codependent because I don’t think something bad is going to happen if I don’t answer the phone when she’s calling, I know something bad will, because it already has. It always has, and she blamed me because she believed it. If she couldn’t be a mom then it wasn’t worth trying at life.

So my choice, today, is to not care, and move on, or try and help her. My problem, then, was that I didn’t know how to fail. I didn’t know what to do if I helped her and she still struggled because she was wrong. She’s a good person, allowed to live a good life, and she doesn’t need a reason. I don’t mind that I tried with her for so long, but for a long time I wished I knew how.

But one day, after she threatened to kill herself, it occurred to me that I’d tried as hard as I could and if she really didn’t want to live anymore then that wasn’t my fault. The only thing you can do for an addict, or at least one like me and her, is provide an example of how to live a different way, and dear God stop trying to convince them.

An addict doesn’t not love you, at least in my mother’s case, but an addict robs from you your peace of mind, and they can’t see it. You always think the moment you leave them alone that they’re in danger. You monitor their moods—having to take their temperature—because if it falls below a certain degree on the thermostat something like thunder rolls in, and then rain, and it’s difficult to find shelter. I still feel this sometimes, even though I know she’s okay. It’s impractical—unintellectual—but it’s in your bones.

Given that Tatum has become a progressive freedom fighter on Instagram, I get nervous when she watches the news too much, or participates with reels, because it brings her down. But it also gives her purpose—she’s always had a cause—so wherever it takes her is justified. The world is troubled, no matter your perspective, and sad things are allowed to make people sad; I can’t control that, but I don’t have to take it personally. Compassion and empathy can make me feel drained, but I don’t mind that anymore. I’d rather be helpful, and tired, no matter how hard, then spend too much time considering me. I was what used to keep me awake at night. How are you helps me rest.

I don’t fight off how I was raised anymore; I don’t run from it. It is neither entirely that I’m traumatized, and need to spend my life healing, or rub some dirt on it, and quit complaining, but both. Embrace the parts you like, change the parts you don’t. I’m attentive, and caring. My mom taught me how to love, and I love big, and I feel big, but that’s okay, too. My life doesn’t have to hinge so much on feelings. I can feel things I don’t like and survive them. I steady my boat, so if I have to reach in the water and grab someone up, they can’t pull me in with them.

I still get scared when I don’t order the right things for her on Sundays, but only because she won’t leave me alone till I get it right. She currently is in dire need—“now would be best”—of Yerba Mate tea bags. She gets disappointed and then terrified when she’s running out of vapes. You begin to understand why it may be ever more complicated—or at least different complicated—for celebrities to get clean, because people just don’t say no to them very often. When I go out to dinner with my dad, no matter where we go, he stares over his reading glasses for a while—I guess pretending to scour the menu—before ordering something that he likes to eat at home, that definitely wasn’t written anywhere before him.

“How about like some, uhh, sliced mozzarella with a bit of prosciutto, a couple of pastas—bolognese if you have it—steamed broccoli, and some brown rice?”

I always shake my head, hoping that they’ll say we don’t have that, but they always say yes. Sometimes I imagine a manager running to the back of the house and telling one of the bus boys to go to the nearest Gristedes and buy brown rice, broccoli, and maybe even easily sliceable mozzarella cheese, because they’ve already accounted for the cheese in house for the dishes that they have to make. The bus boy comes back sweating, with a plastic bag tied to his forearm, having biked the six blocks back and forth from the only 24-hour supermarket in the area, just in time for my dad to be looking at his watch while they drop his custom order before him, somehow frustrated that it isn’t quite as he’d imagined it should be.

The point I’m making, fundamentally, has very little to do with the way my mother is only just starting to hear no, as she’s become a person, or that my dad still doesn’t much, outside of his wife and his daughters, who, thank god, NO him eternally, but just that the heartbreak that this causes Academy Award-winner Tatum O’Neal might be saving her life, and mine. My refusal to buy her vapes is teaching her that she can’t get whatever she wants whenever she wants it—which is, for some, the definition of addiction—and it teaches me, again, how to say no. What’s right and what feels good are most often not the same thing, and often opposite things. Sometimes after you do what’s right you feel better though. Perhaps that’s integrity, and perhaps that’s what leads to the sustainability of being grown up.

And so back to the autograph show, where other very grown-up former stars find ways to pay for their surgery co-pays and concierge psychiatrists. My mother used to do these in the 2010s as the money got thin. When I was in the hospital, she flew to New York and held my hand while got my vitals read every few hours. She was mired in her own issues as she sat by my bedside, wearing surgical gloves to protect her from the mites she had decided were burrowing through her skin, so it wasn’t necessarily a meeting of the minds. I was there for a month, and she watched 90 Day Fiancé beside me, but what I didn’t know was that she was staying at a nearby hotel, and that it wasn’t a cheap hotel. On the back end, she had an autograph show to do. This is how she planned on paying for said month-long stay at her suite.

This is how she lived her life. Money was spent—we’d figure it out later. Before she overdosed, the last time, the stroke time, my mother had spent almost all of her money buying dresses from Marni online, because I think she’d decided that there wouldn’t be a later. But she made it, and there are still beautiful dresses. I think my sister wears them. She’s been through a lot. She deserves it.

I got a call before the autograph event from a woman in her 80s who claimed to be organizing it. She called me from a landline—a 310—with her 90-year-old husband on the other line in the kitchen, to explain that they would send a car—I believe they even said stretch limo—provide the images for her to sign, and take care of her. Sometimes I wonder how these people get my number, but it usually comes back to money. When there’s money involved they tend to figure it out.

In certain respects, my mother’s stroke, caused by a drug overdose—most of which was prescribed, everything except the meth—has made her the mother I always hoped for. She’s relatively reliable, and accountable. She’s full of love—she’s a fan. I know where she is, and what she’s doing. She cares and she listens, and sometimes she asks how you’re doing, too, and not because she knows she’s supposed to, and not because if she queries then you might be more willing to ask her.

My mother’s hair is dark, and she sits in her chair, most of the day, doing Zoom meetings and watching episodes of The First 48 between airings of Meet the Press. Not always happy, but content. But she gets to feel like a star again, and, even though it might pull on her equanimity, I think she’s ready for that not to be her everything.

I was there when they did a photoshoot for Variety. My mother was great that day. She lit up with the camera on her. She smiled and that smile rolled past her shoulders and then hit the ground like a wave, and the water from that wave washed over, and, for some—for me—through—the onlookers, the fans, who watched her. Her smile—the moneymaker, the parasite—infected us all, and I thought to myself—“My mother’s great at this.”

The best part of being a celebrity, it seems to me, is that sometimes you can make someone else’s day, and my mother knows that. She lets in sunshine, but only for you to feel. She can make your day, and will, so you let her, even if it sometimes hurts. If your boat’s strong enough to withstand the tide, which is really hard to do and requires a lot of patching, why not try and pull ‘em all up.

A version of this essay was originally published in Literary Hub. Check out ’s newsletter, .

“Imagine you’re her,” my voice coach tells me. She’s at the piano, and I’m bouncing on my toes beside her, trying to relax as I gaze at the lake view from her living room. The voice she wants me to imagine is big, loud, and full of emotion, a voice with the power to reach past that lake. A voice that belongs to a character I made up.

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Several months earlier, I’d come up with the idea to record two songs that I’d written, on a whim, for the rock star character in my new novel, The World to See. These would be fun, I thought, a way to create a little extra environment around the book. I was happy with the lyrics I’d written, and thrilled when a singer-songwriter friend agreed to put them to music. But when I tried the chords she’d written on the guitar I rarely touch, the tremulous sound of my own voice reminded me that I’d overlooked something crucial. I hadn’t sung in public for nearly half my life, and this wasn’t fun at all. This was a bad idea.

I read once that when we hear a song we like, we either imagine ourselves the singer or the person being sung to. In high school, I imagined I was the singer. I styled myself a Janis Joplin wannabe; cigarette in the corner of my mouth, torn jeans, my “wild child” attitude obscuring my anxious heart.

Back then, my friends and I all wanted to sing like Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Joan Armatrading, the Beatles, the Stones. We sat cross-legged in circles on the grass in the park and sang. We sang in the school’s smoking lounge. (This was the ‘70s.) We sang in each other’s bedrooms and rec rooms, and most of us toted guitars everywhere, even if we could barely play.

In college, my Joplin persona splintered into Maggie Roche and Donna Godchaux-shaped pieces. With those singers in mind, I attempted close harmony in dorm rooms and apartment kitchens with friends, but I accepted that where I belonged was wailing backup vocals behind the band boys at parties.

“Imagine you’re her” meant putting myself in my novel’s rock star character’s place. “How does she feel about that guy in the rock song,” my voice coach asked. “How deeply does she miss her mother in the ballad?”

A character in a novel, if she’s going to feel real, shares some of the author’s emotional DNA. If I was going to sing reasonably well, I had to stop pretending I was singing alongside Joni Mitchell or Grace Slick, and instead open up my heart and allow myself to be vulnerable. The pain of missing my mother had to overtake me. My rage at any number of boys and men who’d seen me only as a body had to shake the room. But if I did, I might crack open, and what would I do with that ruptured mess of me?

But I’d said I’d do this. Four friends, talented musicians with years of experience on stages and in studios, had agreed to play guitar, bass, drums, and piano on these songs, with me singing. One is a gifted sound engineer, and we would record in her basement studio. There was a tab on my website ready for the song links. My anxious heart wrestled with the promises I’d made, and when I wasn’t practicing the songs at home, I practiced excuses for giving up.

In the lesson, my voice coach played the rock song’s opening chords again, and I closed my eyes and imagined her voice: Celeste, my fictional young woman at the microphone who wants more than anything to be heard for who she really is.

I knew that feeling of not being heard. I knew it because once upon a time I’d convinced myself that I was a good girl, a polite girl, although rarely a quiet girl. I know it now because I’m 66 and people don’t always see me. When they do, they assume that I’m sweet or meek because of the gray in my hair. (Never mind my tattoos or my propensity for elaborate swearing. I’ve been described as having “punk rock” energy, which I think means that some people don’t quite know what to make of me.) As my voice rang out in that room, more than heard, I felt my book’s main character inside of me, and I let those feelings reach almost as far as the lake.

I knew that feeling of not being heard. I knew it because once upon a time I’d convinced myself that I was a good girl, a polite girl, although rarely a quiet girl. I know it now because I’m 66 and people don’t always see me. When they do, they assume that I’m sweet or meek because of the gray in my hair.

The day we recorded, my nerve faltered under the weight of my own expectations. I’d been in studios before: in my 20s, I worked closely with the music producer on a song-themed television show in Los Angeles. My favorite thing to do in those days, in addition to bringing armloads of charts—chord notations for various instruments—to the soundstage, was to page through the massive PhonoLog Reporter loose-leaf binders and read up on every recording by every artist I could think of. (The show’s writers sometimes needed this information, but mostly I was nerding out on arcane music trivia.) When I moved to another show, I was sometimes the person tapped in a crisis to phone the instrument rental company on Sunset Boulevard for replacement drum heads, extra guitars, or an esoteric instrument I’d never heard of. I loved being in the thick of things while professional musicians did their work.

My mouth was dry and my hands were sweaty in my friend’s studio, but when I slipped the headphones on and stepped up to the mic, I realized that my novel’s character could feel nervous, too. I’d read about Carly Simon’s stage fright and Janis Joplin’s fear of failure; the women I’d wanted to be when I was young had been afraid, too. When I had trouble singing a slower tempo bridge, I took my friend’s advice to “talk it through.”

When I was asked to sing the chorus to the rock song several different ways, I went for it, knowing that the plan was to multi-track my voice so I’d sound like I was harmonizing with myself. And at the end of the night, when I heard my own voice in playback, I was stunned. I sounded, if not confident, fully present. I could still carry a tune. And more than anything, I heard myself in a way I’d never heard before. Vulnerable. Ferocious. My anxious heart, open to the world, and having fun.

I can’t be great, or even good, at everything. I can be just okay. Writing those songs, then trying to play the chords, and finally trusting my friends–and myself–to record them gave me a deeper understanding of the singers I’d admired as a young woman. I’d thought they were perfect (never mind that that “Perfect” was Christine McVie’s original surname.) They’d sounded great to teenaged me. They sound even better now.

What took me decades to learn was that their voices were guiding me toward finding my own, and how hard it can be, sometimes, to hear ourselves.

Listen to Jessica Handler singing “Blossom Queen” and “Doll Named Body”—two songs she wrote for her protagonist’s “band,” “Celeste and the Heart’s Desire.”

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The World to See. Her novel The Magnetic Girl was awarded the 2020 Southern Book Prize. She’s the author of the memoir Invisible Sisters, one of the “25 Books All Georgians Should Read,” and the craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Five Points, Image Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, Salvation South, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Oldster—where she previously wrote “Owning My Worth,” and elsewhere. www.jessicahandler.com

Text and all illustrations by Peter Moore.

I NEVER MET MY FATHER-IN-LAW. Jack Falding McCrea died of colon cancer at age 47, when my wife was 9 years old. So he was a big part of my life, even though I only saw him in ghostly black and white photographs.

That mortal shadow fell over my wife and her brothers, who have made a hobby of colon kibbitzing their entire adult lives.

So far, so good.

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It’s a deadly disease, unless it’s diagnosed early. People who screen reduce their death rate by 67%. I have no family history of colon cancer–the prime determinant of risk–but I became a screener, anyway. If you’re Native American or Native Alaskan, or Black, or the descendant of Ashkenazi Jews, you have elevated risk, and should quit reading this and schedule that appointment.

My wife didn’t give me a choice. But I shouldn’t have needed a nudge. I’m 69 years old, and have already ridden the wild colon-scope four times, beginning in my 50s. My polyps have been clipped, analyzed, and dismissed.

So far, so good, for me too. But now?

A week before my test, I received two pages of intense instructions about what I a) could, and b) couldn’t, eat, drink, and do for the twenty-four hours before my colonoscopy. Answers: a) not much; b) everything I like. Still I followed the instructions to the letter.

Especially about drinking.

Actually, no.

My constant companion from 5pm on Colonoscopy Eve (it should be a national holiday!) until 10am on Colonoscopy Morning (ditto), was an enormous jug of GoLYTELY™—a diabolical fluid designed for colon cleansing and spectacular toilet visits (not shown).

But even GoLYTELY™ goes down easier than this.

I was allowed one solid food.

The most recent time I had eaten J.E.L.L.O., I was 12, when my mom gave it to me after school. Nostalgia doesn’t taste that great, it turns out.

As for the test itself, nobody actually wants to feel, or remember, a colonoscopy. Propofol took care of that. OK, that was the anesthesia that killed Michael Jackson. But I rather enjoyed it. Here’s a transcript of my complete pre-procedure conversation with Rick, who administered the IV.

It’s all I remember of my half-hour in the operating room.

No, I don’t know how we began discussing cycling in Pennsylvania. But I had opinions, for as long as that lasted.

Afterwards, my gastroenterologist seemed pleased. She passed on these images.

She cut out the four tiny polyps and sent them off to the pathology lab to search for signs of cancer. I’ll have the results in a week.

Can’t stand the suspense? Me neither.

While we’re waiting, why don’t you schedule your own colonoscopy? It’s pretty much a breeze, at least compared with a lingering, painful death from colon cancer.

Think of all you might miss! Including…

SPECIAL COLONOSCOPY BONUS: Before you’re scoped, the doc will pump gas into your colon, to expand your colon and expose polyps hidden in its many folds. Post procedure, this will give you the ability—and the excuse!—to rip epic farts that are almost narrative in their duration and expressiveness.

Your turn.

Peter Moore is a writer and cartoonist living in Colorado. He amuses himself and 18,000 readers at petermoore.substack.com, and is a regular contributor to NPR and the Colorado Sun. In a former life he was the editor of Men’s Health and the articles editor (no, really) of Playboy. He is a regular contributor to Oldster. Check out all of his work for Oldster here.

When I was 12, Caroline, two years ahead of me in school—pale, bony, cotton-white hair and eyelashes—got “knocked up.” A quiet girl. But with that ghostly hair and skin, and eyes that would suddenly flash, you knew she was there.

Then one day she was gone.

Knocked up. Kicked out. Banished forever to Whisperland.

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This was rural Virginia, 1951. Except for avid attention to animals, we kids knew nothing real about sex. No internet, sex-ed, anatomy books, not even Playboy. My father was a doctor, but even so, his theme-song was “Wait till you’re older.” We were stuck with school-yard gossip.

What’s knocked up?

Preg-a-nant.

How did Caroline get preg-a-nant?

A guy put his thing in her hole.

He put a baby in there? Didn’t it hurt?

The baby grows inside your stomach, stupid, and comes out through your hole.

Your hole stretches from the width of a soda-straw until a grapefruit can pass through.

No “fact” ever had a tenth the power of that straw.

One day she was gone. Knocked up. Kicked out. Banished forever to Whisperland. This was rural Virginia, 1951. No internet, sex-ed, anatomy books, not even Playboy. My father was a doctor, but even so, his theme-song was “Wait till you’re older.” We were stuck with school-yard gossip.

Where was Caroline?

With her grandmother, someone said. Sent away to an aunt. Maybe in the preventorium, a kind of temporary insane asylum.

My mother said to me: The minute you start mens’strating, you can wind up just like Caroline.

When I was 5, she taught me that my hole was called vagina. She taught me the word mens’strating. But at school, no one said the “v” and “m” words. We said, hole and Aunt Flo’s visiting.

My father was Caroline’s doctor. I heard him tell my mother that her family didn’t know who the baby’s father was. She didn’t have a boyfriend they could go after, but they’d taken her back when she agreed to give the baby up for adoption. Like a puppy they didn’t want.

“What did she have?” I asked my father.

“Bouncing baby girl, cotton-candy hair just like her mother.”

“Is Caroline sad about her baby?”

“That child,” my father said, “is a thousand times better off with a responsible family.”

“Caroline’s lucky they took her back,” my mother said.

Caroline had fallen into that world where nobody cared what she felt. “Why are they being so mean?” I asked.

“They’re Baptists,” my mother said.

Then Caroline ran away.

And that, I tell you now, is the last real thing I know about Caroline.

***

In gym one day, my pants were wet. I felt down there and my fingers came up dark. One of the girls said, “Oh, now all the blood in your body is coming out!” I knew better, but I was scared anyhow. I balled up my bloody underpants, stuffed them in my pocket. At recess, I sneaked them into a trashcan. Some boys found them and waved them around on a stick, gagging and cat-calling. But nobody knew they were mine.

Now I could have a baby.

But I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to be Caroline.

The restroom at the dime store near our school had a machine where you could buy pads, 15 cents. I’d been menstruating a year before Mother found out and told my father.

“Well!” he said. “Time for your baseline pelvic exam.” A rite-of-passage, secret and frightening. There were no women doctors—some man was going to look at my naked body. My father took me to one of his friends, “Uncle Buck.”

My father was Caroline’s doctor. I heard him tell my mother that her family didn’t know who the baby’s father was. She didn’t have a boyfriend they could go after, but they’d taken her back when she agreed to give the baby up for adoption. Like a puppy they didn’t want.

Uncle Buck led me into a room with a small table—so small, only half my body fit on it. “Take off your clothes,” he said. “Get on the table, pull the sheet over you, and put your feet in those stirrups.”

The sheet just covered my front. My bare bottom hung over the end. My legs, those things you need for running, were spread apart, held up in metal loops. I was helpless. What if I farted? What if I fell off the end of the table – naked?

Uncle Buck pushed his hands inside me. It hurt.

He put his finger up my ass.

Was that what my father did to Caroline? I could see her, blazing with the hatred I felt. A wonder his fingers didn’t burn.

When it was over, my thighs were sticky, my insides ached. My father and Uncle Buck shook hands. On the ride home, I leaned against my reflection in the car window, nose and eyes swollen from crying. I whispered, Nobody will ever do that to me again.

I needed some facts. What was my vagina? What did it do? What was my womb? What could go wrong? What did men do to you? How could I make sure no one ever stuck his hand inside me again?

In a box under my father’s bed, I found a little Japanese bowl with a painting of a couple, faces expressionless, fancy robes pushed aside showing white thighs, a red rod, and – spiders’ legs? My introduction to penis and pubic hair.

In my father’s med-school books, I found a diagram of my secret girl-parts, another one of a boy’s parts, and then the two locked together like a jigsaw puzzle. There were pages and pages about vaginas and wombs—uteruses. Hysterectomy: cutting out your uterus. The Greeks called it hystera, because it wandered all over your insides, making you into a crazy. Whenever I got really upset, my mother would say, “Hush, or you’ll turn into one of those crazy women screaming in the street.”

I learned you can die when you have a baby. The baby can die. I learned the words “miscarriage” and “abortion.” One was an accident, the other was murder. Doctors who did abortions went to jail. If you were bleeding to death, you might have a legal abortion – the baby could be scraped and sucked out of your uterus. But your husband got to decide which of you lived.

The baby begins as a little cell that grows into a curled-up worm. Using your body, your food, your oxygen, your very bones and teeth, the worm grows into a baby. Made out of you. Living inside you. And comes out of you, through that straw.

Then what? Who helps you? Who loves the two of you?

No wonder Caroline ran.

My mother said to me: The minute you start mens’strating, you can wind up just like Caroline.When I was 5, she taught me that my hole was called vagina. She taught me the word mens’strating. But at school, no one said the “v” and “m” words. We said, hole and Aunt Flo’s visiting.

I made up stories: my Caroline became a famous movie star, a beautiful opera singer, a bank-robber like Bonnie-and-Clyde. She was rich. When her family came smarming around, she said, Who the hell are you?

I knew she couldn’t get her baby back—she’d signed a paper. But in all my stories, Caroline finds her baby.

The girls at school said, “She’s probably working some awful job.” Waitressing in a white uniform with smudges around the buttons. Or she was drunk in the gutter. My mother said that: That girl is probably in a gutter somewhere. She said, A thousand stubborn, disobedient Carolines are out there.

Behind my eyelids I saw her plainly. Tall, pale, white braid over one shoulder. A stubborn, disobedient ghost. Not in a gutter. And she owned herself. I wanted to own myself.

After Uncle Buck, I obsessed about being safe. I refused sex or even playing around, and at 17, I went off to a college where girls couldn’t study science and they locked us in at night. Safety was insulting.

At 20, I bravely transferred to a school far from home, where the “rules” for girls weren’t so stringent.

Then, against my father’s wishes, I married the first boy I slept with. He was too young to be as powerful as my father or Uncle Buck, so I’d still own me, right? My diaphragm meant I’d decide on babies. And when I got pregnant, he’d make our baby “legitimate.”

***

When I did get pregnant, my whole body rebelled—fever, vomiting, cramping. I knew it was a boy. Could that even be true? Later I learned that some of our babies’ cells escape the placenta, go into our brains, hearts, bones. We know because they find male cells in us. Little imps, slipping along our deepest pathways.

Inside me, my son kicked, bubbled, drummed—Let me out! “There’s no door,” I whispered. “All I’ve got is a straw!” We were locked in one elastic skin: two heartbeats, four eyes, four arms, four legs.

On the phone, my father said, “Sounds like you could have a hydatidiform mole.” He started describing symptoms and I hung up. But he’d snagged me: A baby whose cells melt, or turn into a cancer?

“No, no,” my doctor said, “you and your baby are fine.”

“I have to know everything,” I said, thinking of Caroline and the theft of her baby. “I have to be awake when this child comes out of me.”

“Oh, you don’t want all that pain,” he said.

I was awake, though. In the middle of my labor, before any medication, the doctor went to lunch, and my son made his break for freedom. Powerful waves swept through me. “My god,” I said to the nurse, “I’m splitting open!”

I made up stories: my Caroline became a famous movie star, a beautiful opera singer, a bank-robber like Bonnie-and-Clyde. She was rich. When her family came smarming around, she said, Who the hell are you? I knew she couldn’t get her baby back—she’d signed a paper. But in all my stories, Caroline finds her baby.

But my little straw—magic straw—stretched. Until at last, my son lay, belly to my belly, bloody but whole and sweet, thick blue cord of flesh connecting us. We breathed together. I touched his head, where the skull was still open, the delicate brain beneath its thin blanket of skin throbbing against my fingertips. His eyes were tiny bright slits, light from a crack under the door.

I would have died before I gave him up.

And I knew then exactly what had happened to Caroline. Living with that baby girl growing, moving inside her, pushing out of her body—she was overwhelmed. The possibility of this fierce connection is really in us, our flesh, our hormones. I felt it. Caroline too. When her baby was taken, she ran.

Could anything good have happened to Caroline?

I thought about these things. We were urged—commanded—not to think, just do what you’re told. The hierarchy was clear: Father, Mother, Baby. Women alone with their children were welfare queens and dirty lesbians. But I found that women alone with their children really are in trouble. When my son was two, his father died. I was a “respectable widow” and my son wasn’t a bastard, but keeping your child safe and fed without eating yourself alive turns out to be an art. I did it. But with fear and error. And time. A long time.

In the dim light of remembrance, Caroline’s hair and eyes shine. We whisper – two old post-menopausal ghosts, half-insane from the follies of life. Did you find your baby? I ask her. Yes! Or: No, never. Never.

Sometimes she says she had other children, a boy, a girl. Sometimes she tells how, through DNA, her daughter found her. The responsible new mother had been good, but still – where was Caroline? And Caroline, sorrowing, tells how she’d been a child herself, punished, demeaned. Shamed. I let them take you.

We talk about our granddaughters. Girls, whose mothers, raised in the wake-up days of the 1970s women’s movement and living in relative freedom for 50 years, let their daughters explore more freely.

Wonderful modern girls. They know things impossible to imagine back in 1951. My granddaughter is six feet tall. Caroline’s has a cap of snow and wise eyes. The two of them discuss everything. If they don’t know something, they google it, they dive into modern medical books, investigate doctors, the latest birth control, morning-after pill, abortion drugs. These girls own their bodies, their minds. Even my little neighbor, 10 years old, calls her vagina my temple.

Look! They’re flinging off their clothes, getting out their iPhones, snapping pictures of the world between each other’s legs. Oh—pink lips! Little tutu!

They own themselves.

But watch out, sweet girls—the old controllers are on the move again.

They want you.

Previously Sallie Reynolds wrote “Writing his Obituary” for Oldster.

Dear Oldster Reader,

What follows is an excerpt from American Rambler, my new book in which I follow the path of Johnny Appleseed—a real-life wanderer named John Chapman, born around the time of the Revolutionary War—and go see the country at eye level. In this scene, I’m traveling back east from Indiana, across Ohio, when I stop in a bar full of weathered regulars and a casual conversation takes a turn toward history, memory, and the names we give the places around us.

Here’s to not dying on barroom floors. <3

***Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online instead of in your email.

Isaac Fitzgerald is the New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts (winner of a New England Book Award and the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award). He appears frequently on The Today Show and is also the author of the bestselling children’s book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (winner of an IACP Award). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He lives with his wife, Kelly Farber, and their two dogs on the North Fork of Long Island. His latest book is American Rambler, published this month by Knopf.

***

Somewhere in Ohio, but not as far from the Indiana border as I want to be, I see a giant green sign that reads “Indian Lake.” At first I have no intention of stopping. It’s not that I have anywhere to be, particularly, but when driving across a good hunk of the country, it’s nice to get into rhythm, and then not to disturb that rhythm—stops for gas or an occasional bite to eat being part of the trancelike dance.

When you’re walking, you’re moving through the world at a human pace. You slow down. You pay attention. Driving is the opposite—it’s the speed itself that makes you pay attention. Hurtling across the horizon, traveling faster than any of our ancestors could have imagined. Yet it feels casual. A little Outlaw Country on the radio, your seat conforming to your body as the hours march on. But still, keep your eyes on the road—bouncing from signs to traffic to the skyline—constantly moving. Constantly alert.

The meditation comes from knowing that you’re driving a giant metal death machine, but the end result is the same. My busy mind grows quiet. As if my brain needs something—anything—to chew on. To gnaw on. To bite and tear and consume. Reading, another favorite activity, does the same.

But every once in a while the rhythm gets interrupted.

Like the time I was driving in Western Pennsylvania and a burst of torrential rainfall fell from the sky, seemingly out of nowhere, on an up-until-that-very-moment sunny day. I instinctively slowed Rabbit down, which is when a Saab convertible drove by—the top still down in spite of the rain. A white-haired man in an expensive-looking shirt looked over at me—his wife or girlfriend screaming in the seat next to him. The man was still wearing his sunglasses, but I swear we made eye contact. The man was laughing hysterically, he then shrugged, turned his eyes back to the road, and disappeared into the sheets of precipitation.

When you spend a lot of time out on the road, you have dozens of these little encounters. Like the time I was stuck in traffic, assholes ripping down the breakdown lane—further delaying all of us as they cut back into traffic just before reaching the accident that had caused the backup in the first place. All of a sudden, a semi trailer truck put half its ass in the breakdown lane, immediately backing up all the jerks barreling down it. People rolled down their windows, myself included, to shout thanks at the truck driver, who pulled the cord on his airhorn, letting out a blast, and saluted us all.

It’s worth mentioning that in all my time driving this year, I’ve come to see truckers as the unheralded knights of the road. Someone broken down on the side of the highway? Usually it’s an eighteen-wheeler that has pulled over to see if they can help—setting out flares for safety if the sun has gone down.

It’s these little moments of distraction that can pop you out of the meditative calmness that comes with driving. A man in a convertible in the rain, a heroic truck driver, an Amish teenager in a racing buggy, a giant green sign—almost begging you to stop—that reads “Indian Lake.”

I rip Rabbit into a hard right and hit the exit.

After driving through yellow soybean fields I get to the lake. The first thing I notice is the majesty of the water. The flat, undisturbed lake stretching out—pushing into the horizon. A reservoir so big that it momentarily makes me miss the ocean.

The next thing I notice are the street names. Blackhawk Drive, Cherokee Drive, Chinook Drive, Mohawk Drive. You get the idea. This is out on an island—accessible by a small bridge—called Semi-nole Island, which is next to Tecumseh Island.

Indian Lake indeed.

Across the water I see what looks to be some semblance of a downtown. I head there, hoping to find a place to rest for a bit.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

Here we go again. “Stick out that bad, huh?”

I’m younger than the bartender by two decades at least. But she is beautiful. Surely more beautiful than me, or anyone else at the bar. The rest of us—myself included, with my unkempt graying beard and long hair, tattered Hawaiian shirt, running shorts, and flip-flops—look like the pallbearers at Jimmy Buffett’s funeral. She looks like an angel, one who has perhaps lived a little rough, but has been heaven-sent to escort the famously laid-back crooner to the great big Cheese-burger in Paradise in the sky.

She notices me noticing her and gives the slightest little smirk. “It was more your New York license plate.”

She nods at Rabbit, just visible through a skinny window that allows a cut of afternoon light into the otherwise dim bar. As if the jukebox can read my thoughts, Jimmy Buffett starts playing.

The bartender doesn’t ask me who I am or why I am here. Hell, maybe she already knows—the answer being, “You know, that really big green sign out on the highway.”

She serves me a cold bottle of Bud and I just sit there, falling into that same meditative state as when I’m walking, as when I’m driving, as when I’m sitting in a dimly lit church—or in a bar—taking a li’l communion. Until the third beer, that is, when she tosses me a wooden chip promising me a fourth, on the house. Looks like I won’t be getting back to the highway until tomorrow, so I order a shot and offer to buy one for the bartender, too.

We clink glasses and toss the whiskey down.

My lips loosen, I ask about life on the lake—it used to be a real summer draw, she tells me. There was an amusement park and a dance hall, advertised as the “Midwest’s Million Dollar Playground,” but that all closed down in the 1980s. Still, the lake did bring in tourists, and as the land became more developed people started living here year round. Mostly retirees, like the folks currently populating the bar.

After another shot, I finally ask: What the fuck was with the street names.

“How do you mean?”

“Look, it’s Indian Lake. I get that. I’m just now coming from Indiana.”

“Uh huh.”

“But every street around here—Pocahontas Path, Big Bear Path—have y’all ever thought about . . .”

“Changing them?” “Yeah.”

“To shit like Lakeview Drive and Atwater, and Pirate’s Cove? Sun-set Lane?”

“To exactly shit like that.”

“Oh, New York, and to think I was starting to like you,” she says, pouring me another shot. “It’ll only be well whiskey for you if you keep this bullshit up.”

“What’d the kid say?” shouts one of my fellow Jimmy Buffett music video extras from down the bar.

“He asked if we ever considered changing the street names around here.”

A long, grumbling murmur covers the far end of the bar. I’m not absolutely sure, but the word “dickhead” seems to barely reach my ears more than once. Looks like I’ve been downgraded from “kid.”

The bartender pours herself a shot.

“Let’s start here, New York. Why don’t you change the name of Manhattan?”

I pause. “Fair point.”

“You’re from the East Coast—you want to change the name of Connecticut? How about Massachusetts?”

Now seems like a bad time to mention that Massachusetts is my home state. I think of the large body of water near where I grew up: the Quabbin Reservoir. She goes on. “If we change the name of our streets, we should probably change the name of Ohio itself, right? Drink your shot.”

I drink my shot.

“Why not change the name of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkan-sas? That’s just the A-states, mind you.”

She pours another shot after taking her own—pointedly no lon-ger drinking with me.

“The Cleveland Indians are now the Guardians. Does that make you feel more comfortable?” She doesn’t give me time to respond. The dark murmuring at the end of the bar has turned into grumbling encouragement, almost low-volume cheering.

“What about Washington’s football team—the Commanders?” I manage.

“What about ’em?” “I mean—”

“That was different. That was a slur.”

I almost point out that the Cleveland Indians’ mascot wasn’t exactly inoffensive, but as I mull it over, a clear sentence finds its way out of the Greek chorus at the end of the bar.

“She’s Native, kid.”

I look at the bartender.

“My mother’s side. Shawnee. Take your shot.” I wince as it goes down.

“History is violent, cruel, and often stupid. But ignoring it so people feel slightly more at ease in their day-to-day life? That’s stupid, too. You want to change the street names? How about doing a little land acknowledgment while you’re at it? Another way for white people to say, ‘Sorry for all the murder, and land stealing, the Trail of Tears, and forced subjugation.’ But that shit is relieving your guilt. Doesn’t help me, or my ancestors one bit. But sure, change a sports team name, so you don’t even have to spend a moment thinking about the past and how shitty and complicated it is. Change the street names—hell, try and make a perfect society where nobody gets offended and there’s no mention of anything uncomfortable from the past, ever. Let me know how that works out for you.”

I nod, quietly, but she wants more.

“End up naming every damn street in the country Jesus Christ Street, is that what you want?”

Not exactly what I was trying to say, but I shake my head no. “We done here?”

“Yes.”

“Good, now let’s get back to flirting, I liked that better.” “Is now a bad time to mention I have a girlfriend?”

The gallery at the end of the bar lets out a collective laugh.

“Slow down, New York. I said I liked flirting with you. You’re not getting any.”

We go back to talking, and I put money in the jukebox, my song selection of more Jimmy Buffett winning back the gaggle of men at the other end of the bar. Eventually, they ask me if I want to go smoke a joint with them out on the porch, so I do.

All of the men are easily twenty years my senior—probably more—and they go back to calling me kid as we pass the well-rolled joint around, introducing ourselves. At my urging, the men tell me stories about their childhoods spent on the lake. Soon the bartender, who never offers her name, joins us—smoking a cigarette—and I am entrusted with going behind the bar and getting folks fresh beers, carefully marking the sheet of paper that keeps track of their tabs.

I have an armful of Buds and Coors Lights when I hear a crash on the porch.

The noise is quickly followed by “Oh, fuck,” and shouts of “Oscar!” I abandon the bottles on the bar and run back to the porch. A rather large man with rakish long white hair and a prominent goatee has hit the deck. The bartender is at his side—a bottle of water in her hand, which she pours into his mouth.

“Oscar, wake up!” A man—supposedly Oscar’s friend—bends over and gives Oscar’s potato-sack body a firm shake before slapping him across the face.

“Should I call 911?” I ask, not knowing what to do.

“No!” Comes the quick, unanimous response from almost every-one, the bartender’s voice loudest.

The man slaps Oscar again, hard—and Oscar comes to. I say a quick “Thank God” under my breath.

“Oscar, you went out there for a second.” The bartender hands him what’s left of the water bottle.

“What the fuck am I doing down here?”

“You fell pretty hard, O. You break anything?”

Oscar squeezes parts of his body while slowly getting up, cau-tiously putting weight on one foot, then the next.

“I’ve got pills in my jacket, grab those for me?” Oscar is asking his buddy, who then looks at me. I go back into the bar and see a light-weight windbreaker hanging off the back of his chair. Sure enough, a prescription bottle is in the jacket’s front pocket. I bring the pills over to Oscar, who thanks me before cracking open the bottle and popping a handful into his mouth, chasing it with a last sip from the water bottle.

“Damn, that was some strong dope.”

We laugh at his attempt at humor, but we don’t really mean it.

Everyone is a little shaken, including Oscar.

“Jokes aside—that could be my ticker. Who’s coming with me to the hospital?” Oscar’s friend helps him into the parking lot, where they get into a truck and drive off.

“Well, that was a boner killer. Who needs to settle their tabs?”

I pay the bartender, who doesn’t ask if I need a place to stay, nor does she tell me to drive safe. She just says, “Be sure to visit again next time you’re passing through. Maybe there won’t be a minor heart attack, and we can pick up where we left off.”

But before I leave I ask, “Why not call 911?”

“Nobody needs the world’s most expensive taxi on top of a hos-pital bill. Hell, bowing out here might be the best option for some of these guys.”

One of Isaac Fitzgerald’s segments on The Today Show:

I walk around the empty downtown stoned, trying to sober up. There was a time in my life when that would have been what I wanted: simply to party, to have a good time, and then to drop dead on a bar-room floor—like Chapman, in a way. That’s changing now, as I get older. I value life more, having less of it.

I call my ma, still up in north central Massachusetts with her sister, taking care of their mother. She doesn’t pick up. I call Kelly, and she does.

“Sounds like you’ve been drinking,” she says right away. “Might have been.”

“No drinking and driving. You promised.” “I know.”

We catch up as I walk past Rabbit, stopping only to grab my sleep-ing bag. Dusk is turning into night. I don’t tell her about the man collapsing—why give her something else to worry about? She’s already been so understanding, of all of this. She asks after my ma, and how things are going up there. I tell her the truth, which is that I don’t know.

We chat until we both start sounding tired. “Okay, I have to get ready for bed,” she concludes.

“Me too,” I say, though I am just staring out at a soybean field.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I put my phone into my pocket and lay out my sleeping bag. The sky above me begins to fill with stars. The next morning I’ll wake at daybreak in a bright yellow field, walk back down East Lake Drive, climb into Rabbit, and head out from Indian Lake.

From American Rambler © 2026 by Isaac Fitzgerald. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Sidewalks sizzle in Manhattan. Molten, hissing, dangerous. And even more torrid in the tenements where I work for a childcare agency. It is 1966. People, driven to desperation by nine days of temperatures in the high 90s, hack into fire hydrants, preferring to be hit by brutal torrents of water to staying boxed in broiling homes.

I get home at 7 for my other job, the evening shift, as my father’s night nurse. Cancer has racked, ravaged, reduced him to stretched skin on bone. He weighs 95 pounds now, has turned a deep yellow, somewhere between leather and wood, and is twisting, contorted, on sheets of white. He asks for water, then swallows two neon pink pills for pain.

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But he must have swallowed many more pills I didn’t see before I got home and planned to take just the last two with me. He tells me not to call 911 and adds he does not want his stomach pumped and does not want to go to a hospital. Then he tells me to read Kierkegaard and to flush the remaining pills down the toilet. I say, “I love you,” and he says, “Thank you. Flush.” Those were his last words.

It is 1966. People, driven to desperation by nine days of temperatures in the high 90s, hack into fire hydrants, preferring to be hit by brutal torrents of water to staying boxed in broiling homes.

I tell my mom about the pills right away, but during the five hours before my father’s last breath, she does not join us. I imagine her sitting like a statue, immobile on the farthest end of the sofa, at the farthest end of our very small home. I don’t know why she does not/can not move. I flush the pills, then sit like a statue, too, holding my father’s hand, something I’d likely never done before. Around midnight my father’s friend, Fred, a doctor, arrives and tells me my dad is “gone.” He means “dead.”

A few weeks later, my father comes back in a box. I plant him in the horseshoe garden. My mom stands there, mute, absent, as she had been the night he died, while I dig a hole and cover the box. Within a year, she sells the house with the box and the horseshoe garden and the lilacs and roses she tended with love.

***

My father had also been a doctor, with two sets of patients: the ones who could pay and the ones who could not. He worked pro bono at Ellis Island for many years, trying to keep in this country immigrants not welcomed here. During the McCarthy era, he was pressured to rat out “commie doctors,” which meant doctors fighting for what is now called Medicare. He declined, developed a huge clot in his leg, and was forced to quit the career he loved because he could barely walk.

I grew up in a house of silent strangers. I was one of them. The clot was like a time bomb which, if dislodged, could shoot to his heart or lungs or brain and kill him in moments. I was made aware of this endless ongoing threat from a very early age. He could die walking down the hall. He could die at any time doing nothing—or anything at all. No day felt safe to me or was safe for him.

I get home at 7 for my other job, the evening shift, as my father’s night nurse. Cancer has racked, ravaged, reduced him to stretched skin on bone. He weighs 95 pounds now, has turned a deep yellow, somewhere between leather and wood, and is twisting, contorted, on sheets of white.

My father could explain suns and moons and stars and planets and Mozart and gravity. He could, but he didn’t. He had loved practicing medicine and likely hated being stuck at home. I learned it was right/good to stay shut in my room, not moving much and not making noise. Alone in my room, I drew large, happy families like I saw on TV. I named each child and tucked their age beneath their feet.

Their moms woke them with a kiss. Mine did not. A pediatric social worker, she fled each morning to the happier, more normal life of kids in a county hospital and was gone at night gaining two advanced degrees. I was not in the picture, not in any picture, not even in the pictures I drew. My mom had thousands of kids, but I wasn’t one of them. She called the kids in chronic care pediatrics, burn units, cancer units, and AIDS clinics, her kids, like she was their mom. Their moms were missing in action and my mom was missing, too. From me.

When I was 8 or 9, I found a shoebox stuffed with tattered photographs. The box was at the top of a closet, likely to keep it from me. Evidently, these were pictures of family I had never heard about. Their pictures did not have names. We lived with six million people in six rooms and with six million stories no one could tell, and tiny blue numbers tattooed on arms, which no one discussed.

What did I want? I wanted to be the little girl that everyone wanted, the perfect little girl with blonde curls and blue eyes who grew up to have one hell of a tennis serve and was an equestrian marvel, and went to the right schools, married the right guy, and had the right kids and a happy family always welcome anywhere.

He must have swallowed many more pills I didn’t see before I got home and planned to take just the last two with me. He tells me not to call 911 and adds he does not want his stomach pumped and does not want to go to a hospital. Then he tells me to read Kierkegaard and to flush the remaining pills down the toilet. I say, “I love you,” and he says, “Thank you. Flush.” Those were his last words.

I wanted Halo shampoo and Ba-Bo cleanser and Juicy Fruit gum and Hostess cupcakes and a father who could walk and a mom who looked like Donna Reed. My father spoke to me, though rarely, as if we had never met. An awkward impersonal courtesy. I learned nothing about him from him—and very little from others.

I had a blue bike then, and rode it sometimes. Other kids were taught to ride a bike by their dad, or perhaps by their older brother. I was taught by a high school kid my mom paid to teach me. I was an only child. On bad-weather days, when all the other kids were picked up by their moms, my dad picked me up at school. I hated it. The moms, who were in their 20s or early 30s, had 2.8 kids and shiny hair that matched their shiny cars. My dad drove an ancient, gray Buick. It was a relic and so was he. I was ashamed that I was ashamed.

Dinners for the two of us were strained, the reverse of comfort food. Speed-eating. Brittle, busy, masticating. You could call it serving time. Hard to say who felt more trapped, or more released when we rose and went back to our separate cells. My father labored to heat things up, baking potatoes in a dark gray dented thing that may have survived World War I. It looked a bit like a helmet. In my father’s first years as a doctor, he treated veterans of World War I and victims of the Spanish Flu. Maybe that’s why his face looked closed, like a cabinet.

A few weeks later, my father comes back in a box. I plant him in the horseshoe garden. My mom stands there, mute, absent, as she had been the night he died, while I dig a hole and cover the box. Within a year, she sells the house with the box and the horseshoe garden and the lilacs and roses she tended with love.

Eating by myself was better. Chunks of Velveeta and mayo on Wonder Bread with 12 essential vitamins, consumed standing in the kitchen. I mastered that meal in second grade. Once I learned to open cans, I ate Franco American spaghetti with butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), ethoxylated diglycerides, ammonium sulfate, sulphur dioxide, azodicarbonamide, rBGH, rBST, methylcyclopropene, fructo-oligosaccharides, and propylene glycol alginate.

Later, I branched out. Swanson Roast Turkey with mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and peas, or Banquet Fried Chicken, also with mashed potatoes and peas, which I ate sitting down. A few nights a week, my mom returned and shared a meal with us. I liked drying dishes, standing side by side with her, just the two of us, before she called “her kids.”

When I got a report card, my father would tear a sheet off his prescription pad on which was printed Max Weiss, MD plus his Rx license. On the prescription he’d write two words: “Congratulations. Dad.” It was attached with a paper clip to my report card, which was often blue, and placed in the middle of the white chenille spread on my bed. I imagined being adopted by a perfect family. Like the perfect families I had drawn for years. It didn’t work. I needed them. They didn’t need me. So I adapted a way of speaking. Any sound or style or speed. Any way or voice you need. Some folks borrow a cup of flour; some borrow a family. Others just imagine one.

When I was in college, I got a job wrapping packages. They looked great. I wanted to be like them. Then I worked for magazines. I cut and pasted words so they made sense and landed the right words in the right place at the right time. They looked great. I wanted to be like them. This was called freelance writing. It entailed making even more lovely places I did not belong and even more lively conversations I wasn’t in, and even more wondrous places I had never seen.

I could sound like Vogue or Elle or Elmo or Vanity Fair or New York or Esquire or Big Bird or Kermit the Frog. I could disappear, voiceless, nameless, telling someone else’s story in someone else’s words. I made things fresh, fun, perky, cozy, easy, sweet. Home the way you wanted it. Life the way you wanted it. The scent. The color. The texture. The ease. I was called “an outside creative.” Pretty creative, very outside.

Which of these sounds less likely? My mom had thousands of kids. My family was stashed in a shoebox. I freelanced for Martha Stewart. I was a ghost. They’re all true.

Check out all of ’s essays for Oldster.

Hoping for some light entertainment, I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 on a recent Sunday afternoon. In addition to killer haute couture looks and the requisite catty quips of the fashion world, I walked away with something entirely unexpected: moving insights on the changing work world and the intersection of ambition and aging—both topics close to my heart.

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(Warning: spoilers ahead.) Twenty years since the original film, life caught up with the main characters: Runway magazine’s legendary editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly, played flawlessly by Meryl Streep; and a commanding Anne Hathaway, reprising her role as journalist Andy Sachs. Both women have matured and rendered themselves more reflective, wiser and more relatable than in the popular original version.

From the opening scenes, we find Priestly under pressure. Her once unrivaled style magazine fights to stay relevant. Long-form narrative print articles are out of fashion (pun intended), replaced by digestible digital soundbites. Budget cuts are imposed, as many advertisers now spend their dollars elsewhere, and the once hefty September issue is described by Priestly as “so thin you could floss with it.” I felt her pain as so many beloved traditions of the workplace have been upended by AI and a world viewed through our phones. Rather than building her business, Priestly must cut costs, fire people and answer to consultants with no love for her craft. Her painful tasks are all too common in offices across the country.

Sachs arrives back at Runway an accomplished journalist, no longer a nervous executive assistant. It’s heartening to see her pursuing truth and writing features at the magazine rather than delivering coffee and running errands. Her maturity allows her to view Priestly with empathy, manage a media crisis and convince her boss to share the spotlight with her long suffering second in command, Runway’s art director Nigel Kipling, played by Stanley Tucci. Sachs declines a lucrative book deal for a tell-all biography about Priestly out of loyalty. She is a hero for our times.

With an impish grin, Priestly says, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?” My heart lurched. I was one with her, her stubborn ambition, and desire to continue to have impact. I wanted to stand up in the darkened theater and shout “Yes, I do!”

The breathtaking moment comes near the end, when Priestly and Sachs are sitting in the back of a chauffeured sedan rejoicing over clinching a deal to keep Runway from the clutches of a hapless tech titan. They are uncharacteristically happy, relaxed and enjoying one another’s company. Priestly gives Sachs her blessing to go ahead and write the biography, saying: “You should write it, and you should keep all the juicy bits. How impatient I am and demanding and imperious. And, you know…how much of my children’s lives I’ve missed. Just put it all in there. Because people should know. They should know the cost.” Priestly is no longer dedicated to a false image of perfection and willing to reveal the struggle. Once rigid and aloof, she is bending with grace and revealing painful truths.

Then, with an impish grin, Priestly adds, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?” My heart lurched. I was one with her, her stubborn ambition, and desire to continue to have impact. I wanted to stand up in the darkened theater and shout “Yes, I do!”

This line hit a nerve with me, as, at 64 I’ve shifted away from my full-time gig. It was time, but not easy to leave my career as an Executive Vice President at a pharmaceutical company, one that gave me tremendous opportunity, access and joy. Now, after a lot of soul searching, I’ve cobbled together a post-employment portfolio of companies I advise, candidates and causes I support, and writing projects on subjects of interest. It’s working for me. I still get to do meaningful work, meet interesting people, learn and contribute.

“Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day,” Joni Mitchell sings in “Clouds.” Yes, I’ve lost the comforts of the C-suite, and the thrill of being able to punch above my weight with a multinational corporation by my side. Yet I’ve found liberation in being my own boss and speaking with my own voice on the topics of my choosing. Like Priestly, I am evolving with confidence and a new, albeit older, sense of self.

Do you love to work? Are you of retirement age, but resistant to move on from your career? Have you switched careers later in life?

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I could hear Mom’s breathing in the cramped room, shallow and raspy. She was recovering from the short walk between the waiting area and the exam room. It was not a good day for her—there had been days when she could tend the garden and play piano for a couple of hours. Not today. Good days were few and far between now.

A soft knock on the door and a petite young woman in a white coat entered.

“Hello, I am Dr. Kou!” the doctor had a soft voice. “Ni jin tian hao ma (How are you doing today)?” She extended her hand to Mom.

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I expected Dr. Kou to be taller and older, someone projecting more authority and experience.

Mom was diagnosed with Mitral Valve Stenosis ten years ago when she was 80, and the only effective treatment to repair the defective valve would be open-heart surgery. Mom refused surgery. “I don’t want to be opened up and die on the table!” she insisted. She was adamant about no invasive treatment, no “cutting my chest open,” a decision she later came to regret, especially in the prior two years, when her heart condition had been steadily deteriorating, taking her quality of her life with it.

A few weeks earlier we’d moved Mom to be closer to my son Howie, her only grandson. That day was Mom’s first visit with Dr. Kou. Although she didn’t state it explicitly, I knew Mom was hoping a new doctor might offer a new treatment option for her worsening condition—something her previous doctors hadn’t been able to offer.

“Ni hao! (Hello!)” Mom was surprised to hear the Chinese greeting; her eyes brightened. Without looking to me for help as she would usually do, she started listing her usual complaints in Chinese: lack of energy, poor appetite, and loss of taste. There was still exhaustion in her voice, but the familiar language seemed to have encouraged her.

Dr. Kou turned to me, her eyes asking for help—the greeting was probably the only Chinese she could manage. I proceeded with translation for the rest of the visit.

“Okay, let’s have a listen to your heart,” she said, putting on her stethoscope. Mom took several deep breaths, quietly obeying the doctor’s instructions.

I noticed a pink heart-shaped button clipped on Dr. Kou’s stethoscope. It triggered a memory from many years ago and my mind suddenly saw a tiny elephant, with fuzzy grey fur and a pink tongue sticking out, also clipped to a stethoscope.

***

That was Dr. Bleicher’s stethoscope, in a spacious exam room decorated with animal print wallpaper and glittering stars. Baby Howie lay on the examination table lined with a plastic floral pad. He had only his diaper on. Mom sat next to me, shifting in her seat. “Why does this doctor have to take off all the clothes?” she whispered to me in Chinese. “He’s going to catch a cold!”

I ignored Mom’s question and concentrated on Dr. Bleicher’s next move, the main reason we were here: to get the baby’s first vaccine—a cocktail of vaccines to be exact. Howie was oblivious to what was about to happen, his hand reaching towards the elephant on the stethoscope.

“You are such a sweet and happy baby!” Dr. Bleicher cooed as she arranged multiple baby-sized syringes with tiny needles. While holding down the baby’s plump legs she delivered a quick jab. Startled, Howie’s hand stopped in the air for a second before grabbing the tiny elephant.

“Good job! You have quick and strong hands!” Dr. Bleicher cheered before the second jab. Mom was startled in her seat. Stunned, the baby opened his mouth, ready to issue a cry.

“Look at you, what a brave boy!” Dr. Bleicher tickled Howie’s bare chest, and without losing any time, there went a third jab. which elicited a loud wail. “We are almost done! Just one more.” She delivered the fourth shot before finishing the sentence. By then, I wasn’t sure who was more upset — Howie or Mom.

“Are you planning on sending Howie to a daycare?” Dr. Bleicher didn’t seem to sense Mom’s disapproval; she smiled at us while applying four Snoopy bandages.

The wailing continued. Mom stood and picked Howie up. Balancing the baby in her arms, she started to put clothes back on him. She was done with this visit, whether the doctor agreed or not.

“Eh, no, my mom is going to take care of him while I finish school,” I explained, returning the smile, hoping to make up for my mom’s apparent dissatisfaction.

I noticed a pink heart-shaped button clipped on Dr. Kou’s stethoscope. It triggered a memory from many years ago and my mind suddenly saw a tiny elephant, with fuzzy grey fur and a pink tongue sticking out, also clipped to a stethoscope.

Minutes later, as I trailed after Mom in the parking lot, she couldn’t wait to enter the car to announce her opinion. “I don’t like this doctor, and I don’t like how baby care is done here!” Her voice grew louder, “How could she administer so many vaccines to such a small baby in one session?!”

“Shh!” I looked around and made sure no one was paying attention to her outburst. “That’s how things are done here; it’s perfectly normal!”

“Well, it’s barbaric!” she said, putting on her seatbelt after helping me buckle in the car seat. She turned her face to look out of the window, too upset to continue this conversation.

***

“Do you have a care plan in place for your mom?” Dr. Kou’s voice startled me.

“Yes, we do. We have caregivers visiting every day to help with all the chores she can’t do herself.”

“Have you discussed end-of-life care?”

The words hung in the air. Mom’s labored breathing suddenly seemed louder in the small room. I shot her a quick look. She was pressing her fingers on her knee as if to flatten the invisible wrinkles on her pants. Was she following this conversation? I shifted in my seat, the vinyl floor squeaking under my chair.

“Of course, not now, but for later,” Dr. Kou added, briefly pausing her typing on the computer, and softening her voice.

“She has signed a DNR, if that’s what you mean.” The words came out clipped. I was done for this visit.

Walking out of the small exam room, I was thankful that the doctor’s Chinese vocabulary ended at Ni Hao.

***

We were waiting for the elevator, and I reminded Mom that she still needed to get her blood drawn for her regular anticoagulant blood test before we could go home.

“Again? No, I don’t want to!” she protested. “Last time the nurse had to poke several times before she could find the vein. Look, the bruise is still here!” She pulled up her sleeve, and sure enough, her arm was littered with different sizes and shades of bruises. I searched for comforting words in vain.

“Okay, maybe we will get a more skilled nurse today,” I coaxed.

Hearing my own voice, I had a flashback with Mom’s voice, saying these words to me, in a crowded urgent care room in Shanghai.

I was not much older than 3 or 4 years. A case of food poisoning from potato sprouts sent our entire family to the emergency room. Mom and I shared the same hospital bed, and the doctor had ordered IV fluids for all of us. But the veins on my arms were too tiny. After several failed attempts, the nurse was frantically looking for veins in my leg.

With one of her hands hooked to an IV, Mom held mine with her other hand, and assured me softly, “It’s going to be alright; this nice lady is going to get it done and your tummy won’t hurt anymore!” Her body against mine, I watched the nurse finish with the needle—no tears, no wailing.

Five decades later, I looked at Mom’s frail figure and pleading eyes. I thought, Fuck the test! I guided Mom to a bench at the building’s entrance, “We won’t do the blood test today. You rest here and I will get the car.”

On the drive home, Mom’s spirits lifted. She commented about the flowers on the trees and how she wanted to learn my way of steaming eggs. Her breathing was smooth and voice louder. I looked at her from my peripheral vision and remembered her confidence when I was hurting, her opinion about Dr. Bleicher when her baby grandson was hurting, and wondered if she even cared to have an opinion about Dr. Kou now.

I reached out, held her hand in mine, and returned her chatter with a smile.

***

That was the last time Mom and I held hands.

Six months later, at my home in Washington, I stood on the phone with the San Jose paramedics.

“There is no pulse, Ma’am,” one of them said.

I told them about the DNR form taped to the refrigerator, right next to the steamed egg recipe I had written for her.

Previously wrote “At the Lunar New Year, Remembering ‘Auntie Mommy’” for Oldster, and took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. She writes the newsletter .

Last December, my husband David and I hosted 30 people who came to celebrate our ridiculously grandiose, over-ornamented Christmas trees, our 29^th anniversary, and having survived a challenging year.

Our garlanded home looked seasonally smashing. For three days prior I cooked like a man possessed. (No artfully composed, gastronomically unsatisfying fruit, cheese and charcuterie boards in this house.) I concocted an innocent tasting punch with devilish ingredients that got lapped up like Veuve-Clicquot. David built roaring blazes in both fireplaces.

One guest after another on my podcast, The Happy Grownup, has emphatically stated how necessary and advantageous it is for what I call “New Agers”—those of us over 50 who look forward to our lives with curiosity, confidence and a desire for at least one more act—to curate a significantly younger circle of friends.

The day was warm, convivial, buoyant, Hallmarkian even. And as I surveyed our guests eating, drinking, laughing, sharing, and ribbing, I realized— with no great surprise—that I was the oldest one in the room. Though not a “Daddy” in the sexual sense, I was one in this instance, demographically speaking. In fact, I was probably older than many of our guests’ parents.

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Not that it bothered me. After all, one guest after another on my podcast, The Happy Grownup, has emphatically stated how necessary and advantageous it is for what I call “New Agers”—those of us over 50 who look forward to our lives with curiosity, confidence and a desire for at least one more act—to curate a significantly younger circle of friends. Regardless of the particular “Gen” they’re from, it’s important, invigorating, instructional and satisfying to nurture relationships with those whose perspectives stem from a different timeframe of reference, who have alternative priorities, who gather information from other sources, know how to do things you don’t, and don’t know things you do. These contrasts generate mutual curiosity and appreciation. And being surrounded by youth can make you feel fresh.

However, over the course of the holidays I caught some of our younger guests posting pics of more fun times they’d shared with their shiny-skinned, anti-aging-cream-free peers. Those party invitations had not been extended to us. Suddenly, youth made me feel overlooked, and it bugged me. Why weren’t we included in those celebrations, and those group shots that followed? Was it something I said? My breath? Because my hair isn’t cut in a fade, and I can’t recite any rap by Cardi B by heart? Am I fooling myself in thinking that those younger people are really our friends?

Regardless of the particular “Gen” they’re from, it’s important, invigorating, instructional and satisfying to nurture relationships with those whose perspectives stem from a different timeframe of reference, who have alternative priorities, who gather information from other sources, know how to do things you don’t, and don’t know things you do. These contrasts generate mutual curiosity and appreciation.

After some thought I’ve come around to the notion that I’m not mistaken. They are our friends. To paraphrase Sally Field’s immortal Oscar winning misquote, “They like us. They really like us!” But we may have been expecting too much, and ignored some of the dynamics that make having a coterie of younger chums possible and fulfilling.

I’ve heard other New Agers echo my concerns. Here’s what I’ve learned.

What brings people together isn’t necessarily common demographics. What bonds us are shared passions—for food, causes, projects, location, amusements, charities, humor, vacation destinations. When these intersections occur, friendships are forged. But different age groups also have specific interests, and their own idiosyncratic comfort zones.

Did you have to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour three times to ensure you wouldn’t die of FOMO? (That’s young-person speak for “fear of missing out.”) Were you champing at the bit to get caked in mud for ten days at Burning Man? Can you code? Do you excel at Snowboarding or Fortnite? Work for a tech company? Are you eager to attend an eight-day destination wedding in Patagonia or dive into an Electronic Dance Music (or as the kids call it, EDM) rave at a waterfront warehouse until sunrise? Do you prefer a table of four in the corner, or one for twelve right next to the restaurant’s resident deejay? Is the young’uns’ collective reaction crickets when you drop a memorable line from any of the following films: Pulp Fiction, All About Eve, The Shining, The Big Lebowski, Xanadu, or Female Trouble? Are you worried about changes in Social Security benefits? Hey, your still “invincible” pals rarely even see a doctor.

What brings people together isn’t necessarily common demographics. What bonds us are shared passions—for food, causes, projects, location, amusements, charities, humor, vacation destinations. When these intersections occur, friendships are forged. But different age groups also have specific interests, and their own idiosyncratic comfort zones.

What must be acknowledged is that though you and your younger pals may be equal in affection for one another, that doesn’t make you peers.

Consequently, you’re not going to be included in everything your younger friends do, nor invited everywhere they go. Don’t take it personally. It’s not rejection; it’s math. They may love their parents even more than they love you, yet they aren’t inviting their forebears to go parasailing either.

We New Agers are blessed with pride, a wealth of knowledge and experience, and healthy, well-earned egos. But it still makes us wince to be left out.

Get over it.

Do not: regress; try to assume their “cool”; insinuate a fervent interest in taking part in all they do; or attempt to be their contemporary. Doing any of these puts you in danger of becoming an older mascot to them. Younger friends appreciate you, and will come to you because you are not their peer, because you possess a resolve and a seasoned outlook they lack, because you have stories about times they missed that they yearn to hear you recount—hopefully with more mischief than nostalgia, because you aren’t in competition with them—because you’ve been around long enough to know the difference between challenging times and a panic, because you know how to organize and fight back. And oh yeah, because you are easier to talk to than their parents.

Friendship with youth isn’t merely mentorship, it’s mutual usefulness. They offer access. You offer context. They come with urgency. You show up with wisdom. The happy result of this union is that everyone becomes more adept at tackling life.

Here’s a brief primer for New Agers to get the most out of younger friends:

DON’T:

· Correct their language.

· Dress like them.

· Use lingo that sticks in your mouth.

· Repeatedly diagnose their generation monolithically.

· Belittle technology. No matter what you say, they aren’t going to pick up the phone and call. They text. TikTok isn’t dumb just because you don’t know how to benefit from it.

· Monopolize conversations with stories, no matter how much you are asked.

· Offer career advice or adopt devil’s advocacy, unless asked.

· Say “back in the day” more than once every four meetings.

DO:

· Ask questions about their work and future plans with sincere curiosity.

· Learn to use their tools, because they work.

· Share resources without strings, or waiting for a thank you.

· Introduce them to others who can help if they need it.

· Admit what you don’t know and when you are wrong.

· Let them teach you, and enjoy being the student.

About a week after Christmas. I received a text from one of our gosling guests who had subsequently Instagram-storied a gathering where we were not in attendance.

“Wow,” he wrote, “you guys throw the warmest parties. Delicious food. The nicest people. The coolest house. That damn punch! We wish we knew how to do that.” I replied that one day they would. “Don’t worry, it’ll happen.”

About two minutes later, he texted again. “Can I please have your recipe for that chocolate cake? It was fucking amazing. Oh, I know you’re usually upstate but if you’re in town this weekend, we’re going to the Boom Boom Room. I think Alex is playing. Please come. Figure midnight, or no later than 2.”

I replied, “We’ll be upstate. David will be asleep. I’ll be motionless in front of a fire. But thanks for asking. Appreciate it. Love to see you soon.”

And I really meant it.

What has your experience been with friends from other age groups?

Leave a comment

A version of this essay was originally published in The Happy Grownup, Hal Rubenstein’s weekly newsletter hat celebrates the joy, challenges, discovery, and serenity possible in life after 50.

He also hosts a bi-weekly podcast by the same name on Apple Podcasts and Spotify You can listen to his interview with Oldster founder Sari Botton here. He’s the author of eight books including the best-selling 100 Unforgettable Dresses (HarperCollins), and Paisley Goes with Nothing: A man’s guide to style (Doubleday). His most recent books are Dressing the Part: Television’s Most Stylish Shows and Street Art Icons: The Story of The Wynwood Walls (Assouline) He is one of the founding editors of InStyle Magazine, where he served as its Fashion Director for 15 years. He is the former Men’s Style Director of the New York Times Magazine, one of the founding editors of Details Magazine and 7 Days, founder and Editor-in-Chief of the cult classic Egg Magazine. He was a restaurant critic for both Details (8 years) and New York Magazine (7 years) and Interview (4 years), and a columnist for The New Yorker, Vogue, Elle, Interview, and Ocean Drive. He’s been a design and hospitality consultant for several brands. And he’s won numerous awards including the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a board member of The Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Previously Rubenstein took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.

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.