Three-Quarters of a Century

First, the photograph: above you see Pugsy, our adorable little chug (chihuahua X pug) who had a rare beauty appointment Tuesday. Daisy, because she has long hair and a penchant for biting people who hold a brush, has a monthly appointment with Dana. Dana smiles bravely each time we thank her for doing that which we are afraid to do. I once swore I would never take a nasty little dog to a hapless groomer. I had never had a Pomeranian. Pugsy, on the other hand, is a charmer, a lover and a delightful personal companion who, for whatever reason, smells like a dog and grows his toenails out until they click on the floor. Nancy and I own a respectable pair of nail clippers designed for dogs. We have had, oh, four dogs during the life of these clippers. Riley said, “Oh, forget that–you’re not coming near me with those.” Annie said, “Yo, I’m a little pit. Try it, go ahead.” Comparatively Pugsy is small and he has a deformed hip which makes reefing on him by grabbing an extremity a fairly dramatic event (for he is, indeed, a drama queen) and neither of us can bring ourselves to maim the feet of our beloved pets.

Pugsy came home clean and short-nailed and utterly delighted with himself. He spent the day rubbing against me, either to remove whatever smells they soaked into his fur or to rub his own smell on me (I’m never sure. Often when Daisy comes home from her beauty appointment, he pees on her.) Daisy came home in her usual humor; she crawled into an unreachable space under Nancy’s desk and growled at anyone who looked at her.

Nancy came home a little saddened because when she took the dogs to the groomers no one said, “Oh, what a cute dog!” to Pugsy. He tries so hard. And truth be told, the first time I saw him I thought, ‘he looks like a monkey’ and Nancy didn’t see him at all because the rescuers had thrust Daisy in her lap. Daisy is pretty. Daisy has moments when she is adorable. In the evenings for Last Out she followed me through the house, tail held high and waving, a dance in her little steps, and she is everything we could reasonable expect from an aging Pom. When we go away, Daisy crawls under Nancy’s desk and sleeps. Pugs suffers our absense endlessly until we return, when he greets us with such loving enthusiasm that sometimes when I’m feeling unloved I just step out into the garage and wait five minutes to come home again. Since the groomers know Daisy, they do not, shall we say, fawn over the opportunity to serve her, but she deserves their lack of enthusiasm. Pugs is a charmer. But you have to get to know him.

The Title: I am seventy-five years old today. I never thought that would happen. Beyond a little teen-age angst, I have never embraced the alternative, nor, for that matter, often needed to face it. Once, when in the emergency room (which I never visited before the age of 69) a doctor asked, “If your heart stops, do you want me to start it up again?” I suppose they always ask that, after a certain age, but it was a new experience for me and it practically stopped my heart right there on the gurney.

For a fat, lazy ex-smoker (who quite, not once, not twice, but three times because my lungs said, ‘you can smoke, or you can breathe. Pick one’) I have fared remarkably well. I would be a sight to behold, if you could see me right now: I’m sitting at my desk, my office chair tipped back, a sort of serape-cape thing thrown around my shoulders and my new birthday warming blanket thrown across my lap. I have a patch on one eye, like a pirate (to the eternal fascination of two to four year-olds in grocery stores.) I could have combed my hair, but, yeah. Why?

Still, there is a part of me that responds to milestones, like 75, about the way Daisy greets her groomers.

The Conservatory, wherein lies my desk: We believe this house was built to withstand the atomic bomb, insects of all kinds and possibly even time itself. The floors are concrete on steel support beams. When we first moved in the built-in screens had not been opened in years and the house was all but hermetically sealed. Even today we rarely hear the traffic on the road just in front of us and there really are birds in the trees outside, but we have to open the windows to hear them.

But. Originally, the house had a small and as far as I can tell, useless room behind the fireplace, and then a porch behind that. Someone tore out the wall and put a bank of larger windows across the back and enclosed the porch into the extra room. They did not put any insulation in the wall that holds up those windows, nor are those windows of the same quality as the rest of the house. So as I sit here with my desk facing the windows, which (when I’m not sun-blind) gives me a delightful view of the backyard and the six-inch forest that borders it, the room is ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. Every winter I get a little older the room gets a little colder. We have slapped external insulation against the wall, put plastic on the windows, tried space heaters (big space, small heaters)… My new birthday warming blanket is a gift of love.

As I get older, and my heart just a touch crankier, it feels like I spend the winters going from one electric blanket to the next.

And finally, the post: I am75 years old. I was an English major, am yet an aspiring writer. I have never read Jane Eyre. Recently I read a book where the main character’s name was Jane Air and every review written about it chortled about the frequent references to ‘the original’. So I said, “I should read the original.” Nancy found it for me in the library.

For the past two weeks I have been slogging through the remarkably emotive prose of the Victorians, not only Jane Eyre (which I may never make it through, given I don’t like either of the main characters, and Charlotte’s fondness for stacking four subordinate clauses into one sentence, all to say, ‘she thought he was rude’ is getting to me) but also her sister Ann Bronte’s book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is still Victorian and still features every single conceivable emotion experienced by anyone wandering past while she wrote it, is, for the modern taste, a little more readable, although it is a wonder, given the basic temperament of the men she writes about it is a wonder there ever was the next generation, and, sadly, I notice my sentences have become more complex by contamination.

Once upon a time in my own lifetime, I loved Henry James. Historically I can’t even tell you when he wrote, but it was during that time when a 75-word sentence was considered sparse. The I got a subscription to Time Magazine and the clipped, efficient journalistic prose of the 80s sucked me in and I had actually forgotten how dense prose can get.

But fear not. Once I have waded through these masterpieces, I will be on to The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, and I will throw away the commas and semi-colons and be back digging through my little jar of periods.

Me: I have matured as I have aged. You can tell because there was a time in my life when I would have not been able to admit in public that–while I DO understand why it’s a classic–my English-loving self is really, really struggling with Jane Eyre.

It still feels like treason.