Plump It Up!

plus, banisters

Welcome readers, old and new!

Please tap that ❤️ above to maintain a healthy bottom-line about your butt.

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As you read this, I’ll be traveling with two dear friends, one younger than I and the other a bit older. We’re taking the bullet train to the Japanese “art island” of Naoshima to explore its widely admired architecture, sculptures, and geography before making our way to a neighboring small island, best traversed by bike, and then heading our separate ways.

Wandering around a shrine in Tokyo a week before this trip, I mentioned to the older friend—as we carefully maneuvered uneven stone steps—that one concession of older age is that I always use a banister now when walking down stairs. I expected him—an expert skier, still—to laugh, maybe even dismissively. “Me, too,” he said, “I’ve even installed shower guards at home.” He made me feel wise rather than frail.

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I wrote recently about the unexpected pleasures at this age—which feels to me like being an adolescent again, but with a riper kind of angst. Appreciating the present and anticipating what’s to come yields a difficult commixture of joy and sorrow. Yet what a gift it is. Jan Morris, one of my favorite writers, captured similar feelings of magic and loss in an essay from The American Scholar.

I simply believe that everything one does in life can be measured against a scale of kindness. None of us can ever achieve full marks on the scale, and kindness itself must sometimes be weighed in the balance—is it ever kind to be cruel?—yet it seems to me that if there is any ultimate judge out there beyond the Milky Way, we can hardly be faulted if we have done our kindly best.

So soldier on, dear comrades in kindness, keep smiling,
Fervently love your loves, play your later years with a straight bat,
Forget Phlebas and greet old age not as a breaking-up, but as an
Overture to a new program, waiting there under the stairs with
The rest of the junk.

Like older age, The New York Times is full of surprises both pleasant and unpleasant these days; one of the more pleasant ones was this recent appreciation of aging women. Which reminded me of another lovely appreciation, published a few years ago. (Both essays are gift linked.)

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