Here is an excerpt from a classic article written by Roger Angell for The New Yorker, published in 2014. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe
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Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or head: nothing in the middle. But cheer up: if I reverse things and cover my right eye, there you are, back again. If I take my hand away and look at you with both eyes, the empty hole disappears and you’re in 3-D, and actually looking pretty terrific today. Macular degeneration.
I’m ninety-three, and I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb. Shingles, in 1996, with resultant nerve damage.
Like many men and women my age, I get around with a couple of arterial stents that keep my heart chunking. I also sport a minute plastic seashell that clamps shut a congenital hole in my heart, discovered in my early eighties. The surgeon at Mass General who fixed up this PFO (a patent foramen ovale—I love to say it) was a Mexican-born character actor in beads and clogs, and a fervent admirer of Derek Jeter. Counting this procedure and the stents, plus a passing balloon angioplasty and two or three false alarms, I’ve become sort of a table potato, unalarmed by the X-ray cameras swooping eerily about just above my naked body in a darkened and icy operating room; there’s also a little TV screen up there that presents my heart as a pendant ragbag attached to tacky ribbons of veins and arteries. But never mind. Nowadays, I pop a pink beta-blocker and a white statin at breakfast, along with several lesser pills, and head off to my human-wreckage gym, and it’s been a couple of years since the last showing.
My left knee is thicker but shakier than my right. I messed it up playing football, eons ago, but can’t remember what went wrong there more recently. I had a date to have the joint replaced by a famous knee man (he’s listed in the Metropolitan Opera program as a major supporter) but changed course at the last moment, opting elsewhere for injections of synthetic frog hair or rooster combs or something, which magically took away the pain. I walk around with a cane now when outdoors—“Stop brandishing!” I hear my wife, Carol, admonishing—which gives me a nice little edge when hailing cabs.
The lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut county road, thanks to a herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me from Gary Cooper to Geppetto. After days spent groaning on the floor, I received a blessed epidural, ending the ordeal. “You can sit up now,” the doctor said, whisking off his shower cap. “Listen, do you know who Dominic Chianese is?”
“Isn’t that Uncle Junior?” I said, confused. “You know—from ‘The Sopranos’?”
“Yes,” he said. “He and I play in a mandolin quartet every Wednesday night at the Hotel Edison. Do you think you could help us get a listing in the front of The New Yorker?”
I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.
On the other hand, I’ve not yet forgotten Keats or Dick Cheney or what’s waiting for me at the dry cleaner’s today. As of right now, I’m not Christopher Hitchens or Tony Judt or Nora Ephron; I’m not dead and not yet mindless in a reliable upstate facility. Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Roger Angell was a senior editor and a staff writer. He died in 2022, at the age of a hundred and one. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956. He wrote more than a hundred Sporting Scene pieces, mostly on baseball but also on tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. In addition, he wrote film reviews, stories, casuals, Notes and Comment pieces, and, for many years, the magazine’s Christmas verse, “Greetings, Friends!” His writing has appeared in many anthologies, including “The Best American Sports Writing,” “The Best American Short Stories,” “The Best American Essays,” and “The Best American Magazine Writing.” His work has also been collected in nine of his own books, among them “The Stone Arbor and Other Stories,” “A Day in the Life of Roger Angell,” “Let Me Finish,” and “This Old Man: All in Pieces.” His baseball books include “The Summer Game,” “Five Seasons,” “Late Innings,” “Season Ticket,” “Once More Around the Park,” “A Pitcher’s Story,” and “Game Time.” “Nothing but You: Love Stories from The New Yorker” is an anthology of fiction selected by him. He won a number of awards for his writing, including a George Polk Award for Commentary, a Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011 he was the inaugural winner of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. In 2014, Angell received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to writers by the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2015, he won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for his piece “This Old Man.