On Being Squeezed

In the locker room each day after I swim, I place my wet swimsuit into a small spin-dryer. Centrifugal force squeezes the water out of my black nylon Speedo.

The sign on the spin-dryer says, “This unit is self-timed and will shut down automatically at the end of its cycle. It will not reset.” This message is an epiphany. An inert spin-dryer sign is communicating not only instructions about a device, but also a decree: After 80 years of being vertical, I Will Not Reset.

Friends I haven’t seen in a while greet me with, “You look great!” But youth and middle age have passed me by. So I conclude that “You look great!” must be the third phase of my life.

If I really do look great, it’s a peculiarly unfair and paradoxical compliment. Why do people expect me to have the memory ability, the physical agility, the quickness of mind, the word-fluency and vocabulary I had in my mid-50s or mid-60s, just because I may sometimes “look great”? At 80, I’m really what would have been considered old in my parents’ era. If my parents were my age now, they would have been dead for seven years. Why can’t I look my age?

People ask, “What’s your secret?” I’ve got well-rehearsed, tongue-in-cheek answers: “First, you have to choose the right grandparents. [I did!] Second, you have to be happily married. [I am!] Third, you have to love your work. [Yes!] Fourth, you have to take naps. [I do!] Fifth, modern medicine. And most important, you have to act immature.” (Check! And double check!)

I get weak smiles at these sophomoric clichés.

I’m kidding on the square, trying to deny the inevitable, making fun of old age and longevity because deep down it is a serious subtext to my every autobiographical thought. I’m dying (so to speak) to squeeze out (so to speak) and convey the defining stories of my life, my memories, before all the juicy life is extracted and wrung out of me. Like the swimsuit water extractor does to my Speedo.

Memoirs are in the air (like avian flu, pollen, and humidity), and I read them — and my own — with a grain of salt (Pliny’s purported antidote for poison).

There is a kernel of truth and tongue in cheek in every grain of salt. “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me.” My version: “A grain of salt, a tongue in cheek, a kernel of truth, and grandchildren reading my memoir.” (Note the first two letters of memoir are “me.”)

How would I define me? With a grain of salt as a buffoon, smart aleck, wise guy? With a kernel of truth as a very sober still-vertical creature wanting to be taken seriously as a man of substance? With tongue in cheek as a jocular extrovert, a semi-hypochondriac?

A friend says, “To know Steve is to be his friend.” Another says, “Steve feels emotions more deeply than others.” A former colleague said, “Winston Churchill was an introvert compared to Steve Rosen.” But Winston said, “We are all worms, but I believe I am a glowworm.” He was. Am I? Or am I simply a voluble candidate for a support group of loquacious people in recovery, to be called On-and-On Anon?

La Rochefoucauld said, “Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set a bad example.” I can still set bad examples, but avoid advice because my life’s lessons learned refer to me alone.

I wrote my memoirs because I had a stroke and was eager that my children and grandchildren know more about me, but they were not amused by what I wrote in the book, “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great: Dying to Come Back as a Memoir.” My memoir was written, not for my children and grandchildren, but for myself, as an exercise in self-interest, as an ironic reincarnation.

A Baroque musician has left us instructions on how to write a sonata: First, find a sonata that you like, so you can use it as a model. Second, replace its treble clef notes with a melody of your own, taking care to ensure it tracks properly and harmoniously with the original existing bass clef notes. Third, replace its existing bass clef notes with your own original notes to harmonize with your new treble clef notes. Then, write it down, and voila, a new sonata!

My life themes (physics, music, helping lawyers, doctors, and scientists) resemble the original old sonata with its old bass and treble notes. My new activities resemble those new bass and treble notes that replaced the old ones and created a new sonata (changing careers, doing welded sculptures, writing songs). Yet the original old sonata still defines, echoes, and reverberates.

But in a memoir, do I really have to define myself, dammit? If I’m to be reincarnated in (or as) a book, my experiences and circumstances, my adventures and misadventures, great happenstances and small occasions, my insights and outlooks, my foibles and legacies, my immodest achievements and embarrassing mistakes will have to speak for themselves. Thus . . .

After Beethoven had finished playing one of his newly composed sonatas, a fan asked him, “But sir. What does it mean?” Beethoven reportedly sat down and played the sonata through again, and when he had finished — refusing to be defined — said, “That’s what it means!”

I said to my naive young proctologist as he was about to insert a fiber-optic device into my lower colon to perform a colonoscopy (as Gloria Swanson says to Cecil B. DeMille in the movie “Sunset Boulevard”): “I’m ready for my close-up.”

Pass the salt. Note the tongue in cheek. And the kernel of truth.

Stephen Rosen lives in East Hampton and New York. “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great” is available for the Kindle.