I was hanging with a bunch of guys—hanging on zoom, in the contemporary fashion—the other night. This was a group of very politically alert guys, all younger than I am. And suddenly I realized we hadn’t discussed the elephant on the calendar. 

      Thursday night the two serious candidates in what is arguably the most important U.S. election in history—with the possible exception of the previous one or the one before that or Lincoln versus Douglas—will be debating.

      “Hey, we all have some important TV to watch Thursday night,” I said, or something to that effect, to open a conversation about Biden’s prospects. Instead, it opened a very different conversation . . . .

Willie Mays, arguably the most electric, graceful—and certainly one of the most joyful and competitive—players ever to wear spikes, died May 18 at age 93.

  Though I grew up in New York, I never saw him play in person for the New York Giants at the old Polo Grounds. But etched in my memory are black-and-white replays of “the Catch” during game one of the 1954 Giants-Indians World Series when, with the score tied 2-2 in the eighth and runners on base, Mays robbed Vic Wertz of an extra-base hit with an incredible basket catch of a long fly ball near the Polo Grounds’ scoreboard.

The Giants went on to win the game 5–2 in extra innings and eventually the World Series. “The Catch” was rightfully called one of the greatest plays in baseball history.

This was during the glory years for N.Y. baseball fans, when the city boasted not one but three major league teams: the New York Yankees in the American League and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Giants in the National League. . . .

My friend Bruce can just sit. He is an early riser. I’m not. And most mornings, when he’s visiting, I’ll wake up to find him sitting on our couch—phone-less (he barely knows how to work his), book-less, magazine-less, newspaper-less, word-puzzle-less; immersed in silence, just looking straight ahead.

      Bruce, a retired professor, certainly reads, mostly Victorian novels. He keeps up with current events, through the PBS NewsHour and his local newspaper. He goes to movies, plays and concerts. His conversation is lively and wide-ranging. But often—and Bruce says he can do this for hours when home alone—he just sits and thinks.

      Bruce has what my in-laws used to call in Yiddish: ziztfleisch, sitting flesh. He doesn’t need to be busy cleaning, cooking, rearranging or even fidgeting. But it is more than that: Bruce doesn’t need distractions. . . .

Music has bookended my life.

Growing up, thanks to the wonderful albums my parents owned, I fell in love with music. I have fond memories of my dad relaxing in his living room chair on the weekends, smoking his pipe and singing out of tune to the live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

I, on the other hand, was smitten by new folk, especially that of Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary, and rock (especially starting with the Beatles), doowop and soul/R&B. 

After my parents made me study piano ('til I whined long enough to get them to let me quit), when I was 13 I decided I wanted to play guitar because I idolized my summer camp’s  charismatic counselor who played that instrument.  

I got my ‘rents to buy me a six-string acoustic and taught myself more in a few months than I’d learned about piano in a year and a half. . . .

When I was eight years old, my mother tucked me and my brother into her 1958 Imperial convertible and drove us 2,021 miles to Mexico. 

Random as it was, I soon learned that my father was flying into Acapulco to meet my mother for a quick divorce. 

Our last dinner together was at a restaurant in the El Mirador Hotel at La Quebrada, which was perched on the top of cliffs where the La Quebrada cliff divers dove off of 100-foot cliffs into the sea below. . . .

It’s not an easy subject to talk about, at least to talk about seriously, so sometimes we joke about it. We joke about how hard it is to get through the night without having to get up and go pee.

It’s called nocturia. Like pretty much every other bodily function, nocturia becomes more problematic as we age, particularly when we are past 60. While women have the problem, too, particularly older women, nocturia is much more common in older men.

It affects more than 50 percent of adults after age 50. It’s considered normal for a 60-year-old man to get up once, a 70-year-old man to get up twice and an 80-year-old man to get up three times a night. . . .

Pre-Cannes, I rendezvoused with my good friend, Todd McCarthy, in Normandy at the home of our mutual amie, Florence Dauman, for about a week of talk and table. We had been debating about whether to go west to the WW II beaches, or north to lunch in Deauville/Trouville.

In the end, Flo stayed back—going to Omaha Beach for her would be like a San Antonian going to see the Alamo, and Todd and I drove up to Trouville for a long lunch at Les Vapeurs, a historic bistro across from the grand casino that still serves up a good lunch despite the heavy whiff of tourist trap about it.

As we were nearing the end of our meal, a tall young man and woman sat down across from us. It was nearly four, the restaurant was mostly deserted. The young man was straight up and down as an arrow, short hair, clear blue eyes and wearing an odd T-shirt that said Watergate. . . .

Here’s some of what we have seen recently that might be of particular interest to our generation. (Apologies for any pay walls.) Send us what you have seen at WritingAboutOurGeneration@gmail.com.

• A Peek Inside the Brains of ‘Super-Agers’, Dana G. Smith, The New York Times, April 29, 2024

• Number of 401(k) Millionaires Surges Thanks to Booming Stock Market, Pete Grieve, Money, May 24, 2024

• Does Your Penis Shrink with Age?, Luke O’Neil, Esquire, Oct 19, 2017

• Caution! These Drugs Can Cause Memory Loss, Rachel Nania and Aaron Kassraie, AARP The Magazine, April 30, 2024

• ‘It’s basically inaccessible without a phone’: are kids losing their love for music? Oliver Keens, The Guardian, May 22, 2024

• 8 Best Beach Destinations to Retire in for Beautiful Views, Mild Weather, and a Laid-back Vibe, Patricia Doherty, Travel & Leisure, May 16, 2024

• Dating After 60: A Lot of Roses, Some Thorns, Catherine Pearson, The New York Times, Jan. 9, 2024

• A Drug to Slow Alzheimer’s Is Finally Available. How Are Patients Faring? Dana G. Smith, The New York Times, June 10, 2024

Click for more

House calls

Hiding a transistor radio under the pillow

Being able to wear heels

Flipping baseball

cards . . . .

And more things we don’t miss:

The Vietnam War

Floppy disks

TV dinners . . . .

      Because libraries and school curricula are currently under assault regarding the appropriateness of diverse representations and gender expression, it seems like a good time to look at the homophobia and Culture Wars of the ’90s, a time when conservative forces organized, successfully, to destabilize arts funding

      I was curator of performing arts at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1988 through 1996. Our mission was to be “a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences.”

      We presented 100 performances each season in theaters ranging from 100 to 4,800 seats. Given the mission, I at times produced identity-based performance work, some of which became entangled in the culture wars of the ’90s. . . .

After a 45-minute wait, we learn our United flight from LAX to Newark has been cancelled because of a mechanical problem.

      Okay. Now what do we do?

      A line immediately starts forming at the gate of the cancelled flight: We are about a dozen people back, and that line ain’t moving. An announcement instructs us that we can get help finding new flights from a human on the United app. My wife tries. No human, just a recording playing over and over again.

      I walk up to the front of the line, to find out how long this is going to take. The lonely United employee there responds: “one hour.” I can handle that.

      But then she makes clear that she meant it would take an hour just to find alternative flights for the first couple on that line . . .

They gave me a certificate and a t-shirt, and some parting words of advice. After 36 early-morning sessions, spread out over three months, I finally had graduated from cardiac rehab.

Each of the 36 mornings, beginning two months after my near-fatal heart attack, I got weighed, had my blood pressure and pulse taken, attached color-coded electrodes to my body, and then spent 50 minutes or so on the treadmill or a stationary bike.

It was reassuring, so soon after almost dying, to have physiologists and cardiologists and other staff watching over me, checking the data from the electrodes, noting my target heart rate, asking me how hard I was working, making sure that I was pushing myself but not pushing myself too hard.

I knew that the foremost risk factor for having a heart attack is having had a heart attack. The cardiac rehab staff was there to make sure that didn’t happen, at least not on their watch. . . .

(This is an excerpt from Ted Gioia’s consistently provocative Substack: The Honest Broker.)

More than 100 years ago, sociologist Emile Durkheim studied the problem of anomie. That’s not a word you hear very often nowadays. But we need to bring it back.

Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.

But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite. . .

No, no, no—I don’t mean the 1970s. I mean the seventh decade of one’s life.

For anyone under that age, your gagging reflux might kick in when you think of older people having sex. I get it. When I see an older couple kissing and making out in a movie, I get a little queasy. My usual response is “Oh my gosh—do we look like that? Ugh, what a turn-off.”

So, don’t worry; I promise to keep this essay quietly tucked under a PG rating and I will not attach any videos.

But take a look at the photo above, one of my husband and me just a few months ago, getting all giddy for one another. We are indeed a sexy couple. We can’t keep our hands off each other. . . .

No, we’re not talking about the 34 recent felony convictions of that real estate guy from Queens.

We’re talking about two other guys from the boroughs in our 70s—us—who just, finally, have convinced Facebook that the website you are currently reading is not spewing spam all over the internet.

Here’s the backstory. . . .

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, four months, 24 days and 11 hours after nearly dying from a heart attack, I finished a 5K race.

It was my daughter’s idea, part birthday gift, part incentive, part recovery celebration.

She thought I could do it; I wasn’t so sure, even though the cardiologist had said my heart had healed.

5Ks, I thought, is a lot of Ks. I had neither run nor even walked that far since the heart attack….

Thinking About ArtificiaI Intelligence

Requires Thinking About Human Intelligence.

And Humans Have Demonstrated

The Limitations Of Their Intelligence

By Messing Things Up Pretty Badly.

Click for video.

Tough newspaper city columnists, like Breslin, Royko and Hamill

Newspapers

Sleeping through the night

A human being answering the phone

Snuggling up in the front seat

Feeling comfortable driving at night

Leafing through Life Magazine

The new Beatles album

I winced as the friendly, strong junk guys maneuvered my husband’s old desk down the brick front steps and tossed it into the truck bed, where it splintered. Even though that desk was never my favorite, I felt a quick pang of regret as it landed with a crunch.

The competent guy in charge had told us that they would recycle what they could. I realized then that our definitions of recycling might vary, but overall I was glad to get these eight or nine pieces of well-used furniture out of our house.

There went the particle board bookcases I bought more than 45 years ago for my first apartment—cheap, because that was all I could afford on my teacher’s salary. Onto the pile went my mother‘s antique vanity dressing table, which had one broken leg for years that we never got around to fixing.

You get the idea. None of the items in the junk pile was worth saving and no one wanted any of them. Even so, I could almost hear a few pieces groan and sigh as they were abandoned.

We are downsizing from a two-story house to a one-level ranch. . . .

Donald Trump supporters are turning their flags upside down this week to protest his conviction, CNN reports. I’m not impressed. My head has felt like it has been turned upside down for many months now.

In fact, at times it’s felt ready to explode as I try to understand how more than 40 percent of U.S. voters reportedly support, and in many cases revere, a man who is a non-stop liar, a bully, a narcissist, a wanna-be dictator, a racist and, now, a convicted felon. It pains me to even think about it; I can’t fathom why.

I do know this: if Joe Biden loses the presidency in 2024 it won’t be because of his age. It won’t be because he’s a mediocre speaker. . . .