Being Eighty - Running A Country Or A Chaise Lounge In Florida, So Why The Angst?

‘How does he do it?', said Ben Licht to his cousin, Abe. 'Me, I'm happy just to be upright and mobile'. 

The two were talking about Donald Trump, President of the United States at eighty responsible for national security, the financial and economic health of the country, and the overall well-being of the nation, when most men of his age were playing shuffleboard at their Florida condos.

Both Ben and Abe had been successful businessmen.  Ben was a furrier who catered to the women of the West End - mink stoles, ermine coats, and sable jackets - and his cousin Abe who was a clothier and had a high-end store on Main Street with couturier dresses, blouses, and skirts.  

Both men were known and respected by the town. They were honest, God-fearing, community-minded men who were model citizens.  Abe was cantor at the Beth-El, and Ben on the board of the New Brighton Yeshiva. 

They had given the best years of their lives to the town and to their families, and now at eighty it was time to close up shop, trade their spurs for a chaise lounge, relax and enjoy life for a change, retire to a condo in Miami, on Collins Avenue, South Beach, the traditional winter havens for rich Jews which is what they were, so who's complaining?

'Nah' said Abe, no class anymore. Not what it was.  Remember the Fontainebleau? Now that was a classy outfit. What a time I had there.  Esta Pilchman under a beach umbrella by the pool, a sweetheart, wife of Saul Berman, a real prick, no wonder she was a gay divorcee.'

'Don't live in the past', replied his cousin. 'That will get you nowhere'; but Abe, once started down memory lane, was in no mood to pull up. 

'And Bette Cohen.  Ah, a real darling, the times we had!; but Cousin Ben wasn't listening.  He was a practical man, a sensible man, and Abe's meanderings were no more than early senility or at best a flighty nostalgia. Ben  knew Esta Pilchman, and she was a cunt, pardon my language, but that's what she was, my furs and his Armani trolling for rich widowers on Collins Avenue, what else is there? 

And that Cohen bitch, a chip off her father's block, that diamond-cutter who cheated and weaseled his way to becoming The Diamond King Of New York, shyster, gave a bad name to all Jews, a man who brought up his daughter to be just like him, a conniver, a cheap con artist, and an intellectual hack.

'Back to Donald Trump', said Ben.  'I'll bet his mind's not on some Bette Cohen or Esta Pilchman', and the two men marveled at the President's energy, persistence, all-hours work ethic, macho bully, transformer, undaunted premier.

He is running the country while we're still here.  Caterers is all we are, in-between men who buy cheap, charm the old ladies with our stories of Monte Carlo and Rimini.   What were our lives worth?  What difference did we make?  And here we are at eighty stumbling our way down to Florida on the Orange Blossom Express. 

Abe and Ben were not the only old men comparing themselves to the President.  Eighty was a time for aches and pains, prothesis, indifferent children, plumbing issues and lawn maintenance and thoughts of Riverside Senior Living; and here was Trump duking it out with Putin and Xi, bombing Iran, sending storm troopers to Chicago, electrifying border fences, whooping it up before tens of thousands of adoring Americans while most other men his age were doodling and dithering their way to the cemetery. 

Take Alvin Blatter, Yale Class of ____, now well into his eighties still fighting for traction in the progressive movement, securing his legacy, leaving something behind, standing at the podium at his Class Reunion, still harping and banging away about climate change, the coming Armageddon, and the fate of the planet.  

He was just a wheezy, jowly old man pounding away on an issue no one was interested in any more since the polar ice caps were gaining ice at record rates, sea levels were decreasing, the weather was as modulated and regularly capricious as ever, but there he was, red-faced and apoplectic, his furnace fired up, steam rising in one last, gasping attempt to show the world he meant something. 

There was no vaudevillian second in the wings ready to hook him off the stage, so he kept on whaling away until the very last, his way off the stage to desultory applause and sat down. 

If he wasn't the President, he was at least somebody of worth and perennial merit; but only a scattering of alumni sat in Woolsey Hall to listen to him and were just anxious for a breath of fresh air after Alvin's bellowing bombast. He was not presidential material. 

So two old Jews and a bunch of well-to-do Wall Street, Nantucket, and Palm Beach Yalies found themselves in the same boat, struggling with old age and wondering how they failed so desperately when Donald Trump was a firestorm of agency, wit, energy, and meaning.  

'"We all end up in a pile pele-mele", said Ronsard or Villon or one of those French poets', said Ben remembering Harold Bloom's guest lecture at NYU when he and Abe were students. 'In the end, worm food, and don't you forget it, you, me, and Donald Trump in the same mouldering grave'; but Abe was having none of his cousin's morbid philosophy.  

Who cares what one did?  Only did you have fun doing it, with Esta Pilchman and Bette Cohen and all the groupies on Washington Square when he was a radical, friends with Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd, talking Marx and Engels, charming girls who left Vassar and Smith for the East Village and the likes of him. 

'He's closing the Straits of Hormuz', Abe said to his cousin. 'Can you imagine that?'.  Not that the President of the United States was enforcing a naval blockade, but an eighty year old man. 'What’s going on?', said Abe. 

'Don't overreact', said Ben.  'You're being melodramatic'. 

And so it went with the Licht boys, back and forth both trying to make sense out of being so old.  Vladimir Nabokov had written in Speak, Memory his memoir, that the present is but a fraction of a millisecond, an indefinable moment and the future but a possibility.  Only the past is real.  We are our past

Nabokov knew this from the very start, and spent his youth indelibly fixing memories of Moscow, Paris, and the Mediterranean in his mind, playing the tape over and over again so that the past and the present were indistinguishable.  The more memories that became as substantial as anything in the present, the more substantial he became. 

'See', said Ben. 'Take a lesson'. 

'Being eighty is no picnic', replied Abe who couldn't get the Straits of Hormuz out of his mind and Donald Trump's finger on the button while he was ready to open the Collins Avenue condo for the winter, clear the deck, get some provision from Katz's Delicatessen, run by Herman Katz, great grandson of the founder of New York's Katz's (Send a salami to your boy in the Army). 

'No point in fussing about Trump', Abe conceded as he tucked into a prelim - an overstuffed pastrami and chicken liver on rye made specially by Joe at Wagshal's.