DAY SIX: Get a Dog

…You also will meet other people out walking their dogs and who are equally pissed off that they had to go out in the rain and sleet twice that day for that mutt their kids promised they would be responsible for and take care of. And if you have a snarling, aggressive dog that bites complete strangers, that’s always a good conversation starter that may lead to a lasting friendship or at least a long-running legal case.

A video experiment. A moral enquiry. A walk on the Upper West Side.

….In the late 1970s, when I was living in Paris. I was desperately trying to finish a manuscript that was way past its deadline. After I wrote “the end,” I raced with my box full of 300 typed pages, some marked with WhiteOut, to the local post office. It was a Saturday, and I got there right before the post office closed at noon.

I handed over my box, paid the tariff and walked home.

And as I walked, the thought occurred to me: Did I tell them to send it via airmail?

Because if I didn’t tell them, if they didn’t send it via airmail, the only copy of the manuscript would go by boat and take six or seven weeks to get to my publisher….

This is a complaint – about modern times, on behalf of my music collection.

I’m not often inclined to quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But, when it comes to the song “I’m Free” by the Rolling Stones (in particular), to the various iterations of said music collection (in general) and to the experience of my generation (in even-more general), Marx and Engels were onto something. “All that is solid,” as they put it, does indeed “melt into air.”

I mean, it had to have been a mistake. Yes, I’m 77, but I am the guy who completed the Great Saunter, the 32-mile, one-day walk around Manhattan island, three times. I’m the guy who works out regularly at the gym. I’m the guy who wasn’t fat and hadn’t smoked since 1974 and ate healthily, lots of fruits and vegetables, regularly checked my blood pressure, and ran every other day and drank only moderately, didn’t take many medications and finished first in my age group in a recent 5K.

But as the cardiologist said later, you can’t outrun genetics.

After screwing up the world for the last 50 years or so, we baby boomers are clearly no longer lead players in our culture. We have become generic character actors, comic relief, like Chester in “Gunsmoke,” a reference surely lost on people busy streaming “Stranger Things” and “White Lotus.” We boomers rightly sense we have become irrelevant to the central story, unconnected to the moment’s gestalt, which many of us believe may be a digestive disorder.

Is it surprising, then, that we have become the butt of “ok, boomer” jokes? Yes, admittedly, we have ruined the planet, despoiled the oceans and bear much of the responsibility for the success of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Once upon a time, we were parents, unquestionably wise. Now we are grandparents — and apparently know nothing.

The knowledge we supposedly had gained by raising those kids who now have their own kids, has been replaced by mom groups, sleep consultants, bloggers, Google, gadgets, you name it.

What we did as parents — time-outs, (over)praising our kids, making them drink milk, putting them to sleep on their stomachs, letting them cry themselves to sleep, ordering them to do things they didn't want to do — was all wrong.

How's that for a Mother's Day present for you, grandma?

If we could reverse time as we can the other three dimensions…. Speculations on Einstein, entropy and aging.

In 1977, when I was in my late twenties, my husband and I met an “elderly couple” (he was in his early seventies and she was younger) who impressed us so much that we recently coined a word in their honor. Their last name was Cornyn, and we have paid tribute to them with the word cornyng: when older travelers (that’s now us) are sufficiently adventurous to venture off the beaten path.

I’ve been planning my death for a while now. Decades actually. But then, you’re looking at a guy who has had more imagined terminal illnesses than baseball cards over the span of a lifetime. And I had a lot of baseball cards — that is, until my parents, without asking, decided to throw them all out when I was in college.

Still, there’s important stuff to sort out. Somewhere in the underwear drawer of our Cape Cod home are letters to Kathy, my partner and love (on most days) of 52 years, to my two daughters and to my three grandkids. I write these whenever I fly alone.