“Where’s Tahiti?” my dad asked. “I don’t know,” she answered. “But we’re going in 16 days.” And we did.

Tahiti was lush and gorgeous; after bleak Depression-era Brooklyn, I felt as though I’d stepped into Technicolor. We lived on a lagoon and slept under a thatched grass roof.

Our family had to be flexible and practical to make a life in the South Seas. I learned French quickly, then Tahitian. Mother planned for us to live as fruitarians—she had been vice president of the Vegetarian Society of New York—but the sugar in all that fruit gave my brother and me boils. So Dad studied how our neighbors lived: fruit, vegetables, and fish. When we added fish to our diet, it fixed the boils, and I remain a pescatarian.

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We made this pact early on, and our agreement endured. But when the pact was broken in 2019, our marriage ended.

We were never competitive; the opposite, in fact. I cheered when her novels received laudatory national reviews. She celebrated my fellowships and academic appointments.

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In my 60s, I’m at a point in my life where I look backward more than I used to. I suppose a lot of people do that. What is surprising, at least to me, is that I am thinking more and more often about my long-deceased grandparents, Zaide and Bubbe, who escaped from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century.

They were part of a massive wave of pre-World War II Jewish refugees—more than 3 million Jews came to the U.S.—but the circumstances that drove them out were never well-documented. In more modern times, antisemites have seized the opportunity to recast them as a group of unusually greedy emigrants, even calling them “white colonizers,” with all its implications of privilege. I’m from the last generation that heard about the diaspora from original sources; with my own limited time remaining on this earth, I have come to feel a powerful need to tell my grandparents’ stories. Time is running out to try to set the record straight.

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Let me tell you a story.

I grew up in my maternal grandparents’ house in Boston. My grandfather started a business with a partner in Chinatown in the 1930s manufacturing maternity lingerie, mostly slips. I was the only child in the house of five adults that included my mother, and Katie, our cook. Katie was from Ireland, one of seven children, from a little village in Connemara. She arrived in America at age 18, escaping a famine there. She came here with one possession, a gold sovereign coin with the visage of “Bertie”—the King of England, Edward VII—stamped on it.

Katie gave me the coin on my 21st birthday. I had it put on a gold chain, and I wear it every St. Patrick’s Day.

Katie was one of the hundreds of young Irish women who worked in the houses of well-off Bostonians, and she became the most important woman in my life. She was there to help with my first steps and my toilet training. She spoon-fed me my first food, applesauce, and sang lullabies to me in Irish.

Katie taught me how to step-dance and sing along with her in her native tongue, songs like “Finnegan’s Wake” and “Whiskey, Yer the Devil.” She told me my first risqué joke and taught me how to swear in Irish. It was like she raised me as an Irish boy in a Jewish household in America. I was Johnny in English, but always Sean or Seaneen to Katie.

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My wife of nearly 49 years died from pancreatic cancer six months ago. I held her as she took her last labored breaths. She was 81 years old.

Harriet had had a long life and, as she said repeatedly while she was dying, a happier life than she ever expected. She accepted the inevitability of her death gracefully, and dare I say, optimistically.

To my surprise, I wasn’t ready to accept it. We had prepared, I thought. She and I had had all the conversations you should have about what we wanted to happen to our bodies and what kind of service we wanted. We had done our advance directives—wills, beneficiary designees, healthcare proxies, and all the rest of it. Our affairs were in order. We were ready.

Except: Our expectation had always been that I would die first, as men usually do, especially men like me with multiple chronic health conditions. Harriet had settled into the idea that she would be a widow, and so had I. She was close to her family and had many friends who would be there for her. We were both sure that her life after I died would continue to be fulfilling, and we were both comforted by that.

It turned out, when she was the one who died first, and I was the widower, I was not so ready after all. I was not ready to find myself crying with little provocation. I was not ready to be alone in our bed. I was not ready for her not to be there to talk to. As I said in my eulogy for her, when I finished writing it, I got up from my desk to go show it to her. I sat back down, stunned, when I realized she wasn’t there.

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One Tuesday morning about six months ago, I went to a dance fitness class for older people at a community center in Minnetonka, a Minneapolis suburb near where I live. I thought I was signing up for Zumba and gave myself a figurative pat on the back. “This is hot stuff,” I thought. “Everyone will be impressed that at my age I’m doing Zumba.”

Half a year later, I still have no clue what Zumba is, but it’s certainly not what I do on Tuesday mornings. What I do on Tuesday mornings is Cuban cha-cha and Dominican bachata, with an occasional Brazilian samba thrown in for good measure. I’ve never been to any of these exotic places, but I grew up in New York so I know how the music sounds. I know it’s brassy, thumping, percussive, and irresistible. It was a loud and persistent presence on the Upper West Side of New York in the 1950s. Back then, in a soundscape mixed with sirens and car horns, Puerto Ricans of all ages partied out in the street late into the night.

Middle-class people were fortressed in apartment buildings like mausoleums with vast faux marble lobbies and uniformed doormen. But Latinos were always out in force, sitting on their stoops eating cuchifritos, playing dominoes and doing the merengue up and down those side streets between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue before all those blocks became the gentrified streets littered with chain coffee shops that they are today.

Latin culture was a huge feature of my life growing up. The women were magnificent in tight-fitting clothes, their eyelashes curled, their lips painted bright red. The men looked at me in a way I didn’t know about. I was small and pale, walking on 83rd Street when I had to go to the post office for stamps, or south on Amsterdam to the local branch of the public library. I was a little scared, but being a little scared was part of the energy of uptown. The year I turned 12, in 1957, my parents sprung for tickets to the Broadway production of West Side Story and there she was, Chita Rivera, flouncing her skirt and singing those songs.

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When my new book, When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, recently appeared, my mother mobilized.

First, she ordered a dozen copies to send to her friends—which, by momentarily jacking up my Amazon ranking, made her middle son feel good. She quickly turned her dining room table into a command post, covered with the promotional flyers she’d had me commission from my publisher and the envelopes into which she’d stuff them. She began sleeping fitfully, hounded by nightmares of not getting to the post office until just after it closed.

I guess the proud mothers of many authors would do the same thing. But two weeks ago, I turned 74. And come this March, my mother will turn 102. Having a parent so old, and remaining someone’s son so long, proves one thing about aging: It happens at different rates for different people. In my case, in this as in many other respects, I am a late bloomer, a perpetual Peter Pan. For better or worse (actually, it’s surely some of each), I still feel very youthful. Or very immature. Or both.

While all of us regularly remember that we’ll die, I don’t dwell on it much more than when the realization first hit me as a boy. True, scrolling all the way down to my birth year on all those online forms now seems to take forever, like reaching Wyoming under “State.” And while my synapses fire more slowly now, making names and adjectives and even the spellings of elementary words ever more elusive, I don’t assume I’m losing my wits, or that my best or happiest or most productive years are behind me.

In fact, freed from various past constraints (and thanks to an insistent editor), I feel this new book of mine is my best: I’m finally finding more of my own voice, with still more of it, I hope, to unearth. At the age, to repeat, of 74. (Just FYI, Ernest Hemingway was 61 when he died, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was gone at 44.)

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While playing volleyball in Florida with a “senior therapist,” I asked her, “Who does well in retirement?”

“Women,” she replied. Later she added, “Also, men who golf.”

Who does badly?

“Men who used to run things.”

It reminded me of an ABC News segment I once did with a psychologist who studies people after divorce. ABC had run stories on how men take advantage of women financially. According to the reports, men were trickier—more devious—with money. It’s probably true. But this psychologist said that after a divorce, women were generally happier than men, even if they got the short end of the financial stick. He believed it was because women had, on average, six friends with whom they share personal feelings. Men had one—often their ex-wife.

I thought hard about that because I tend to isolate too.

“Stop going into a corner reading your book!” Arnold Diaz, the late consumer reporter, used to yell at me. By the time I reached The Free Press’s “ancient” category—for the record, I’m 78—my two closest friends had died. Aging, I saw, would only increase my isolation. So I came up with a few ways to stave off reclusiveness.

When Covid-19 hit, I started two men’s groups. It was considerate of Covid to delay itself until Zoom was invented, because my hearing isn’t good. In conversations, I struggle to decipher words, but on Zoom, voices, via earbuds or my hearing aids, go right to my brain. That makes it much easier to connect—which I try to do once or twice a week with the six or seven men in each group.

Our men’s groups continued past the pandemic. Relative strangers are now friends. Often, I complain, “Enough sports! No more whining about Trump! Say something personal!” And we usually do.

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One often hears about those books people would like to have along if marooned alone on a desert island. The selection, at least among my fellow graybeards, doesn’t often contain many surprises: Homer, Dante, Michel de Montaigne, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, and a few other standbys are usually mentioned. Old age is a kind of desert island of its own. In old age one figures to have lost some friends and family to death and seen others of them lapse into ill health, perhaps even dementia. If one has arrived at old age with enough money to retire, reading, for some of us, becomes one’s main activity. That certainly includes me.

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries,” Immanuel Kant wrote. And so in a sense it is, but with the obvious qualification that it is a one-way conversation, the book speaking to you, not you to it. Kant himself of course had one of those finest minds, which may have limited his reading. I don’t, which makes my own prospects for reading material nearly endless.

But reading what? Or better, reading how? My sense is that one reads differently in old age than when younger. For one thing, some writers who once seemed vital, central, indispensable, no longer seem so. For another, with one’s time before departing the planet limited, one tends to have less patience. Then, too, after a lifetime of living, one’s experience has widened; and with any luck it has also deepened, and so one has a different perspective on the things one reads or has read, often holding them to a higher standard.

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When I recall the Christmases of my childhood, I can’t help but wince a little. It’s not that they weren’t magical; they surely were. I can picture in my mind’s eye coming down the stairs—no, racing down the stairs—with my eight brothers and sisters, all of us pushing our way into our small living room, and looking for a piece of white cardboard with our name on it.

That’s where our individual stack of presents would be: bicycles and wooden trains; toy trucks and Play-Doh; Hula-Hoops and Lincoln Logs and cowboy and Indian getups, complete with cap guns. (Hey, it was the 1950s.) The lights on the tree would be on, and the cookies left for Santa half eaten. We would scream with delight as we ripped open each present, and then show them to our “surprised” parents, who beamed with their own delight. We kids fought a lot growing up, but never on Christmas morning.

So why do I wince now? Partly, it’s because I understand what it took for my parents to make Christmas happen for us. Until we fell asleep Christmas Eve, the living room was bare but for the tree. The next morning, all the toys had been assembled, and wrapped, and placed into nine separate, labeled piles. I doubt they got an hour’s sleep that night.

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When friends and family sometimes remark on the state of excellent health I’ve enjoyed for the last few decades, I’ll often explain my good fortune by saying that I don’t do the minor stuff—colds or the flu—that I only do major illnesses like cancer and heart disease, and that I got them out of the way early on in life.

In 1940, when I was 2 years old and being operated on for a ruptured appendix, the surgical team lost my vital signs for more than 30 seconds. When I was 19 years old, I was diagnosed with giant follicular lymphoma, and received 1,000 roentgens of cobalt 60 radiation to each side of my neck. And when I was 60 years old—though I had no high cholesterol, no high blood pressure, no worrisome family history, and I was swimming a mile a day—I had emergency quintuple bypass surgery. Two of my three major coronary arteries were 100 percent occluded, and the third, the left anterior descending artery (the infamous “widow-maker”), was 95 percent occluded.

Once, some years ago, when I did get a nasty case of the flu and took myself to bed for several days, my youngest son, Eli, became frightened “because,” he later explained, “I’d never seen you sick.”

Now, when Eli tells me I’m looking fit, and I reply by saying what I say to others when they remark on my state of health—that I’m a lucky guy—he’ll shake his head in disagreement. “Maybe,” he’ll say, “but you take really good care of yourself, Pop.”

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If you’re a Boomer like me, you can’t help but view your teenage years as the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll. The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and so many more were recording one great song after another, music that sounds as fresh today as when we first heard it. My fate as a rock ‘n’ roll die-hard was sealed on September 14, 1964, when I was 12 years old and the Beatles came to Pittsburgh, where I grew up. My father pulled some strings and wangled a backstage pass, and I actually met the Fab Four. The thing I most remember is how short they were; I had expected these larger-than-life musicians to be, well, larger than life.

By the time I got out of high school, I had seen, if you’ll allow me, The Smothers Brothers, The Temptations, Little Anthony and The Imperials, Vanilla Fudge, The Doors, The Guess Who, Three Dog Night, and Led Zeppelin—all bands we Baby Boomers knew well. In college I saw The Moody Blues (with Van Morrison as the opening act), Neil Young, James Taylor and Carole King, Ike & Tina Turner, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead. During law school, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band offered respite from the grind of reading cases.

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As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m grateful and surprised by my luck in being alive at 95. When I was young, this outcome did not look like a good bet. Early on, I nearly died.

It was 1938, and Omaha hospitals were then thought of by its citizens as either Catholic or Protestant, a classification that seemed natural at the time.

Our family doctor, Harley Hotz, was a friendly Catholic who made house calls toting a black bag. Dr. Hotz called me Skipper and never charged much for his visits. When I experienced a bad bellyache, Dr. Hotz came by and, after probing a bit, told me I would be okay in the morning.

He then went home, had dinner, and played a little bridge. He couldn’t get my somewhat peculiar symptoms out of his mind, however, so later that night he dispatched me to St. Catherine’s Hospital for an emergency appendectomy. During the next three weeks, I felt like I was in a nunnery, and began enjoying my new “podium.” I liked to talk—yes, even then—and the nuns embraced me.

To top things off, Miss Madsen, my third-grade teacher, told my 30 classmates to each write me a letter. I probably threw away the letters from the boys but read and reread those from the girls; hospitalization had its rewards.

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In many ways, I have lived an extraordinarily “ordinary” life. When I was in grade school, my parents moved to Union, New Jersey, a lower-middle-class town close to Newark. My dad was a shoe salesman for Florsheim, and my mom stayed home until I went to college. They were loving and supportive parents, even if at times a bit overprotective. But I really was the perfect child. I never did anything risky, never rebelled, never lied to them, and I always took my mother’s advice.

It was very important to my father that I receive what he called a “good” Jewish education. For him, this meant joining a Conservative synagogue and sending me to Hebrew school. I loved Hebrew school. And I loved being Jewish—so much so that right before my bat mitzvah I decided to keep kosher and keep Shabbat—that is, refrain from labor from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall—in keeping with the standards of Conservative Judaism. My mom dutifully accommodated the wishes of her only child and made the necessary changes to our kitchen. She also was happy to come with me to synagogue on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, although my dad usually had to work.

I had a core group of mostly non-Jewish friends from my public school as well as some friends from my Hebrew school. I distinctly remember feeling that I was living in two worlds, and this feeling grew stronger as I became more religious, but my worlds didn’t compete. I had balance in my life—and it made me feel complete.

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Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, the poet Rebecca Okrent, 75, wrote a moving essay on the importance of late-life friendships. This week, Jim Heintz, 73, explains how he wound up in Estonia, and why he’s decided to grow old there.

On a vacation to South Africa in 2024, I amused myself by telling people that I came from Estonia. Their eyes narrowed and their lips compressed as they tried to remember where Estonia is and whether they should care. If they asked how life is there, I’d smile and say, “It’s the land of no sex and no future.”

That’s a linguistics wisecrack since the Estonian language has only past and present tenses, and pronouns aren’t gendered. The joke also has another layer for me; I’m trying to build a future here after my 40-year reporting career at the Associated Press came to an end only 18 months after being transferred here from my longtime home in Russia.

I scrounged for a strategy to remain here before my legal residency, which was tied to my job, expired. I had four months to figure it out. The search’s difficulty was compounded by having to fight the paralyzing dismay—maybe self-pity is a better description—about losing a job that had always meant a lot to me. I was 73 years old, but retirement was not exactly in the cards.

Going back to the U.S. would be onerous financially and an emotional blow—expatriation can be great for an old-timer because life in a strange place demands your attention and keeps age-induced brain fog at a safe distance. I’d had a great life in Russia, but I couldn’t go back there, and returning to the U.S. after decades away wasn’t especially appealing.

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That’s the insupportable downside of a community that presumes commonality based solely on age. Our friendships are vital. Geriatric—nasty word—specialists convincingly insist that our friends are therapeutic; that social connections stimulate the brain, help us maintain cognitive function, encourage physical activity, and provide crucial emotional support.

Even with years of varied experiences behind us, we have no experience at being This Age. It baffles. We’re as clueless as adolescents who cling to each other as they figure themselves out. Instead of parents, we have old age to rebel against, so we lock arms with our old friends, treasure the guidance of older friends, mourn their deaths, and seek younger friends to reliably divert the conversation away from interminable deliberations on failing health, memory loss, who died, or has the best doctors, and what magic potions prevent wrinkles and crepey skin.

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Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Anne Roark, 74, and Marshall Goldberg, 78, talked about their nearly 41-year marriage—and what it took for it to endure. This week, writer Lou Ureneck, 74, explains why nature is so meaningful as he gets older.

About 20 years ago, I pulled myself out of a deep funk by building a cabin in Maine. Crafted from the lumber of trees felled nearby, it was the tonic I needed to get me back on my feet. It was a serious yearlong project that revived old skills and put me deep in nature.

The cabin still stands on a hillside of red maples and balsam fir overlooking a beaver pond in the White Mountains. It has given me a lot of joy through the years. It’s sparsely furnished—fishing rods, bunk beds, a fly-tying desk, a battery-powered transistor radio to listen to ball games, and a big skillet for making blueberry pancakes. My family and I have celebrated Thanksgiving in it; moose sometimes wander by; and I once had a bear come in through the kitchen window.

I travel there alone in late fall when only a few yellow and red leaves cling to the oaks and maples. My task is to button up the cabin for the long winter. Occasionally, I will take a break and indulge in the simple pleasure of sitting on the cabin steps in the mellow October sunshine to watch the chipmunks chase each other through a stack of firewood, or listen to geese gabbling in the pond below.

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Marshall Goldberg: I moved to Los Angeles in May of 1979 to be a screenwriter. I was lucky—within 10 months, I got my first job. I wrote for Diff’rent Strokes, and later for The Jeffersons, and still later for Paper Chase, Newhart, Silver Spoons, LA Law.

Anne Roark: At the time, I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. People at the paper kept telling me I should meet Joy Horowitz, a woman who worked in another section. When we finally did meet, we went to dinner at Maurice’s Snack ‘N Chat, an old LA institution. She was great, so I asked her at the end of the evening if she happened to know any single men. It turned out she was a storied matchmaker.

She proceeded to ask me, I don’t know, 25 to 50 questions: “What books or magazines do you want him to like to read? What do you want his interests to be? Do you want someone who is athletic? Curly hair or straight?” And on and on. At the end of it, she told me she had the perfect man for me. And it was you. I later found out she had fixed up all of her single women friends with you.

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