The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Decline and Fall (ii)

If you could live forever in good health at a particular age, what age would you be? As people get older, their ideal age gets higher. For 18-to 24-year-olds, it’s age 27; for 25-to 29-year-olds, it’s 31; for 30-to 39-year-olds, it’s 37; for 40-to 49-year-olds, it’s 40; for 50-to 64-year-olds, it’s 44; and for people over 64, it’s 59.

Your IQ is highest between ages 18 and 25. Once your brain peaks in size—at age 25—it starts shrinking, losing weight, and filling with fluid. In a letter to his father, Carlyle wrote that his brother, Jack, “decides, as a worthy fellow of twenty always will decide, that mere external rank and convenience are nothing; the dignity of mind is all in all. I argue, as every reasonable man of twenty-eight, that this is poetry in part, which a few years will mix pretty largely with prose.” Goethe said, “Whoever is not famous at twenty-eight must give up any dreams of glory.”

When I was 31, I was informed that someone had written, in a stall in the women’s bathroom in a bookstore, “David Shields is a great writer and a babe to boot.” This is pretty much the high point of my life, when my acne was long gone and I still had hair and was thin without dieting and could still wear contacts and thought I was going to become famous. (Just recently, looking for compliments, I asked my father what he thought of what I’ve become, and he said, “You were such a great athlete as a kid. I thought sure you were going to be a pro basketball player or baseball player.”) Sir William Osler said, “The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.” Which is in fact true: creativity peaks in the 30s, then declines rapidly; most creative achievements occur when people are in their 30s. Degas said, “Everyone has talent at twenty-five; the difficulty is to have it at fifty.” The consolation of the library: when you’re 45, your vocabulary is three times as large as it is at 20. When you’re 60, your brain possesses four times the information that it does at 20.

Your strength and coordination peak at 19. Your body is the most flexible until age 20; after that, joint function steadily declines. World-class sprinters are almost always in their late teens or early 20s. Your stamina peaks in your late 20s or early 30s; marathon records are invariably held by 25-to 35-year-olds.

When you’re young, your lungs have a huge reserve capacity; even world-class athletes rarely push their lungs to the limit. But as you age, your lungs get less elastic: you can’t fill them as full or empty them as completely of stale air. Aerobic capacity decreases 1 percent per year between ages 20 and 60.

“It isn’t sex that causes trouble for young ballplayers,” Casey Stengel said. “It’s staying up all night looking for it.”

“During the summers of 1938 and ’39,” my father wrote in a piece for his class, “I worked as a keeper of the tennis courts and occasionally as tennis instructor at Chester’s Zunbarg—Sun Hill—a small, 120-capacity resort in the Catskills Mountains 80 miles northeast of New York City. The first day of that first summer, Anne Chester briefed me on the job I was about to step into at her hotel: ‘The salary is small—just $200 for the summer—and I apologize for it, but the fringe benefits more than make up for it.’

“What fringe benefits?” I asked in my youthful ignorance.

“It won’t take long for you to find out what they are,” she said, with a sly wink.

Twenty-four hours later, a sultry brunette walked up to me on the courts and asked if I gave tennis lessons.

I said I did and asked her what day and time would be convenient for her lesson.

“And do you give any other lessons besides tennis?” trilled this siren-cum-tennis pupil.

“Just tennis, lady,” I managed to squeeze out, extending my hand. “The name’s Milt and I’ll see you here tomorrow at 10.”

“Yes, I know,” she replied, still holding my hand. “I’ll be there.” I thought she’d never let go. I needed that right hand for serving up the ball. “The name’s Eva, Eva Gordon.”

The next morning, at a few minutes before 10, I was on the courts with a bushel of used tennis balls and a galloping curiosity as to what kind of tennis player this hand-holding Jezebel would turn out to be. 10:15 and no Eva. Was it all a none-too-subtle ploy to meet and size up the new tennis pro? Conventional wisdom has it that tennis teachers are glamorous and sexy guys, though you wouldn’t recognize me from that description.

Just when I was ready to give up on her, Eva strolled leisurely onto the court, saying, “Here I am, Coach.” She was dressed to the nines in flaming red shorts and a low-cut halter that showed her heart was in the right place.

“Let’s get started,” I snapped, very businesslike. I had another guest coming for a lesson at 11.

Eva was a revelation on the courts. She had the smoothest forehand this side of Helen Wills and a backhand that tore the cover off the ball.

“Do you play for some school?” I asked, signaling a brief time out.

“Yes, Hunter College in the city,” she replied.

Eva stayed for two weeks at Chester’s that first time and took a lesson every day. We also played quite a few sets—ahem—off the courts. She was just as good and explosive at that extracurricular activity as she was on the court.

She returned twice more during the summer for week-long stays and—er—lessons. By Labor Day, we were damned serious, but I had to get back to the city and try to find a job in the heart of the Depression and Eva had to complete her education at Hunter. What’s more, we both knew (we weren’t moonstruck kids) that we’d had a summer fling, one to be treasured, but—for a lot of reasons—not followed up. It was great while it lasted, we both agreed over a tall drink at the hotel bar.

Arteriosclerosis can begin as early as age 20.

As you age, your responses to stimuli of all kinds become slower and more inaccurate, especially in more complex tasks. From age 20 to 60, your reaction time to noise slows 20 percent. At 60, you make more errors in verbal learning tasks. At 70, you will experience a decline in your ability to detect small changes, such as the movement of a clock hand.

Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remembers 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.

Most people reach skeletal maturity by their early 20s. At 30, you reach peak bone mass. Your bones are as dense and strong as they’ll ever be. Human bones, with their astonishing blend of strength and flexibility, can withstand pressure of about 24,000 pounds per square inch—four times that of reinforced concrete—but if you were to remove the mineral deposits, what you would have left would be flexible enough to tie into knots. In your late 30s, you start losing more bone than you make. At first you lose bone slowly, 1 percent a year. The older you get, the more you lose.

Beginning in your early 20s, your ability to detect salty or bitter things decreases, as does your ability to identify odors. The amount of ptyalin, an enzyme used to digest starches, in your saliva decreases after age 20. After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you’re drying up.

Lauren Bacall said, “When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she’s on the slide. It’s downhill all the way from then on. It doesn’t give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being.”

Jimi Hendrix died at age 27, as did Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones of the Stones, Kurt Cobain, and bluesman Robert Johnson.

Until you’re 30, your grip strength increases; after 40, it declines precipitously. After age 65, your lower arm and back muscle strength declines. Owing to reduced coordination rather than loss of strength, your power output—e.g., your ability to turn a crank over a period of time—falls after age 50. My father, on the other hand, could defeat me in arm-wrestling halfway into his 60s.

At age 30, men show a decline in enthusiasm for typically masculine activities such as sports, drinking, and car repairs. Be grateful, I say, for small favors. Still, easily one of the happiest moments of my life occurred when, nearly 30 and in grad school, I went with several of my classmates to the gym to play basketball. Out on the wing on a fast break, I caught the ball, reverse-spun on William Mayfield, who started at forward for the University of Iowa basketball team, and beat him to the hoop. (Was he dogging it? Who knows? I don’t want to know.) My fellow grad-student nerds went nuts; they all kept saying, “You don’t even look like a basketball player!” Glasses, love handles, etc. Hoop dream (vii), undoubtedly.

Nicholas Murray said, “Many people’s tombstones should read, ‘Died at 30. Buried at 60.’” The ancient Persians believed that the first 30 years should be spent living life and the last 40 years should be spent understanding it. Reversing the time periods, Schopenhauer said, “The first forty years of life give us the text; the remaining thirty provide the commentary on it.” According to Rousseau: “Man is always the same: at ten he is led by sweetmeats; at twenty by a mistress; at thirty by pleasure; at forty by ambition; at fifty by avarice; after that, what is left for him to run after but wisdom?” At every age, 10 or 90, my father has been a pleasure-seeking missile.

Since your vertebral column continues to grow until you’re 30, you might gain anywhere from three to five millimeters in height between ages 20 and 30. Starting at 30, though, you lose one-sixteenth of an inch in height per year; your posture changes because your vertebrae shrink while your hips and knees bend closer to the ground and your foot arch flattens. My father has shrunk from 5'11" to 5'7". As you age, you lose body water and your organs shrink: your body consumes 12 fewer calories per day for each year of age over 30.

For most people, the ability to hear higher sound frequencies begins to decline in their 30s; men are 3½ times more likely than women to show a decline in their ability to hear high notes. Whatever level of loss is found, it will get, on average, 2½ times worse each decade. The sweat glands that keep the auditory canal moist die off one by one; ear wax becomes drier and crustier, and hard wax builds up to block out sounds. One-third of hearing loss in older people is due to this buildup. Your eardrum becomes thinner and more flaccid, causing the drum to be less easily vibrated by sound waves. You progressively lose your ability to hear sound at all frequencies.

The limbic system—“the seat of emotions”—exists in a part of the brain, the hippocampus, that humans share with lizards. (Your brain has three layers: the brain stem, controlling basic functions and basic emotions, is the reptilian layer; the mammalian layer houses more complex mental functions such as learning and adaptability; and the third layer constitutes most of the human brain—the cerebral cortex and cerebellum—which allows us to use language and perform complex acts of memory.) Beginning at age 30, parts of the hippocampus die off.

Emerson said, “After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.”

At 31, Tolstoy said, “At our age, when you have reached, not merely by the process of thought but with your whole being and your whole life, an awareness of the uselessness and impossibility of seeking enjoyment; when you feel that what seemed like torture has become the only substance of life—work and toil—then searchings, anguish, dissatisfaction with yourself, remorse, etc.—the attributes of youth—are inappropriate and useless.”

Before being guillotined, Camille Desmoulins, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, when asked how old he was (he was 34), said, “I am 33—the age of the good sans-culotte Jesus, an age fatal to revolutionists.”

By age 35, nearly everyone shows some of the signs of aging, such as graying hair, wrinkles, less strength, less speed, stiffening in the walls of the central arteries, degeneration of the heart’s blood vessels, diminished blood supply to the brain, elevated blood pressure. In my father’s case, the only sign of aging at 35 was a rapidly receding hairline. One out of three American adults has high blood pressure. The maximum rate your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every year. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.

You couldn’t prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky: my father would be jogging. In an hour, he’d run 20 (then, when he got older, 15 and, later, 10) times around a track that was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, that had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. As he once wrote me, apropos of nothing in particular, “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.”

Rheumatoid arthritis most frequently begins between ages 35 and 55.

In 1907, the French writer Paul Léautaud, at 36, said, “I was asked the other day, ‘What are you doing nowadays?’ ‘I’m busy growing older,’ I answered.”

In My Dinner with André, Wallace Shawn says, “I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old I was rich, an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m thirty-six, and all I think about is money.”

Mozart died at 35; Byron, at 36; Raphael and Van Gogh, at 37.

James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, said, “I must fairly acknowledge that in my opinion the disagreement between young men and old is owing rather to the fault of the latter than of the former. Young men, though keen and impetuous, are usually very well disposed to receive the counsels of the old, if they are treated with gentleness, but old men forget in a wonderful degree their own feelings in the early part of life.” When Boswell wrote this, he was 37 and Samuel Johnson was 69. Whenever I mention an accomplishment of mine to my father, he quickly changes the subject or mentions a more impressive accomplishment by someone else. I asked him once whether, in his view, competition was built into any relationship between father and son, and he briskly denied it, saying he’s never felt anything except pride and admiration.

London Symphony Orchestra conductor Colin Davis said, at 38, “I think that to so many what happens is the death of ambition in the conventional sense. That great driving motor that prods you and exasperates you and brings out the worst qualities in you for about twenty years is beginning to be a bit moth-eaten and tired. I find that I’m altogether much quieter, I think. I don’t love music any less, but there’s not the excess of energy I used to spend in enthusiasm and in intoxication. I feel much freer than I’ve ever been in my life.”

The oldest person ever to hold a boxing title was 38. The oldest person ever to play in the NBA was 43. The oldest age at which anyone broke a track-and-field record was 41, in 1909. The oldest person to win an Olympic gold medal was 42, in 1920. In the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer wrote, “If gold ruste, what shal iren do?”

At age 40, your preference for fast-paced activity declines.

Beginning at 40, your white blood cells, which fight cancer and infectious diseases, have a lowered capacity.

Jack London died at 40; Elvis Presley, at 42.

On my 30th birthday, under my girlfriend’s influence, I got my left ear pierced and bought a diamond earring. I wore various earrings over the next 10 years or so, but wearing an earring never really worked for me. Earrings forced me to confront the nature of my style, or lack of style. I’m certainly not macho enough to wear an earring as if I were a tough guy, but neither am I effeminate enough to wear an earring in my right ear as if I were maybe gay-in-training. Instead, I’m just muddling through, and the earring forced me, over time, to see this, acknowledge it, and respond to it. On my 40th birthday, under the influence of Natalie, who thought it made me look like a pirate, I took out the earring I was then wearing—a gold hoop—and haven’t worn an earring since.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died at 44, wrote in his notebook, “Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40.”

Each year, more fat gets deposited in the walls of medium and larger arteries, causing the arterial walls to narrow. The weight of your small intestine decreases; the volume and weight of your kidneys shrink. Total blood flow to the kidney decreases by 10 percent for every decade after the age of 40. Every organ will eventually get less nourishment than it needs to do its job.

Don Marquis, an American newspaper columnist who died at 59, said, “Forty and forty-five are bad enough; fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five.”

“Forty-five,” said Joseph Conrad, “is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill.” Those clichés of male midlife crisis—having an affair, for instance, or buying a red sports car—are, on a biological level, anyway, profound rebellions of the “rage, rage, against the dying of the light” sort. My father’s first marriage broke apart when he had an affair with his gorgeous, red-haired secretary at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, one picture of whom appeared—somewhat bizarrely—in our family photo album.

Cicero said, “Old age begins at forty-six.” He died at 53.

John Kennedy died at 46.

Virginia Woolf said, “Control of life is what one should learn now: its economic management. I feel cautious, like a poor person, now I am forty-six.”

Victor Hugo said, “Forty is the old age of youth. Fifty is the youth of old age.”

On my 10th birthday, when my father was 56, he pitched so hard to me and my friends that we were afraid to hit against him. “Get in the batter’s box,” he growled at us.

Bloodline to Star Power (ii)

In 1955, my parents were living in Los Angeles, my mother was working for the ACLU, and she asked my father to ask Joseph Schildkraut to participate in an ACLU-sponsored memorial to Albert Einstein, who had died in April. “After all,” my father wrote in reply to one of my innumerable requests for more information, “Einstein was a German Jew and Pepi [Schildkraut’s nickname] had spent so much of his professional life in Berlin and was a member of a group of prominent people who had fled Germany in the years before Hitler and lived in the Pacific Palisades–Santa Monica area.”

My father got Schildkraut’s phone number and called him, telling him he was a Schildkraut, too, and inviting him to speak at the memorial tribute. “After much backing-and-filling and long, pregnant pauses (his, not mine) on the phone,” my father said, Schildkraut told my father to bring him the script. A few days later my father went to Schildkraut’s house in Beverly Hills to show him the script he would read at the memorial if he decided to appear on the program. Schildkraut came to the door, greeting Shields (né Shildcrout) stiffly. “He was very businesslike—cold, distant.” For a moment or two they talked about their families. My father told him about the backstage visit in 1923. Joseph knew absolutely nothing of the Schildkraut family’s ancestry. “Joseph Schildkraut, I would say,” my father said, “and I think it’s a fair statement, was somebody who didn’t think about his Jewish heritage.”

Schildkraut talked to my father for about thirty minutes in the foyer of the big, rambling house. “Later, in telling the story, I often exaggerated—said he clicked his heels, Prussian-like. He really didn’t.” Schildkraut said that he had to show the script to Dore Schary for approval. (Schary was a writer who had become the head of production at RKO and then MGM. Anti-Communist fears lingered; the blacklist was still in effect.) Schildkraut told Shields to come back in a week.

When my father returned, Schildkraut again talked with him rapidly in the foyer of the house—“On neither visit did he have me come into the living room, nor did he introduce me to his wife, who was moving about in the next room”—and wound up saying that Schary had read the script and said it was all right. The script was taken almost entirely from Einstein’s writings on civil liberties, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. The memorial was held at what was then the Hollywood Athletic Club and later became the University of Judaism. Also on the platform were Linus Pauling; A. L. Wirin, the chief counsel to the ACLU; John Howard Lawson, a screenwriter and the unofficial spokesman for the “Hollywood Ten” Anne Revere, who before being blacklisted won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her performance as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in National Velvet; and a novelist who my father insists was once famous and who in any case has a name worthy of the Marx Brothers—Lion Feuchtwanger.

The event was free. Every seat in the immense auditorium was filled. Hundreds of people sat in the aisles. Eason Monroe, the executive director of the ACLU and a man upon whom my mother had an immense, lifelong crush, asked the overflow audience to find seats or standing room in several small rooms upstairs. Monroe assured them that all the speakers would come upstairs to address them after speaking in the main auditorium. The program started a little late, about 8:30 P.M., but Schildkraut still hadn’t shown up. Monroe asked Shields, “Milt, where’s your cousin? It’s getting late.” My father assured Monroe he’d be there. “He was too big a ham to stay away on such an occasion.” His name had appeared prominently in the ads as one of the main speakers.

Finally, Schildkraut showed. Monroe greeted him and asked him if, as the others had consented to do, he would also speak to the groups upstairs. Schildkraut said that first he’d speak to the main auditorium audience; then he’d “see.”

The other speakers—Pauling, Wirin, Lawson, Revere, and Feuchtwanger—spoke to the audience in the main auditorium, were “warmly received” (whatever that means), then went upstairs to speak once again to the overflow audience in a couple of anterooms. “The occasion lifted even the most uninspired speaker and material to emotional heights,” according to my father. “But then came Pepi, the last speaker on the program. When he got to the podium, the audience was noisy and restless. After all, people were feeling the emotion of the memorial to this great man. Schildkraut took one look out there and employed the actor’s stratagem: he whispered the first line or two, and a hush fell over the audience. Then, when he was sure he had their attention, he thundered the next lines. When he finished, he got a standing ovation. And this for a political naïf, or worse: a man who certainly didn’t agree with everything he had just read, or anything else Einstein stood for. But he was the consummate actor, and he read his lines—to perfection.”

When Schildkraut finished, my father asked him about going upstairs. Schildkraut looked right through Shields and walked out the door. “Now he truly was like a Prussian soldier. That’s the last time I saw him. In person, that is. Of course, I saw The Diary of Anne Frank on the screen half a dozen times. And if it’s ever on television, I watch it again.”

Boys vs. Girls (iii)

By ages 30 to 34, women are 85 percent as fertile as they were at 20 to 24, and the rates decline to 35 percent by 40 to 44, and to virtually 0 percent after age 50. Among men, the decline in fertility is more gradual: at 45 to 50, men retain 90 percent of their peak fertility, a rate that declines to only 80 percent after 55. Males who mate with older women pass on less genetic coding, while females can mate with older men without the same problem.

On January 22, 2005, in Palm Beach, Florida, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, before 400 of their friends, Donald Trump, now 61, who is estimated to be worth $2.5 billion, married his companion of six years, blue-eyed Slovenian-Austrian model Melania Knauss, now 37. Trump was previously married to models Marla Maples and Ivana Winklmayr. Two sons and a daughter from his first marriage, and his daughter from his second marriage, attended the half-hour wedding, which was the culmination of three days of celebrations.

At the ceremony, the bride, who said she may want to have children (when her baby was born the following year, the baby pictures were sold to People for what were estimated to be “the mid-six figures”), lit the unity candle that she had used during her baptism. Knauss said she wanted an event that was “chic, elegant, simple, and sexy.” Her dress was made of 300 feet of white satin, had a 13-foot train, weighed 50 pounds, took all 28 of Christian Dior’s seamstresses 1,000 hours to stitch, and took an additional 50 hours to embroider. Trump said about Knauss, “When we walk into a restaurant, I watch grown men weep.”

According to French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who donated his services, the new Mrs. Trump has “impeccable taste” Donald Trump is his landlord. The wedding cake stood two yards high and was covered with 3,000 sugar roses. The reception, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, featured a 36-piece orchestra.

Billy Joel, who at 55 had recently married “restaurant correspondent” Katie Lee, 23, in a wedding at which his daughter, Alexa Ray, 19, was a maid of honor, said Trump’s wedding was a “beautiful ceremony.”

When he was 53, John Derek was asked by Barbara Walters whether he would still love his wife, Bo Derek, then 23, if she were disfigured or paralyzed. He thought for a moment and said no. Bo Derek tried hard to smile, but she couldn’t.

Sex Changes (Everything)

Menopause, which typically occurs between ages 45 and 50, is unique to humans, for which there’s a good evolutionary reason: by age 50, a mother is beginning to experience many of the adverse effects of aging. She enhances her genetic contribution to future generations if she stops having babies of her own and thereby increases the likelihood that she’ll survive to raise her children and assist with her grandchildren.

Menopause happens gradually: 10 or more years before they cease menstruation, women may experience briefer cycles. At age 30, women typically get their periods every 28 to 30 days; at age 40, every 25 days; at 46, every 23 days. After age 35, women’s eggs are more genetically defective; if fertilization occurs, the babies produced are more likely to have birth defects. The follicles stop obeying orders from the brain to make estrogen. The amount of estrogen, especially estradiol, the most powerful estrogen, becomes scarce.

As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia become more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman’s vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and—with loss of elasticity—less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis. (Mickey Rooney on Ava Gardner: “She was unique down there, like a little warm mouth.”) In postmenopausal women who aren’t receiving estrogen, the vagina becomes smaller in length and diameter. Women’s breasts sag and mammary gland tissue is replaced by fat, which aggravates the sagging and is accompanied by wrinkling. The nipples become smaller and get erect less easily. Stretch marks in the breast grow darker. Fat accumulates in the torso, especially near the waist, neck, arms, and thighs—which creates uneven bulges, except in the face, which loses fat and creates a hollower visage. (A friend of Laurie’s told her, “At forty, a woman must choose between her face and her ass: nice ass, gaunt face; good face, fat ass.”) Women’s skin wrinkles, dries, and thins. Men have a thicker dermis than women do, which may be why women’s facial skin seems to deteriorate more quickly. Premenopausal women typically show no loss of bone density; postmenopausal women show a faster rate of bone loss than men of comparable age.

For women ages 20 to 40, vaginal lubrication after sexual arousal takes 15 to 30 seconds; for women 50 to 78, it takes 1 to 5 minutes. For younger women, the vagina expands without pain during arousal; for older women, there’s a limit to the expansion. Increased blood flow causes the labia minora in younger women to become red; in older women, there’s no reddening. For younger women, the clitoris elevates and flattens against the body; in older women, this doesn’t happen. For younger women, during orgasm, the vagina contracts and expands in smooth, rhythmic waves, usually 8 to 12 contractions in approximately 1-second intervals, and the uterus contracts. For older women, there are only 4 to 5 contractions, and when the uterus contracts, it’s sometimes painful. Older women return to a pre-arousal state much more rapidly.

When men turn 40, the tissues in the back of the prostate gland atrophy and the muscle degenerates, replaced by inelastic connective tissue. A hard mass sometimes appears on the prostate, causing men to produce less semen and at a lower pressure. For many men, the gland cells and the connective tissue in the middle of the prostate overgrow, causing pain during urination. Enlargement of the prostate gland occurs in almost all men, including my father (who had prostate surgery at 85), and the hormone changes that accompany this enlargement can result in various diseases, including cancer. Rates of testicular cancer peak in the 30s, then decline sharply. More inflexible connective tissue grows on the surface of the penis, whose veins and arteries become more rigid. With the reduced blood flow, men find it increasingly difficult to produce and maintain erections. One physician calls the brief, violent upsurge of sexual desire in old men the “final kick of the prostate.”

Men ages 20 to 40 need 3 to 5 seconds to achieve an erection when stimulated; for men ages 50 to 89, it takes 10 seconds to several minutes. Younger men quickly feel the need to ejaculate; older men feel less of a need to ejaculate, even over several episodes. For younger men during orgasm, the urethra contracts 3 to 4 times in one-second intervals; semen travels 1 to 2 feet. For older men during orgasm, the urethra contracts 1 to 2 times; ejaculation is 3 to 5 inches, with less semen and a smaller amount of viable sperm. The proportion of immature sperm increases over time. Young men return to a pre-arousal state in anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, in two stages; older men return in a couple of seconds, in a single stage.

On the upside: the oldest verifiable father was 94 at the birth of his last child; the oldest mother was 66.

On the upside, somewhat more viscerally: my father, at 70, telling me a couple of years after my mother’s death, “I’ve been more active this year with Sarah [his new paramour] than I’d been the previous twenty-five with your mother, and I don’t mean once a night. I mean two or three times a night most every night of the week and then again in the morning.”

Memento Mori

Hair is produced in the skin’s hair follicles. A follicle contains more than just hair-producing cells. The melanocytes deposit their pigment in the root of the hair, coloring the hair shaft proteins as they’re made. If pure melanin is made, you’ll have brown to black hair. If an analogue of melanin called phaeomelanin is made, your hair will be red or blond. If the cells quit functioning altogether, your hair will be white.

There’s really no such thing as gray hair. Your hair turns white, not gray. The gray hues you think you see are actually only the intermediate steps as this process advances unevenly across your scalp. The amount of gray you perceive depends on how much of your original hair color mixes with the white.

Everybody has a million hair follicles; only about 100,000 follicles have hair growing from them (blonds slightly more, redheads slightly fewer). The other 900,000 follicles are resting. Each strand of hair grows six inches a year, eventually reaches two to three feet in length, and has its own blood supply. As you age, the density, diameter, and strength of your hair decrease; fewer hairs grow, more rest; you lose hair on your scalp and gain it on your face; and your hair can change not only in color but in texture: your hair can go from straight to curly. Men’s eyebrows get thicker, and hair sprouts on the inner canal of the outer ear.

Because they have less estrogen to counteract their bodies’ testosterone, postmenopausal women grow facial hair; by age 55, about 40 percent of women grow hair above their upper lip. As women age, they have less armpit hair, which, in older women, often disappears. Armpit hair disappears in most postmenopausal Japanese women. Pubic hair vanishes in a small percentage of women over age 60.

Approximately 100 hairs fall out of your head each day, more during the fall and fewer during the spring. Hair loss is the result of changes in the levels of hormones. If you lose hair, you’re more sensitive to these changes in hormone levels. People whose parents experienced hair loss are more likely to lose their hair. One in four women loses some of her hair.

Because of a gradual decrease in adrenal secretion—which begins, for both men and women, in the late 20s—the cells that manufacture hair protein, the germ centers, are selectively destroyed or deactivated. When the affected hair is shed, no replacement occurs.

Forty million American men are bald. Thirty percent of 55-year-old men are bald; 60 percent of 65-year-old men have experienced significant hair loss. Both men and women view bald men as weaker and less attractive than men with a full head of hair. Seventy-five percent of men feel self-conscious about their baldness, and 40 percent wear a hat to hide their baldness. Hair transplants are the most common plastic surgery for men.

There’s no cure for baldness. The Ebers Papyrus—dating to 4,000 B.C., one of the oldest written documents—advised Egyptian men to treat baldness with a magical potion composed of sea crab bile, blood from the horn of a black cow, burned ass hoof, and the vulva and claws of a female dog.

Woody Allen says, “The best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age. If you are sixteen or under, try not to go bald.”

Harlan Boll, a publicist for celebrities, says, “There wasn’t as much pressure on men like Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra to look young. Even today this is true. If they keep their hair, they pretty much have it made.”

While campaigning for Bush-Cheney, former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, who’s bald, said about Kerry-Edwards, “Everybody is given a certain amount of hormones. If you want to spend yours growing hair, that is your business.”

My father has been bald since his early 40s, is unusually self-conscious about the fact, and is fond of saying that the only cure for baldness is a baseball cap, which he wears around the clock, indoors and out. Although I’ve repeatedly explained to him that a man inherits baldness at least in part from his maternal grandfather, he frequently apologizes for bequeathing to me a bald head. Throughout my 30s I did all the usual boring things: applied Rogaine, studied glossy brochures featuring color photos of weaves, transplants, and men and women in hot tubs. Several years ago, I stumbled upon the shaved-head-and-goatee approach, which I must say I like. It’s an acknowledgment of death rather than a denial of death (as, to take an extreme example, the comb-over is). Your head becomes an early memento mori.

The Trouble with Being Food

Your taste buds regenerate; cells within the taste buds die every ten days and are completely replaced. Even if a nerve that forms taste buds is destroyed, other buds will form around the new nerve that replaces it. However, it takes more molecules of a certain substance on your tongue for you to recognize the flavor later in adulthood. As you get older, you enjoy food less. Whenever I visit, one of the first things my father always wants me to do is drive him to a specialty market, where he buys gourmet health food. I’m not sure he enjoys food anymore, but he’s obsessed with efficient fuel for his body, that amazing machine. He talks with his mouth full and sprays food so often and so far that Natalie, Laurie, and I take turns sitting across from him at restaurants. Natalie has suggested building a portable sneeze-guard.

Nevertheless:

In Britain in 1991, 13 percent of men and 16 percent of women were obese—twice the number of 10 years before. Half the British population is now overweight; more than 20 percent are obese. In the U.K., snack-food consumption has risen 25 percent in the last 5 years.

More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese; 127 million people are overweight, 60 million are obese, and 9 million are severely obese. American adults are now, on average, 25 pounds heavier than they were in 1960; the average man has gone from 166 to 191 pounds, while the average woman has gone from 140 to 164 pounds. I doubt my father has ranged more than a few pounds over or below 155 since World War II. More women than men are obese (34 to 27 percent). The average 10-year-old boy weighed 74 pounds in 1963; he now weighs 85 pounds. The average 10-year-old girl weighed 77 pounds in 1963; she now weighs 88 pounds.

In 1980, the government recommendation was 1,600 calories a day for women and 2,200 for men; women now consume 1,877 calories a day and men consume 2,618. In 1970, each person ate 1,497 pounds of food; in 2000, each person ate 1,775 pounds. In the United States, health care costs for treating obese adults amount to $100 billion a year. In 2004, obesity caused 300,000 deaths.

Was my father ever not as skinny as a (third) rail? His meals very nearly always consist of oatmeal and juice for breakfast, a sandwich and a bowl of soup for lunch, “a lean piece” of fish or chicken for dinner. Has he ever taken a second helping of anything? Has he ever not grumbled before reluctantly accepting an offer of dessert? Has a day ever gone by in which he didn’t exercise a couple of times? On long family car trips, did he ever not get out every few hours and execute a hundred jumping jacks, to the admiration and/or puzzlement of other travelers on the highway?

I live across the street from a fundamentalist church, and on certain melancholy Sundays I’m filled with empathy for the churchgoers. Adulthood didn’t turn out to have quite as much shimmer as we thought it would. For an hour a week, they’re hoping to get caught in a little updraft; who can blame them?

Leonard Michaels wrote, “Life isn’t good enough for no cigarette”—which is precisely how I’ve come to view my relationship to sugar. Today was a disaster, I tell myself at least twice a week, stopping at a café that makes the most perfect Rice Krispies Treats, but this tastes delicious. “Eat dessert first,” as the bumper sticker says, “life is uncertain.” Quentin Tarantino, asked why he eats Cap’n Crunch, replied, “Because it tastes good and is easy to make.” Cap’n Crunch, Rice Krispies Treats: I’m addicted to refined sugar in its less refined forms: breakfast cereal, cookies, root beer floats, licorice, peanut brittle, et al., ad nauseam—kid stuff.

When I’m happy, I consume sweets to celebrate. When I’m upset, I eat treats as consolation. I’m therefore rarely without a reason to be in the throes of sugar shock. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I do sugar, in massive doses. So what? Who doesn’t? What’s the harm? I still stutter slightly, and much of the glory of sugar overload is the way it mimics the biochemical frenzy of a full-blown block and crystallizes it into the pure adrenaline of a brief, happy high (followed quickly by a crash). To me, sugar consumption is a gorgeous allegory about intractable reality and very temporary transcendence.

Everything I Know I’ve Learned from My Bad Back

Intractable reality (ii): I’m not thrilled to acknowledge that I date the origin of my back problems to the period, 14 years ago, when I repeatedly threw Natalie, then an infant, up in the air and carried her around in a Snugli. It’s a dubious etiology, since another cause would surely have come along soon enough; my back, one physical therapist has explained to me, was an accident waiting to happen. It makes perverse sense, though, that in my own mind Natalie and my back are intertwined, because dealing with a bad back has been, for me, an invaluable education in the physical, the mortal, the ineradicable wound.

When he became a father, Jerry Seinfeld said, “I can’t get enough of my baby, but let’s make no mistake about why these babies are here. They’re here to replace us. They’re cute, they’re cuddly, they’re sweet, and they want us out of the way.”

I wish I got to indulge in the luxury of being lionized as Atlas by Natalie, but I can’t. I’m still quite good at unscrewing tight bottle caps and pinning her arms when I’m tickling or wrestling her. However, if she’s sitting atop someone’s shoulders on a walk in the woods or getting tossed around in the pool, they’re going to be someone else’s shoulders, or it’s going to be someone else in the pool. At parties, I look first for a chair, since I can’t stand for more than a few minutes. I can’t hula hoop with Natalie or dance with Laurie. Trying to jog, I usually get pins and needles down my right leg. When we take trips, Laurie has to carry the heavy luggage; at home, she moves the furniture. Atlas I ain’t.

You might suspect—I might suspect—Laurie definitely suspects—that maybe I just have a pathetically low pain threshold. And yet my back doctor assures me that with my back, some people play golf and tennis while others have been on disability for 15 years. I fall about in the middle: I’ve never missed a day of work because of my back, but I certainly complain about it a lot; it’s weirdly toward the forefront of my consciousness. I’m not so much a hypochondriac as a misery miser, fascinated by dysfunction. A couple of years ago, I heard an elderly woman, interviewed on the “Apocalypse” episode of This American Life, say she welcomed entering the kingdom of heaven because she would finally be granted relief from her incessant physical pain. While I was listening to this, I was driving, my back was killing me every time I turned the steering wheel, and at that moment, I must admit: I could relate.

My father has never even tweaked his back, never had a single physical ailment until the last few years, and yet he’s not prone to expressing gratitude for his near-century of good health (“I’ve had to see more doctors from 94 to 97 than I did from 0 to 94”). Over the last decade I’ve gone to innumerable physical therapists and doctors. One doctor said I should have back surgery immediately; he had an opening later in the week. Another doctor said all I had to do was perform one particular leg-lift exercise that Swedish nurses did, and I’d be fine. One therapist said I should run more; another therapist said I should run less. One said that human beings weren’t built to sit as much as I sit; another said people were never meant to stand upright. One thought I would need to keep seeing him for years and years; another criticized me, after a few months, for not cutting the cord. I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back. Gerald Jonas’s book about stuttering is called The Disorder of Many Theories. Back Theory seems to suffer from the same Rashomon effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

A few days after 9/11, I saw a back doctor who, unlike 95 percent of doctors I’ve ever seen, presents himself as a person rather than as an authority figure; ask him how his day is going and he’ll say, “Terrible; no one’s getting better.” He, too, has a bad back, and when he drops his folder, he’ll squat down to pick it up, the way back patients are instructed to do, rather than just lean over, the way everyone else does. When I speak to most doctors, I feel slightly or not so slightly crazy, whereas I feel like a person, like myself, when talking to Stan Herring (great name—sounds like a figure from my dad’s Brooklyn childhood, like a character from a Malamud story). At my first appointment with him, he emphasized how many of his patients with bad backs carve their entire identity out of the fact that they’re patients; they’d have no idea what to do with their lives otherwise. The WTC suicide bombers were, to Dr. Herring, similar to professional patients; their entire existence was given structure and purpose by the fetishization of their pain, their victimhood. The message was subtle, but I got it: don’t let yourself become a suicide bomber.

Herring recommended that I see a physical therapist with the unlikely name of Wolfgang Brolley, who goes by the name “Wolf” and looks and moves in a rather lupine way as well. As I am, he’s bald (with a shaved head), bespectacled, and goateed, but he’s elfin where I’m tall and lanky/clanky. I feel somewhat similar to Herring, who’s Jewish and self-deprecating; Wolf is Irish, Chicago-born, passionate, earnest, views himself unselfconsciously as a healer, goes to Zen retreats around the globe. I give him an essay I wrote about my adulation of Bill Murray (that death-haunt); he gives me an article he read about the international black-market slave trade. He directs the Center for Physical Arts and Rehabilitation, which features framed quotations from ancient Chinese philosophers and Christian mystics. He’s not my buddy; he’s something of a taskmaster. When he measured my hamstrings’ flexibility—lack thereof—he couldn’t help it: he snorted. One morning, when I called to say I felt too bad to come in for my appointment, he said, “You have to come in—that’s what I’m here for,” and gave me electronic stimulation and a massage. One of my favorite experiences in the physical world is a massage from Wolf.

I used to throw my back out completely—the classic collapse on the sidewalk and yowl to the heavens—but now, thanks in large measure to the Stan-and-Wolf program, I seem to have it under control to the point that my back never goes out completely anymore. (Knock on lumbar.) I sit on a 1" foam wedge on my chair and get up every hour to do exercises or at least tell myself I do or at least take a hot shower or apply an ice pack or a heat pad. I sleep on my side, on a latex mattress; upon waking, I don’t just sit up but rather first “find my center” (there really is such a thing, I’m pleased to report). Wolf keeps reminding me that neither he nor Dr. Herring has a solution: I have to become my own authority and view my recovery as an existential journey. I reassure him that I do, I do. I see going to the drugstore to get toothpaste as an existential journey.

And what existential journey hasn’t been aided by chemistry? I’ve been in and out of speech therapy all my life, but nothing has mitigated my stuttering as effectively as taking 0.5 mg. of alprazolam before giving a public reading. The ibuprofen, the muscle relaxants have certainly helped my back, but the Paxil has been transformative.

At first I strenuously resisted Dr. Herring’s prescription, primarily because my father has suffered from manic depression for most of his adult life. In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

“What do you mean?” my mother, who was a young 31, asked. “You get down in the dumps every now and again?”

“I think I’m on the road to having it licked,” he said, “but after the war, then again during a brief period of unemployment before we met, I needed a little electroshock to get me through some bad patches.”

Living with a manic depressive wasn’t like living with a drug addict. It wasn’t like living with a funeral. Last December, Laurie received a card that showed the words “Merry Christmas” being manufactured by a bunch of goofy little guys who looked like Santa’s sugar battalion. It was more like that: just knowing every lake is man-made and sooner or later needs to be emptied. For several years my father would be fine and funny and athletically buoyant; then one day he’d come back with an entire roll of negatives of the freeway. Once, in Sacramento on behalf of the poverty program, he mailed me an epistle consisting entirely of blank pages—for no real reason that I could make out. Another time, I was looking for some leftovers in the fridge and came across a note Scotch-taped together, sticky with bloodstains, like advertisements for a sympathetic reader. My mother packed his suitcase, and he waved shy good-byes like a boy leaving for camp.

However, Herring assured me that I wasn’t being “secretly” treated for depression; Paxil has apparently been used to treat chronic pain for more than a decade. For the last several years I’ve been taking 10 mg. of Paxil a day. I worry a little about becoming a grinning idiot, but I figure I already have the idiocy part down, and I’m so far over on the grouchy side of the continuum that a little grinning isn’t going to kill me.

Maybe it’s all just the pure dumb rush of selective serotonin reuptake, but now, rather than endlessly rehearsing how my life might have been different, I tell myself how grateful I am for my life—with Laurie and Natalie and our relative health and happiness together. (Knock on lumber.) I’m newly in love with Laurie—aware of her weaknesses and accepting of them, because I’m so blisteringly aware of my own. I go to sleep with a night guard jammed between my teeth, a Breathe Right strip stretched across my nose (to mitigate snoring), and a pillow tucked between my legs. I walk around with an ice pack stuck in one coat pocket and a baggie of ibuprofen in the other. I’m not exactly the king of the jungle.

I like the humility and gravity and nakedness of this need, for—and this is apparently a lesson I can’t relearn too many times—we’re just animals walking the earth for a brief time, a bare body housed in a mortal cage. For his 50th birthday party, a friend rented a gym around the corner from his house, and I played basketball for most of the night as if I’d somehow been transported back to my 20s—“Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again just for tonight!” I was, according to Laurie, “running around like a colt,” although, of course, a couple of weeks later I aggravated my back and was out of action for a few days. At least I’m now in action. My back will always hurt a bit, or rather the pain will always come and go. “Pain is inevitable,” Dr. Herring likes to say. “Suffering is optional.” When I quoted the line to Laurie, she said, “Thank you, Dr. Herring.” A while ago, I asked Wolf why I have a bad back. He explained that the ability to walk upright was a key evolutionary adaptation for mankind, but vertebrae that are aligned in the same direction as the force of gravity often become compressed, leading to pinched nerves and ruptured disks. Then he said, “In your case, though: bad attitude.” He was joking, but I think I got it.

Notes on the Local Swimming Hole

Swimming is by far the best tonic I’ve found yet for my back. I’m not a good swimmer—I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane—but when I took a two-week break from swimming, I was surprised how much I missed it. When I returned to the pool, I realized it’s where I get, as Evelyn Ames says in Postcards from the Edge, “my endolphins.” I can hardly bear Sunday, when the pool is closed.

Outside the Green Lake Community Center are the healthy people—the gorgeous rollerbladers and runners and power walkers doing laps around a large lake in the middle of the city, the buff basketball players, the junior high baseball players, the yuppie Ultimate Frisbee players, the latte drinkers checking one another out, the Euro-cool soccer players, the volleyballers, the softball players. The indoor pool is the wetland of the maimed—home to those bearing canes, knee braces, neck braces—for who else would be free or motivated to be here at, say, 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday? I’m joined by people recovering from knee surgery, spinal surgery, car accidents; obese people who weigh themselves daily but never seem to lose a pound; a man in a wheelchair with his faithful dog barking at any potential interference; another wheelchair-bound man whose assistant is an almost cruelly cheerful Nordstrom shoe salesman; the Walrus Splasher (a huge guy with a handlebar moustache whom we’re all trying to build up the courage to approach about the tidal waves he sends our way as he pounds the water); and a pre-op transsexual from New Jersey who, day by day, is wearing more and more feminine attire and is sticking out his butt and chest with greater self-confidence. He’s the one who told me the locker room was closed one day owing to an outbreak of leprosy; it turned out to be just a homeless guy who had shat his pants. Nearly everyone here is trying to come back from something; you can feel it in the men’s locker room, where we don’t talk that much.

The good swimmers while away too much time talking; they’re not desperate, as the rest of us are, to claw their way back into shape by doing their assigned 36 laps (one mile). The good swimmers have an uncanny ability to skid across the top of the water, while the rest of us plunge down, down, down. The falling apart of our bodies; the perfection of youthful bodies; the pool is, for me, about one thing: the tug of time.

Every swimmer seems lost in his or her own water space (accidentally touching someone’s toe or shoulder always feels thrillingly, wrongly intimate). I’m never so aware of the human perplexity as when I’m at Green Lake with my fellow bodies. We’re all just trying to stay alive; we have no greater purpose than glimpsing a shadow of ourselves on the surface as we glide underwater. What is the point of floating? To keep floating. I feel the weightless, gorgeous quality of existence.

Until very recently, my father would swim at least 15 laps every day, diving headfirst rather than sashaying his way in, as I do. Now, though, he can hardly manage a stroke or two across the width of his condo’s pool without his arthritis forcing him to stop and clutch his leg. He’s always been addicted to terrible puns; now, he keeps playing with variations on the word “arthritis.” Arthur, write us. Author, write us. Author, right us. There’s no author, we both know, and there’s no way he can right us. Earlier this year, it was just the two of us alone in the pool. I was doing laps and flip turns—my back was feeling weirdly trouble-free for the moment—while he was tottering in the shallow end. After just a few minutes, he got out, toweled off, and headed over to the sauna, carrying the sports page.

Sex and Death (iii)

As soon as animals, including humans, reach sexual maturity, many of their functions weaken. These weaknesses appear in humans beginning at age 25.

With the salmon and octopus and many other plants and animals, reproduction is, in effect, willful suicide. After reproduction, the body is a useless shell, so it’s discarded. The body is, for all intents and purposes, the host, and the reproductive system is the parasite that brings the body to its death.

As the biologist E. O. Wilson says, “In a Darwinian sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. Samuel Butler’s famous aphorism, that the chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, has been modernized: the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”

Bats live longer than rats, but they reproduce more slowly. Birds live longer than ground-dwelling mammals, but flightless birds have short lives. Some turtles and tortoises live longer than humans. Organisms exposed to high risk invest little in maintenance and a lot in reproduction, whereas organisms exposed to low risk do the opposite.

Virgin male and female fruit flies live longer than fruit flies that reproduce. According to Luc Bussière, a zoologist at the University of Zurich, the best predictor of male crickets’ mating success is the quantity of time spent calling females. “We heightened this behavior by manipulating dietary intake,” he says. “For males on high-protein diets, it had the effect of promoting their promiscuity and reducing their longevity. They literally knocked themselves out trying to impress female crickets. For humans, this might seem counterproductive because we don’t want to die young. We want to live long lives. But for animals the goal isn’t living longer; it’s to reproduce.” The survival instinct and the reproductive instinct are opposed.

Women who live longer have, on average, lower levels of fertility. Childless men and women, though, don’t live longer than those who are mothers and fathers. You can’t choose not to have children and thereby gain extra years of life by redirecting your resources for reproduction into efforts at self-maintenance. Your genes make you disposable but have not left you the flexibility to choose to live a longer life by not propagating them. My father has frequently complained to me—without the least self-consciousness or irony—about what a toll it took on him to have to earn a living. “Let’s put it this way,” he once said. “I wanted a good life available on terms that did not offend. It hasn’t always worked out that way. There were jobs I wasn’t exactly crazy about, worked at them because there were bills to pay, a lot of financial obligations and responsibilities.”

In an experiment on white mice gender-segregated by an electric fence, the males backed off at the first severe shock whereas the females continued to charge the fence until each in turn was electrocuted.

A woman’s shapely hips are a sign of childbearing potential; fat deposits serve as an energy source during pregnancy. A few weeks after Natalie was born, I was walking home from the market, carrying diapers, baby food, etc. Noticing a young, attractive, glammed-up woman wearing a halter top and driving a red convertible, I viewed her in terms I would never have considered before: something approaching awed appreciation that she was doing all she could to perpetuate the species.

So many Hollywood movies are barely disguised procreation myths—getting the most fertile couple to come together. To take one among thousands of examples, in Otto Preminger’s film Laura, gossip columnist Waldo Lydecker lives in language and can’t engage life. Shelby Carpenter, a gigolo, is too dumb to have any grasp on life, expressing himself only through clichés. Homicide detective Mark McPherson knows what life’s about and so is able to maneuver through it successfully, despite its dangers and the inevitable conclusion (death). Lydecker winds up killing the wrong woman, then getting shot. Carpenter childishly submits to an older woman’s maternal embrace. McPherson and Laura, at movie’s end, are ready to breed.

Which is all our obsession with human beauty is, anyway: an evolutionary adaptation for evaluating others as potential producers of our child. Male college students, shown photos of more and less attractive women, are far more likely to volunteer for altruistic and risky acts for a beautiful woman. Attractive women are 10 times more likely than plain women to “marry up.” Not news. But mothers with attractive babies spend more time holding their baby close, staring into their baby’s eyes, than mothers with babies judged less attractive; the latter spend more time tending to their baby’s needs and are distracted much more easily. Babies born prematurely—who often have falsely mature faces—are imagined to be difficult and irritable, and people are less willing to volunteer to take care of them. So, too, a study of abused children under court protection in California and Massachusetts found that a disproportionate number of them were “unattractive.” When people are asked to approach a stranger and stop when they no longer feel comfortable, they stop nearly two feet away from attractive people, as opposed to less than a foot from less attractive people: beauty is privileged territory. In youth, my father was extremely handsome, a Jewish prince, and he’s never gotten over that fact. When my first novel was published and I had a little book party to celebrate, he didn’t attend because he wasn’t looking his best. This was in 1984; he was 74.

People will say about an especially pretty little girl, “She’s going to be a heartbreaker”—which is, to me, an odd and revealing phrase. What does it mean, exactly? It means that when she grows up, she will use her beauty as a weapon, and she is expected to do so.

In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff describes American coots: gray birds whose chicks have orange plumes and bald heads that turn bright red during feeding. The chicks beg for food by flashing their red and orange signs for their mother. When researchers trimmed the orange plumes, the drabber chicks got less attention and food from the mother, who fed the more colorful chicks first. When human mothers give birth to high-risk, low-weight twins, they invariably favor the healthier twin, soothing, holding, playing, and vocalizing more with the twin more likely to survive. A mother has limited resources; she needs to know how much to invest in her new baby without endangering herself and the lives of her other children.

A mortal animal is a germ cell’s way of making more germ cells, thereby optimizing the likelihood that they’ll fuse with germ cells of the opposite sex. The continuation of the germ line is the driving force of natural selection; longevity of individual animals is of secondary importance. Animals are selected through evolution for having physiological reserves greater than the minimum necessary to reach sexual maturation and rear progeny to independence, but once this goal has been accomplished, they have sufficient excess reserve capacity to coast for a period of time, the remainder of which is called your life span. You’re a salmon without portfolio.

In 1930, one in five cancer patients survived; in 1940, one in four; in 1960, one in three; in 1990, 40 percent survived. Now, 50 percent survive. One out of every eight American women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, and the risk increases with age. Three of the risk factors are early menstruation, childbirth after 30 or no childbirth, and menopause after 50; you’re urged, in other words, to get on stage when expected, hit your lines at the right time, and then exit on cue. Any deviation, and evolution punishes you. There’s really only one immutable biological law, it has only two imperatives, and it gets stated in dozens of ways: spawn and die.

I was patiently waiting my turn at the pharmacy when a 20-something, accompanied by his pretty, punky girlfriend, tried to cut in line. I told him to go to the back. He said, “What is this, junior high?” I said, “No, this is the line for the pharmacy, but the way you’re acting—” He asked why I couldn’t grow hair on my head. I wondered why he hadn’t grown any taller. It was a very high-level exchange. He pushed me; I pushed him. He raised his fists and said, “Let’s go.” Forty years receded, and it was as if I’d returned to 6th grade, the last time I was in a fight: I got a huge adrenaline surge, I could hear my heart thumping, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath. I declined the drugstore fisticuffs, but I replied—with the emphatic approval of my middle-aged comrades in line—“Life has rules.” It does? I was appalled; it never occurred to me that I would ever say anything remotely resembling this. If life has rules, what are they? At a party recently, I overheard a woman, attempting to seduce a young man half her age, say, “I’m forty-five, but I’m tight.” That’s pretty much it: sex and death. Reproduction and oblivion.

In Rabbit, Run, published when John Updike was 28, he wrote, “The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us and we become, first inside, then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”

Steve Nash, 34, who has been the Most Valuable Player of the National Basketball Association two of the last three years and who is the father of 3-year-old twin girls, says, “I guess I’m learning more how insignificant my life is. I still enjoy my work. I still enjoy my friends and family and relationships, but you realize the girls are so innocent and dependent. You realize your life, in some ways, is over.”

Thackeray said, “When one is twenty, yes, but at forty-seven Venus may rise from the sea, and I for one should hardly put on my spectacles to have a look.”

A few years ago, I told Laurie that it seemed to me as if so many people our age—48 or a bit older—had started taking “nice pills” everyone seemed so much more mellow. She said, “It’s not them. It’s you: you’re nicer. And so people seem to you—”

“No,” I protested. “No I’m not. I’m a walking blade.”

In a short story, Barry Hannah writes about his protagonist, who’s in his late 40s, “He still did not know precisely what accounted for it, but some big quiet thing had fallen down and locked into place, like a whisper of some weight. Ned Maxy had been granted contact with paradise, and he could hardly believe the lack of noise.”

Joke courtesy of Dr. Herring: There are three kinds of married sex. When you’re first married, you’re so lusty you have sex in every room in the house. After several years, the passion dies down a little, and you confine sex to the bedroom. After many years, you pass each other in the hallway and say, “Fuck you.” One in five married couples has sex less than once a month; I recently heard a woman on the radio suggest that couples should have sex no more often than they do their taxes (quarterly? annually?).

The weak links of the human body are exposed when people survive beyond the reproductive period. For instance, the thymus gland degenerates after your sexual maturation. At age 50, you retain only 5 to 10 percent of the original mass of the thymus, which produces hormones whose levels decline at age 25 and are undetectable after 60.

The weight and size of the uterus decrease after menopause until age 65, when it’s half the weight it was at 30. After age 60, men have fewer and fewer erections during sleep. Sexual daydreams decline in frequency and intensity until age 65, when they largely disappear.

Sophocles, in old age, said finally being free of sexual desire was “like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.”

In opposition, again, to all this decline and fall, this piece my father wrote, in his late 80s, for his class:

It’s funny how easily you can misjudge people or, more specifically, women. How easy it is to be deceived about what happens or what’s said at a first meeting. After our first date, I felt that we would become lovers in a month. In a worst-case scenario, six weeks or two months. I met Virginia for the first time at a Palo Alto senior center where I’d gone to a lecture on the future of the novel. I got there late and the only seat was in the back row, which turned out to be next to her. When the lecture and question-and-answer and coffee-and-cookies periods were over, I said I’d escort her to her car in the parking lot, since it was late. When we got to her car, I mumbled the ritualistic “Glad to have met you” and was prepared to leave, when she reached into her purse and pulled out a card with her name and phone number on it. She asked me to call her.

Two weeks later I did. It was on a Friday night and I asked her about seeing her the next night and quickly apologized about calling on such short notice. She said there was no need to apologize, invited me to her place for dinner, and said I’d be as welcome as the flowers in May. Damn if she didn’t repeat that silly “flowers in May” line every single time I called to arrange the time and place of our next meeting.

On that first evening together, I helped her wash the dishes after dinner. She said something about me being a real handy man to have around the house and added that her husband, a busy Santa Clara doctor, never washed or dried a dish in all the years they were married. This remark of hers about my being so helpful was the perfect opening for one of my sure-fire laugh-getters and I promptly said, “I’m not one of those men who thinks a woman’s place is in the stove. No macho male me.” She chuckled appreciatively and said something about my being a nice guy and added she was glad she ran into me at the senior center that night.

At 10:00, Virginia suggested we watch the news. We sat on the sofa and I held her hand. After about 15 minutes, I tried to kiss her—nothing serious, but she pulled back and pleaded with me to go slowly and be patient and told me I was the first man she’d dated since her husband’s death three years ago. She followed that up with the words I was to hear over and over: “Milt, I need a little more time.”

No problem, I assured her that first night. We watched the rest of the news holding hands. Not bad, I remembered saying to myself during the 45-minute drive home. Give it time and it will work out. Couldn’t miss. I was a lonely widower with a lot of time and a little money and she was a lonely widow, anxious for companionship. Plus. So she hinted, not very subtly.

Several months later, after attending a lavish 40th anniversary banquet for a couple Virginia and her late husband had known for many years, we got back to her apartment about midnight. I had had more than my usual 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.