The other day I saw an elderly man pushing his walker down the steep public library ramp. “Do you need help?” I asked. He looked up at me quizzically, his weathered face more wrinkled as he squinted against the sun, his full head of grey hair waving slightly in the wind. “Are you good?” I said, changing the way I phrased the question so as not to embarrass him if he should be so stubbornly self-sufficient as the elderly often are, as I hope to be.   He stopped his slow careful descent and looked up at me, checking me out from the bottom up, up my bare legs, up past my dress and on up my body…

A few years back, my new friend from a writing class, I’ll call her Nancy, invited me out for a drink in the West Village. Before too long, in front of a curious bartender badly pretending not to pay attention, she let on about her passionate pastime, her inclination to stray in plain sight of her husband at “lifestyle” parties of the type most of my married Park Slope friends only joke about with a fair bit of longing or at least curiosity catching in their voices. Strangely, her writing had not made mention of such intriguing material, which I questioned her about immediately. “It’s hard to…

Finding themselves newly single in their 40s, my friends have epiphanies about themselves as if they have been reborn, as if who they see in the mirror is someone new. It is not always pretty, that vision, the one they have to present to others to judge. “My skin…” one friend said, slapping at the not-so-taut parts of her exposed epidermis to indicate one of the several hurdles she has discovered, surprisingly, in the post-separation search for a mate. “It’s just…” she shrugged, unable to describe the new, unexpected texture. “Well,” I said, trying to look on the bright side. “At least you’re…

I somehow thought when I was younger that at a certain age, (probably 30, since that sounded so old), I would give up caring about a lot of the things that then consumed me. I would, for example, probably not think all that much about the pursuits of love and sex. In this image I had of my older graying self, I would happily gain weight, put on some flowing elastic-waist pants and putter around in my garden, uncaring of the dirt on my face, of mussed hair. My husband certainly wouldn’t care, and what would it matter if he did? Part of the Aging Gracefully vision was that “older people” just …