Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  I read with curiosity the stories of people, like this newly married woodsman, who decide to leave the city in search of quiet and privacy on a ranch, on a beach, on a mountaintop, or in the countryside. I figure that the final quiet will come soon enough. The grave offers privacy. I also realize that what I want in the last chapters of life is contact with, not separation from, others. “Independent” housing arrangements for seniors always encourage a kind of camaraderie, cheerful and grim in equal measure. My father lived in such a place for five years. Every day the sound of an ambulance called everyone to momentary, breathless attention. Everyone was waiting. They knew the clock was ticking. Seek not to ask for whom the bell tolls.

  I had a recent discussion with a colleague who has decided to retire with his wife to a farmhouse in the Dordogne. I asked whether he knew anyone there. No, he said. “Do you speak French?” No. “Are you handy with home repairs?” No. “Do you understand French legal and commercial habits?” Again, a simple American no. I said that his idea of a challenge, an adventure, a source of pleasure, was my idea of a nightmare. He asked what I dreamed of for the next move. I replied immediately that at the end of the road I do not want to be at the end of a road in some rural hideaway, especially where I do not really know the language. I want to be surrounded by everyone I have ever known or at least by people who share my language and customs.

  “Let me tell you,” he said, “there’s nothing like having a farmhouse in the South of France to ensure that everyone you have ever known will make a visit.”

  Perhaps he is right, I thought, but this is not the same thing as daily life in the presence of relatives and old friends and in the midst of everything that will go on without you after you leave it. You can take comfort in the fact of your cosmic insignificance. You are reminded, in the city, of your utter irrelevance to the greater scheme of the universe. Aging means giving up, de-accessioning, and knowing that all worldly achievement, like wealth, counts for little. Urban life makes you feel like a nobody. Paradoxically, it also makes you feel alive.

  The automobile had everything—or at least a great deal—to do with my decision to leave Texas. I grew up driving, champing at the bit to get behind the wheel and get out of the house. Like most Americans, I can divide my life into pre-car and post-car chapters. A driver’s license marks any teenager’s major rite of passage. My sixteenth birthday gave me freedom, in imagination more than actuality. But the promise of such freedom got me through my high school years. I could escape from home, doing or trying to do what adolescents want to. Many of today’s college students have false identification cards so they can gain access to local watering holes. I wanted my driver’s license only for purposes of movement. Wheels afforded access to more than just what young people crave: the promise of sex in those hot boxes of callow adolescent passion. They took me to museums, theaters, libraries, country ponds, and friends’ houses. They extended my geographic, intellectual, and affective radii. I began to see more of the world, especially the parts I could not reach through the Philadelphia bus and subway lines.

  As an adult, I think I have resented every hour I have spent driving a car. When buying my last one—“last,” I suspect, in both senses—some fourteen years ago, I went out for the requisite test drive with an overly cordial but not very alert salesman. “Tell me, Willard,” he asked hopefully, “isn’t it fun driving this car?”

  I replied quickly, firmly, but without scorn, “Listen very carefully. The words ‘drive’ and ‘fun’ do not belong, for me, in the same sentence.” This marked the end of our discussion. I know how un-American and unmanly this claim must sound. Unlike most men, I have also never minded asking for directions, from a car or on foot, when I am lost. My ego is intact without my having to feel in control. Driving, especially fast driving, gives people, especially men, authority. It speaks to their testosterone levels. Some women suffer from the same mania. Surrendering a license often represents the last challenge to the independence of any senior citizen. Some go gentle, others kicking, into their car-free existence. If I had infinite wealth, I would have hired a permanent chauffeur decades ago. Imagine: being driven, while spending your time reading, writing, napping, talking, all things you can do on the subway if you are lucky enough to get a seat. New York, especially Manhattan, leads all American cities in its population of carless drivers. Boston and Washington, D.C., come in a distant second and third. It is possible, with great difficulty, to live without an automobile almost anywhere. But it is seldom convenient.

  And I know as well that for many people driving gives something that their lives otherwise lack. I chatted with a young colleague who lives in a Dallas suburb, and I asked about his commute: How long does it take to get home in the afternoon? That depends, he said, on when he leaves campus. At three o’clock, he can make the drive in twenty minutes; at four o’clock, it will take more than twice as long. And then the punch line: he prefers the later drive. Why? I should have known: “It’s the only time during the day that I have entirely to myself.” Family and attendant chores, the children, the lawn, the dog, the soccer practice and the music lessons, tonight’s dinner, and the morning’s dishes all awaited him at home. The driving hour, undisturbed by anything other than NPR, music, or Books on Tape, was for him alone.

  The automobile liberates us. It also isolates us. Walking focuses and expands the mind. Driving closes the mind to everything except driving itself.

  Is anything as sad as a parking lot, or even a multistoried city parking garage, with the rows of abandoned cars bereft of life and waiting for their owners to come back and fire them up? The urban scene must accommodate the automobile as hospitably as it accommodates the human population. A parking garage at least has the modest aesthetic advantage of hiding its inhabitants: you can’t see its invisible population of pent-up machines. But nothing can be done to soften the vast expanse of an open-air lot paved in asphalt or concrete. The anomie of hundreds of empty cars always conjures up for me thoughts of an urban graveyard, but at least most cemeteries have appropriate landscaping.

  Few visible phenomena in the American environment are as dispiriting as these plots for things already symbolically dead, things lying side by side and piled up above rather than beneath the ground. In addition to nature’s softening touches, cemeteries have reminders of human life: tombstones are inscribed with names and dates, and even modest literary allusions. No one has ever wandered through a parking lot for solace. It is not a thing of beauty. Off-hours, it is just a forlorn empty space. But in cities like Dallas, parking facilities are essential. A business, restaurant, shop, or gallery without adequate parking will fail. How can customers get to their destination without a car? And once there, where will they put it?

  Privacy is necessary to well-being. Insulation or isolation is not. People have talked of the disintegration of city life, and the alienation it creates in urban dwellers, for more than a century. And yet I never feel more alone than in a car or attempting to navigate on foot through suburban Dallas neighborhoods. One Christmas night, I had to walk—my car having been left in the repair shop—to my office a mile away from home to retrieve something I had forgotten but needed to take to a conference the following day. Whatever festivities were taking place at well-stocked tables in the houses of the haute bourgeoisie, I could neither participate in nor even see from outside. In wealthy Dallas neighborhoods, families leave the rooms at the front of their houses open for view. They never draw the curtains. They are proud to show off the parts of the house they seldom use. The real living is done at the back and out of sight. The living room is for display, mostly for the benefit of people driving through the neighborhood.

  So when I walked through Highland Park on that Christmas evening, I never saw another living person. Never have I felt so existentially isolated. On the year’s major day of celebration, I was alone, actually and spiritually. In Manhattan, one is alone in the crowd. One is apart from and a part of it. There’s always someone else enjoying a
solitary walk. A private meal at the diner can lift the spirits. At least it does not dampen them. Whenever I see Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks, which the artist said represented “the loneliness of a large city,” I feel that I have joined the human race, not separated from it. The four figures—one couple side by side, one additional customer, and the serving guy behind the counter—sit or stand in quiet, uncommunicative postures. We see them through a curved plate glass window. Their diner has no sign of an entrance door or even a window that might open. We are cut off from them but can gain solace from their togetherness. This picture does not fill me with sadness. It portrays the possibility for a self-sufficient community in the least likely circumstances. In their locked bubble, these people have one another. Even if they don’t know it, we do.

  When I was an adolescent always willing and eager to borrow the car for an evening or even an hour, I also knew about the fabled land of Manhattan, ninety miles north of my little Philadelphia suburb. Jean Shepherd broadcast his off-kilter, neurotic, and often insane monologues over WOR; I listened to him from bed on my tiny radio and wondered what kind of people inhabited this land. When I was sixteen, I took the train with three friends, and we spent a weekend in the city. We stayed at a YMCA and a YWCA on West Twenty-Third Street. We rode the subway uptown to visit older friends who’d already made their getaway to college at Barnard and Columbia and, taking the wrong line, had to hike up through Morningside Park to Broadway, only to learn that we might have been mugged en route. Fortune smiles on the innocent: nothing untoward befell us. Off-Broadway shows (Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Albee’s Zoo Story) bewildered us but made us feel sophisticated, just as reading The Waste Land did. We smugly pretended that anything easy did not count as art. I could not understand a word of Eliot. I had no sympathy for the condition of Krapp, with his tapes and bananas, or for Albee’s two men on a Central Park bench, but it did not matter. I worshipped difficulty and opacity. I knew I had to get back to the place where such incomprehensible artistry and the people who must have understood it seemed to thrive, where coffeehouses were filled with bearded or flaxen-haired folksingers who sang their political protests to left-leaning audiences. We were baby suburban beatniks, in search of our kind.

  During my college years, I occasionally made the trip in from the country—my first opera at the old Met, concerts at Carnegie Hall, overnight visits with classmates who lived in Brooklyn and Long Island—and felt the city’s appeal, its aching beauty, its clamor punctuated by stillness. Driving down the Henry Hudson Parkway to cross the George Washington Bridge for mandatory holiday visits with my family, I gazed, Carraway-like, in wonder at the Palisades on one side of the river and what seemed like magnificent, eternal granite outcroppings on the New York side. The lights, the buildings, and the marvelous city: everything spelled magic if only because I was always looking up, from below, or out, from a distance. Precisely because I was not at home, I felt at home, speeding along at sixty miles per hour. I wanted to be home, here.

  Having partially relocated to Manhattan three years ago, I have taken it upon myself to see as much as I can via foot and subway. I bought a pedometer to measure my progress and also to make a comparison between life in Dallas and life in New York City. In Dallas, it turns out I averaged less than two pedestrian miles per day. Most of that involved walking from parking lot to office and back. And, within my university building, for decades I have walked the seventy-eight steps from the back door to my fourth-floor office. Probably four or five times a day. If I took the elevator and omitted the stairs, I’d have racked up even fewer miles. It is easy to understand why many Americans feel an obligation to go to a gym. We must plan to exercise. On an ordinary Manhattan day—running errands, walking along the local streets, doing nothing special or arduous—I average six miles on foot. If I want to be more leisurely and at the same time get more exercise, I can do ten miles without even thinking about it. It is no wonder that obesity rates are lower in Manhattan than elsewhere in the country.

  The possibilities for excitement are endless. And I converted my pleasure into a form of work. I persuaded an editor to commission some journalistic pieces from me, the new walker in the city, a twenty-first-century flaneur in the honored tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin in Paris, or Alfred Kazin and Joseph Mitchell in Manhattan. I would do New York. Everyone can. And everyone’s experience will be utterly different from everyone else’s.

  * * *

  I like New York in June. If you’re looking for healthy excitement when the weather is not too oppressive, let me recommend what I did on the second day of summer. I went for a walk, a long walk. With five like-minded pedestrians, all thirty years younger, I did Manhattan from top to toe, starting at 8:30 and ending eleven hours later, with only modest pedal calluses as uncomfortable reminders the morning after.

  The plan was easy. Anyone can follow it, or design his or her own variation. We met at the top of Manhattan, the borough, not the island. A geography question: Where is this? If you said Marble Hill, at 230th Street, located officially in the Bronx on the other side of the Harlem River, but actually part of the borough of Manhattan, you get a star. Very few New Yorkers know this.

  We were three college English teachers, one librarian, and two social workers. We were two married couples who had come from the Midwest, one single woman from Queens, and I, who counted as a recent, part-time Manhattanite. We gathered outside the 231st Street No. 1 subway station in the golden light of a Saturday morning. The city was waking up. With its undistinguished red and yellow brick buildings, Upper Broadway qualifies as a melting pot, many but not all of whose ingredients are Caribbean and Hispanic. The Dolce Vita Salon and Day Spa sits beside the office of a Vietnamese chiropractor, the Gold Mine Cafe (“Open 24 Hours”), the Te-Amo Convenience Store, and Keenan’s Irish pub (“est. 1961”). Mr. McGoo’s Pub is up Broadway a block, and Loeser’s Kosher Deli a block down. Such examples of a United Nations of Commerce exist in almost all New York neighborhoods.

  Tourists do not come to this part of the city.

  We crossed the Broadway Bridge and headed into Inwood, in Manhattan, its tree-shaded streets filled with sedate single-family houses, small, trim apartment buildings, and well-maintained gardens. By 9:20, it was time for our first snack, pastries from the Isham Street Farmers’ Market. Then we continued south, past small Orthodox shuls and the Dyckman Street subway station at Fort Tryon Park, where the tower of the Cloisters rises from the treetops.

  On Broadway and 181st Street—aka Juan Rodriguez Way here—we saw a sign for the dental offices of Dr. Moshe Glick and his partner Dr. Olga Iglesias, on top of Colorina Shoes and across from the Pagan Driving School. Nearby: a taco truck called La Viagra. (I wonder what happens after you eat one of its specialties.) Moving past Audubon Terrace, we finally entered Manhattan’s more familiar precincts. We stopped for early Bloody Marys and eggs Benedict on 125th Street and Broadway. A little after noon, fortified, we resumed.

  Greenery beckoned. We headed down quiet Claremont Avenue paralleling the Hudson. Columbia University had mostly emptied out for the summer. The Dalai Lama was doing a gig at Riverside Church. From the back of the hall, I softly sang to myself “Hello, Dalai!” and then we ambled down leafy Riverside Drive, witnessing en route a bicycle accident—fire truck and ambulance on the scene to rescue the hapless victim, who had slammed into an opening car door—and headed east, past the Cathedral of St. John (“the Unfinished”) toward the northwest corner of Central Park.

  We circled back to Bank Street Book Store on Broadway (last year, it moved down the street to a new location) for some of our group to find souvenirs for their kids. Catty-cornered, on the northeast side, we saw our first real tourists of the day, snapping photographs in front of Tom’s Restaurant. Think Seinfeld.

  Then into Central Park, weaving between sun and shade, between roller-bladers and canines, through the glorious stand of American elms south of Bethesda Fountain and the kayak-crowded lak
e. At 2:20, we emerged in front of the Plaza, back in the city again.

  Even on a summer weekend, midtown Manhattan throbs with people, mostly tourists. The commuters, office workers, and businesspeople have retreated. We pressed west and then south through Sixth Avenue’s street vendors hawking all manner of things to eat, drink, and wear, and hit Rattle N Hum, an Irish pub west of Madison Avenue on Thirty-Third Street. Cold, dark, and empty was the place, with European soccer matches on big TV screens. Cold and dark were the beers, even more appreciated.

  A movie crew had occupied a dozen square blocks around Madison Avenue in the twenties and thirties, at what expense one could not even begin to calculate. Traffic had halted. “What are they doing?” we asked. It turned out to be a sixty-second chase scene for an upcoming Spider-Man movie, but we heard this through the grapevine, not the closed-lip traffic controllers. A flatbed truck sped by, carrying the (presumably) dead or wounded body of Spider-Man, or a Spider-Man counterfeit.

  Our exciting brush with entertainment left us unsettled, so we turned west through Madison Square Park, went past the Flatiron Building, and down Fifth Avenue to Eleventh Street, one of those tasteful residential blocks that virtually whisper: “The West Village: You Really Cannot Afford to Live Here, But You May Dream” and—after pizza slices on Sixth Avenue—meandered to West Street on the Hudson, where we refreshed ourselves briefly (whiskey and pickles) at the Rusty Knot, full of what looked like local hipsters.

  Everyone can discover curiosities during a walk like this and have plenty of questions about history, architecture, and culture. Smart phones have never been more useful or appreciated. What was that abandoned picture hall on Upper Broadway? It’s the old United Palace, featured in that morning’s Times; it opened in 1930, became the church of Reverend Ike in 1969, and is now engaged in a fund-raising campaign to restore its original magic.