An Extra Life After Ninety

Think you're too old to get a whole new life?

Have a look at this week's New York magazine, which honors nine current high achievers who are in their nineties or over a hundred. (In their hundreds?)



For example, composer Elliott Carter has published 14 new pieces of music since he turned 100.

Turning through the portraits in New York, I was wowed and inspired by what it's possible to do (as long as you're breathing.)

Though maybe it helps to breathe Manhattan air (the location of my most recent and delightful "bonus life" adventure.)

Bold Bonus Life Tip #3: Age is no deterrent. You can get an extra life at any age.





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My Bold Bonus Life: 11

Well, I screwed up.

I'm here in New York apartment-sitting, with the simple duties of watering the plants and bringing in the mail. You'd think I could handle that.

But I let one of the plants on the terrace go too long without water. Its prognosis is now iffy.

I've sent my confession and apology to Audrey Hepburn (that's the way I think of the New Yorker who owns this apartment). I didn't want her to discover the news here first.

I feel bad.

And, as regular readers here may already know, I have a touch of mild-to-medium obsessive-compulsive disorder of the type known as scrupulosity: fear of doing wrong, of accidentally hurting somebody, that sort of thing.

I've done the best I can to turn my upset to action to fix the situation as well as possible. I'm trying to ID the plant. Have sent photos of the troubled creature to two NY Botanic Gardens and an extension agent back home in NC. Been to three plant stores this afternoon. No help. At one of them, the guy didn't know a leaf from a stem. (I should talk!)

In the meantime, I'm hoping that watering and misting and staring at the plant will help.

Again, I'm sorry, Audrey Hepburn and my friends who helped to entrust me with her plants. I'm striving to make it up to you.



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My Bold Bonus Life: 10

The first day of the second half of my bonus life in New York felt like four different days crammed together. Yesterday was:

Gallery-hopping.

Doll clothes.

Meeting with book editor.

Evening haircut that felt like a Japanese tea ceremony.

And then today turned out to be a half-day. Time has been funny that way in this extra life.

Yesterday morning I started with the galleries, the cluster of them in the 57th street area. Clutching a torn page from a magazine guide, I found that finding each one was part of the adventure. The first gallery, curiously named Haunch of Venison (you'd think it was a rock band), turned out to be upstairs in the same building with Simon & Schuster, publisher of my first novel, Revelation. Huge erotic paintings formed a major part of the show: tangles of pink limbs based on photographs of moments in the life of the artist. In another room was a sound sculpture made by the amplifications of the faint noises of a foot bridge, with a weirdly fascinating video of vibrating cables. I loved the music of the bridge -- a strange sort of wind chime.

Four other galleries forming a similar melange. One of the highlights in an exhibit on privacy was called Privet: a wall lighted from within made of green glass shards. A hedge forbidding and beautiful.

While I was hunting for these art spots, I happened upon a collection of a radically different sort: The American Girl Place. You may have heard of this doll that has become a cultural phenom. I had read about it, and the American Girl emporia that have become pilgrimage sites for pre-teen girls and their mothers.

I was never big on playing with dolls -- I feel disloyal to Cuddles and Jane as I say that. But I've always liked miniatures. And this store for me was a museum of intricate and detailed miniatures: the customizable and child-like dolls in their bazillion different outfits and settings. And then there were clothes for children to match those of the dolls; a girl could get a photographer's outfit (short loose jacket, serious working pants, and a beret) for herself and her doll.

Aside from the fascination of the miniatures, I was interested in seeing what a pro-girl-power message was conveyed. Be brave, be a leader, pursue your interests, follow your inner star. So valuable for girls of this age.


In the afternoon the meeting with a book editor: I pitched several ideas. She liked one, was interested in a proposal, but first wanted me to increase my blog traffic.
A much more complex and mysterious undertaking than writing a book.

The meeting felt relaxed and fine to me. But I felt wiped out afterward, wandering around in the heat in stupid high heels. I also realized I hadn't had my daily caffeine and it was too late in the day for it.

But an oasis lay ahead: I had a 7 p.m. appointment for a haircut. It was with a student at a high-end salon; a $10 bargain I'd discovered in The Cheap Bastard's Guide to New York City. I'd badly needed a trim at the time I got this apartment-sitting invitation and, in the flurry of getting ready, forgot about this detail.

The salon on E. 55th was Shige Kosuda and the hairdresser's name was, as I understood it, Santoshi, a lean young guy with thick black hair. He conducted my haircut in a stylized manner that felt like a quiet, almost religious ritual that went on for a full hour and included a neck and shoulder and scalp massage. As you might imagine, I enjoyed this. And felt completely restored. Here is the haircut.


Mid-evening, I went back to the apartment and slept sixteen hours. I started my day at 5 p.m. today. This is the half-day I'm talking about. I couldn't believe I'd slept so long. But I woke up doubly restored.

Spent the evening in the West Village, had supper at the White Horse Tavern, haunt of many writers in the 50s and 60s. My friend Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties among many other books, had asked me to hoist a pint there for him. I stopped in and hoisted a chicken pot pie and a Sprite. (Food report: the pie was excellent, but no bigger than a cupcake).

Then to a musical that's part of the arts festival, Fringe NYC. I didn't love it, had had enough at half-time and slunk out, though I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Somehow, the story just hadn't engaged me. It was about this novelist....




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My Bold Bonus Life: 9

Number 9? This means that I'm at the halfway point in my 18-day extra-life-within-a-life. As a New Yorker, I'm middle-aged.

But I'm not taking this as a sign that I should re-assess, have a crisis, or do anything differently in my New York adventure. I'm going to keep on poking into things on whim.

I worked some yesterday on getting ready to talk with a book editor today. Then went off to "New York's largest witchcraft/goddess supply store," Enchantments, Inc. on E. 9th in the East Village. At the time, I didn't think the meeting prep and the store visit were related, but now I wonder. I did glance twice at an orange Success candle.

The low-ceilinged little store was rich in atmosphere, deeply worn floorboards with ground-in sparkle as if from old meteor showers. Incantatory smells. Soothing music. And shelves and shelves of jars of gathered-from-nature mysterious materials.

Fascinating story about the place in a 2008 New York Times. If I'd read it first, I might have bought the orange candle.

I'd planned on having lunch at an appropriately atmospheric place nearby, Cloister Cafe, with its monastic stained glass windows, suit of armor, wall sword, etc. But, no. Closed on Mondays. I peered in the window and absorbed the medieval darkness.

Food report: I wound up around the corner at a Japanese bakery and sandwich shop, Panya. Had a salmon sandwich on a baked-on-the-premises-that-morning baguette. The bread was wonderful, better than salmon.

Then a long train ride uptown in time to catch an ethicist giving a talk at PicNic Cafe, an Alsatian bistro. The $10 ticket included one drink.

The subject was the moral value of "negative" emotions, such as anger. The speaker was a Columbia philosophy professor, Macalester Bell, who described herself as "a recovering Kantian." I have no idea what that specifically means, but found her very thoughtful on what constitutes moral anger: the acknowledgment of wrongdoing, etc. She was quite young and seemed charmingly un-angry --and has taught previously back home at UNC.

At the end of her talk, she asked us to please be kind to the wait staff: she did that kind of work for years and knew that it could stimulate lots of negative emotions.

The wait/philosopher and the goddess store: that's the kind of combination I'm finding intriguing in these days here. Note the combo of business and building in the photo below. The CVS in Raleigh was never like this.


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My Bold Bonus Life: 7

A few highly personal images from my Bonus Life in New York:

From the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. At home, I live beside a little pond with a Japanese zigzag bridge. Husband Bob has very Eastern tastes and philosophy.


A piece of the Tudor City neighborhood, on the east side of mid-town, where two of my good friends grew up.



The base of a beech tree in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, wonderfully sculptural. (I'm a great fan of trees.)

Waiting for the train. I like cobalt blue almost as much as I do trees.


The Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park: a fair summation of my Bonus Life in New York experience.


And PLEASE NOTE: IMPORTANT: An image of the Time Out New York cover salted caramel sundae
.



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My Bold Bonus Life

Have embarked on my 18-day life-within-a-life in New York, the one I promised myself as celebration of turning 60 a year and a half ago. I hadn't yet figured out how to work it out (pay for it) and then this marvelous house-sitting arrangement fell in my lap and suddenly I'm here.

And it's thrilling. I arrived yesterday on "the Chinatown bus" -- an express overnight trip from Grand Asia Market at home in NC to Canal Street in Chinatown (a $30 trip, can you believe it?)

We rolled in at 10 am and then, sweat-drenched, I rolled and toted and subwayed my monstrous suitcase (housing computer et al)to a lefty church service where a former client of mine is minister. Got there just in time to hear her preach, and meet her afterwards. I'd never even met her; being several states apart, we'd communicated only by email. Her sermon was inspiring; about making important changes by shifting your weight in the desired direction, a little and then a little more and so on. Music was gorgeous: a piano and flute performance of one of Satie's Gymnopedies, and then a solo by a woman with a Broadway style voice (rather different from most of the church sopranos I've ever heard, no warble)

Then uptown to my home for this bonus lifetime. Wow! it's terrific. A sunny studio on the third floor with a glass atrium at the back that has been made into a sunlit office that then opens onto a large third floor terrace in a breezy canyon of trees within the center of the block. (see terrace view in photo)

Also, the owner, whom I've never met, (daughter of a friend of a friend, and oh, what nice people) is 28 years old with a glamorous career, Audrey Hepburn taste, and an excellent book collection. I am happy to be twenty-eight again for the coming weeks.

In the afternoon, I went first to the Manhattan Dominican Day parade.
Continuous dance music and everybody dancing. (I had no idea that 90% of New York was Dominican.) Then to the E. 60th Street Fair, and more walking (my favorite thing in New York) and sudden exhaustion: back to the apt. Ate the owner's mother's homemade pumpkin bread and leftover white wine on the terrace at dusk. (I was asked to eat up all the leftover perishables or get rid of them)

How did I get such a miracle opportunity as this? By telling everyone I knew. And I didn't even do it to look for an opportunity, just out of excitement. But the results convince me more than ever: if you have a dream, start making it real by making it public.

Feel free to announce any dream(s) of your own here in the comments.





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