This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  Recent and not so recent surveys (including the six-decades-long Grant Study of the lives of some nineteen-forties Harvard graduates) confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising ourselves with happiness. Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still with us, we sense a trickle of contentment flowing from the reliable springs of routine, affection in long silences, calm within the light boredom of well-worn friends, retold stories, and mossy opinions. Also the distant whoosh of a surfaced porpoise outside our night windows.

  We elders—what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel?—we elders have learned a thing or two, including invisibility. Here I am in a conversation with some trusty friends—old friends but actually not all that old: they’re in their sixties—and we’re finishing the wine and in serious converse about global warming in Nyack or Virginia Woolf the cross-dresser. There’s a pause, and I chime in with a couple of sentences. The others look at me politely, then resume the talk exactly at the point where they’ve just left it. What? Hello? Didn’t I just say something? Have I left the room? Have I experienced what neurologists call a T.I.A.—a transient ischemic attack? I didn’t expect to take over the chat but did await a word or two of response. Not tonight, though. (Women I know say that this began to happen to them when they passed fifty.) When I mention the phenomenon to anyone around my age, I get back nods and smiles. Yes, we’re invisible. Honored, respected, even loved, but not quite worth listening to anymore. You’ve had your turn, Pops; now it’s ours.

  I’ve been asking myself why I don’t think about my approaching visitor, death. He was often on my mind thirty or forty years ago, I believe, though more of a stranger. Death terrified me then, because I had so many engagements. The enforced opposite—no dinner dates or coming attractions, no urgent business, no fun, no calls, no errands, no returned words or touches—left a blank that I could not light or furnish: a condition I recognized from childhood bad dreams and sudden awakenings. Well, not yet, not soon, or probably not, I would console myself, and that welcome but then tediously repeated postponement felt in time less like a threat than like a family obligation—tea with Aunt Molly in Montclair, someday soon but not now. Death, meanwhile, was constantly onstage or changing costume for his next engagement—as Bergman’s thick-faced chess player; as the medieval night-rider in a hoodie; as Woody Allen’s awkward visitor half-falling into the room as he enters through the window; as W. C. Fields’s man in the bright nightgown—and in my mind had gone from spectre to a waiting second-level celebrity on the Letterman show. Or almost. Some people I knew seemed to have lost all fear when dying and awaited the end with a certain impatience. “I’m tired of lying here,” said one. “Why is this taking so long?” asked another. Death will get it on with me eventually, and stay much too long, and though I’m in no hurry about the meeting, I feel I know him almost too well by now.

  A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it. We have become tireless voyeurs of death: he is on the morning news and the evening news and on the breaking, middle-of-the-day news as well—not the celebrity death, I mean, but the everyone-else death. A roadside-accident figure, covered with a sheet. A dead family, removed from a ramshackle faraway building pocked and torn by bullets. The transportation dead. The dead in floods and hurricanes and tsunamis, in numbers called “tolls.” The military dead, presented in silence on your home screen, looking youthful and well combed. The enemy war dead or rediscovered war dead, in higher figures. Appalling and dulling totals not just from this year’s war but from the ones before that, and the ones way back that some of us still around may have also attended. All the dead from wars and natural events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again escaped and felt terrible about and plans to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s never anything new about death, to be sure, except its improved publicity. At second hand, we have become death’s expert witnesses; we know more about death than morticians, feel as much at home with it as those poor bygone schlunks trying to survive a continent-ravaging, low-digit-century epidemic. Death sucks but, enh—click the channel.

  I get along. Now and then it comes to me that I appear to have more energy and hope than some of my coevals, but I take no credit for this. I don’t belong to a book club or a bridge club; I’m not taking up Mandarin or practicing the viola. In a sporadic effort to keep my brain from moldering, I’ve begun to memorize shorter poems—by Auden, Donne, Ogden Nash, and more—which I recite to myself some nights while walking my dog, Harry’s successor fox terrier, Andy. I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window. But shouldn’t I have something more scholarly or complex than this put away by now—late paragraphs of accomplishments, good works, some weightier op cits? I’m afraid not. The thoughts of age are short, short thoughts. I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

  I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

  TEACHER: Good morning, class. This is the first day of school and we’re going to introduce ourselves. I’ll call on you, one by one, and you can tell us your name and maybe what your dad or your mom does for a living. You, please, over at this end.

  SMALL BOY: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.

  TEACHER: A mechanic! Thank you, Irving. Next?

  SMALL GIRL: My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer.

  TEACHER: How nice for you, Emma! Next?

  SECOND SMALL BOY: My name is Luke and my dad is dead.

  TEACHER: Oh, Luke, how sad for you. We’re all very sorry about that, aren’t we, class? Luke, do you think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?

  LUKE (seizes his throat): He went “N’gungghhh!”

  Not bad—I’m told that fourth graders really go for this one. Let’s try another.

  A man and his wife tried and tried to have a baby, but without success. Years went by and they went on trying, but no luck. They liked each other, so the work was always a pleasure, but they grew a bit sad along the way. Finally, she got pregnant, was very careful, and gave birth to a beautiful eight-pound-two-ounce baby boy. The couple were beside themselves with happiness. At the hospital that night, she told her husband to stop by the local newspaper and arrange for a birth announcement, to tell all their friends the good news. First thing next morning, she asked if he’d done the errand.

  “Yes, I did,” he said, “but I had no idea those little notices in the paper were so expensive.”

  “Expensive?” she said. “How much was it?”

  “It was eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I have the receipt.”

  “Eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars!” she cried. “But that’s impossible. You must have made some mistake. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “There was a young lady behind a counter at the paper, who gave me the form to fill out,” he said. “I put in your name and my name and little Teddy’s name and weight, and when we’d be home again and, you know, ready to see friends. I handed it back to her and she counted up the words and said, ‘How many insertions?’ I said twice a week for fourteen years, and she gave me the bill. O.K.?”

  I heard this tale more than fifty years ago, when my first wife, Evelyn, and I were invited to tea by a rather elegant older couple who were new to our little Rockland County community. They were in their seventies, at least, and very welcoming, and it was just the four of us. We barely knew them and I was surprised when he turned and asked her to tell us the joke about the couple trying to have a baby. “Oh, no,” she said, “they wouldn’t want to hear that.”


  “Oh, come on, dear—they’ll love it,” he said, smiling at her. I groaned inwardly and was preparing a forced smile while she started off shyly, but then, of course, the four of us fell over laughing together.

  That night, Evelyn said, “Did you see Keith’s face while Edie was telling that story? Did you see hers? Do you think it’s possible that they’re still—you know, still doing it?”

  “Yes, I did—yes, I do,” I said. “I was thinking exactly the same thing. They’re amazing.”

  This was news back then, but probably shouldn’t be by now. I remember a passage I came upon years later, in an Op-Ed piece in the Times, written by a man who’d just lost his wife. “We slept naked in the same bed for forty years,” it went. There was also my splendid colleague Bob Bingham, dying in his late fifties, who was asked by a friend what he’d missed or would do differently if given the chance. He thought for an instant, and said, “More venery.”

  More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

  This is a dodgy subject, coming as it does here from a recent widower, and I will risk a further breach of code and add that this was something that Carol and I now and then idly discussed. We didn’t quite see the point of memorial fidelity. In our view, the departed spouse—we always thought it would be me—wouldn’t be around anymore but knew or had known that he or she was loved forever. Please go ahead, then, sweetheart—don’t miss a moment. Carol said this last: “If you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone I’ll come back and haunt you.”

  Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night. This is why we throng Match.com and OkCupid in such numbers—but not just for this, surely. Rowing in Eden (in Emily Dickinson’s words: “Rowing in Eden— / Ah—the sea”) isn’t reserved for the lithe and young, the dating or the hooked-up or the just lavishly married, or even for couples in the middle-aged mixed-doubles semifinals, thank God. No personal confession or revelation impends here, but these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret. The invisibility factor—you’ve had your turn—is back at it again. But I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.

  Nothing is easy at this age, and first meetings for old lovers can be a high-risk venture. Reticence and awkwardness slip into the room. Also happiness. A wealthy old widower I knew married a nurse he met while in the hospital, but had trouble remembering her name afterward. He called her “kid.” An eighty-plus, twice-widowed lady I’d once known found still another love, a frail but vibrant Midwest professor, now close to ninety, and the pair got in two or three happy years together before he died as well. When she called his children and arranged to pick up her things at his house, she found every possession of hers lined up outside the front door.

  But to hell with them and with all that, O.K.? Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you. Hook, line, and sinker; never mind the why or wherefore; somewhere in the night; love me forever, or at least until next week. For us and for anyone this unsettles, anyone who’s younger and still squirms at the vision of an old couple embracing, I’d offer John Updike’s “Sex or death: you take your pick”—a line that appears (in a slightly different form) in a late story of his, “Playing with Dynamite.”

  This is a great question, an excellent insurance-plan choice, I mean. I think it’s in the Affordable Care Act somewhere. Take it from us, who know about the emptiness of loss, and are still cruising along here feeling lucky and not yet entirely alone.

  Onward and Outward, February, 2014

  SPINKED

  Remarks on receiving the J. G. Taylor Spink Award at the American Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York

  Thank you—and first thanks to the Baseball Writers of America, who went out of their way to select me, a non-member and a part-timer, for this shining prize Spink! Spink! J. G. Taylor Spink! This was one of that early flood of tingling baseball names that rushed over me when I was a boy and first began hearing about and reading about baseball. Ossie Bluege! Flint Rhem! Hod Lisenbee! Mel Ott—an Oh with two “T”s! Jimmie Foxx—a fox with two “X”es! Spink—not a ballplayer but a baseball publisher? The Sporting News—a paper with just sports in it? Why don’t we get that here at home? So this is a thrill for me as well as an honor. The roster of Spink honorees is stuffed with old heroes of mine like Red Smith and Toni Meany, and with baseball-writer friends who have also been models and heroes, folks like Jerry Holtzman and Peter Gammons and Bill Madden, who were so quick to put me at ease in the clubhouse and fill me in whenever I turned up again. A million thanks also from me to four extraordinary editors of The New Yorker—William Shawn, Bob Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick—who each granted me weeks of time and acres of space for my baseball stuff, a gift that only writers can appreciate.

  (Credit 45.1)

  My gratitude always goes back to baseball itself, which turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and exacting, so easy-looking and so heart-breakingly difficult that it filled up my notebooks and seasons in a rush. A pastime indeed. Fans know about this too. Nowadays we have all sports available, every sport all day long, but we’re hanging on to this game of ours, knowing how lucky we are.

  I was a city kid and I grew up on New York baseball. At Yankee Stadium, in the spring of 1930, I saw Lefty Gomez win his first game in the major leagues. A long time later he told me, “I beat Red Faber and the White Sox, 4–1, and I’d never seen so many people in one place before in my life.” I was nine years old on the day of that game but had exactly the same impression. Lefty Gomez is here in the Hall, of course, still undefeated, 6 and 0 in the World Series.

  In a game in 1933, I saw a pair of Yankee base-runners, Lou Gehrig and Dixie Walker, tagged out on opposite sides of home plate together—bang, bang—on a single swipe by the Senators catcher Luke Sewell. Washington, not the Yanks, took the A.L. pennant that fall. At Ebbets Field, eight years later—it’s Game Four of the World Series and now I’m a senior in college—I watched Mickey Owen, the Dodgers’ catcher, drop that third strike with two out in the ninth—and the Yankees rise from the dead to win. They won again the next day, too, for another championship.

  Here’s an August afternoon, in 1951, and I’m sitting up behind first base at the Polo Grounds—still just a fan—when the rookie Willie Mays makes the first fabulous play of his career: a full-tilt running catch and a whirling, back-to-the-plate blind throw that sailed from right-center field on the fly to his catcher, to nail the Dodger baserunner, Billy Cox, at home. I can still see the Giants players on the field and the Dodgers now coming up out of their dugout all staring at each other and back out at Willie again—“What!…What!… Oh, my god, did you see that!”—in wonder. Well, yeah—get used to it, guys. I bring up this game again whenever I run into Willie—he doesn’t quite remember me but then he gets excited again, too. “You were there? You were there?” he cries. “Now you tell ’em. You tell ’em—nobody here believes me!”

  What’s weird here and what you’re all thinking, is how ancient these games and plays are—decades old—and how clear they still seem to be in Angell’s mind. And anyway, can’t we Google old stuff like
this or maybe find it on E.S.P.N., so who cares? You’re right, of course, and all I can say is yes, I care—I still do—even though this kind of caring has gotten so much tougher for us now. What we all have at our fingertips these days is instant replay and total recall: the exact moment and all of tonight’s other astounding moments from all the games and all the parks, and, with them—let’s admit it—a diminishment of that moment. Let’s cue Mays’s throw again: Wow! And one more time: Yes, that’s it. And again: Yep. Got it. I once asked Carlton Fisk if he still had any private memory of his Game Six twelfth-inning home run off the left-field foul pole at Fenway Park in the 1975 World Series—you know: Pudge dancing sideways up the line and waving at the ball, pushing it fair, then raising his arms in triumph. “It’s funny you ask,” he said. “I always go out of the room whenever I think that it’s coming up on the screen again, because I want to hold on to some piece of the moment, keep it fresh in my head.”

  A nice quote—a line for a writer to circle in his notebook and maybe put aside as the closer to a long piece. I collected great lines and great baseball talkers—lifetime .300 talkers—like a billionaire hunting down Cézannes and Matisses. I stalked these guys and buttered them up and got their flow into my notebooks and onto my tapes, and, in rivers, into the magazine. Ted Williams. Ted Simmons. Linda Kittell. Keith Hernandez. Bill Rigney. Lou Brock. Dan Quisenberry. Roger Craig. Among others. I remember arriving at the ballpark in Scottsdale at the beginning of another spring training, and finding Craig, the Giants’ manager, standing with a writer out in left field—I think it was Dave Bush. “Roger has another book out,” David said to Craig after our greetings—meaning me, this Roger—“Have you read it?”