What's one best thing from this year?
Travels with Charley #8
Hi readers,
Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.
Where I’m living
I just got back from a week in Mexico City with two old friends who are also writers. I’m floating on the rush of being there with them. We wandered through the parks and plazas of a city that feels so alive, talking about ideas and writing and our lives, never quite setting down the conversation to turn to the novels in our bags. I ended the trip with a stomach full of mangos, a five-page bullet-pointed shared Google doc full of reading recommendations, and a full heart. I did no writing but it was the best writers’ retreat I can imagine. What a gift to have longstanding intellectual friendships, friends of the heart and mind.
What I’m reading
Tracy K. Smith on inheritance (To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul):
We repeat. Our voices, our features, our names. The turn of a foot. The way the heel of a hand cradles a piece of bread. My uncle gives me my father, just as my father carried his mother forward to me. She softened something in his throat, made his voice theirs, something they shared.
Lorrie Moore’s delightful first paragraph here, setting up the characters, the scenes, the contrast of interior worlds (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?):
In Paris we eat brains every night. My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mousse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean, sprung suddenly free and killed by light; they’ve grown clammy with shelter, fortressed vulnerability, dreamy nights. Me, I’m eating for a flashback.
I think of this Alice Kim description every time I’m in conversation with someone similarly flatulent (The Missing Guest):
Maybe he was like so many men who tried to be feminist, polite, different, but to do this was like holding in a voluminous fart, and sooner or later he would burst, because ultimately he could not forget how important he was.
What I’m wondering
Give me a recommendation from 2023! Could be a book, a recipe, a sweater, a hack for folding fitted sheets. What’s one best thing you gained this year?
What I’m writing
In my conversations with elders, some tricky-yet-universal questions often come up: Where do you make new friends when your old friends start to pass away? How do you figure out when you have enough money to retire? How should you navigate aging while caring for an older parent? How does sex change in your 80s?
So I talked to elder experts (including retired gerontologists) and reported a fun front-of-book package for Bloomberg Businessweek.
More from the aging beat: For a story on finding love later in life for The Wall Street Journal, I went on a dream reporting trip to a seniors speed-dating night at the library. Come for the excellent photos of Captain America and sexy cop getting down on the dance floor, stay for the encouraging examples of how to put yourself out there at any age. Welcome to Romeoville (seriously).
One more: Brian Lehrer interviewed me about my Vox article on intergenerational friendships. Still TBD whether Brian wants to be my intergenerational friend, but in the meantime, you can listen to me on The Brian Lehrer show here.
yours,
Charley