Becoming a Centenarian

Old age is no joke, but it can feel like one. You look everywhere for your glasses, until your wife points out that you’re wearing them. I turn a hundred this year. People act as though this is an achievement, and I suppose it is, sort of. Nobody in my family has lived this long, and I’ve been lucky. I’m still in pretty good health, no wasting diseases or Alzheimer’s, and friends and strangers comment on how young I look, which cues me to cite the three ages of man: Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great. On the other hand, I’ve lost so many useful abilities that my wife, Dodie, and I have taken to calling me Feebleman. Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Feebleman! Dodie doesn’t want me to know how old she is, but she’s nearly three decades younger than I am, and I become more dependent on her every day.If I make it to a hundred (my birthday is December 17th), I’ll be what is called a centenarian. More and more people are breaking the two-digit ceiling these days, prompting talk in medical circles about much longer life spans. I believe the record so far is held by Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who was born in 1875 and died in 1997, at a hundred and twenty-two, although there is some debate about the validity of her age. When Calment was ninety, a widow with no heirs, she sold her apartment in Arles to a local notaire, with the written agreement that she could continue to live there, by herself, until she died, and he would pay the taxes and give her a monthly stipend of twenty-five hundred francs. Calment was still going strong when the notaire died, in 1995, and his children paid the taxes and the stipend until her death, two years later. As Calment put it, “In life, one sometimes makes bad deals.”Somewhat to my surprise, I decided to keep a journal of my hundredth year. I’ve started journals before, at various points in my life, but the urge never lasted more than a few months. This time, I have a motive. Since 1958, I have been writing for The New Yorker, which, like me, was born in 1925. It recently became clear that interviewing dozens of people, gathering mountains of material, and keeping it all in my head has become increasingly difficult, what with my porous memory and failing eyesight. So why not just accept the inevitable and enjoy a year or two of leisure? I’ve tried that, and no thanks. Boredom in excelsis. Hence the journal. Not every day, but when an event, experience, person, or thought catches my attention enough to overcome my laziness.February 15thI’m starting a month and a half in, because the journal idea didn’t come to me until yesterday. January was a preview of the next four years, which may well end up being the worst in American history. Donald Trump trumpeted his second coming with an avalanche of executive orders that sowed chaos and prepared the way for a government of, by, and for the billionaires. His choices for the Cabinet and other top positions have been comic, or insulting, or both. Trump put Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in charge of the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Thousands of government employees have already been fired, and many more will join them. I’m not going to spend much energy groaning about Trumpery in these pages. Plenty of capable people do that every day, and I don’t have the time.February 19thWhat we’ve learned in the past weeks is that, yes, we can carry on with our lives during the Trump catastrophe. Hours go by, sometimes whole days, when his gloating presence doesn’t enter my mind. Maybe I’ll forget his name, as I’m constantly doing with friends, family members, and everybody else, living or dead—not permanently, but again and again. This began a few years ago. I forget names all the time—sometimes, when I’m in the middle of talking to or about a person, their name will suddenly go elsewhere. It’s embarrassing, but, at ninety-nine, what isn’t? I recently revisited a journal that I kept for a while in 2011 and 2012, and came across this entry: “Last week on the Madison Avenue bus, a woman stood up and offered me her seat. I thought she was getting off, but she didn’t. It startled me. Still so few indications of age, as I turn eighty-six.” I didn’t really start to feel old until a couple of years ago, and even now there are periods when the aches and pains seem to vanish. The yoga-based stretching exercises I do twice a day seem to have kept sciatica and other miseries at bay. I hate the short-term memory losses and the increasing unsteadiness with which I totter through the world, but I’m still a long way from what Keats described as being “half in love with easeful Death.”Tomkins and his wife, Dodie Kazanjian, perform a set of lunges on the staircase at their home in Middletown, Rhode Island.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerFebruary 21stTwice in the past week, someone told me I should get a dog. Is this a coincidence, or a signal? Dodie and I both had dogs before we married, but not since. Talking about it experimentally last night, Dodie said the only kind she would consider is an Italian greyhound. She likes her animals to be thin. For me, it would be a black Labrador retriever. When I was growing up, in West Orange, New Jersey, we had a series of black Labs, and the most memorable of them was Loki, named for the Norse god of mischief. Loki’s exuberance led him to run away, which he did fairly often. We’d get a call from somebody (our telephone number was attached to his collar), and my father would go out in the car and pick him up. He once had a dream about this. In the dream, Loki came back on his own from a three-day adventure, and my father said to him, very sternly, “Loki, where have you been?” Loki said, “I’ve been to Montclair.”My father loved dogs, and so did I. Before the Labs, we had two collies, an English setter, a French bulldog, a Boston bull, and a raccoon named Pete, whom Dad brought back from a fishing trip in the Adirondacks. (A forest ranger there had found three starving raccoon cubs with no mother; he offered them for adoption to everyone he met, and Dad took one.) Pete stayed with us for two years, living with the collies in their outdoor kennel and going on bike rides with my older brother, Frederick, and me. We’d take turns letting him ride on our shoulders. Our mother never got used to Pete, and when he nipped one of her friends at an outdoor tea party, his welcome expired. Dad put him in the car, drove for two hours, and released him in the Catskills. Two days later, he was back. Dad then chauffeured him to the Adirondacks. This time, he didn’t return. When I was very young, our grandmother gave us two Persian cats. My mother disliked cats, and she wouldn’t let them in the house. They lived in the kennel with the collies and Pete.I once wrote a children’s book about an overly friendly mixed-breed dog named Ralph, and a haughty Siamese cat named Lavinia, who live in a house with two children and their parents. Ralph is determined to teach Lavinia how to laugh—cats, as you may know, have no sense of humor—and, in the end, he succeeds. The last scene has Ralph demolishing a dinner party by skidding around on the just-polished wood floor, upsetting tables and scattering drinks, and when it’s over and Ralph has been banished to the basement, Lavinia is discovered under a chair, lying on her back and shaking with silent laughter.Tomkins with his parents, in the summer of 1933.Photograph courtesy Dodie KazanjianFebruary 22ndYesterday’s entry reminded me of something that Trippie, my first-born child, said when she was three years old. (Her name is Anne; Trippie came from her love of car trips.) Our dog then, a black-and-brown dachshund named Waldi, had stopped eating, and we were taking him to the vet. He was on her lap, in the front seat of the car, and I could see she was really worried about him. I said, “Trip, he’s going to be fine. You know how, when you get sick, we take you to the doctor and he gives you something that makes you well? It’s just like that.” Trippie was quiet for a while, and then she said, in the sweetly thoughtful voice that still delights me today, “Dad, is Waldi’s doctor a dog?”February 26thThe New Yorker celebrated its hundredth birthday last night, with a party for four hundred people at a club downtown. The magazine’s first issue came out on February 21, 1925, ten months before I did. Dodie and I rarely go to big, deafening social events, but we went to this one. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, met us at the entrance with enveloping hugs that made us feel he was touched by our being there. We stayed for half an hour, saw Bruce Diones, Chip McGrath, Calvin (Bud) Trillin, Cressida Leyshon (my editor), and lots of other friends, whose names skittered away from me. On the way out, we bucked an incoming tide of celebrants who were just arriving. The New Yorker, which started out as what Harold Ross, its founding editor, called a “comic weekly,” has held and still holds a unique place in this country’s cultural history.We subscribed to The New Yorker when I was growing up, and I probably began looking at the cartoons when I was nine or ten. My father read every issue. He sometimes complained that the articles were too long. I remember him saying that he’d get to the end of a very long piece only to find that it was the first of five parts. By the time I joined the staff, in 1960, after three years of writing for Newsweek and contributing short humor pieces, called Casuals, to The New Yorker, the long fact pieces were, at least sometimes, getting shorter—ten or twelve thousand words instead of fifteen or twenty thousand. My first Profile, in 1962, was about a Swiss artist named Jean Tinguely, who made large sculptural machines with moving parts. I had been fascinated by his “Homage to New York,” from 1960, which included bicycle wheels, small motors, radios, a piano, automobile parts, a huge balloon that inflated and then burst, and many other elements from the junk yard. The sole purpose of this ridiculous monolith, which it largely achieved, was to destroy itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. I knew very little about art then, and Tinguely’s irreverent approach, which made ample room for humor, set me on a course of writing mainly (but not exclusively) about contemporary art and artists.March 8thJuan Hamilton, who attached himself to Georgia O’Keeffe when he was twenty-seven and she was eighty-five, died last month, at his home in Santa Fe. He had started working for O’Keeffe in 1973, a week before I went out to New Mexico to spend a few days interviewing her. After lunch one day, O’Keeffe asked Hamilton to drive us, in her Volkswagen minibus, from her house at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, so she could see the purple asters in bloom there. I have a vivid memory of O’Keeffe, in a long white dress, bouncing around imperturbably in the back seat as Hamilton navigated the barely visible dirt roads. She talked amicably with the Benedictine monks at the monastery while we were there, and on the way back she said it would be very easy for her to convert someone to Catholicism. “It has great appeal,” she said. “Not for me, of course—but I can see the appeal.”There was a lot of speculation about O’Keeffe’s relationship with Hamilton, but to me it seemed easy and natural. He was with her until she died, in 1986, and his gently joking presence certainly made her last years more pleasant. She left him most of the paintings that had not been promised elsewhere, and that led to bitter lawsuits and accusations of “undue influence.” But Hamilton and O’Keeffe’s relatives agreed to a settlement in the end.Another memory: The three of us, O’Keeffe, Hamilton, and I, are in the kitchen and she is cooking dinner—a chicken and five different kinds of squash from her garden. (It’s her regular cook’s night off.) Something is wrong with the stove. O’Keeffe kneels down and peers into the gas oven, and suddenly there’s a flash and a loud explosion. O’Keeffe stands up, shakily. Both her eyelids are scorched. “Well, it seems like we’re not having chicken,” she says. Juan and I exchange astonished glances, but nobody says another word.My Profile of O’Keeffe was published in the March 4, 1974, issue, and a month later she wrote me a letter. She had something to ask me, she said. Would I come back to New Mexico so she could ask it in person? Of course, I said yes. There was no monograph on her work at that time, and I assumed that she would ask me to write one. I was wrong. What she wanted was for me to look at notes she had been writing about her paintings. O’Keeffe had decided to publish them, but her younger sister Claudia had told her they were ungrammatical and should not be published. The notes were vintage O’Keeffe—brief, vivid, enlightening, and, yes, often ungrammatical, but brilliantly so. I told her they should absolutely be published. She asked me how to go about that. I offered to call my agent, and she said, Yes, please do. I made the call from her living room. Don Congdon, my agent at the time, could barely contain his excitement. Within a week, he had negotiated a contract with the Viking Press, and “Georgia O’Keeffe,” the first illustrated book on her work, came out in 1976 and became a best-seller. So much for good grammar.Tomkins and Kazanjian visit the Guggenheim Museum to see the exhibition “Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped.”Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerMarch 12thThese notes tend to deal with the past. Here’s one in the present. This morning, when I was brushing my teeth, I saw one of those furry, long-legged insects heading toward me on the bathroom floor. I raised a leg and tried to step on it but missed. The bug veered off in another direction and I followed it, stamping and missing until I lost my balance and fell, heavily. Nothing was broken, but I felt humiliated, defeated by a helpless creature who wished me no harm, and that made me laugh. Maybe I’ll write a series of stories about Feebleman and Milly the Millipede—a book—and call it “The Adventures of Feebleman.”March 13thYesterday morning, Dodie and I went to the Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibition of work by Caspar David Friedrich, whose uncanny ability to paint atmospheric landscapes, with or without figures in them, makes you feel you are there. Until six months ago, I could walk the ten blocks from our apartment to the museum, but now we go by Uber, and I view the art from a wheelchair. Unhappily, I have found that looking at pictures from a wheelchair, with your eyes about two feet below where they would be if you were standing, has irreparable defects—in this case, reflections of the gallery’s overhead lights, which blotted out the paintings. I could remedy the problem by standing up, but that required pushing away the wheelchair’s footrests, and it made me feel so unsteady that I tried it only twice. I sometimes think my main complaint about old age is the way it interferes with looking at art and listening to music. Although the remote control for my hearing aids has a setting for music, it never really works. All music sounds so off-key to my ears that it’s just noise. An audiologist once admitted to me that “hearing aids and music are not friends.”March 16thWhen we invite people to dinner at our apartment, we ask them to come at seven and all but suggest that they leave by nine. One of us will joke that this is the time I start to drool, but the real reason is that from nine on I can no longer take part in a conversation. It happens to me quite suddenly. I just drop out and sit there, smiling like an imbecile. The drooling comes later, when I’m asleep. I wake up and find that one side of the pillow is soaking wet. Old age is so embarrassing.Years ago, Michael Sonnabend, a Dante scholar who married the art dealer Ileana Castelli (whose first husband was the legendary Leo Castelli) when they were both well along in years, made me laugh by saying, as he left a party, that he had to go home and change his diaper. Now the adult version comes in packets of forty, and I use three a day.March 29thMuch attention these days is paid to the benefits and the dangers of artificial intelligence (A.I.), but hardly any is paid to what I call artificial stupidity (A.S.). Donald Trump has made remarkably effective use of A.S. Even Trump can’t possibly believe that he can make Canada our fifty-first state. The whole idea is too absurd to take seriously, but Trump’s repeated references to it add to the chaos and uncertainty that shroud his more sordid activities, such as attacks on the rule of law.Artificial stupidity means deciding to believe something that has no basis in fact, logic, or common sense. When I started using the phrase, a year ago, it was sort of a joke, but the breakdown of trust in our government and our social institutions which paved the way to Trump’s second term has made it all too serious.“Did you say you needed a six-pin-to-eight-pin FireWire for a 2006 MacBook?”Cartoon by Emily BernsteinApril 6thIt seems that I am legally blind. This comes as a surprise. Last year, Murk Heinemann, our longtime ophthalmologist and friend, showed me on my annual visit a photograph that revealed some macular degeneration in my right eye; with luck it might not get any bigger, he said, and he prescribed a stronger lens for the other eye. I’ve always felt that my eyes were functioning more or less normally, given their age. Much of the time, I don’t wear my distance glasses—the world is a little blurry, but I don’t bump into things. Since the pandemic, Dodie and I have been spending more time at our place in Rhode Island. I went to the local eye clinic there a while ago, because I was having trouble reading small print, and the optometrist I saw must have passed the results on to the Rhode Island Department of Human Services. At any rate, a very pleasant young woman came to the house to break the news that I was legally blind, and that the town we live in had amenities to offer, including a tax break.Here’s what I got, without even asking: 1. A red-and-white walking stick, whose colors are the international signal for a legally blind and deaf person. 2. A cube clock with a large yellow button that, when pressed, elicits a slightly impatient male voice announcing the time. Another button activates an alarm, which can be the sound of a bell, a horn, a cuckoo, a beeping, or a two-tone chime. 3. A talking book reader, with someone reading aloud; this one is the “property of the U.S. government” and must be returned if I don’t want to use it, or die, or something. 4.Twelve Pilot Bravo Bold Point Marker Pens. 5. A talking alarm clock that you wear on a chain around your neck. 6. Three copies of a letter certifying that I am permanently legally blind, to be used when applying for a handicapped-parking certificate or a tax adjustment. It was all somewhat overwhelming. So far, I’ve put away the cane, which was heavier than the one I’d been using, and tried writing with a Bold Point Marker Pen, which left a smudge on my index finger that I’m still trying to scrub off. I plan to look into the tax break. (I did, and I didn’t qualify.) The rest of my booty lies in a corner, untouched. New stuff is daunting to old guys, especially when the instructions are in small print.April 7thIn my long life, I can’t say, as Édith Piaf does in one of her defiant chansons, that I have no regrets. Most of mine center on my four children, whom I put through my three divorces and several periods when they had less fathering than they deserved. They all made it to adulthood, marriage, children of their own, and interesting careers, and when we see each other now it’s pure pleasure. Trippie, Susan, and Spencer, the three kids from my first marriage, love to reminisce about the annual ski trips we took, during spring break, to Sugarbush, Stratton, Stowe, and other Vermont mountains, trips that we all remember as among the happiest times in our lives. Sarah, from my third marriage, missed out on the skiing, but I probably spent more time with her when she was growing up. I used to take her to Central Park on the back of my bike. One day, I stopped to chat with a friend from The New Yorker. I was standing beside the bike, and suddenly it started to fall away from me. I yelled, “Oh, shit,” made a frantic lunge, and just managed to keep bike and two-year-old daughter from a bad fall, while Sarah chanted happily, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” My New Yorker friend couldn’t stop laughing.Sarah became a lawyer. Trippie taught high-school chemistry until six years ago, when she retired. (Think of that!) Susan put together a personal-service practice that included cooking, secretarial work, and help with tax returns. Spencer, the only one who lives in New York, is a private art dealer who can earn on a good day more than I can in a year. They all make me feel I’m a splendid father, and I enjoy believing them. Years ago, on one of our ski trips, we decided to take a lesson together. Trippie and Spencer were assigned to a more advanced group than Susan and I. The two of us stayed close for an hour, practicing our turns and laughing at our falls and near-falls, and toward the end of the lesson the instructor, a young woman who was not much older than Susan, said, “What’s the relationship between you two?” Sue said, with a quiet pride that I’ll never forget, “He’s my dad.” In my book, the good luck far outweighs the regrets.Tomkins and Kazanjian exercise at their home in Rhode Island.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerApril 16thMost nights, Dodie and I have dinner at home. We used to go to art-world dinner parties and to restaurants we liked, but my hearing ability now vanishes if people around me are talking, so we tend to stay home. Neither of us really knows how to cook. The menu is limited: rotisserie chicken from FreshDirect, salads of all kinds, broiled salmon, linguine with my pesto sauce, omelettes—that’s pretty much it. Dodie makes the salads, which can include three or four different lettuces, plus arugula, kale, and spinach, and I do the omelettes. I wish I could say I learned how to make an omelette from Julia Child, whom I profiled in 1974, but I actually learned much earlier, when my first wife and I spent a weekend with an uncle of mine, who decreed that each of us would make a different dish for dinner, and I made omelettes using a recipe in his copy of “Joy of Cooking.”Two decades later, I watched Julia on TV making an omelette on an electric hot plate, nursing it to fold over just by manipulating the pan as she talked. On the spot, I joined the millions of people whom she had already bewitched. She was so warm, and so funny. There was a time when some viewers complained about her using wine in her recipes, and Julia liked to tease them. “Now I’ll add a half teaspoon of white wine,” she would say in her plummy voice as she poured copiously from the bottle. “The children will love it.”April 24thBreakfast at our New York apartment with Gavin Brown, an artist in dealer’s clothing. He had a broken foot, and hobbled in on crutches. (I had misheard Dodie, as I often do these days, and thought we were expecting the artist Cy Gavin.) Gavin Brown has always been a uniquely contrary, anti-mainstream figure on the New York art scene, a British-born artist who became a dealer here and introduced Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Urs Fischer, and other young artists, most of whom eventually left his gallery for others that could offer them more money. (He also reintroduced Alex Katz.) Brown is still an irreverent and unpredictable presence.We talked about art, which, he said, “has come to a halt and gone somewhere else,” and then he asked how I would feel about his optioning “Off the Wall,” my 1980 book on Robert Rauschenberg, as the basis of a feature film. “Rauschenberg was the ultimate romantic, the embracer of mistakes,” he said. “It would be about how you get the spirit, the mystery, of art-making into film. I think it could be a great romantic story.” Gavin has never made a feature film; what he meant was that he would somehow find the money and put together a production team. We discussed this for a while, and agreed, amid much laughter, that “his people would call my people.” I tried to find out how he had broken his foot but got nowhere. “There are four screws in it,” he said.April 29thPaula Cooper was honored last night at the New Museum’s gala dinner, which drew about six hundred art-worlders to Cipriani South Street, a huge place that is as far downtown as a restaurant can get. She had a bad cold, and she looked fragile, but also beautiful and wise. Her gallery was the first to open downtown, in 1968, in what was already being called SoHo, and the minimalist and conceptual artists she showed, many of whom she still shows, were the ones that other artists admired—Hans Haacke, Mark di Suvero, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Gober, Rudolf Stingel, Jennifer Bartlett, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Marclay, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Ryman, among many others.I can’t remember when I first met Paula, but it must have been in the early seventies. Some years later, we found ourselves staying at the same Left Bank hotel in Paris, the Montalembert. We had dinner together there one night, and afterward, when we got into the elevator, I felt as though something was going to happen, but it didn’t. We exchanged strangely awkward good nights when she got off at her floor, and I continued on to mine. (What Paula remembers of the evening is that “it was one of the few times I saw him when he was alone. He always had a woman guarding him.”) About ten years after this, I introduced her to Jack Macrae, my publisher and my closest friend. His long marriage had broken up, Paula had been single for ages, and it struck me that they would like each other. It was my only try at matchmaking, and a complete success. They left together that night, got married a year later, and lived together very happily until Jack’s death, two years ago.May 5thThe New Yorker has been devoting more attention to its centennial year than I have to mine. Every issue dusts off a gem from the past. In the latest issue, Anthony Lane gives us a witty rundown on twelve books that various staffers have written on life at the magazine, including James Thurber’s “The Years with Ross,” from 1957, and Gardner Botsford’s “A Life of Privilege, Mostly,” from 2003. Lane, who reviewed movies for the magazine between 1993 and 2024, was the only New Yorker writer in that role who consistently made me laugh, and he does so frequently here. (“The entire stack could be crowned with the heading ‘Fanfare for the Comma Men,’ ” he writes.) His piece also led me to wonder why, in all my years at the magazine, I never wrote about it. The answer, I think, is that I’ve never been fully there. When I came on staff there were no empty offices, so I worked at home. Eventually, I got an office, but I kept on working at home. I came in only when a piece of mine was closing, to work with the editor and the fact checker. That way, I got to know several editors and fact checkers quite well, but not many writers, and I didn’t become part of the everyday life of the place. I felt more at home in the art world, which would become the main focus of my work.In my early years at The New Yorker, the editor was William Shawn, who had succeeded Harold Ross in 1952. Once a year, Shawn would knock on the door of my office—he had ways of knowing when I was there—with my new contract in his hand. He would apologize for disturbing me; Shawn was unshakably formal, and quite shy. I would sign the document on the spot, not even pretending to glance at it, and he would say, “Thank you, Mr. Tomkins,” and leave. When I had a new piece to submit, I would send it via office mail to Shawn, and wait. Usually, I’d hear nothing for several days, but sometimes the wait was longer. On one occasion, after waiting for nearly three weeks the suspense was so agonizing that I called him on the phone. “Oh, Mr. Tomkins, I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said, untruthfully. Nothing was wrong. He liked the piece—so why the delay? In spite of such mysteries, I felt, and still feel, that writing for The New Yorker is the best thing I could have done. I’ve had many editors. Each of them has improved my prose and my thinking, and the fact checkers have saved me from any number of embarrassing mistakes. Shawn edited quite a few writers himself, and I’ve heard two of them say it was a great experience, but he never edited me.The only New Yorker person I saw regularly outside the office was Roger Angell, a senior fiction editor for many years. In the nineteen-fifties, he and I both lived in Snedens Landing, a small community on the Hudson River, south of Nyack, and our children were roughly the same age. I was writing for Newsweek then. Roger urged me to try writing Casuals for The New Yorker, and when I did he edited the ones that were accepted—about half of them were not. His rejections could be biting. Roger did not believe in softening blows. In addition to being the smartest person in any room, he was highly competitive, and sometimes I felt that he enjoyed rejecting things. A number of staffers found him insufferable. “People write me off all the time,” he once said to me, with the implication that it didn’t bother him a bit. It seemed a little unfair that this powerful editor and scion of New Yorker royalty (his mother, Katharine White, helped Harold Ross shape the magazine, and served as its first fiction editor) was also a marvellous writer, whose pieces on baseball, published in the magazine and collected in several books, are great reading for lifelong baseball fans and for people who have never been to a game.Longer ago than I like to think, Roger and I and our wives went on a ski trip in Vermont. On the last day, as the sun was setting, the two of us decided to take one more run down the mountain. (The wives had already gone back to the lodge.) I finished before he did and, as we’d agreed, waited for him so we could ski to the lodge together. The wind had subsided, and there were long shadows on the snow. I noticed that the lift was still running, with nobody on it, and I couldn’t resist. I hustled over and got on a chair, and as it rose high above the hill I saw Roger below me. I waved and shouted, making motions urging him to get on the lift, but when he saw me he threw down his poles and, with both arms, consigned me to outer darkness.I didn’t see him again until that evening, when the four of us met in the lodge’s dining room. There was no mention of what had happened, but, as we studied the menus, Roger said, reflectively, “I looked at myself in the mirror just now, when I was shaving, and I said, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most ill-tempered of us all?’ ” We all laughed, including the girl who was taking our orders. Friendship with Roger was complicated but almost always worth the effort. He had brought me to The New Yorker, after all, and we stayed friends—at a slight distance—until he died, three years ago, when he was a hundred and one.May 18thWe have moved back to our Rhode Island place, in what we call Newport but is really Middletown, one town over. Dodie grew up in Newport, where her family, the Kazanjians, had established an import business in 1882. Once an active port city, Newport is now a tourist haven for people who come to see the palatial summer houses of Astors, Vanderbilts, Wetmores, and other grandees of the Gilded Age. Many of those families bought their Chinese porcelains and other status-building art objects from the John H. Kazanjian & Co. store, on Bellevue Avenue. One of my own ancestors, whom I was named after, had a brief association with Cornelius Vanderbilt. Calvin Tomkins, my great-great-grandfather, ran barges up and down the Hudson River in the eighteen-thirties, when Vanderbilt’s steamboats were ferrying passengers around the New York area. One day, so the story goes, Vanderbilt urged him to invest in railroads, as he was doing, and Great-Great-Grandfather Tomkins, in his wisdom, declined. “There’s no money in railroads,” he said. “I’m sticking to the river.”“I love it. What is it?”Cartoon by Roland HighNewport has many attractions, one of which is the wound center at Newport Hospital. I’d had a rather bad fall that tore up the skin on the back of one leg—at my age, weak skin and blood-thinning drugs make me vulnerable to this kind of thing. Dodie’s bandaging didn’t stop the bleeding, so she called the hospital and was told to bring me to the emergency room. Hoping to avoid that, Dodie said that what I had was really just a scrape, “a wound,” and the person she was talking to said, “Oh, a wound—then bring him to the wound center.” Apparently, this is the hospital’s best-kept secret. Half an hour later, I was in a reclining chair, and Dr. Rocco and Joe Fontenault, one of his assistants, were dressing my wound. What does the well-dressed wound wear these days? After a thorough cleansing, Joe applied a layer of white zinc cream, and then wrapped my leg, from foot to knee, in layers of adhesive bandage cloth, all without causing me the slightest pain. Dodie and I came back twice a week for re-bandaging, and then, two months after the wound had healed, we did it all again after I leaned into a stone step and gashed my left shin. When the bandage came off this one, Dr. Rocco and his crew of assistants gathered to give us a friendly farewell and a blue elastic bracelet with “Wound Care Alumni” on it. I look forward with pleasure to my next injury.May 21stI can no longer read books, magazines, or newspapers. This happened quite suddenly, about a week ago, when I found myself struggling so hard to read an essay in The New York Review of Books that I stopped trying. There had been warnings, I’ll admit, but until that moment it had not occurred to me that something so essential could just go away. Dodie has made an appointment for next week with Dr. Collins, the Newport ophthalmologist, and we’ll see what else, if anything, can be done.May 24thPaul Moakley, who runs The New Yorker’s film-and-video department, wants to make a short documentary about me. I knew only vaguely that the magazine had such a department. It seems that it is more than ten years old, and one of its short films won an Academy Award in March. My first impulse was to say no, because I’m so bad at remembering names, but Moakley was easy to talk to, and he had read a lot of my pieces in the magazine, and Dodie said, “Of course you’ll do it.” The first interview, or session, or whatever it turns into, has been set for August.May 26thSince we started reading the Times online, five years ago, the paper has lost some of its implacable authority. Dodie reads the headlines to me at breakfast. We decide which stories we want to hear and she reads them aloud. (At lunch, we turn to fiction—Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian McEwan.) The one feature we never skip is Maureen Dowd’s opinion column. “In Trump’s moral universe,” she wrote on May 24th, “the right thing to do is always the thing that makes him richer.”Kazanjian prepares lunch in Rhode Island.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerMay 28thToday is Dodie’s and my anniversary. We’ve been married for thirty-seven years. My son Spencer informed us, via e-mail, that if the marriage lasts three more years it will be longer than the three others combined.May 29thDr. Collins had no good news for me. I now have macular degeneration in both eyes. The recent sharp decline in my ability to read was expectable, he says, and stronger eyeglass lenses will not help. All this would have been pretty crushing if I had not been visited, a week earlier, by Molly Faerber, another Samaritan from the league of the legally blind. Molly brought a bag of useful devices, including plastic measuring cups and spoons with the amounts written on them in large white letters; all kinds of protective gloves to prevent burns and cuts in the kitchen; and, best of all, a compact, uncomplicated magnifying device that sits on the page of a book or a magazine and makes every word readable. I liked it so much that I ended up buying one.June 2nd“What time is it?” Dodie murmured, as I came back to bed from the bathroom.“A quarter to four,” I said. And for the next half hour, lying in bed, I found myself mouthing the words to “Chattanooga Choo Choo”—all of them, from “You leave the Pennsylvania station ’bout a quarter to four” to “Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo choo me home.”How on earth did I do that? I can barely remember the names of close friends, and I hadn’t listened to that song in at least five decades. Memory is often absurd this way. I don’t even like the song. Well, maybe I do, a little.June 8thElon Musk’s love affair with Donald Trump is over. After leaving the government, Musk suggested that Trump should be impeached. Trump said he was “very disappointed” with Musk, and threatened to cancel his many government contracts. Tune in next week, or the week after, or not at all.June 9thDodie said she was going to get more music in my life. I said no, my hearing aids are incompatible with music, but then I started to think about it. I always say no, Dodie tells me, and maybe she’s right. Have I experimented enough with the music button on my remote? I really miss listening to music. Maybe this is why I constantly find myself hearing it in my head—all kinds of music, from “Chattanooga Choo Choo” to Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute.” I used to listen to that sublime piece over and over again, and when I came to the repeated phrase of three ascending notes I could rarely suppress tears. I was overcome by the joy of it, and by the miracle of all those musicians landing with such precision and grace on the right note at the same moment. There must be some way to get that back. I’ll keep trying.June 10thAs if in answer to the last line in the above entry, today’s Times ran an ad for Horizon IX, a “revolutionary” new hearing aid that is “smaller than a coffee bean” and offers a staggering increase in hearing ability. Dodie was not impressed. She said ads like this appear all the time. She sent it to Sara Bozsik, our audiologist, who confirmed her doubts—my hearing loss is way beyond any such device.The paraphernalia of old age piles up. Molly Faerber, the angel of legal blindness, visited us again last week and left still more devices, including another magnifier to try out. She also had plastic pill boxes for each day of the week and a computer keyboard with keys about twice as large as the usual ones—it sits on top of the computer, and when I tried to use it the computer went wild, spinning off lines of question marks before I could induce it to stop. I think we’ll pass on that one.June 11thDo I think about death? Yes, of course. I think about it fairly often, but without emotion. The question was settled for me years ago, when I realized that I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife. What I believe is that all of us—humans, animals, birds, plants, trees, and so forth—are part of the same natural world, and that death is as essential as life. This, for me, has always been a calming thought.A great many humans believe in higher beings, single or multiple, and their belief has inspired miracles of thought and art, as well as senseless wars and cruelties. I respect the believers, but I don’t envy them. As for my living so long, I am grateful for that, and ready to accept death whenever it shows up.“For your appetizer, a work e-mail you accidentally glanced at and now need to respond to before enjoying the rest of your evening.”Cartoon by Sarah KempaJune 16thThe artists Cy Gavin and Alex Da Corte spent three days with us in Rhode Island. Cy is designing an installation at what used to be called the International Yacht Restoration School, for Dodie’s not-for-profit enterprise, Art&Newport, which she started, in 2017, to bring international contemporary art—and artists—to Newport. Cy’s new works are rarely like anything he’s done before. We had no idea what he would come up with this time, and neither did he. Alex, whose work is conceptual, is developing a series of lecture-performances at the Metropolitan Museum on the subject of art and glass. His January lecture is on Duchamp. “I am speaking as though I am him, in spirit,” Alex said. When we discussed it at dinner last night, I realized how little I remember about the “Large Glass,” Duchamp’s most complex work. (Its official name is “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.”) Duchamp spent years creating it, and then, when sloppy crating caused it to shatter in transit after an appearance at the Brooklyn Museum, he restored it, shard by shard, and told friends that he liked it better with the cracks. I published a biography of Duchamp in 1996. I’d like to reread it before Alex’s lecture, but I can’t—using the new magnifier, it would take me a month or more. Countless books on Duchamp have been published since mine came out, but no biographies in English. This makes me feel I still own the man—even though I’ve forgotten more about him than most people ever knew.As one of the last Duchampians who actually knew Duchamp, I am often asked, by artists and non-artists, what he was like. It’s a hard question to answer. When Mary Reynolds, whom Duchamp had lived with, off and on, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, was dying, from cancer, in 1950, she told her friend Elizabeth Hume that she could no longer stand being with people. “Am I people?” Hume asked, and Mary said, with a rueful laugh, “Yes, even you, too. Marcel is the only person I ever met who was not people. He could be in a room with me and I still felt alone.” It was a strange tribute, one that reflected her respect for the solitude and the absolute freedom that Duchamp needed to do his work. Mary had chosen to live in Paris, and Duchamp had moved to New York and become an American citizen. When he learned that she was dying, he went to Paris and stayed with her during the last ten days of her life.Tomkins, using a portable magnifier to view his handwritten notes, works on a journal entry alongside Kazanjian.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerJune 24thYesterday, quite suddenly, my eyesight got even worse. I had been making corrections in the June 16th entry. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back I could barely see the words on the page or the keys on the computer. What had happened? I lay down on the bed, with a vague hope that if I closed my eyes for a while things would clear up, but they didn’t. Shaken, I wondered if I was going really blind, not just legally. But away from the desk everything seemed normal. I could see the house next to ours in as much detail as usual, and the trees around it, and across the river to the houses there. The objects on my desk were blurry, though, and using the computer had become almost impossible. Something had definitely happened that morning. Or had it?Reading a book or a magazine was already impossible for me without a magnifier—why should using the computer be any different? The solution stared me in the face. I would have to start dictating, something I had never considered before. Dodie, when I broached this to her, said, “Of course. We’ll do it together.” She has to do a piece for Vogue first, and open the Cy Gavin exhibition, so it will be a while before we can start—what? My career as a dictator.July 2ndI’ve had two very bad days, feeling that my whole world was collapsing at breakneck speed. It wasn’t, of course. What’s happened is neither sudden nor surprising. Dodie and I discussed this at breakfast. I was raving about how I refused to make her give up two hours every morning to take dictation, and she said nothing would give her more pleasure. What we’re doing right now is exploring the process. She’s sitting at my desk with me, taking down what I say, deleting it so I can say something better. It’s going to be a while before this becomes even marginally doable, but I’m starting to feel a little calmer. “So am I,” Dodie says.I’m exhausted, but it’s a start.Tomkins takes an afternoon nap in Rhode Island.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerJuly 17thWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thoughtI summon up remembrance of things past,I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:In my junior year of college, I took a course on Shakespeare’s sonnets—just the sonnets. The professor condemned us to read all hundred and fifty-four of them, memorize as many as we could, and be tested on what we remembered. That sounded impossible. How could we remember even five of them? To our great surprise, however, almost all of us did fairly well on the first test. And although today I can’t quote a single entire sonnet, snatches from several of them, such as the opening lines of Sonnet 30, quoted above, have stayed with me.It fascinates me that these days, with my short-term memory in tatters, I can remember anything at all. What is it about those four lines that makes them stay in my head, and how does that relate to my faultless memory of every word in “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” which I never tried or wanted to memorize? Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory,” which Dodie is currently reading aloud to me, takes us deep into such questions. Nabokov’s command of words is Shakespearean as he describes the earliest experience he can remember. It occurred in the park of his wealthy family’s country estate on an August day in 1903, when he was four years old. He was walking with his mother, a “twenty-seven-year-old being in soft white and pink,” and his father, who was dressed in the colorful uniform of a Russian Horse Guard officer, which he had pulled out of storage to amuse the others. Walking between them, he writes, “I see my diminutive self as celebrating . . . the birth of sentient life.” We can’t all share Nabokov’s elevated consciousness of himself and his world, but I like to think there is a link between the excitement of his discovery and my remembering Shakespeare’s lines. My memory of them is not infallible. I tend to forget the word “sessions” in Sonnet 30. I struggle with “When to the . . .” To the what? And then, out of nowhere, “sessions” floats down, with the sibilance of its neighbors “sweet” and “silent.” Telling this to Dodie, I am for some reason close to tears, and so is she.July 22ndThe last entry was our first sustained attempt at dictation. Dodie put what I came up with into magnified type (three hundred per cent) that I could read, and then I spent the next four days moving sentences around, adding new words and deleting others, repunctuating everywhere, and rethinking what it was I wanted to say and how to say it. It was hard work, exhausting at times, and I kept going with the aid of brief naps. But all that was not much different from my lifelong writing process. For many years, it had seemed to me that the physical act of typing was essential to the flow of words that came to me in short bursts, but the ideas flowed about as well with Dodie typing.These days, sitting at my desk on the second floor of our Rhode Island cottage, I spend a lot of time looking out the window at the new house next door. It’s a modernistic, two-story structure with an Olympic-size swimming pool. The odd thing is that since it was finished, a couple of years ago, nobody seems to live there. Once in a while, we see a few young people swimming in the pool or lying on one of the many chaise longues; on rare occasions, always holidays, they stay overnight and leave the next day, but for months at a time the house is empty. We’ve never met the owners.We did know and like the people who used to live next door, Dottie and Ed Sheffield. They were friendly, and older than we were. Every year, Dottie, who belonged to the Newport Garden Club, gave Dodie ginger plants from her garden, to be used as a ground cover. And every summer they gave a dinner party for their many friends. After an hour of cocktails, dinner began with a cup of cold vichyssoise, served while we were still standing. Dottie and Ed stopped coming a few years back, and both of them died soon afterward. Their son Win came occasionally, but in 2022 we heard that he and his brother had sold the house. We were living full time in Rhode Island then, because of the pandemic. In November, we went down to New York for a few days, during which time I had a pacemaker installed. (My heartbeat is normal, but subject to fibrillations.) The day we left, a monstrous demolition vehicle appeared on the lawn next door, and when we came back the Sheffields’ house, Daisyfields, had vanished without a trace.August 14thI am flat on my back, on the floor of my bathroom. The top to my wooden shaving bowl dropped to the floor, and as I squatted to retrieve it I heard Dodie call out from the next room, “Don’t bend down! I’ll pick it up.” But I was already bending down and losing my balance. Dodie got there in time to prevent my head from hitting the sink as I fell, but I landed hard on my back and my rump.Falls are the scourge of old age. I’ve had four or five during the past two years, and it was pure luck that kept me from serious injury. Our E.N.T. doctor and dear friend, Vijay Anand, once misjudged the distance between himself and the bed he was sitting down on, and he spent the next year and a half in the intensive-care unit of the hospital. At first, I thought I’d been lucky again, but I found that, even with Dodie’s help, I was unable to get myself up from the floor. She called her brother John, who lives nearby. He came over, and, for what seemed like an hour, the three of us struggled to turn me over so I could be kneeling. I was sure that I would be able to get up from a kneeling position, but I was wrong. Never in my life had I felt so helpless. I finally let Dodie call 911. Five minutes later, a pair of strapping young men arrived from the Middletown Fire Department. Each put an arm under a shoulder, and one, two, three, I was standing. It turns out that in our town older people who can’t get up when they fall can call 911 for a “lift assist.”Once again, I’d escaped without major injuries, or so I thought. I was wrong about that, too. For the past two weeks, my legs have been so shaky that even a brief walk leaves me panting and in need of rest. I’ve been back to the wound center to have Dr. Rocco re-bandage the torn skin on my right arm, which had refused to stop bleeding. Something tells me that I’ll never be as spry as I was two weeks ago.August 15thThe erratic motion of a yellow butterfly is immune to artificial intelligence.August 18thPaul Moakley, the New Yorker filmmaker, e-mailed us to confirm that he is coming a week from today, with a cinematographer and a sound engineer, and that they will be with us for four days. They want to “document your regular routine at home,” as Moakley put it.The film thing causes me considerable anxiety. I’m still much shakier than I was before the Fall. Any sort of activity leaves me more or less exhausted, and my short-term memory is a constant embarrassment. But for some reason I think it’s going to be all right, even if I have to talk about my personal “narrative,” that dreadful term which keeps coming up in literary discussions. I can always take refuge in John Cage’s all-purpose stopper: “I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.”August 22ndAs my daytime naps grow stronger and deeper, it strikes me that this will continue until I just don’t wake up. That would qualify as Keats’s easeful death.August 24thI dreamed that Trump died and went to Heaven, where he immediately set about changing things. He fired a hundred or more of the busier angels, and flew into a rage when they paid no attention to him. St. Benedict, the Angel of Explanation, took him by the arm. “There are no jobs up here,” he said, “so you can’t really fire people.” Trump fired St. Benedict on the spot and began to work on a financial system that allotted seventeen per cent of Heaven’s assets to Trump. The problem was that money was unknown in Heaven. It took him a while to realize this, and when he tried to will it into existence several angels patted his left arm so sympathetically that it dropped off. Having only one arm was a handicap, and Trump took to raising high his remaining arm and shouting, “Fight!”After many more failures, Trump gave up on Heaven and decided to return to Earth. The angels agreed to help him do this, but nobody on Earth did. “Never again,” the people said. “He’s a really sore loser.”September 3rdThe filmmakers have come and gone. Four days and three nights of going about our life “as though they weren’t there,” while cumbersome cameras and sound systems scooped it all up. They filmed the way I combed my hair in the morning, and while I was taking my postprandial nap. I woke up to a long microphone boom three feet from my head. They spent an hour moving and adjusting reflectors so they could get the exact blue tone of my eyes, and more than an hour catching the way a Kleenex half pulled out of its box fluttered in the wind.All three of them, Paul Moakley; Roxana Reiss, the cinematographer; and Heather Monetti, the sound person, were charming and brimming with energy. Dodie and I both had deep-dish interviews with Moakley. Some of his questions baffled me. For example: “If you were writing a Profile, what would be the first question?” I waffled around that for a bit, asked him to repeat the question, and gave an answer that I recall as being inane. Most of his questions were good, though, and I struggled so hard to find equivalent answers that I had to lie down.He asked me about my parents. I told him that my mother had grown up in Rome, Georgia, the second of five children of a well-known newspaper editor and publisher named John Temple Graves. He edited, in succession, a number of newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, and when Hearst made his ill-considered run for the Presidency, in 1908, my grandfather was the choice for Vice-President. I never knew either of my grandfathers—they died before I was born—but I grew up thinking that John Temple Graves was an important figure. About thirty years ago, I learned, from W. J. Cash’s book, “The Mind of the South,” that he had been an outspoken racist and was largely responsible for inciting the great Atlanta race riot of 1906. I don’t know what my mother really thought about slavery and its abolition.“We don’t have to be friends just because our kids are friends and we’re married.”Cartoon by Daniel KanhaiMy mother was much warmer than my father. She played the piano and sang songs from Broadway musicals, devoted countless hours to working in her extensive garden, and had many friends in our suburban community. My father was a born New Yorker. In the First World War, he served as an instructor in the newly commissioned Army Air Service. He came back unscathed, in time to rescue the family business, the Newark Plaster Company, from bankruptcy. He expanded the firm’s range of products and ran it quite successfully until the mid-nineteen-fifties, when he sold it to the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation. I sometimes thought he would rather have done something else—been a publisher or maybe even a writer. What gave me this idea was a story he used to tell about Samuel Johnson: The printer who had published Johnson’s writings died, and his widow came to Johnson and asked for help. “The only thing he left me was his business,” she said, “and I know nothing about printing. What should I do?”“Do not worry, Madam,” Johnson said, “for if business were difficult, those who do it could not.”Dad taught me and Fred, my older brother, how to swim, play tennis, ski, sail, ride horses, and fish for smallmouth bass in Canadian lakes. He did everything well, with a kind of inborn authority that I was sure I could never achieve. I had a painful stutter when I was growing up. It didn’t go away until I was in my twenties (it still comes back now and then, in stressful situations), and it was always worse when I talked with my father.September 24thWe spent last week in New York. Dodie and our French friend Donatien Grau had recruited twenty-five artists to make works for an exhibition inspired by “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” Michael Chabon’s novel, which has been re-created as an opera. The exhibition—installed at the Metropolitan Opera House—and the opera were both scheduled to open on Sunday night, ushering in the Met’s fall season.I had looked forward to being in the city again, after four months in Rhode Island, but I found that I was not at all happy there. Our shabby old building on the Upper East Side had become a construction site. Hardhat workers were pulling up the big cement squares on the wraparound terrace so they could address leaks in the roof, and there was scaffolding on two sides of the building which seemed likely to be there for a long time. Our scruffy penthouse struck me as evidence of a life out of control. For thirty years, we’d been looking for an apartment we could buy (ours is a rental), but every time we came close we both realized that we liked our current one better. The rent kept going up, though, and as a result what we have is high upkeep and no equity. The place is hopelessly cluttered. We ran out of bookshelves years ago, and Dodie’s solution was to stack new books on the floor, with great care given to size, shape, and color—to hell with content. I counted seventeen book towers, some of them quite tall, in the living room alone.Dodie had arranged for two close friends who were in the show, John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, to meet us at our apartment before the opening on Sunday night, to help tie my black bow tie and get us to our seats in the opera house. Anna Weyant, a young painter who was also in the show, came over, too. She had brought a bottle of chilled Montrachet, which turned our impromptu gathering into an event. After that, we all went in a caravan of cars to the Met. During the half-hour intermission, Dodie showed us as much as she could of her exhibition, called “Super Duper,” for which she had asked the artists to imagine what a superhero would look like today. From my wheelchair (Feebleman takes over at big events), it struck me as a cornucopia of powerful images.The opening-night audience was wildly enthusiastic about the opera. To me, the music seemed ponderous, but for the first time in ages I could actually hear it. My hearing aids, which had always turned music into noise, had been readjusted the day before, and this time it worked—the music sounded like music. There was a dinner party afterward, and when John and Rachel brought us back uptown it was after midnight.Tomkins and Kazanjian are joined in their New York apartment by John Currin and Rachel Feinstein on the Metropolitan Opera’s opening night. Currin ties Tomkins’s bow tie, while Feinstein plays an instructional video from YouTube and Kazanjian holds up her cellphone light.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New YorkerOctober 2ndCulled from the Department of Affordable Aphorisms:Willful waste makes woeful waffles.The early bird really dislikes the taste of worms.Nonagenarians who go to the opera and stay up late need three days to recover.October 17thMy life as a centenarian is two months away. It looks like a sure thing, although the signs of advanced old age keep mounting. My forgetting machine operates 24/7. For several hours this week, I couldn’t remember the name of Dodie’s brother Powel, who’s been staying with us for a few days, and in the late afternoons my knees are so weak that I wonder if I can make it up the stairs.I keep telling people that the first hundred years are the hardest, but right now the future looks unpromising. As the late musician and philosopher Thomas Wright (Fats) Waller used to say, “One never knows, do one?”November 6thThe idea of home has been weighing on me. For seventy years, if someone asked me where I lived I would say—and not without a touch of pride—New York City. But early in the pandemic Dodie and I moved to our small house in Rhode Island, and a year ago we made it our primary residence. I still refer to New York as home, although the noise and confusion and rush of the city now make me edgy and tired. We’re back in the city again this week, and it feels less and less like home. Dodie says that when I’m here I miss Rhode Island and when I’m there I miss New York, which is probably true.Growing up in Llewellyn Park, in West Orange, which is considered the first gated community in America, I could see the tallest Manhattan buildings from my bedroom window. I did not long to go there. Our trips to the city were usually to visit my paternal grandmother, whose sardonic wit made me uneasy. When my brother was first allowed to drink coffee, Grandmother asked him, at breakfast, “And how do you take your coffee, Frederick?” He said, “Black, please.” She looked at him quizzically and said, “Hero!”A few years later, I was taken out of school twice a week and driven into the city, to an institute for speech disorders. My stutter had become a real handicap at school, where some teachers would save me embarrassment by not calling on me. The classes at the institute had no effect whatsoever, so far as I could tell. My stutter came and went for another decade or so, worse in stressful situations (the telephone was one) and barely noticeable in relaxed ones. It stayed that way during my years in the U.S. Navy and at Princeton, and then it just faded away, with brief reappearances here and there. By this time, I was married and living in Manhattan, which was far too exciting in those years to be a home.Looking back, the whole idea of there being “no place like home” seems a bit ephemeral. I’m sure many people would disagree with that, and, in some ways, I envy them. I certainly don’t share Robert Frost’s frosty description of home as “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”“The first rule of the Park Slope Food Co-op is you do not stop talking about the Park Slope Food Co-op.”Cartoon by Juan AstasioNovember 18thA small and rather quiet exhibition of works by Robert Rauschenberg opened recently at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “Quiet” is not a word we associate with this artist, and, of course, it doesn’t really fit. “Barge” (1962-63), a silk-screen painting that occupies most of one wall in the show, is thirty-two feet long, and the images in it range from trucks, rooftop water towers, spacecrafts, stencilled text, football players, highway interchanges, and an enlarged mosquito to parts of Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.” But many of the fifteen drawings, prints, and paintings on view have the delicate, subtle quietude that this protean artist could summon whenever he felt like it. The show marks what would have been Rauschenberg’s hundredth birthday (he died in 2008), and it set me thinking about my relationship with Bob and how it influenced my understanding of contemporary art.We met in 1961. I was working on my Jean Tinguely Profile, and someone told me I should talk to Rauschenberg about him. The two of them had bonded, the person said, when Tinguely came to the city in 1960 to create “Homage to New York.” Tinguely had asked Rauschenberg to contribute something to his self-destroying sculpture in the garden at MOMA, and Bob contributed a “money-thrower” device that scattered silver dollars on Tinguely’s mega-work while it was committing suicide. I went to Bob’s studio, a large loft on lower Broadway, and we talked about Tinguely and God knows what else for at least two hours. Bob and I were the same age, but our backgrounds could hardly have been more different. He had grown up in Port Arthur, Texas, and didn’t discover that there was such a thing as being an artist until he joined the Navy and went to the Huntington Library and Art Museum, in San Marino, California. Among the many things I learned in our first conversation was that self-expression had no connection with what he was doing. “I want what I do to be more interesting than that,” he told me.I spent many hours in Bob’s loft, while I was writing about him for the magazine and afterward, when I was working on his biography. During much of that time, I was waiting until he felt like answering my questions. People—friends, other artists, dealers, museum curators—kept arriving and leaving, and I had to wait my turn. Although Bob admitted to being dyslexic, he was a brilliant talker, and he knew quite a lot about many things. For Bob, making art was always a collaboration of one kind or another. He collaborated with the materials he chose to put in his combines, many of which—an Angora goat with an automobile tire around its middle, an ancient quilt that he didn’t need because warm weather had set in—were making their début appearance in a work of art. Bob didn’t want to exert control over these objects; he wanted to let each one show him what to do with it.I used to wonder if Bob’s work could last, physically. All those non-art materials seemed to invite the ravages of time, and some of the combines, I’d say, have begun to seem like relics. But to anyone who has looked at a Rauschenberg, really looked, this hardly matters, because the images are so deeply imprinted on your mind’s eye. The critic Hilton Als, writing in the November 17th issue of The New Yorker, makes a compelling argument for the staying power of Rauschenberg’s work, which is as influential today as it was in the nineteen-fifties.In 1959, when I was just starting to get interested in the art of our time, I did something that I had never done before and would never do again. I was at the Museum of Modern Art, standing in front of a piece called “Double Feature,” by Rauschenberg, in an exhibition called “16 Americans.” It was a medium-sized collage, one of whose elements was part of a man’s shirt—the part with a small pocket. By chance, I was alone in the gallery. My heart was racing. I fished a quarter out of my pants and slipped it into the shirt pocket in the collage. What was I thinking? That this act somehow made me a participant? Or was it just a quiet bravo, a vote of confidence? It made me feel good for the rest of the afternoon.November 24thAs December 17th draws closer, I’ve started to wonder about the future. I’d like to keep going with this chronicle, but my eyes are getting weaker, less and less able to perform my part of the writing process that Dodie makes possible. When she types my spoken text, I spend the next few days editing it on my antediluvian laptop—changing words, deleting sections and redoing them, fine-tuning the focus. This gets harder and harder, but the alternative, I fear, is doing nothing. I may be a prisoner of prose.December 4thI woke up to go to the bathroom at a few minutes after three on Thanksgiving morning, but my legs wouldn’t take me there. Dodie, who hears everything, asked, “Are you all right?”My attempt to explain was so slurred that we both knew the answer was no. I’d had a stroke.It’s now a week later, and there’s little or no progress. I can walk a bit, very slowly and with Dodie’s help. The slurring comes and goes. We are cancelling nonessential appointments, but not the medical tests, which all confirm the stroke.I can do a pretty fair imitation of somebody who has not had a stroke, but I don’t fool anyone.December 6thThe medical consensus seems to be that I will get a lot better, but it will take time, and (wouldn’t you know) I’ll have to do most of the work—new exercises ahoy. Meanwhile, my centennial is at the door.This will be the last entry for a while. ♦Tomkins and Kazanjian in Rhode Island.Video by Roxana Reiss for The New Yorker