Ok, first of all, I grew up a block away from where you lived in 1972, and I remember those lines during the gas crisis and of course the Paris Hotel, before it turned into a fancy condo. Ah, the old neighborhood;-)! Also, I loved smoking so much. It solved many of my social anxiety problems. Quitting, finally, after ten or so tries, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s been thirty years since I last inhaled and I cannot stand the smell of a cigarette, except, once in a while, when walking behind a smoker on the street, I get a faint whiff of illusory coolness that was mine.
It's a great neighborhood, miss it! I was wondering what became of the Paris Hotel. Me, too, it took several tries--i only wrote about the successful one--and me too, i can't stand the smell of smoking, not even a faint whiff.
The Paris is now fancy condos, hilarious given its previous manifestation. My dad still lives in the apartment where I grew up so I am there often. Broadway is unrecognizable, but West End and Riverside look the same, even though it's now too expensive. Few of the old haunts remain...the old restaurants mostly gone.
I loved this! Beautifully written and so relatable. I loved smoking too, and quitting was like a death of part of me. It was a security blanket, a constant source of comfort against the anxiety that I carried with me everywhere. I didn’t waste any time finding other addictions to replace it. I’ve always been most comfortable with the addicted me (drugs, sex, shopping, gardening, anorexia, parenting, teaching, exercising, and writing). I’ve moved in and out of these places of enslavement. Every one of them has cost me something. Some cost more than they gave me.
Beautiful writing. Thank you. Entirely due to genetics (and not smoking, I guess), I am 71 with few lines on my face. The double-edged compliments (no! I can't believe you are 71!) annoy the hell out of me, for reasons I do not entirely understand. I guess it is because they carry so much freight about the fear of old age. I was a university professor ,too, and you are right--they can't hear us when we talk about their future. It makes no sense to them, and it didn't to us, when we were that age. I remember sitting outside in the grass, 1973, UMass-Amherst. My poetry teacher was a woman about 60. I looked at her aged feet and the cobwebs of tiny purple lines around her ankles and could not even fathom looking like that. So distasteful! I was a highly evolved (!) young feminist who didn't shave my legs, yet the sight of her legs was distasteful to me. Go figure.
youth and age, "if the young knew..." "Can't believe you are 71"--I know what you mean. I think you're right to feel annoyed. I still sort of lap it up, while it's ageist and spineless to. Go figure. :)
I don’t think the pendulum is ever going to swing back to any kind of privacy or modesty.
There’s an aggressive kind of in-your-face exhibitionism now, particularly ghastly skin wounds & conditions, in my local grocery stores. There’s a guy that sheds copious amounts of skin all over the produce and just leaves it on the store’s mobility cart too. 🤮
But if the store said anything about the health hazard they’d get sued.
What a great piece! I remember thinking in the 1970s that the year 2000 was inconceivably far away because I’d be 50 then, which was unimaginable. But I quit smoking in January 1976, when I learned I was pregnant with my first child. My first book was published in 2001. Living long enough to delight in my grandchildren — and to be remembered by them after I die — seems like the real pay-off now.
Thank you Gayle for push a beautiful piece, and also * for helping me look forward to my 70s, which are only 7 years away * for reminding me that “over age” is under-rated, generally * and for putting a word to something that’s been bubbling in my mind for so long… unrealisable! Yes. Don’t you think it goes beyond age? Is it a human condition tohave an undeveloped sense of the impending and inevitable? I doubt if I am the only one who, after 9 months of pregnancy, and looking and feeling like I was having triplets for a good 5 months of that, was shocked to the core to be holding a baby, and continued to wonder for months when the real parents were going to come and pick up their baby?
That is funny, wondering when the real parents were going to pick them up! Yes it probably is the human condition to lack imagination or maybe deliberately shut down imagination because otherwise, well, unrealisable.
I quit smoking in 1996, the year my mother passed away. I said if I could get through that devastating period without smoking I could make it permanently. Quitting was one of the hardest things I ever did but no regrets. I don’t think I’d be alive now if I continued. I had a lot of pack years.
It's the big 60 for me this year, with all the dismay and reflections that go with it. I've decided to lean in. Let my hair go white. Forgo the contact lenses. Embrace the tunic. Because what's the alternative?
I've decided to fight the 20 extra menopause pounds though. One has limits.
I have lines, sure. But for me it's more about gravity. What little jawline I had in my youth is now mostly gone. I'm looking a lot more like my dad. Except for my eyelids, which are sagging down around my big baby blues like my maternal grandma's, judging from the photo I keep of her by the bedside. . Both developments are actually kind of cool. Especially when you manage to accept that no one is looking, and friends and family aren't judging.
well said, especially when you accept that no one is looking. Abigail Thomas says that invisibility is a superpower. I see my mom peeking out from my mirror these days; luckily I liked my mom. :)
There’s a lot to be said for becoming more ‘invisible’. It is shocking though, to be invited into a photo and loathe the result…
Just when I learn to gracefully accept something deteriorating, something else drops. It doesn’t end until I end either.
I’m glad I have a few photos of my special clothes from my 20s30s. I was naturally skinny and had great taste, designed and created many great pieces on very modest income. Now the great local fabric stores are gone. I did just research Britex in San Francisco and they’re still open!!! Highlight of many a trip there in the 80s. Makes my day!!!
My brother always says, “After 21, it’s all maintenance.” I still think we need to have some of those experiences: tan using a reflector and baby oil, use butter to cook, eat some sweets (not all of them). Laugh and cry and get some life lines. How odd we’d all look if we hit our 80s with baby smooth skin!
"Aging requires many sacrifices of present pleasures for future benefit, though the benefit may be nothing more than buying time." Loved every line (pun intended).
I loved your column. I was three months old when FDR died, so I’ll reach eighty this coming end of January. I hope you are in good health! Some people with the relevant expertise have written that people currently in good health and even modest means may reach their “longevity escape velocity” by as early as 2030, or not terribly long after, when personal life expectancy grows faster than passage of time on the calendar. (Understanding and maintenance/repair capabilities are growing rapidly and accelerating.) From what you write, you seem to have the spirit to anticipate that with pleasure.
I attended one Foresight Institute conference in 1999 at Palo Alto. The keynote speaker was Ralph Merkle. He began his talk by asking for a show of hands for who in the audience took a “personal” interest in the heat death of the universe. I didn’t see any hands NOT go up. (I have mused whether in the fullness of time we will learn how to “worm-hole” our personal information to some young fertile universe when ours has grown feeble.) 😊
So what in the world would we do with potentially limitless time? Would overwhelming boredom inevitably rear its head? Ray Kurzweil has suggested humanity will develop an “exocortex” in “the cloud” to supplement our neocortex, with a neural interface making the union (which should solve the political problem: direct democracy). I dream of inhabiting the world library: everything is interesting! Max Planck commented that science grows one funeral at a time, suggesting the mind inevitably grows ruts and loses its creative potential. I think a response would be to change focus occasionally, perhaps every century or so, returning to any given area of thought, after ages have passed, as an eager student thirsty for new knowledge.
I found in a online query that the opposite of "sour grapes" is "sweet lemons": to find something "sweet" in what might objectively be considered "sour". Wallace who died in 1955 lived in a time when death, as it had been throughout the ages, was inevitable; so Stevens poetic line, or others like "Death gives meaning to life." may have given some consolation for a hopeless situation. Ideas have inertia, and may persist after their reason for being held as inevitable have passed. Lechayim!
Wonderful piece -- and kudos to you for quitting smoking. It's a VERY hard thing to do, and people don't realize the ferocity of its power to addict. And I'm right there with you -- I'm 70 and I wouldn't trade it for 20 even if I could -- even if I'd magically know what I know now. Because then I'd be expected to hang out with nobody but other 20-year-olds!
Oh, I love kids — I just don't want to be restricted to being around ANY particular age group. But there's something to be said for the cohort with shared history.
Fantastic. THIS: "Then a wave of alarm, tidal—oh, shit! Processes are taking place. Even if I can’t see them and don’t really believe in them, they are happening. And—conceptual breakthrough—if they’re happening on the outside, they’re happening on the inside, too. " Even if I can't see them and don't really believe in them. SO good.
Well Gayle I believe you have helped me cement the idea of not warning my sons of old age. I believe I will let them revel in thy youth. If they ask a question on aging, always the most honest answer I can give, but I can't predict their future.
Well, there's thought! I think life is a lotta leaps of faith... might as well assume the best. My dad once told me "never grow old." That was not helpful at all!
I love this SOOO much, Gayle. Your reminiscences *almost* make me want to smoke again. Though these days, the smell of a cigarette, even 40 feet away, makes me feel ill. I’m turning 60 this year, and just beginning the writing career I thought I would have in my twenties. Thank you for giving me a sweet reminder that it’s not too late, and we have so much more to say now.
Ok, first of all, I grew up a block away from where you lived in 1972, and I remember those lines during the gas crisis and of course the Paris Hotel, before it turned into a fancy condo. Ah, the old neighborhood;-)! Also, I loved smoking so much. It solved many of my social anxiety problems. Quitting, finally, after ten or so tries, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s been thirty years since I last inhaled and I cannot stand the smell of a cigarette, except, once in a while, when walking behind a smoker on the street, I get a faint whiff of illusory coolness that was mine.
It's a great neighborhood, miss it! I was wondering what became of the Paris Hotel. Me, too, it took several tries--i only wrote about the successful one--and me too, i can't stand the smell of smoking, not even a faint whiff.
The Paris is now fancy condos, hilarious given its previous manifestation. My dad still lives in the apartment where I grew up so I am there often. Broadway is unrecognizable, but West End and Riverside look the same, even though it's now too expensive. Few of the old haunts remain...the old restaurants mostly gone.
I loved this! Beautifully written and so relatable. I loved smoking too, and quitting was like a death of part of me. It was a security blanket, a constant source of comfort against the anxiety that I carried with me everywhere. I didn’t waste any time finding other addictions to replace it. I’ve always been most comfortable with the addicted me (drugs, sex, shopping, gardening, anorexia, parenting, teaching, exercising, and writing). I’ve moved in and out of these places of enslavement. Every one of them has cost me something. Some cost more than they gave me.
<3
Beautiful writing. Thank you. Entirely due to genetics (and not smoking, I guess), I am 71 with few lines on my face. The double-edged compliments (no! I can't believe you are 71!) annoy the hell out of me, for reasons I do not entirely understand. I guess it is because they carry so much freight about the fear of old age. I was a university professor ,too, and you are right--they can't hear us when we talk about their future. It makes no sense to them, and it didn't to us, when we were that age. I remember sitting outside in the grass, 1973, UMass-Amherst. My poetry teacher was a woman about 60. I looked at her aged feet and the cobwebs of tiny purple lines around her ankles and could not even fathom looking like that. So distasteful! I was a highly evolved (!) young feminist who didn't shave my legs, yet the sight of her legs was distasteful to me. Go figure.
youth and age, "if the young knew..." "Can't believe you are 71"--I know what you mean. I think you're right to feel annoyed. I still sort of lap it up, while it's ageist and spineless to. Go figure. :)
Yah, I’m annoyed yet affirmed. Go figure, indeed.
I don’t think the pendulum is ever going to swing back to any kind of privacy or modesty.
There’s an aggressive kind of in-your-face exhibitionism now, particularly ghastly skin wounds & conditions, in my local grocery stores. There’s a guy that sheds copious amounts of skin all over the produce and just leaves it on the store’s mobility cart too. 🤮
But if the store said anything about the health hazard they’d get sued.
What a great piece! I remember thinking in the 1970s that the year 2000 was inconceivably far away because I’d be 50 then, which was unimaginable. But I quit smoking in January 1976, when I learned I was pregnant with my first child. My first book was published in 2001. Living long enough to delight in my grandchildren — and to be remembered by them after I die — seems like the real pay-off now.
Thanks!
Thanks! the blessings of long life...
Thank you Gayle for push a beautiful piece, and also * for helping me look forward to my 70s, which are only 7 years away * for reminding me that “over age” is under-rated, generally * and for putting a word to something that’s been bubbling in my mind for so long… unrealisable! Yes. Don’t you think it goes beyond age? Is it a human condition tohave an undeveloped sense of the impending and inevitable? I doubt if I am the only one who, after 9 months of pregnancy, and looking and feeling like I was having triplets for a good 5 months of that, was shocked to the core to be holding a baby, and continued to wonder for months when the real parents were going to come and pick up their baby?
That is funny, wondering when the real parents were going to pick them up! Yes it probably is the human condition to lack imagination or maybe deliberately shut down imagination because otherwise, well, unrealisable.
I love how this piece moves through lines on your face and time so poetically.
Thanks!
I quit smoking in 1996, the year my mother passed away. I said if I could get through that devastating period without smoking I could make it permanently. Quitting was one of the hardest things I ever did but no regrets. I don’t think I’d be alive now if I continued. I had a lot of pack years.
good you quit! and yes, it is hard... this was my third try, I was writing about.
It was my third attempt as well. Thanks for such a great article piece!
Loved this and just ordered Missing Persons.
It's the big 60 for me this year, with all the dismay and reflections that go with it. I've decided to lean in. Let my hair go white. Forgo the contact lenses. Embrace the tunic. Because what's the alternative?
I've decided to fight the 20 extra menopause pounds though. One has limits.
I have lines, sure. But for me it's more about gravity. What little jawline I had in my youth is now mostly gone. I'm looking a lot more like my dad. Except for my eyelids, which are sagging down around my big baby blues like my maternal grandma's, judging from the photo I keep of her by the bedside. . Both developments are actually kind of cool. Especially when you manage to accept that no one is looking, and friends and family aren't judging.
well said, especially when you accept that no one is looking. Abigail Thomas says that invisibility is a superpower. I see my mom peeking out from my mirror these days; luckily I liked my mom. :)
There’s a lot to be said for becoming more ‘invisible’. It is shocking though, to be invited into a photo and loathe the result…
Just when I learn to gracefully accept something deteriorating, something else drops. It doesn’t end until I end either.
I’m glad I have a few photos of my special clothes from my 20s30s. I was naturally skinny and had great taste, designed and created many great pieces on very modest income. Now the great local fabric stores are gone. I did just research Britex in San Francisco and they’re still open!!! Highlight of many a trip there in the 80s. Makes my day!!!
isn't that the truth, just as you learn to accept it, it changes again.
well, as Abigail Thomas says, invisibility is a superpower.
My brother always says, “After 21, it’s all maintenance.” I still think we need to have some of those experiences: tan using a reflector and baby oil, use butter to cook, eat some sweets (not all of them). Laugh and cry and get some life lines. How odd we’d all look if we hit our 80s with baby smooth skin!
Maintenance is the word, for sure!
"Aging requires many sacrifices of present pleasures for future benefit, though the benefit may be nothing more than buying time." Loved every line (pun intended).
thanks!
Hi Gayle!
I loved your column. I was three months old when FDR died, so I’ll reach eighty this coming end of January. I hope you are in good health! Some people with the relevant expertise have written that people currently in good health and even modest means may reach their “longevity escape velocity” by as early as 2030, or not terribly long after, when personal life expectancy grows faster than passage of time on the calendar. (Understanding and maintenance/repair capabilities are growing rapidly and accelerating.) From what you write, you seem to have the spirit to anticipate that with pleasure.
I attended one Foresight Institute conference in 1999 at Palo Alto. The keynote speaker was Ralph Merkle. He began his talk by asking for a show of hands for who in the audience took a “personal” interest in the heat death of the universe. I didn’t see any hands NOT go up. (I have mused whether in the fullness of time we will learn how to “worm-hole” our personal information to some young fertile universe when ours has grown feeble.) 😊
So what in the world would we do with potentially limitless time? Would overwhelming boredom inevitably rear its head? Ray Kurzweil has suggested humanity will develop an “exocortex” in “the cloud” to supplement our neocortex, with a neural interface making the union (which should solve the political problem: direct democracy). I dream of inhabiting the world library: everything is interesting! Max Planck commented that science grows one funeral at a time, suggesting the mind inevitably grows ruts and loses its creative potential. I think a response would be to change focus occasionally, perhaps every century or so, returning to any given area of thought, after ages have passed, as an eager student thirsty for new knowledge.
You raise a lot of good questions here, to which I have no answers. Except to quote Wallace Stevens, "Death is the mother of all beauty."
Gayle,
I found in a online query that the opposite of "sour grapes" is "sweet lemons": to find something "sweet" in what might objectively be considered "sour". Wallace who died in 1955 lived in a time when death, as it had been throughout the ages, was inevitable; so Stevens poetic line, or others like "Death gives meaning to life." may have given some consolation for a hopeless situation. Ideas have inertia, and may persist after their reason for being held as inevitable have passed. Lechayim!
I love reading this. What joy to meet somebody like Gayle.
What a nice thing to say!
Wonderful piece -- and kudos to you for quitting smoking. It's a VERY hard thing to do, and people don't realize the ferocity of its power to addict. And I'm right there with you -- I'm 70 and I wouldn't trade it for 20 even if I could -- even if I'd magically know what I know now. Because then I'd be expected to hang out with nobody but other 20-year-olds!
thank you! and well said, definitely one of the benefits, not having to hang out with kids who were as clueless as I once was.
Oh, I love kids — I just don't want to be restricted to being around ANY particular age group. But there's something to be said for the cohort with shared history.
Fantastic. THIS: "Then a wave of alarm, tidal—oh, shit! Processes are taking place. Even if I can’t see them and don’t really believe in them, they are happening. And—conceptual breakthrough—if they’re happening on the outside, they’re happening on the inside, too. " Even if I can't see them and don't really believe in them. SO good.
Thank you!
Well Gayle I believe you have helped me cement the idea of not warning my sons of old age. I believe I will let them revel in thy youth. If they ask a question on aging, always the most honest answer I can give, but I can't predict their future.
Well, there's thought! I think life is a lotta leaps of faith... might as well assume the best. My dad once told me "never grow old." That was not helpful at all!
I love this SOOO much, Gayle. Your reminiscences *almost* make me want to smoke again. Though these days, the smell of a cigarette, even 40 feet away, makes me feel ill. I’m turning 60 this year, and just beginning the writing career I thought I would have in my twenties. Thank you for giving me a sweet reminder that it’s not too late, and we have so much more to say now.
Thanks! I'm so glad if this gave you a bit of a nudge . 60 is still young--and truly, think of how much more you know than you knew in your twenties!