Lessons From Lucy

by Dave Barry

  The result is that, at age seventy, I know a ton of people, but I have few close friends, mostly people I met long ago. And the truth is, I hardly ever see or talk to them. For all I know, some of my close friends could be dead. The only way to find out would be to call them up and talk to them about what’s going on in their lives, and I never do that.

  I think this is true of many guys, even the ones who are not Humor Personalities: we do not view talking about our personal lives as an acceptable activity.

  Imagine two people who are acquaintances, and who have both just been diagnosed with serious, possibly fatal diseases. Now imagine that they run into each other at a car wash, so that, while waiting for their cars, they spend a few minutes talking. If these people are women, they will immediately discover their common plight, and there will be tears and hugging, and possibly an immediate trip to Starbucks for commiserative chai lattes.

  But if these two people are men, it’s entirely possible that neither will mention his medical situation at all. It’s entirely possible that their entire conversation will consist of dissecting a recent decision by an NFL quarterback—whom neither one of them knows personally or will ever meet—to throw a short pass to a running back on third and twelve when the deep receiver was wide open for God’s sake. ON THIRD AND TWELVE!!!

  Sometimes I think the main purpose of professional sports is to give guys something to talk about that does not involve them personally.

  My point is that women tend to be better at making, and keeping, friends. My wife, Michelle, who is a woman, has dozens, maybe hundreds, of friends, and makes new ones regularly. Whenever she sees or hears from any of these friends, they have a conversation, usually involving their personal lives, that could easily last longer than dental school. She is closer to all her friends than I am to any of mine.

  My seventeen-year-old daughter, Sophie, also has far more friends than I do, thanks largely to Snapchat,5 which enables her to keep in constant contact with the entire seventeen-year-old population of the Western Hemisphere. And, like Michelle, she’s constantly making new friends.

  Whereas I am not. I am, through death and distance, losing and drifting apart from my friends. And what bothers me about this, when I stop to think about it, is that it doesn’t really bother me. The older I get, the more accustomed I am to solitude. When Michelle and Sophie are off doing things, I can spend an entire weekend alone—making no effort to see or talk to anybody—and be perfectly content.

  That’s me: content. No complaints.

  But . . .

  I’m thinking I shouldn’t settle for being content.

  I think that, even at seventy, I should still be aiming to be happy.

  Like my old—but still happy—dog, Lucy.

  Which leads me to the first Lesson from Lucy, which is:

  Make New Friends.

  (And Keep the Ones You Have.)

  Making friends, at this point, will not be easy for me, but I intend to try. When I meet new people, I’m going to make a conscious effort not to hide behind my humor barrier, nor use my age as an excuse to be a recluse. I’m going to think about Lucy—about the trustful, open, unreservedly joyful way she approaches everybody, and the happiness she clearly derives from her many friends. I’m going to think about that, and look these new people straight in the eye, and, with a positive, welcoming attitude, I am going to thrust my snout into their groins.

  OK, no, I will not be emulating Lucy to that extent. But I am seriously going to try to be more open to new friendships. I am also going to make an effort—starting today—to stay in better touch with my old friends.

  Between the end of that paragraph and the beginning of this one, I turned the computer on which I am writing this all the way off so that I couldn’t distract myself with the Internet. Then I called Rob Stavis, whom I’ve known since the sixties, when we were students at Haverford College, where, on the night that he was accepted at the medical school of his choice, we celebrated by, among many other things, standing in the dormitory-bathroom shower fully clothed with the water running and drinking bourbon from a shoe that did not belong to either of us.6 That’s the kind of friends we were back then, and I still count him as one of my closest friends. But these days we don’t talk much, and when we do it’s almost always because he reached out to me.

  So this time I reached out to him, and we talked for half an hour, which for me is a very long conversation. When we finally said goodbye, I felt really, really good, and I wondered why I didn’t call him more often. I will make a point of doing that again, with him and with other friends. What the hell am I doing that’s more important?

  So that’s my plan for being a friendlier, and I hope happier, me. I may even attempt to strike up conversations with strangers in bars. This could be tricky, because, as I said, I am fundamentally shy. I have little experience with conversation-starting small talk.

  ME: Hi.

  STRANGER IN BAR: Hi.

  ME: I can smell the asparagus metabolite in my urine.

  STRANGER IN BAR: Check please.

  So OK, maybe I won’t make my new friends in bars.

  But I will make some new friends.

  * * *

  4 If you know what I mean.

  5 Whatever the hell that is.

  6 If you must know, it belonged to John Cooper.

  THE SECOND LESSON FROM LUCY

  Getting old sucks.

  That’s not the second Lesson from Lucy. Lucy is not aware that she’s getting old. But for humans, it’s a fact of life: getting old sucks.

  Oh, sure, some people claim it doesn’t suck. And by “some people,” I mean AARP.

  AARP, as you probably know, is the last sound you make before you die.

  911 OPERATOR: This is 911. Do you have an emergency?

  CALLER: Yes! It’s my husband! He collapsed to the floor and his face turned blue and he’s making a weird noise!

  911 OPERATOR: What kind of noise?

  CALLER: It sounds like “aarp.”

  911 OPERATOR: OK, I’ll send a hearse.

  CALLER: Don’t you mean an ambulance?

  911 OPERATOR: No.

  “AARP” is also an abbreviation for “American Association of Retired Persons Standing in Line Ahead of You Demanding a Discount on Every Freaking Thing.” AARP is a powerful lobbying group representing the interests of senior citizens. Like, if a member of Congress even thinks about cutting Social Security benefits, an elite AARP tactical assault lobbying squad will descend on the congressperson’s office at a slow rate of speed and wave their catheters around in a threatening manner until the congressperson sees the light.

  I have no problem with that aspect of AARP. I’ve been paying into the Social Security system since the French and Indian War, and I want to cash in. Yes, I am aware that Social Security is basically a giant Ponzi scheme, and that we baby boomers, as we retire in vast numbers and start collecting from the system, will be imposing an enormous, unfair and potentially ruinous financial burden on younger generations. I view this as payback for what the younger generations have done to music.

  But I part company with AARP on the question of whether or not aging sucks. AARP’s official position is that it does not. The CEO of AARP, Jo Ann Jenkins, has a book, heavily promoted by AARP, titled Disrupt Aging: A Bold New Path to Living Your Best Life at Every Age. In this book, according to AARP, Jenkins “encourages us to re-think the negative stories we tell ourselves and each other about aging.” AARP has a whole “Disrupt Aging” campaign going: the message is that society should abandon the stereotype that older people are crotchety clueless doddering old farts.

  “Enough with dotty driver and goofy grandma memes!” states AARP. “The over-60 set is running corporations and ruling supreme courts, why is it still acceptable to group all elders as demented dimwits unable to use a TV remote?”

  (AARP apparently believes that senior citizens are “ruling” supreme courts.)

  “Age isn’t a punchline,�
�� asserts AARP. “It’s about growth. You aren’t ‘too old’ for anything.”

  Oh really, AARP? I beg to differ. Those of us drifting into our seventies and beyond are definitely too old for some things. Public nudity is the obvious example. Some years ago my family and another family, both with young children, were on a Caribbean cruise that stopped for a day at St. Martin. The island is divided into two sectors, a Dutch sector and a French sector. The Dutch sector is known for nightlife, by which I mean drinking. People on the Dutch side start engaging in nightlife as early as breakfast.

  The French sector is known for nude beaches. That’s the weird thing about the French. If you go to Paris, you’ll find that everybody is dressed quite formally, at least by American standards. If you walk into a Paris restaurant attired in shorts and sneakers, the French will look at you as though you are wearing a Hefty trash bag. But when these same French people get to a beach, they immediately remove all their clothes and stroll around openly flaunting their legumes.

  So anyway, we were on this St. Martin French beach with our small children, and no sooner did we settle onto our beach chairs than a herd of French people commenced parading past us stark naked. Some of these people were not unattractive to look at; these were your younger people. But the older naked people made you yearn for a total solar eclipse. There was a lot of drooping. The men, especially, were prone to extreme droopage in the groinular region, which as a human you do NOT want to see. There was one elderly man—I will never be able to completely erase this image from my brain—who was strolling toward us with his scrotal appendage dangling so low that a crab could easily have reached up a claw and grabbed it, although tragically this did not happen.

  So no matter what AARP says, you can definitely be too old for public nudity. Also, if you’re an older person who is not Mick Jagger, you are too old for “skinny jeans.” Also older people should not unironically attempt to use millennial slang that millennials use to communicate to other millennials the information that they are millennial, such as “bae,” “JK,” “FOMO,” “JOMO,” “salty,” “hepcat,” “twenty-three skidoo,” etc.

  Commercial airline pilots are legally required to retire when they reach age sixty-five. At that point they’re probably all still perfectly competent, but they have to stop anyway. Why do you suppose that is, AARP officials? If aging is about “growth,” why not let these pilots keep right on growing and flying large planes into their seventies, their eighties, even their nineties?

  PILOT: Folks, we’ve reached a comfortable cruising altitude, so I’m going to go ahead and turn off the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign.

  (All the engines shut down. The plane immediately starts losing altitude.)

  PILOT: OK, apparently we’ve begun our descent into Chicago.

  Which leads us to the unfair stereotype that older people are confused by technology. Wherever did THAT crazy notion come from, AARP officials?

  Let me suggest a possible answer, based on my experience as an author. When I have a new book out, I’ll usually travel around the country making appearances in bookstores, where I’ll give a short talk and then answer audience questions about my work, such as “Do you know Carl Hiaasen?” and “What is Stephen King really like?” After that I sign books for people who’ve bought them. Often people want to take pictures, which is of course very flattering; over the years I’ve posed for thousands of pictures, taken by people of all ages, almost always using cell phones. I have observed that young people and old people use very different picture-taking techniques.

  YOUNG-PERSON TECHNIQUE

  1. Hold up the phone.

  2. Take the picture.

  OLD-PERSON TECHNIQUE

  1. Hold up the phone.

  2. Frown at the screen for thirty seconds.

  3. Say, “Wait, I think it’s on Google.”

  4. Stab at the screen for a while with a forefinger.

  5. Hold up the phone again and say, “OK! Smile!”

  6. Frown and say, “Wait, I think it’s making a video.”

  7. Stab at the screen some more.

  8. Hold up the phone again and say, “OK! Smile!”

  9. Frown and say, “Wait, it took a picture of me.”

  10. Hand the phone to a younger person, who takes the actual picture.

  I have here several news reports from Webster Parish, Louisiana, concerning a sixty-one-year-old woman who is suing the Webster Parish Convention and Visitors Bureau to get her old job back. She was the parish’s tourism director, but she was fired.

  What happened, according to the reports, was that she was in Baton Rouge one evening on business, and she decided to livestream video of herself nude to her husband via Instagram. This was of course a totally OK, even admirable idea; speaking on behalf of all husbandkind, I say: God bless this woman. The problem was, she was using an iPhone 7 that she had been issued for work, and, as she told the Minden Press-Herald: “I am a new Instagram user and, unfortunately, I pressed the wrong button.”

  The result was that she broadcast thirty minutes of her unencumbered self on the official, and public, Instagram account of the Webster Parish Convention and Visitors Bureau. I like to think that this broadcast could actually have boosted convention and visitor business, that the concept developed by this woman could be used as part of a new tourism-promotion campaign (“Webster Parish: Check Out THESE Attractions!”).

  Instead the woman was fired. As I write this, she’s suing on the grounds that the firing was done improperly. I hope she wins, because, as a senior citizen, I can easily imagine messing up an Instagram livestream video. Like millions of people my age, I don’t really know what Instagram is. Every time I ask my daughter if she’s on it, she looks up from her phone, rolls her eyes several linear feet and says, as if explaining something to an unusually stupid plant, “This is Snapchat.” (Which is another thing I do not understand.)

  I could present many more examples of seniors struggling with technology, but I believe I’ve proved my point, which is that AARP—an organization for which I have the utmost respect—is full of shit. Aging is not “growth,” unless you are referring to nasal hair. Aging is getting old, and it sucks. Things that used to be easy—standing up, for example, or remembering the names of your immediate family members—become increasingly difficult.

  These are among the obvious reasons why getting old sucks. One of the subtler reasons—and the subject (finally) of this chapter—is that you stop having fun. You stop seeking fun experiences; you stop even remembering what fun is. The fun has pretty much evaporated from your life, replaced by a focus on such matters as where your reading glasses are.7 But you tend not to notice the de-funning, because it happens so gradually. The truth is that the fun has been slowly draining out of your life for most of your life.

  I become acutely aware of this when I hang out with my grandson, Dylan Maxwell Barry. He’s three, and when he’s not sleeping or experiencing minor episodes of three-year-old crankiness, he’s having fun. It’s what he does. He’s a small but potent nuclear reactor of fun.

  Dylan lives in a condominium building in New York City, at the end of a long hallway. To an old person such as myself, this hallway is just a random, nondescript passageway to be trudged through en route from the elevator to the condo and back. But to Dylan, the hallway is a wondrous space—a playground, a racetrack with lines on the floor that you can jump over, a tunnel with corners you can duck around and use for hiding. And at one end is an elevator that goes up and down and has buttons that you can push AND THEY LIGHT UP! Dylan uses that hallway maybe a half dozen times a day, and every single time he has more pure fun than I do in the average week. Dylan has fun all the time.

  Pretty soon he’ll start school. He’ll still have fun there, especially early on, but he’ll also start being exposed to non-fun activities as part of the educational process, and these activities will become less and less fun, leading, inexorably, to: the cosine.

  Dylan’s education will be followed by a car
eer, and at some point probably marriage and family. These life stages will of course offer opportunities for fun, sometimes great fun, but this fun will have to be squeezed in amid the seemingly endless exhausting obligations of work and worry that overwhelm us grown-ups, wearing us down over the years, eroding our fun-having skills until we reach the point where it never would occur to us that a hallway has any purpose other than to get us from Point A to Point B.

  For now, though, the hallway is still fun for Dylan. Almost everything is fun for Dylan. To him the world is still new, surprising, fascinating, full of wonders.

  We old people have mostly lost that sense of wonder, which is why we respond viscerally—at least I do—when we hear Louis Armstrong sing “What a Wonderful World.” It’s a simple song with an obvious, even corny, message: the everyday world around us, the things and people we take for granted—flowers, friends, trees, babies—are pretty darned marvelous when we stop to think about them. But of course we don’t stop to think about them, except when Louis Armstrong reminds us to. For the two minutes or so that the song is playing, we become mushballs, filled with wistful yearning and gratitude and sap. I think to myself: Louis Armstrong is absolutely right—it IS a wonderful world.

  Then the song ends, and my mushy feelings linger for maybe another thirty seconds, and I remember that I have a bill to pay or an email to answer, and before long I am once again trudging obliviously down the Condominium Hallway of Life, heading for my inevitable rendezvous with the Elevator of Fate.8

  I realize I’m not imparting original wisdom here. Every thinking adult knows what I’m talking about. Our existence on Earth is limited; we’re reminded of this every time we attend a funeral. Yet as soon as we leave the cemetery we resume pissing away our remaining hours obsessing over what are mostly minor annoyances. We keep telling ourselves that someday we’ll retire, and then we’ll have time to enjoy ourselves. We’ll have fun! But when we finally get to the point where we really could retire—I’m getting there now—we’ve forgotten how to have fun. We’re out of practice.