Joe Cillo

 

LIVING THE GOOD LIFE

There are three ingredients in the good life:
Learning, earning and yearning.
Christopher Morley

Ezekiel Emanuel is 57 years old.  He is a physician specializing in cancer and the Vice Provost professor The University of Pennsylvania. He is a very smart man. Last October, he wrote an essay saying he wanted his life to end at 75.

He is a fool.

When I was 57, I had no idea what fun I could have once I crossed the line where productivity, beauty and fame topped the list of what I needed to make my day.   When I was 57 I cared that my face was drooping, my hearing dulled and my walk slowed, step by step.  I am 81 now and I love my wrinkled face.  It gets me every perc I could possibly want.  I step into a packed car in the tube and at least 3 gorgeous men stand up so I can rest my wrinkled bum on a seat.  I board a train and take a premium seat that is labeled Priority Seating just because I have been around a long time.

When I carry packages up or down stairs, there is always someone to carry those bundles for me and usually with a smile.  I hop (yes I can still hop) on a bus and sit down without worrying about the fare.  I go to movies, plays and concerts and pay at least 25% less than everyone else including all those youngsters under 60 with low paying jobs and expensive taste.

If I am in a queue and it is taking too long I clutch my heart and gasp a little; that gets me to the head of the line before I can exhale.  I stand at a counter rummaging though endless coins I cannot recognize without my glasses and NOT ONCE has anyone said, ”Hurry up, Bitch.”  No indeed.  Invariably there will be some kind soul who will hold my packages while I search for coins I dropped in the bottom of my purse and the clerk will ALWAYS smile and say, “Take your time, darling.”

And that brings me to another point:  EVERYONE, man, woman and even toddlers, address me as “Darling” and they mean it. The very things I did at 50 that annoyed the hell out of everyone; the missteps and accidents I had in my twenties that made both husbands leave me; all are absolutely adorable now that I am in my ninth decade.

But it isn’t just the attitude of everyone around me that has made life so very sweet these days.  It is MY attitude.  I am no longer concerned with what I see in the mirror.  It never got me much when I was younger and I don’t expect it to be the 8^th aesthetic wonder of the world now.  That means that all the time, money and anguish I spent in beauty shops and on countless rejuvenation creams, skin enhancers, hair boosters…all of it is now spent on more rewarding activities like eating anything I want because what the hell: by the time I am too obese for my coffin, I won’t care. I won’t have to spend the extra money for it either.  The welfare department will.

I am at the age now where I can spend as much as I want for anything I want.  If I run out, I can get benefits.  My intention is to reduce my bank balance to zero and then apply for residence in a home.   We take care of our elderly here.  I am not worried about my liver either.  It’s held up this long, hasn’t it?

When I was in my fifties, I anguished because I had not made a visible mark in the world.  No one knew who I was.  My name never made a headline.  Now I realize that it isn’t the publicity you get for what you do, it is what you do that matters.  If it makes me happy and I am involved, then hooray; getting some award or a mention in someone’s column won’t change that.  It took me this long to get that.

“But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world,” says Emanuel.

And I say, “How does he know that?  He hasn’t gotten there yet.”

Well I have and I can honestly say that my walk is slower, but I get where I want to go and I do not feel deprived.  I enjoy my life just as it is.  I do not have the same desires I had at twenty or thirty or forty because that is not the stage of life I am in right now.  My perspective has improved.  I have confidence in myself. I trust my judgment.  I don’t want to go to bars and find a hot sex pot to take me to bed.  That doesn’t interest me anymore.  I don’t want to wear uncomfortable clothes that reveal my nether parts because my nether parts are not the focus of my pleasure anymore.  My mind and my heart are the hungry organs now and I do everything I can to feed them.  It is more fun and not as sloppy.

It took me a long time to figure out that life is like a card game.  You take the hand you get and play it out the best you can. It does no good to bemoan what you didn’t get or begrudge others for what they have achieved.  You do not know what they had to do to get there.  I am happy now with the life I have but I am not content to stand still.  Not yet.

I am living in the now.  What is past is gone.  I am not that person anymore.  I don’t look good in her clothes.  I do not want to walk in her shoes.  They would pinch my bunion.  I do not want to waste the time she did on the telephone bemoaning what she didn’t have.  I love my current life and I am determined to make the most of it.  I will not waste my energy worrying about what I will do when I am ninety because I am not there yet.  When I am, I have no doubt that I will have adjusted to the difference in my motor abilities, my memory and my diminished life style.  I do not know how I will like it until it happens.

Do not get me wrong.  I do not want to waste away in a hospital bed anymore than you do.  I have reached an age where I am determined to let my body fall apart at its own pace.  I do get my flu shots but I am not sure I would allow any procedures to prolong my life if I had a terminal illness.  I am not afraid of dying.  It is after all the most dramatic event in our life other than birth.  I cannot recall being afraid when I exited my mother’s body and I have no intention of being consumed with fear about my death because I have no idea when it will happen or how.  When I am there, I will deal with it. Hopefully it will be a grand and dramatic departure.

My goal right now is to live abundantly.  I will not spend one iota of the time I have in worry because worry never accomplished anything and I have a lot I need to do.  I want to learn to fan dance. I see me shimming and swaying to the music showing off my cute bum and my shapely lets and then turning to the crowd, peeking out of the fans with a face that looks for all the world like an abandoned prune that needs ironing.  It should have an amazing effect on the crowd.

I want to play the ukulele and tap dance while I do it.  I want to explore the nooks and crannies of a Europe I have read about and I want to make a lot of strangers laugh.   Want to fall in love the right way this time…loving who he is, not how he looks, what he buys me or what he wears. The size of his wallet or his dick are not barometers of love for me anymore.  They never were but I thought they were.  I know better now.   I cannot be bothered regretting the hump on my back or the arthritis that has gnarled my fingers.  They still work and while they do, I am using them.

I have done the accepted thing.  I have prepared a directive that tells everyone not to resuscitate me and not to use any artificial means to keep me alive.  I have donated all the organs that work to anyone who needs them although who would want my ears is something I still cannot figure out.  My kidneys however are stellar and I hope the person who gets them appreciates how beautifully they have worked for me.

I do not want to lie in a hospital bed on life support with medical science keeping me alive and i know very well that is a decision I must make while i have all my faculties and can prepare the proper papers to keep an exuberant medical staff from pumping up my lungs and stimulating a heart that no longer wants to beat.  I have done that but that is all I have done.  I am ready and willing for death to happen when it is ready for me.  My mother always said I arrived two moths after I was due.  “You were always slow,” she said.”Right from the beginning.”

But I got here didn’t I?

I hope my exit will be cleaner and faster but if it isn’t well…I cannot know what it will be like until it happens.  I am determined to only die once….and that will be on the day my heart stops beating and my lungs give  me no air.  …not one minute before.

The trick is to live…live as fully, as beautifully and as daringly as you can.  Reach for every star and don’t be afraid to meet the price, do the work and pay the dues to get you there.  There is no dream that is impossible.  Wallace Stegner says we do not die from a disease.  We die because we are finished.

I am not finished.  Are you?

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
William Shakespeare

We aren’t naming our babies George, anymore.  Evidently, parents don’t want to saddle their children with names that imply delusions of royalty.  Instead of naming our little boys nice solid names like George, William or Harry, we are turning to something more exotic like Mohammed or Ali. I think that is a huge mistake.   A very young child can manage to spell George or Harry easily enough but what is he to do when he has to remember how many em’s and where the a’s and the e’s go in a name like Mohammed?  The challenge is even greater even for the little guy if his parents go a bit more exotic and opt for Ibrahim or Omar.

Girls fare no better with the top name of the year: Sophia.  You have to be pretty mature to understand that p and h together make f.  And worse, the i in that name sounds like an e.  That is a lot of remembering to expect from a little 4-year-old maiden trying to spell her name for her teacher.

The truth is simple names sound much more solid and reliable.  You can trust a guy named Bill and you KNOW you count on a Jane or a Mary.  I have found that people often adopt the characteristics implied by their names.  If I have a friend named Lucretia, I know she is going to be all over the place with so many syllables and funny letter combinations.  …a frivolous, unreliable person who forces you to stop and think before you address an e mail to her.

I personally love the name George and I think Kate and William had the right idea when they christened their little prince.  When I envision a George, I see a no frills, honest, down-to-earth guy I can trust; just the kind of qualities women look for in a partner, and bosses want in their interns.  No doubt about it, you name your child George and everyone will believe in his integrity and look up to him before they even meet him.  A name like George reeks of authority.  It gives you a feeling of security.  A guy named George could very well end up a king. Mohammed?  Not so much.

 

 

 

OH MY GOD!!!!

Only when we are no longer afraid
Do we begin to live.
Dorothy Thompson

It is always something…and that something terrorizes us.  In Britain, we are all petrified of spiders and the strongest among us get queasy when we look down from a high place. If we are planning suicide, we much prefer to hang ourselves or swallow poison.  It isn’t as scary.

All of us can feel our blood pressure rise when we hear what is happening to the ozone layer even though not one of us have ever seen it or really know what it is.

We were warned that greater exposure to ultra violet rays has caused a rise in melanomas to eat away our skin even as it blinds innocent fish and little bunnies.  Every educated person worries that our deserts are expanding and we are going to dry out if we are not completely cooked by global warming or drowned by the melting glaciers first.  Worse, the air has become so polluted that if anyone dares to take a deep breath these days, he will die. Now it is the Ebola Virus that is seeping in from Africa and will kill every one of us within moments.

What next?

I have lived through it all and I can testify that all of it is smoke and mirrors.  My mother believed that the Russians created the Asian Flu epidemic and I believed she was the cause of all my cavities.  My sister blamed my mother for making her so fat and my mother blamed my father when the car stalled.

All of us are afraid that we won’t have enough money to take care of ourselves until we die and now that we all live longer, we are stashing funds into retirement accounts, under mattresses and behind the furnace just in case we have the bad luck to live to be 110.

The truth is that all the fuss about organic foods is spoiling dinner. I am sorry if the beef I eat was taken from viciously murdered cows and I feel terrible for the spinach soaked in nasty insecticides so it wouldn’t look like green Swiss cheese when it arrived at the table. If am going to worry that the vegetables in my salad had an unhappy childhood or the cream I rub on my face is nothing but wax, I am not going to have time to go dancing.

Hooray for caring about our environment.  Hooray for doing our best to clean up the air and return to real food instead of the genetically modified, tasteless fakes the supermarkets give us.  Hooray, too,  for medical advances that protect us from epidemics.  I believe in doing our best to do our best for ourselves now….and deal with disaster when it happens. If the coward dies 1000 deaths and the hero dies but one, I want to be a hero.

 

 

 

NO, THANK YOU

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life
Is “No thank you,” it will be enough.
Lynn Ruth and Meister Eckhart

No one likes to take responsibility for their own destiny and the American people are a prime example.  They have blamed the car manufacturers for our automobile fatalities, the cigarette manufacturers for lung cancer and now they are blaming dessert creators for our obesity.  It turns out that unsuspecting consumers are not at fault for increasing their circumference faster than the speed of light.  Nor is it their doing that they no longer fit in a revolving door.  The blame is now on those profit-mongering villains who make delectable biscuits, marvelous confections and delicious drinks to quench our thirst. Indeed, these greedy monsters are deliberately adding a ton of sugar to all the goods we adore for the sole purpose of making diabetes our national disease.

The latest scientific studies confirm their corruption.  Sugar is toxic and unscrupulous manufacturers like Sara Lee (yummy cheesecake) or Krispy Kreme Doughnuts have deliberately stuffed their products with this poisonous substance that has been proven to kill us even faster than fatty beef will clog our arteries.

In less informed times, these bakers were our heroes.  We longed for their recipes, gobbled up their products and reveled in the sugar high we got to finish our meal.  We reached blindly for them in the mid-afternoon to pep us up when the “threesies” hit.  Now, thanks to those experts who conduct scientific studies that destroy our confidence in our own preferences, we all know better.  We have been the innocent pushovers of a diabolical plot to put money in the pockets of the obscenely rich manufacturers of cookies, cakes and pies even as we collapse in droves from insulin failure.

The baking industry and the soft drink tycoons are scandalized at the accusations the scientific community has made to smudge their good name and destroy their public image. After all, they say, all they did was create a product that people enjoyed eating. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” one reportedly said. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”

I cannot help but remember my sister who turned to hypnotism to help her when she topped 400 pounds.  “My right hand was hypnotized so it would not touch the refrigerator,” she said.  “So I learned to open it with my left.”

Now, I know perfectly well that it has become politically incorrect to blame the consumer for what he consumes but I cannot help but remember my dear old mother (who wasn’t dear ALL the time but sadly almost always right) when she said.  “If you don’t want it, just say, ‘no thank you.’”

I would love to see a scientific study that figures out why the obese among us are incapable of pushing away that second piece of pie, or turning their noses up and their fifth glass of soda pop.  I suspect that if we could create a no thank you serum to inject into ourselves before dinner, we would save a fortune in diabetic remedies, fat farms and gastric by-passes.  Isn’t funny, how simple solutions seem to escape us?

In the dark ages when I was a child, Gwendolyn Turner and I took my chubby sister to an ice cream parlor and, because we only had thirty-five cents between us, we ordered a chocolate soda with three straws.  My sister, who was the shortest, grabbed her straw and began drinking.  Gwendolyn and I kept bumping heads trying to get to our straws and before we managed to solve this spatial challenge my sister had finished the soda.  Moral: If you want something bad enough, there is always a way to avoid sharing it.

My mother’s family was very poor and ate potatoes almost every night.  Every once in a while, my grandma managed to bake a cake for her 4 daughters and her son, Charlie.  She would cut it into portions, put it on the table and as soon as all four little girls look rapturously at their dessert, my Uncle Charlie would point to the ceiling and shout “LOOK!!!”  When his sisters looked down again at their plates, their cake had disappeared.  Moral: Brothers cannot be trusted any more that the manufacturers of sugar-filled products; scheming monsters every one of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NAKED IS AS NAKED DOES

The male body is hairy and lumpy
And should not be seen by the light of day
Richard Roeper

Americans do not mind seeing people murdered on their television screen and they love watching heads flying and limbs severed at the movies.  They like the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, bodies strewn across the pavement and little children crying for their lost mummies and daddies.   The more violence the better.  That is the American way.

The truth is that violence and tragedy make great entertainment.  So does pornography.  Americans actually prefer to watch lust happening even more than they like doing it. What a thrill to see a man and women tearing each other’s genitals to pieces or whipping and chaining each other for the sheer pleasure of hearing them scream.  Porn is almost as popular in America as violence.  We watch both every day and love it all.

But let some poor schnook walk outside to get the newspaper in the altogether and he ignites public outrage. “It offends me to see anyone that way,” said one insulted observer. “It is disgusting.”

That is why San Francisco decided to compromise its image of freedom of expression and tolerance of the odd-ball and ban public nudity from its streets.  No more can raunchy old men spread a towel on a stone bench and sun themselves in the Castro district.  No more, can its citizens strip to the flesh to bathe in the afternoon sun.  San Francisco now supports the theory that our bodies are so hideous they must be concealed in public.  No matter, that liberated women, forward thinking men and eating disorder specialists are trying to make us comfy with our diverse shapes and sizes.  In San Francisco, it is pc to be ashamed.

Now, it seems that the Japanese, too are offended by nudity, but they have taken it one step further.  They do not want to see representations of the human body, much less the real thing. Michelangelo’s David  was presented to the town of Okuizumo and the inhabitants ran for cover.  “It’s frightening the children and worrying the adults with its nakedness,” said one of the town’s bigwigs.

I can only assume that they have also stripped their museums of reproductions of Van Gogh’s NUDE WOMAN ON A BED or Renoir’s AFER BATHING not to mention Whistler’s shocking NUDE GIRL WITH A BOWL.

Obviously, the very sight of a naked body horrifies the more sensitive among us.   It is difficult to understand why we think the sight of a penis or a breast will frighten our children more than the sight of shattered limbs and battered heads. Will our innocent youth smash the bathroom mirror when one day they see those very banned organs protruding from their own bodies?

The truth is that in America our bodies are considered repulsive and offensive unless we film them and flaunt them on a screen.  The only answer to this dilemma is to cover every baby at birth with ornamental tattoos so that as they mature, no one will recognize the new growth.  And everyone will be amazed when it rises to an occasion.

 

 

I don’t even like to be naked
In front of myself!
Camryn Manheim