Ages

My 8-year-old said: "Mommy, you are 40. You are at your peak now. It's peak time for you for one year and then you will be going down. Minute by minute, second by second. Next thing you know, you are 50!"

51-year-old (Marc Maron at BAM on Friday) said: "Have you ever been to the YMCA, happening upon a 90-year-old wrestling his testicles into a jock strap and you have that moment where you're like, that's what you get if you win? It's just a never ending battle with your descending ball sac?"

My 86-year-old aunt, who has reached the old age we hope to achieve through restraint from the bad stuff and the right amount of exercise    said last night: You can't live this long without paying the price. 

Distractions

So what makes you succeed? Delaying pleasure, if you believe the afore-mentioned marshmallow test. The key to being able to resist temptation and delay gratification is distraction. More fundamentally, it is distraction from feeling sad or thinking about death. Walter Mischel, 84, the guy who came up with the marshmallow test said in a recent New York Times interview:

“It’s to keep living in a way one wants to live and work; to distract constructively; to distract in ways that are in themselves satisfying; to do things that are intrinsically gratifying...Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don’t do melancholy. It’s a miserable way to be.”

Constructive distraction sounds good. But what does a man who never wants to acknowledge sadness mean by constructive distraction? 


Society frowns upon those who distract themselves by doing drugs, partying like crazy, or having too much sex.  Jumping off mountain tops in crazy flying suits or living with grizzly bears are extreme distractions, barely more acceptable than drugs. These can dEstrUct, if taken to the extreme, rather than dIstrAct.  (Oh what a few vowel changes can do...). Surely, Mr. Mischel wouldn't approve. But when very well-educated straight A students choose their distraction to be working 80-plus hour weeks at a prestigious law firm or bank performing thankless (and often pointless) tasks then society gives a lot of positive reinforcement. And you don't have the time or the mental capacity for almost anything else. Your distraction is complete. It doesn't even matter if you get a little bit destroyed every day.

Damien Rice

Back in 2006, when I was pregnant with Eli I wrote: "I cry at the sight of any commercial that has babies in it and each time I hear the first note of pretty much any Damien Rice song." I forgot how this was with Damien and me, but remembered it the other day when we went to see him in Brooklyn with my brother, Lili and Ildi. (David, unfortunately, had to work so Ildi replaced him...).

He disappeared from my life and my playlists for years, but hearing him live brought back my tears and all these memories of youth and heartache came flooding back. He is an amazing performer and we enjoyed every minute of the concert (it was something like this). Also, now that I feel a mid-life crisis coming on like a freight train on the loose, I like to indulge in (and embellish?) memories of my then under-appreciated youth. So I take note and tell myself: come on, you will like now much better later. Try and be present to appreciate it. 

But I'm glad I got Damien back and when I want to cry there is always this and this and, of course, this...  

Marshmallows

So marshmallows are disgusting, if you ask me. But let's just use them as a stand in for "something really appealing that is immediately available, but could be doubled if you resist enjoying it right away," as the famous Stanford scientists did. At my workplace, I am surrounded by people who probably all would have aced the marshmallow test. I am one of them, or would have been, as 5-year-old; delayed gratification, after all, is necessary for academic success in most cases.

After a brief conversation with one of the partners the other day about vacations and work, it hit me that in an environment that demands giving up as much short- and medium-term pleasure as a high-pressure wall street law firm or bank, the most successful people are not simply those who "pass" the test and gobble up the two marshmallows five minutes later:

    
No. The winners in this system are those who, after dutifully waiting to double their reward, would have hidden away the double dose of marshmallows in a secret place and locked them up...only to be found all shriveled up and inedible many years later. They are the uber-delayers. 

parts unkown 2

Szeged, where Bourdain's guide to Budapest, the amazing, famed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and my grandmother, Lili, both were born, made me recall the many stories she would tell about a wonderful, cultured town full of excitement and adventure. She was born in 1910, exactly 20 years before Zsigmond, but they both wistfully spoke of this small town as a magical land where it seemed like it was always summer and kids just had the time of their lives. Often, the memory of something great experienced for the first time stays more vivid and wonderful than the reality of a lovely thing experienced for the hundredth time, right now. That is true of some things only; not, for example, sex. But I am still convinced that the the pizza I had at the Tilleul restaurant in Marseille in 1983 was the best slice I will ever have. 

My grandmother had a nice life in Szeged. Her father,  Bentian Eidus, who (as I just discovered!) has a Wikipedia page in Hungarian, was a dentist, a revolutionary, a poet, and a translator (into Yiddish) of many famous Hungarian poets and writers. In my grandmother's telling, poets I learned about in school, including Kosztolanyi, Ady, Radnoti (none of whose names mean much to non-Hungarians),  hung out in their comfortable apartment drinking coffee and cognac, eating delicious food prepared by the cook, served by maids, while she, a little blonde girl who wasn't as pretty as her younger brother, was sneaking around trying to catch scenes and conversations she wasn't supposed to see or hear. I tried to imagine the scene many times and in my child's eyes, Lili was the coolest, most romantic girl I was never going to be.

Lili talked a lot about her father's intellect, style, generosity and "just" strictness. As a kid, I never understood why she thought that the time her father hit her with a leather belt because she went out to meet a boy in secret one night was ok. It was for the best, she learned a lesson, she said. She also claimed not to mind that she was not allowed to become a doctor like she was planning to be and had to study dentistry to follow in the footsteps of her father.

Bentian died in 1944 in Auschwitz. The details of this death we cannot imagine and Lili would not dwell on them, ever. Instead, I suppose, she wanted to celebrate the memories of his life and maybe the details become more beautiful, more intimate, more amazing than they perhaps were. But thanks to her, I still think of the man. I want to tell the story of him. Because the only way for me, heathen that I am, to fathom immortality is to believe in the power of human memory.

“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

parts unknown

as I watched Anthony Bourdain about my home with David and my sister-in-law, Meryl, I tried to see the place  through their eyes or even the eyes of someone who had never even heard of it. it was exotic, beautiful, old, heroic, full of really scary fatty food you should try once... and sad sad people. parts of the city I know so well and love kept appearing and looking prettier than I had ever seen. it also looked alien, like a movie of a long gone place I will never see.

and then the memories came flooding back. recent past, old past, stories i can't tell and stories told to me long ago. i didn't cry, but Meryl kept petting me on the head in a sympathetic way, like somehow all that history and sadness was my invisible burden suddenly in plain sight.

to be cont.