I know the perception is that I have excellent recall of events long-past, but trust me when I tell you, this is a mere shadow of how I used to be. I already know I am losing it. Part of this is due to a migraine prevention medication I’ve long taken called Topamax. It is known to cause word-loss and a bit of confusion. I’ve taken it for at least 18 years and know that I am not as sharp as I once was. Some wags refer to the drug as “Dope-amax”, but if it helps me (which I know it does, as I had to go off it for a while and I was miserable), I’m willing to pay that price.

I’ve never been good with brain-teasers, crosswords or the like. I find writing these weekly stories to be enormously gratifying, if time-consuming. They do help me with word and memory issues better than any game I could devise. I have to genuinely THINK, use vocabulary, memory, be creative. One of the reasons I write ahead is because I like to get my thoughts down, let the story marinate, then go back and see if I can do better; come up with a better word, turn of phrase, of course look for typos or missing words that are so easy to miss no matter how many times one proof-reads. Part of my lack of enthusiasm for games has to do with spatial relations (I have none; why I don’t golf or play tennis). Others in my family are fantastic at it. Vicki is truly gifted.

I believe my continued singing with my choral group is another way to keep my brain in tune (pun intended). Continuing to learn new music (we were working on a Stravinsky Mass when COVID shut us down last March; I have no idea when it will be safe to resume) is challenging, as both the notes and the time signature can be difficult to learn. Our director goes over each choral part during rehearsal time, but is pleased that, as a group, we have become better at sight-reading. We had drills on it in our top high school choir, of which I was a member in 11th and 12th grades. It is a learned skill, but, like most other skills, use it or lose it. As I creep toward the age of 70, that is a muscle that needs flexing as much as any other in my body.

Dan, in retirement (18 years and counting), looks for ways to keep busy. For a while he was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle on Sundays (we only get the Sunday print edition). Then he discovered the online version. He really enjoys that, as he can come back to it, get hints, never has to worry about erasures, can always get a new one easily, can even travel with it.

Then he discovered the “spelling bee”.

This is some sort of letter jumble or anagram. You are supposed to make as many words as possible out of the letters given. He would play this ad naseum on the house computer (in the very public den, which is the computer I use all the time too) at Christmas time when we had all the family home. Vicki always spotted new possibilities, Anna would add another word. It was a group effort and lots of fun to engage when was everyone around. Sort of an on-line Scrabble, something else I am not very good at. I just don’t “see” the patterns in the letters. My brain doesn’t work that way.

Vicki, as a youngster, liked to play “Hangman” with our neighbor on the Vineyard (we were back and forth in each other’s homes all day). Mara still talks about being beaten by the word “sphynx”; a fiendishly good word on my child’s part.

 

Dan also enjoys jigsaw puzzles. These days, he’s working on the 1,000 piece variety, usually covers of New Yorker Magazine. They are very difficult, with lots of white space. He pines for help from Vicki (who is 3,000 miles away). Again, she has that knack for just walking by, picking up a piece and just KNOWING exactly where it belongs. Incredible! The one pictured above was a recently completed project on my Vineyard dining room table. Now what to do with it? So Dan does all these games to try and remain sharp.

When it first came out, we used to love playing “Trivial Pursuit”, particularly with our friends Roger and Francine. That was a blood sport. Now we watch “Jeopardy” at night after the network news. Each of us can run certain categories, but again, I can’t access the names as quickly as I used to. Many years ago I tried out for Jeopardy when they held auditions in Boston. Out of about 100 people in the room, I was one of a dozen who scored highly on the written test to make it into the pool of people who might get called during that taping season and got a little trial audition so the producers could see how I’d perform live. I confess, I wasn’t great “on my feet”. The buzzer timing is very difficult, even if you know the correct answer. I was nervous and not as vibrant as I usually am. The twelve of us remained in the potential applicant pool for a year, but I was never called to Hollywood to tape a show. That’s OK. At least I made it as far as I did. Now I know my recall isn’t fast enough to even do that.

So I write these stories (constantly looking up the spelling of words), searching my memory for good stories from my past. That’s what keeps me going.

 

 

The lost part of turning 75 on is easy to write. Yet, I hope I have found the perspective and patience to look forward rather than to wallow in the misery of the present.
Read More

Two men walk along my street, a red string catches one’s eye. He picks it up, admires what he has found, and lovingly presents it to the other.
Read More

For as long as I remember, I have always been blasé about fame. Or other people’s fame. Not possessing it myself, who knows how I’d feel, although we read often enough that the truly famous pay grievously for their fame in the loss of privacy.

Others, I know, can think of nothing more exhilarating than meeting the rich and famous, as if something magical will happen from the meeting. Meet the Pope and achieve salvation? Meet the Dalai Lama and obtain enlightenment? Generally, I suppose the desired meeting is with a hero, an idol, or a star of popular culture, whether it’s movies, music, sports, politics or religion. It has always seemed to me, however, that meeting someone famous would be hollow, if it’s just to shake hands in a receiving line. Surely, the object of adulation will have no memory of our meeting, and no meaningful discourse would occur. So what’s the point?

As it turns out, however, on the occasions I’ve met the truly famous, there has in fact often been something I took from the meeting, however artificial the meeting. I remember boarding a plane to Washington, D.C., in particular. Sitting in first class was Lillian (“Miss Lillian”) Carter, the President’s mother. As I walked by, I nodded slightly and she acknowledged it in a similar matter. So we shared something that no one else had. And somehow I felt we connected – and I with someone certainly famous – even if she had completely forgotten it before the flight hit the runway at National Airport.

I have met a few other famous people. Does Yale President Kingman Brewster qualify? After all, he was on the cover of Time Magazine, which, in the ‘60s, it seems to me, confirmed one’s fame. I met him in a receiving line for incoming freshmen at Yale. I remember only what a slightly inebriated classmate recounted – The King (as we called him) leaned in to my classmate and said, “Always drink gin.”

And I did meet George H.W. Bush during my 25^th college reunion, when George was attending his 50^th  Reunion. He was from the Class of 1948 (the class the dollars fell on – not so much with the class 25 years later). Meeting the President was memorable, not because of any conversation we had, but in participating first hand in what the Secret Service does. When I saw him, I immediately jumped back, pointed, and practically shouted, saying, “Hey, there’s George Bush!”  (So maybe I was taken in by the fame.) What I most remember was the response of a professional looking woman with him, dressed in a skirt and brown blazer, who focused laser beam eyes at me when I jumped, making sure I wasn’t going to attack him. She was well trained and highly alert. The former president leaned over and, although he didn’t kiss our daughter in her stroller, he cooed at her and tickled her chin. So my lasting memory was not about George H.W.; instead it remains, for me, how the (non-famous) Secret Service agent responded.

And I’ve met several California Governors. I had a long conversation in an official capacity with Jerry Brown (he was mayor of Oakland at the time) where I suggested his legal team was obstructing the sign-off of an environmental cleanup that we all wanted to get done. After then-Mayor Brown signed the papers the Army demanded the City execute before the City took title, he called and asked whether he did the right thing, saying, “I didn’t read the document.” Neither had I, but it seems to have worked out fine. I met Gray Davis when he was interviewing me for a job, and Arnold Schwarzenegger at the State Fair when he was in the process of campaigning to take Gray’s job away from him. I remember nothing except that Arnold was incredibly short. Arnold remains famous because he’s – ta-dah—still a movie “star”; I daresay Gray no longer possesses much fame. I blew my chance to meet Ronald Reagan as he was running for something in the early seventies. I had no desire to meet someone I thought was on his way to doing substantial harm to the country, so I declined tickets for a fundraiser he was attending in San Luis Obispo.

So it seems that although I profess not to be impressed by fame, I do remember something amusing or otherwise memorable about the interactions. And the lasting impression seems to be that those who possess fame are, basically, human like the rest of us.

I also like the Warhol thought, referenced in this week’s prompt, that everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. I can remember two that come close to qualifying. In 2004, I went to Florida to do my part in making sure that George Bush and the Supreme Court didn’t steal another election, at least not in Florida. I was one of hundreds of lawyers (who knows, maybe thousands) watching polls on election day and during early voting the week prior. NPR had a reporter, who as part of their daily financial program, was speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek about the economic impact all these lawyers were having on the Florida economy. I, and my counterpart from the Republican Party answered a few questions — how much were we paying for lodging, meals, rental cars, etc. I quipped that my impact was minimal – I was a Democrat, after all, and all of the moneyed observers were with the other party. I pretty much forgot about it until one of my cousins, a year later, said he’d heard the story and had a good laugh.

The other 15 minutes of fame belonged (I think the past tense is appropriate – if it’s only 15 minutes, it’s no longer present tense) to my father. It was 1946, and President Truman was not doing well, at least according to Time Magazine. So he did what many presidents do when they’re in trouble, which is to visit one of our service academies. He and the Academy Superintendent, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, did the obligatory review of the Corps of Cadets, walking together with a West Point Cadet with a lot of stripes on his sleeves. The Cadet with the stripes was my father. The New York Daily News snapped a picture, and it ran in newspapers across the country the next day. Most of the country saw the photo I’ve reproduced here from Time, but my father got the New York Times, which cropped the unidentified cadet from the left-hand edge. So he didn’t get to share in the 15 minutes, or in this case, the 24-hours of whatever fame he acquired. The Daily News managed to capitalize, however, as they sold a photograph, suitable for framing, to my grandparents, who proudly displayed it in their living room for years.

Fame of the 15-minute variety can be happenstance. Nor does it define you – it’s just something that happened. In my father’s case, it was the result of losing a coin toss to the other Cadet Company Commanders. They got the weekend off, whereas my dad had to stay on the base for the President’s visit. In my case, I just happened to be in the right polling site in Fort Lauderdale. And for me, and perhaps my father, the fun part wasn’t the fame, but a particular memory about the event.