A Life Deductible

“Living the Good Long Life” by Martha Stewart

 Back with a vengeance comes Martha Stewart, the “Nemesis of the Nineties", to maximize her cultural influence and bottom line for the edification and expense of our generation. This, her latest of 77 books she claims to have written and published with Random House, is an encyclopedic tome about “living well is the best revenge”. In it, she ‘transitions,’ as they like to call it, from ‘Aspirational Lifestyle Queen’ to ‘Caregiver Extraordinaire’ for the aging demographic she has served (and milked) for over 25 years.

 I’ve got to hand it to her….Martha is always one step ahead of everybody else. Well me, at any rate. While my parents were aging precipitously, did I bother to make time between chauffeuring them to countless medical appointments and tests, shopping for their groceries, picking up their prescriptions, interviewing caregivers, checking out retirement homes, visiting long-term care facilities and, inevitably, planning funerals and shivas - to found and fund a Center for Living at my local Mt. Sinai Hospital? Did I even consider addressing the Senate Committee on Aging, like Martha did? (Do we even have one of those committees here, in Canada, or are those geriatrics in our Senate part of the problem, not the solution? Admittedly, either Senate is the logical place to start any discussion on the decrepitude and expense of supporting an aging generation).

 No, I didn’t. Not even once. I did think, however intermittently, about writing humorously about this stage of life, maybe for my blog, which I hadn’t written in for months because of the way life had of interfering with such worthier activities. I suppose I only have myself to blame if, when I wake up at the ungodly hour of 4am, I don’t just hop out of bed and give myself a facial and do an hour of yoga with my trainer, like Martha does. No, lazy moi, all I can bring myself to do is reach out for my iPad and play an athletic round of WordsWithFriends with my buddies, who can’t sleep anymore, either. And then stare off into space. (If you want to know how to waste what little time you have left, read MY book. When I get around to writing it!)

 Not so, Martha. Martha has lots of time to do everything and she encourages you to follow her lead in this all-inclusive ‘Death-Style’ guidebook for boomers. In order to do so with the utmost efficiency, which is necessary, since time is definitely running out, you might want to consider employing a staff of, well let’s just call it, in Martha’s own words, “a small army” of helpers. If you are wondering where she finds the time to write a book of this depth and dimension while attending to all her many chores (managing her many estates…or even finding time to visit them, starring on her daily television shows…are they still on? her frequent promotional and guest appearances, grooming her herds of Friesian horses, showing her beloved Chows at Westminster, icing cakes and creating paint colors, weaving broadloom, pruning her orchards, and kibitzing with the countless great and the near-great suitors besieging her on Match.com) the answer is simple.

 She doesn’t. Her army does it for her and she puts her name on the cover, the ‘Brand’ she has so assiduously developed and nurtured for over 30 years (with a little time off for bad behavior).

 Martha’s graciously acknowledged inspiration is her powerhouse of a mother, a woman often referred to as ‘Big Martha’, who is duly credited as the honoree in whose name the “Martha Stewart Center for Living” was established by “little Martha”(?) at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. I can’t help but think, “It’s a good thing” that the daughter is named for the mother, in this case, or there might have been a crisis of conscience over the billing! There is a faint hope that by ‘doing good’ and ‘giving back’, as rich people like to, with their leftover money, she will forever erase the taint on her ‘good’ name by helping to fund a center for the study and care of the newest disease sweeping the nation…. aging.

In Martha’s world, old people can be successful, productive and pretty healthy well into their 90’s, like her own mother, or could be if they’d only take her advice! She comments that most of her relatives lived long, healthy, useful lives, never complaining, (as if they’d dare!), and that she certainly expects to do the same. The idea that good luck or even good genes might be a factor is not really considered….Martha seems to believe in that good old American recipe for success: hard work and self-determination, and regular appointments with your colorist!

Anything less and you deserve what you get. Anything less is your own fault. All well and good, I suppose, but tell that to my friends with cancer, heart disease, worn out hips, Alzheimer’s or MS. They won’t be consulting her bible to research which wrinkle fillers to try, anytime soon. Documentation is a big part of Martha’s plan. How else to keep track of such a full life? (Her lists and charts sometimes remind me of the ones Jay Gatsby formulated as his life plan, and we all know how well that turned out for him!) The best part of this book, however, is not her self-satisfied musings of a life well lived (if you don’t look too closely at the trail of personal destruction left behind), but the excellent resources culled together by the many expert advisors (and co-authors?) in medicine, gerontology, social work and nutrition.

 Maybe I’m being a little harsh. The book is actually an excellent compendium of ‘what to do until the undertaker comes’ kinds of things, most of them constructive, logical and life affirming, especially for those with the wherewithal to provide a comfortable dénouement for themselves. Advice from leading experts in every field remotely connected to an aging life, as it is lived by the healthy and wealthy, abounds. We are spared those familiar, all too horrifying conversations about what to do when catastrophic illness strikes at the family savings (if there are any) or when you suspect a loved one might be losing his mind in bits and pieces, never to be whole again. This book of advice is not for the terminally ill or (cringe) lower classes, but rather for those who can afford to buy it and stash it on their library shelf beside the dusty Funk and Wagnell’s Family Health Encyclopaedia for occasional consultation.

 For the rest, there is always ‘Google’.

 Afterthought: Martha is now making the Media Circuit/Circus rebranding her image as a lonely single woman seeking love in all the wrong places. Match.com? I have to wonder if she owns it? Surely, with her resources, she could afford to hire a full-time Shadchen (matchmaker) on her staff. I could volunteer. Why would she (or her staff) want to sift through the thousands of mis-Matches lurking out there in cyberspace when she has so many other better things to do? And all this recent publicity about ‘sexting’ and ‘threesomes’? Is she so loathe to give up the post-menopausal spotlight to Paula Deen? 

This smells of desperation to me.

Dress This House-1 Future Shock

Back in the nineties, a soothsayer named Faith Popcorn predicted that the coming decades would be devoted to something called ‘cocooning’. After some ‘splainin, it was ascertained that this had nothing to do with spinning pupas. She really meant that those among us with plans to live in the future would be concentrating a lot more of our efforts on our immediate surroundings than we had in the previous part of the century, when we were just too busy fighting world wars, breeding boomers and growing our hair really long.

She turned out to be right…..a fine soothsayer she’d be if she were wrong!...(apologies to Larry Gelbart who should, in turn, apologize to Plautus).

It didn’t seem to make much sense at the time, especially for women, coming out of an era that was obsessed with shoulder pads and bashing through glass ceilings. Faith, like other ‘predictors’, also made other wild forecasts, which, like 'Houses That Clean Themselves' a prediction made in a 1960 Look Magazine article which I happen to have saved, have yet to catch on.

At least at my house.

Martha Stewart, for one, paid attention and led the way. She intiated what was to become a torrent of television programs devoted to feeding our fledglings and feathering our nests, so much so that entire channels were eventually created and filled with 24 hours of advice on buying, selling, repairing, renovating, cluttering and, more recently, de-cluttering our dwellings.
The characters on these shows were not actors, but real people.

Well, sort of real. They let producers into their homes and their lives, to construct mini-realities filled with catastrophes and crisis that are easily solved in half an hour, unlike in real life, where I live, and the plumber has yet to install the matching plug in my bathtub after two years of nagging. The ‘stars’ were the decorators, renovators, agents and therapists who pretended to care for the duration of the makeover, and then vanished, like all contractors, into the vapor, leaving us to wonder if there might be the possibility of some new program to deal with the fallout of all these renovations and impulsive house purchases.

Naturally, I have gathered some wisdom from watching these shows and, not incidentally, from actually living in the real world of home renovation and decoration and would like to take this opportunity to pass along some observations for you to consider or to ignore, at your peril.

PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES
First of all, and most importantly, things that look pretty on TV don’t necessarily function well in the real world.
And visa versa.

We all know that goes for people, too. Or there wouldn't be any celebrities, would there?

Most of the star/decorators on TV are relatively attractive and, like therapists, may have lousy personal lives, but I am only going to talk about ‘housey’ stuff at this time. On a recent show, par example, the ‘star/decorator’ admitted to compromising her perfect choice for upholstery fabric because it wouldn’t ‘read’ well on TV, so her clients were stuck with something far less desirable but more photogenic. Of course, they still had to live with these shmattas long after the cameras went home, but that’s the way it is in TVland.

To maintain their pristine appearance, those white marble or black granite counter tops that everyone salivates over when 'house-hunting' need more care than the average person might care to take. Look at Michaelangelo’s David or Venus de Milo if you don’t believe me. In spite of claims to the contrary, everything scratches, stains and deteriorates after a while, including you.

In real life, it’s just the way it is.

And while I’m at it, crystal chandeliers were never really meant to adorn a kitchen, at least, not mine, where actual cooking takes place. Unless you are merely warming up leftover takeout food on an occasional basis, the grease that hovers in the air after you fry up a batch of bacon or sear a rack of lamb on the cooktop, is going to fly right up and attach itself to those sparkly babies like glue.

Stock up on the Windex at Costco because you, or your maid, if you are fortunate enough to have one, are going to need it!