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Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
I hate that I need reading glasses. I hate that I can’t read a word on the map, in the telephone book, on the menu, in the book, or anywhere else without them. And the pill bottle! I forgot to mention the pill bottle. I can’t read a word on the pill bottle. Does it say take two every four hours or take four every two hours? Does it say, “Good until 12/08/07” or “Expired. Period. End of Story”? I have no idea what it says, and this is serious. I could die from not being able to read the print on the pill bottle. In fact, the print on the pill bottle is so small I doubt if anyone can read it.
Meanwhile, every so often, your children come to visit. They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can’t believe you’re lucky enough to know them. They make you laugh. They make you proud. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and months and years without laying a glove on them, but don’t dwell. There’s no point. It’s over. Except for the worrying. The worrying is forever.
New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a visitor, the city seems to turn against you.
Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don’t mind this when you live here; when you live here, it’s part of the caffeinated romance of this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, you experience change as a betrayal.
Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America;
I broke up with Bill a long time ago. It’s always hard to remember love—years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?
One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you.
2. I live in an apartment. I could never live anywhere but in an apartment. I love apartments because I lose everything. Apartments are horizontal, so it’s much easier to find the things I lose—such as my glasses, gloves, wallet, lipstick, book, magazine, cell phone, and credit card. The other day I actually lost a piece of cheese in my apartment. Also, apartment buildings have doormen, a convenience if you’re having things delivered to you, which I often am, sometimes to replace the things I can’t find.
3. I live in my neighborhood. My neighborhood consists of the dry cleaner, the subway stop, the pharmacist, the supermarket, the cash machine, the deli, the beauty salon, the nail place, the newsstand, and the place where I go for lunch. All this is within two blocks of my house. Which is another thing I love about life in New York: Everything is right there. If you forgot to buy parsley, it takes only a couple of minutes to run out and get it.
I now believe that what my mother meant when she said “Everything is copy” is this: When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.
I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.
But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing. And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.
Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly “I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.”
On the other hand, the full blow is mitigated somewhat by the possibility that somewhere, somehow, you’ll find the lost strudel, or be able to replicate it. And so, at first, you hope. And then, you hope against hope. And then finally, you lose hope. And there you have it: the three stages of grief when it comes to lost food.
Each minute I spend away from the book pretending to be interested in everyday life is a misery. How could I have waited so long to read this book? When can I get back to it?
I can’t believe they don’t understand that what I’m doing is Much More Important. I’m reading the most wonderful book.
There’s something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he’s liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can’t adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All this happens to me when I surface from a great book.
What I Wish I’d Known People have only one way to be. Buy, don’t rent. Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from. Don’t cover a couch with anything that isn’t more or less beige. Don’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store. You can’t be friends with people who call after 11 p.m. Block everyone on your instant mail. The world’s greatest babysitter burns out after two and a half years. You never know.
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But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere—friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realized. There are, in short, regrets.
When you cross into your sixties, your odds of dying—or of merely getting horribly sick on the way to dying—spike. Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again you could be. Meanwhile, your friends die, and you’re left not just bereft, not just grieving, not just guilty, but utterly helpless. There is nothing you can do. Everybody dies.
Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate?
Before you get sick, you have absolutely no idea of how you’re going to feel once you do. You can imagine you’ll be brave, but it’s just as possible you’ll be terrified. You can hope that you’ll find a way to accept death, but you could just as easily end up raging against it. You have no idea what your particular prognosis is going to be, or how you’ll react to it, or what options you’ll have. You have no clue whether you will ever even know the truth about your prognosis, because the real question is, What is the truth, and who is going to tell it to us, and are we even going to want to hear
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