Dears of Stackland,
Here we are at the beginning of year two. It’s raining. I love it. Have I ever mentioned how much I love gray days? The gardens are going nuts.
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Joy
Yesterday Richard and I drove to Woodbury Long Island, where I spent 30 minutes visiting my beloved plastic surgeon. Then we got in the car and drove home. To get to and from Woodbury, Long Island from our house near Hudson, you have to enter some gnarly traffic on the Long Island Expressway this and the Throgs Neck that, not to mention the Bruckner this and the Cross Island that. The doctor has an office in Manhattan as well, but I don’t live there, anymore.
My beloved plastic surgeon and I are talking about life and how he can continue working at his intense pace. We’re talking about the limits of his resources, and time, and love. We’re talking about his devotion to the people who come to him for reconstructive and cosmetic purposes, and I say, “You deliver joy. Everyone leaves feeling happy after seeing you. That is an enormous thing. That is one of the most important things anyone can do in life. And you are kind. Lots of people do what you do and are unable to produce joy.”
He smiled and thanked me. What else could he do? I think it was a genuine moment, but one thing I’ve learned in life so far is you really can’t be sure what anyone else is feeling and thinking. We aren’t dogs, alas, where everything is spelled out across our faces. Humans are crafty, stealthy animals.
I visit my beloved plastic surgeon twice a year to have injections of Botox in a tiny space between my eyebrows, where my mother lives, fretting about Nazis and a nectarine she bought at Fairway that didn’t ripen. Hi, Mom. I also have filler in the puppet lines extending from the corners of my lips toward my chin. That’s it. Afterward, my face looks smoother. There are fewer trenches and divots to catch light, and when I look at myself in the mirror of the upstairs bathroom, I give myself a nod of approval and move on. This activity—the visit to Woodbury, the cosmetic benefits, the daily awareness of looking less like a rag in the garage than I might otherwise look—all of this stirs pleasure.
I had my first face-lift when I was 52, after being dumped by a man who was never going to love me. I wrote about the facelift in Ms. Magazine, working with the great and supportive editor Gloria Jacobs. Women wrote to the magazine to say, in effect, What is wrong with you, Ms. Magazine? You think this is a feminist thing to do, have a face-lift? You think this is a kosher body modification? When people wrote these things and some women said them to my much-improved face, I was surprised people weren’t happy I looked better. I was surprised because I’m an idiot as well as vain (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I wrote the piece in Ms. on purpose, of course, to celebrate all prosthetic technologies and the joys they produce. I’m writing this piece on purpose at nearly 77, for the same reasons. I’m still a bit taken aback people aren’t universally happy for my improvements, and I’m still amazed at how well other people conceal their resentments.
Which brings me to the pleasure people take in the concept of scarcity, you know those questions people like to post on social media, who would you rather have sex with: Idris Elba or a tuna fish sandwich? My answer is always both.
Yes, we need to conserve resources to postpone the inevitable extinction of all life on earth, and yes we need to impose limits on the great pleasure some people feel in unbridled greed, but why do humans find themselves making a virtue of showing each other their unstamped ration books and saying, in effect, admire me for starving, admire me for looking like a rag from the garage, admire me for being sad, admire me for being a stealthy ape capable of harboring my resentments? When Nietzsche was asked this exact question, he said, Christianity is the reason. Christianity is the great bait-and-switch swindle that robs people of their animal joy and exchanges it for some bullshit ticket to Club Med, the virtue edition, where you get to stay once you’re dead.
In the car, driving to Woodbury, I read aloud to Richard a long and wonderful piece written by
that was published in her excellent Substack magazine, Dirt. She was writing about the relationship humans have to objects and to technologies of pleasure and to, therefore, the storage of objects, a circumstance they had to organize as soon as they stopped being nomadic and became agricultural. For ten thousand years, humans have been crowding out the planet with stuff, so that now there’s no longer enough storage space—either for our junk or our prized collections.We don’t need to limit our celebration of pleasure, it strikes me, in order to limit our dependence on objects. We need to expand creatively into different means of experiencing pleasure. The planet isn’t going to survive better, nor are movements to increase the circulation into the goods of life of people limited by muscle and prejudice, none of this is going to go better if you are more judgy and look like the dog’s dinner. If pleasure is thought to be the problem in life, then we’re really screwed.
Which brings me to the subject of recycling—and I don’t just mean the limits on my imagination. We could call this form of recycling the concept of the repurposed boyfriend. The other day, I was speaking to a friend who is now living with a man she knew before she met her husband. She lived with her husband for many years, but she never quite stopped thinking about the other man. She had been engaged to the other man when one day he broke things off with her, without much explanation, and a few weeks later married someone else. Even though my friend was happy more or less in the long marriage to her husband, she’d dream about the man who had jilted her in the way we dream that a dog we had 20 years ago is missing and feared hurt.
My friend’s husband died, and for years she lived alone, enjoying the freedom but not the solitude. She found it was pleasant to love her husband from the distance of his death. She even missed seeing him floss his teeth in the bathroom mirror, morning and night, and eating the same thing for breakfast for 20 years: a ripe banana and Cheerios.
Ten years passed. Then one day she received an email from the man who had jilted her, the Heartbreak Kid, let’s call him, who had, in effect, ditched her during their honeymoon for Cybill Shepherd. It had been easy for him to find my friend, and soon they were exchanging emails several times a day and speaking on the phone. My friend wondered, with her signature wit, if we have only so many actors in a life and so many plots we can repeat.
She hadn’t made war in her heart on this man. One of the large and lovable aspects of my friend is she’s not in life to make war on anyone. It’s not her temperament. It doesn’t mean she’s weak. It means nothing. It’s just her temperament, and because of this, she was able to entertain the return of the Heartbreak Kid, understanding, at this stage of her experience, that a person, from time to time, is going to nuts and tear up the road of their life and afterward desire a way back. During the time she was alone and would think about the Heartbreak Kid, she’d remember being jilted, and it would feel like it was happening for the first time, and she found it made her feel alive. She hated it, and she didn’t hate it, the way any sane person would.
Now, living with the Heartbreak Kid, she said she was happier than she could remember ever being, and she believed this was because happiness made you happier in an arena of scarcity, and after the age of 60, everyone felt the days left to them were an arena of scarcity. You know, the sentiment of “September Song,” where “the days dwindle down to a precious few.” At the same time, feeling loved again, she was returned to the postwar optimism of her childhood, when the world seemed a road of endless possibilities and you could fall down, break a bone or two, dust yourself off, and start the next adventure.
Because life is short and because my friend makes war on no one who has hurt her, and because her parents and siblings all loved her and gave her a cushion of security about herself in the world, she invited the Heartbreak Kid to live with her in her house in Michigan, and she has no regrets. They’ve been together for four years. On the phone, she said, “I forgot how hard it is to live with another person. All the adjustments.” She laughed. “He watches TV. I didn’t think anyone watched TV, anymore. He watches the news, and I hear it.” Then she told me all the places they were planning to travel to. She said, “I jumped out of a burning building.” She meant aloneness. “I didn’t expect to wind up in a resort.”
writes the Rebel Newsletter and this week posted an interview with me. She wanted to know how I started out as a writer and some things I think about the work I’m doing now. It was a pleasure speaking with her. And here is the link.
You had me at "my beloved plastic surgeon," and your post remained wonderful, including "why do humans find themselves making a virtue of showing each other their unstamped ration books and saying, in effect, admire me for starving?" I do think some version of "scarcity" affects us as we age and may make our emotions more intense. "This may be the last time" . . .
If the ideal ménage à trois doesn't involve Idris Elba and a tuna fish sandwich, then 🤷♀️