quota of drinks that night and had danced with her five or six times; that was way above my quota, too. She seemed to cling to me during those slow numbers; she had never done that before.
I felt a little more romantic, a little hornier when we got back to the apartment. As soon as we got inside the apartment and closed the door, I grabbed for her clumsily, but she parried my thrust, saying she had to powder her nose and wanted to get out of her confining and dressy evening clothes. I read into her words a suggestion that the patience I had displayed, when she had asked early on in our relationship for more time on my part, would pay off.
In preparation, I took off my dark jacket and draped it over the chair. The same with my black bow tie. I also took my shoes off and pushed them under the sofa, then waited like an eager schoolboy.
Virginia came out of the bathroom, put a tape with some nice dreamy music on the stereo, and sat down beside me. I grabbed her, pushed her back on the sofa, and reached for her mouth. She pushed me away, asking me to please take it easy. Then I tried to slide my hand inside her bathrobe and fondle her ample breasts.
And that’s when she said what she said on our very first date: “Please don’t rush me, Milt. I need time.” But that night I wasn’t buying what I was convinced was a line or patent ploy. I erupted like Vesuvius, shouting, “Exactly how much more time do you need? Your husband’s been dead for three years now, right?” And what was all this phony business about the wonderful marriage she and her husband had for the nearly 40 years they were together? I reminded her that she’d told me one night that she’d had three extramarital affairs, one of them lasting about seven years; the marriage was slightly less than idyllic. “Lady, it’s high time to get on with the rest of your life, whether it’s with me or anybody else.”
That’s when she asked if we couldn’t be friends, and could we just forget about the sex?
That did it. I snatched my coat and tie off the back of the chair, reached under the sofa for my shoes, and stormed toward the door, where I delivered my parting shot. I told her I’d had enough of her games and playacting. Six months of frustration, six months of an antiseptic, sexless relationship was a bit much. I told her that I needed and wanted the love and warmth of a good and fulfilled relationship and I thought that she wanted the same thing. “If I wanted a friend,” I said, “I would have bought a dog.” I don’t know where I first heard or read that line, but, make no mistake, I thought to myself, it was a barn burner. It left her with her tongue literally hanging out, poised to say something in rebuttal, but she remained speechless. We never, needless to say, saw each other again.
Hoop Dream (viii)
I once felt animal joy in being alive and I felt this mainly when I was playing basketball and I only occasionally feel that animal joy anymore and that’s life. I’m 51 and I feel this way; I don’t think my father started feeling this way until he was 95.
OLD AGE AND DEATH
Decline and Fall (iii)
Samuel Johnson wrote to a younger friend, “When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine what I am now.”
At age 50, your ability to perceive vibrations in the lower part of your body is significantly decreased. The nerves that conduct information signals to the brain are also diminished. Every decade after age 50, your brain loses 2 percent of its weight. You have difficulty learning things and you remember less and less. Memory per se—the actual encoding of information—isn’t diminished in a healthy, older person, but retrieval can be an excruciatingly slow process and take many more attempts. Older people are more susceptible to distraction, have trouble coordinating multiple tasks, and have decreased attention spans. In simple tasks and common situations, the old do fine, but when exercise or other stress is added, they often struggle. Perhaps this is why some older people, finding it harder to cope, tend to start searching for comfort rather than excitement.
Evelyn Waugh said, “Old people are more interesting than young. One of the particular points of interest is to observe how after fifty they revert to the habits, mannerisms, and opinions of their parents, however wild they were in youth.”
“At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves,” said George Orwell.
Virgil, author of
As you age, your eye lens clouds over (cataract). The cells of the optic nerve can be damaged by glaucoma or macular degeneration. Forty-two percent of people ages 52 to 64, 73 percent of people 65 to 74, and 92 percent of people over 75 need reading glasses. My father, after having cataract surgery 20 years ago, didn’t really need glasses anymore.
Shakespeare died at 52.
John Wayne said, “I’m fifty-three years old and six foot four. I’ve had three wives, five children, and three grandchildren. I love good whiskey. I still don’t understand women, and I don’t think there is any man who does.”
You gain weight until age 55, at which point you begin to shed weight (specifically, lean tissue, muscle mass, water, and bone). More fat now accumulates in your thighs and less in your abdomen. Your extremities become thinner and your trunk thicker. Middle-aged spread isn’t only the result of increased fatty tissue; it’s also caused by losing muscle tone and your skin literally thinning out as each skin cell loses its robustness.
Dante died at 56.
Between 50 and 60, your visual memory declines slightly; after 70, it declines substantially.
Noel Coward, advising a middle-aged friend to stop dieting, said, “This is a foolish vanity. Youth is no longer essential or even becoming. Rapidly approaching fifty-seven, I find health and happiness more important than lissomeness. To be fat is bad and slovenly, unless it is beyond your control, but however slim you get you will still be the age you are and no one will be fooled, so banish this nonsense once and for all. Conserve your vitality by eating enough and enjoying it.”
“The years between fifty and fifty-seven are the hardest,” said T. S. Eliot. “You are being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”
In late middle age, the skin in your hands becomes less sensitive to touch. Your skin cells regenerate less often. The skin weakens and dries, the number of sebaceous glands declines dramatically, and all of the tissues of the skin undergo some change: you get wrinkles and gray hair. Wrinkles don’t come from age, though. They come from sunlight, which slowly maims the face, causing wrinkles, mottling, and loose skin. Although the skin loses elasticity and heals wounds more slowly with advancing age, it never completely wears out.
At 59, Neil Young said, “When you’re in your twenties, you and your world are the biggest thing, and everything revolves around what you’re doing. Now I realize I’m a leaf floating along on top of some river.” My father hates this way of thinking, finds it defeatist.
Your blood cholesterol increases. The ability of the blood to maintain a normal level of glucose declines with age. At 60, you’ve lost 25 percent of the volume of saliva you normally secrete for food; it becomes more difficult to digest heavy meats.
When you’re 60, you’re 20 percent less strong than you were in middle age; at 70, you’re 40 percent less strong. You lose more strength in the muscles of your legs than in your hands and arms. You also tend to lose your fast-twitch abilities—a sprinter’s contractions—much more rapidly than your slow-twitch abilities—a walker’s contractions. (Some of this decline can be stalled by exercise, but by no means all. As a rule, the variability between individuals increases with age: almost all younger people will have, for instance, the same kidney function and be able to solve a problem at approximately the same speed, but with older people, some will be normal, others will be very impaired, and most will be somewhere in between.)
