On Being Forty

 "You're forty," says the doctor. "This means we're soon going to need to take a good, long look at your prostate. And your colon. Soon. Not now. But that's on the horizon."

I have always felt like an elderly man in a not-yet-elderly body. Right now, two pop-culture events have consumed all my attention: Bonnie Raitt winning a big Grammy, and Kathy Bates returning to TV in a "re-mount" of "Matlock." When other people aren't abuzz with these matters, I'm actually surprised.

My husband returns from work, and I ask if all his colleagues have been chattering about Raitt. Marc gives me a pitying look, and, in a gentle way, he says, "No."

I understand that I am forty because my mouth is beginning to shut down; for a long while, dentists have urged me to get a mouthguard, so that I stop grinding my teeth. The teeth inflict pressure on the gums, which have now receded like the edges of the Great Salk Lake. I tend to drown out the dentists when they talk at me; I smile and say, "Absolutely!" And I disappear. But now there are murmurings about grafting tissue onto my battered gums, just as one might apply a patch to a hole in an old, nasty coat--and so I feel I may need to act in the near future.

Also, my heroes are dying: Janet Malcolm, Alison Lurie, Beverly Cleary, Stephen Sondheim, Hilary Mantel, Joan Didion, Charles Kimbrough, William Trevor, Rebecca Luker, Terrence McNally, Tomie dePaola, Eric Carle, Angela Lansbury, Jacques d'Amboise, Jerry Pinkney, Christopher Plummer, Maggie Smith's "Downton Abbey" persona....

At least I still have Sally Field. At least I have "Eighty for Brady."

(P.S. Kirstie Alley wasn't my hero, but--no question--I noted her death.)

(P.P.S. William Hurt. Not a hero. Still: Odd that he is dead.)