Let's write about the upside of inevitable aging: For 80 year olds and counting optimists

New York Times essay on aging by Roger Rosenblatt

A famous Maurice Chevalier (b. 1888-d. 1972)

 quote on aging is, "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative". Another related quote is, "I prefer old age to the alternative"

I’d Like to Stay 85 Forever😀

Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think❓

To be sure, there are setbacks, such as the other day, when all at once I found myself on the floor. As I rose to leave the living room chair, it slid out from under me, leaving me astonished, my head banging against the piano keyboard nearby. So weak is my twice operated-upon back, so immobile my muscle-less legs, all I could do was sit there looking plaintively at my wife, Ginny, hoping for leverage, and recalling an ad on TV some years ago. A woman about my age now is on the floor, calling out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” — her cry as noble as Beowulf’s or any tragic hero.

For my part, I felt more foolish than tragic. The fall was a reminder of the liabilities of the 80s. Yet these are more than counterbalanced by the gifts this decade brings. I have a great deal of free time these days, which I’ve chosen to fill in several satisfying if idiosyncratic ways.

I recite lots of poetry, sometimes to Ginny, often to the window. Poetry that has hibernated in my head since my 20s when I used to teach English and American literature at a university. I memorized great swaths of poetry then because it allowed me to talk directly to the students, eye to eye, as if the poetry existed not in a book, but in the air. Right now, if you turned me upside down and shook me (it really isn’t necessary), I could give you several Shakespeare sonnets, a Dylan Thomas villanelle, “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” by Marianne Moore, the last lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and all of the introductory stanza to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” That may sound like bragging about my memory, but I share it because I think it says something about the lasting power of poetry. Also to brag.

These days, I play more of the piano on which I knocked my head. Playing by ear, too lazy to learn to read music as a kid, my range used to be very limited, especially the chords. With time on my hands I’m getting a little better. You would never mistake me for Bill Evans, or Nat King Cole before his singing days, but my touch is pretty good, and I can do a fair job with “My Romance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “What’ll I Do” and nearly everything by the Gershwin brothers, Fats Waller and Cole Porter. At my age it’s a triumph to get better at anything.

Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.

My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.

It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family.

In the poem “October,” the sublime Louise Glück found that these years presented one’s life with a cold clarity, as “an allegory of waste.” Me? I see only harvest. I seem to have been partly responsible for creating a crop of six extraordinary grandchildren (add your own excessive compliments here). Before my October years, I would write the same breezy daily note to each of them: “Love you.” Now I have the time and freedom to putter around in their lives, asking this or that, making private jokes. The kids seem to take my attention gladly, or are too polite to tell me they don’t. Either way I have a flourishing garden of young people with whom I can banter to my heart’s content. So I do.

The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring.

The other night Ginny and I watched the film “They Might Be Giants,” with George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and his psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, who actually is a Dr. Watson. I finally realized what it’s about. The film’s title refers to Don Quixote, for whom the windmills at which he tilted might have been giants, though they were not. But the fact that Don Quixote thought they might be giants meant that his capacity for dreams was greater than his fears.

I still have those. Dreams. Dreams for my country and for the world. And love. I have love intact. Ginny, for instance, the remarkable old woman who helped me to my feet when I parted ways with the chair.

My view of Ginny is one thing that October has not changed. I see her as a rescuer now, as I saw her when we married 62 years ago. Bright colors, cool winds, perfect weather.

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”

Let's write about old fashioned censorship- Remember the Smother's Brothers?

 

Before Jimmy Kimmel, there weree the Smothers Brothers. In fact, 

President Richard Nixon got the brothers’ variety show cancelled after they wouldn’t let up on Vietnam. 

In the wake of the new late-night wars, Dick Smothers is having flashbacks.  Echo article published in The New Yorker Magazine, by Bruce Handy.

An old letter from President Lyndon Johnson has been making the rounds on social media in the wake of ABC’s nervous-gulp suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’s more definitive cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”—decisions noisily lobbied for by our current President, whose minions contributed some Paulie Walnuts-style arm-twisting. The Johnson letter was addressed to Tom and Dick Smothers, the comedians whose hit CBS variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” took shots at the President’s stewardship of the Vietnam War in the late nineteen-sixties. L.B.J. offered magnanimity: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists,” he (or a secretary) wrote. “You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”

The letter was dated November 9, 1968, five days after Richard Nixon defeated Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, for the Presidency. Five months after that, with Nixon in the White House, CBS abruptly cancelled the Smothers brothers’ show. The network claimed that the series’ producers violated their contract by not providing finished episodes to its censors in a sufficiently timely manner (an assertion that would not pass muster in a subsequent civil-court case won by the brothers). Many, including the brothers themselves, felt that they were victims not only of skittish advertisers and conservative affiliates but also of the new Administration, which would prove unshy about targeting perceived foes in the media and elsewhere—though one might give that President a wee bit of credit for not going about it quite as nakedly as others.

Dick Smothers, who is eighty-six, took the long view the other day. “It sure didn’t start with us,” he insisted, when asked about politicians’ recurring habit of attempting to muzzle TV performers. “In my lifetime, it started with Edward R. Murrow, of course. But they didn’t fire him. They just switched him to a time slot not many people watched.”  This is true. In 1954, Murrow exposed many of Joseph P. McCarthy’s lies on his CBS news-magazine show, “See It Now,” a tipping point in the senator’s downfall. Just a year later, the series lost its sponsor, Alcoa, and was shunted from its Tuesday-night prime-time slot to random, irregular dead zones on the schedule.

Smothers was speaking on the phone from his home upstate, not far from Niagara Falls, in the village of Lewiston—“a booming economic juggernaut of a hundred and fifty years ago,” as he put it. (A native Californian, he moved there for love.) Tom, his older brother by two years, died in 2023. They first found acclaim, in the early nineteen-sixties, as comedic folksingers, playing night clubs and releasing popular LPs. A failed but apparently likable sitcom led to “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which débuted in February, 1967. It was a broad tent. Guests included Jack Benny, George Burns, Kate Smith, and Red Skelton. “We wanted the people we hung around the radio listening to when we were kids, people that meant something to us,” Smothers said. But the brothers also wanted the program to be “relevant. Not a silly show.” They assembled a legendary writers’ room, which included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Bob Einstein. But relevancy turned out to be a moving, even accelerating target. “The sixties hadn’t really got into top gear yet,” Smothers said. When they did, “it was like being at the scene of an accident.”

The brothers clashed with the network over silly things, like a “Mutiny on the Bounty” sketch with George Segal that had naughty, homophonic fun with the word “frigate.” 

They also got in trouble for more serious efforts, like bringing on Pete Seeger, who was still blacklisted from the McCarthy era, to sing his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” But all in all, Smothers said, the show’s satire “was gentle. We didn’t do things that were right in your face, like the monologues today.” That wasn’t meant as criticism: he said that he’s a fan of Kimmel, Colbert, and especially Jon Stewart. “They’re brilliant. Brilliant,” he said. The times, in his view, demand in-your-faceness.

Back in the day, Dick was the duo’s straight man; Tom was the pretend naïf who got the best lines and, backstage, served as the act’s guiding hand. “My brother had a little bad-boy thing,” Smothers said. “But to the day he died he also had a strong moral compass.” To that end, he recalled, Tom wrote an earnest letter to L.B.J. which both brothers signed, “basically not apologizing for what we were doing, but saying that, if we were heavy-handed, we didn’t mean to be.” Johnson’s letter to the brothers was his reply. It concluded, “If ever an Emmy is awarded for graciousness, I will cast my vote for you.”

Needless to say, the current White House occupant, an actual member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (though Emmy-less himself), is offering no such absolution. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Muzzled.”