Karen Stabiner

An expiration date on my life — says who?

The podiatrist is a few years older than my daughter, is my guess, and I like her because she’s a foot detective, determined to find an explanation for the beat-up third toe on my left foot. Which she does: It’s the longest toe on that foot, and several times a week it gets jammed against my sneaker as I pedal my bike 5 or 7 or 10 miles. All I need are shoes a half size up and some moleskin padding. That’s her prescription. I’ll be fine.

She smiles. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “that you’re still so active.”

Still so active. Not “so active.” Not “active.” Still so active.

Silly me. I’d passed my cycling expiration date and never noticed. I am an anomaly merely by doing what I have always done.

I try to move through the marginalized world of older women with a semblance of grace, so I smiled, thanked her, and thought positive thoughts until I was in the parking lot. Then I considered how her voice had softened into a sing-song, accompanied by a pat-pat-pat on my shoulder, as she shifted from clinician to booster. She thought my diligent attempt to outdistance time on the bike path was cute. She’d code-switched to the type of voice we use with diminutive creatures who amuse and rely on us, like puppies.

She probably didn’t realize what she’d done. That’s becaus ageism is one of the subtlest and sweetest of all the isms, discrimination and dismissal wrapped in a candy shell. And it’s worse for women, who’ve spent a lifetime trying to escape our lesser gender identity — the little woman, the weaker sex — only to find ourselves treated that way again late in the game.

Some will say that this is all in my head, that I’m too sensitive, which is what people usually tell women to dodge whatever we’ve just said. I am at high risk for overreaction, I’ll give you that, because I am small and people too often assume I am less capable than they are because I can’t look at them eye to eye. I wince at the words “petite” and “tiny,” and tend to shoot back, “Not in spirit, I’m not."

A bit hair-trigger, granted — and yet not necessarily wrong. Here is a short list of things I’ve been advised not to do lately, even by people my own age:

▪ Travel to Italy alone.

▪ Rent a car to drive from Florence to Pienza, a city I have never visited, because I feel a compelling need to walk the Path of Art and Soul, see the 28 sculpted benches along its length, and consume a great deal of fresh pecorino cheese at the source.

▪ Ice skate.

▪ Ride my bicycle with no hands.

I am not incautious. I arrived at the car rental office in Florence armed with a sheaf of printed instructions and maps in case there was no English-language GPS, which of course there was. Hertz and the owner of the Airbnb would notice if I didn’t return that evening. My cellphone was fully charged.

I agreed not to skate until the orthopedist said my knee had recovered from a jarring encounter with a piece of sidewalk that gave way.

And I have guardrail rules for no-hands cycling: only on the bike path, never on crowded weekends, not if the winds are high, not if I’ve had a bad day. When the chorus of concern got too loud, I asked the knee doc for his expert opinion. If he thought it was a bad idea, I would give it up, grudgingly.

He said that riding hands-free was in fact a very good idea within the parameters I’d set. I was teaching my brain to balance, training myself to avoid the very falls that plague older people’s waking dreams. He was all for it.

Being brave is not easy — ou should’ve seen my leg tremble when I shifted that rental car into drive — but there’s an imperative at work here. The stakes are high, because in each case — the drive, the hike, the skates, the bike — the question is the same, and definitive. Am I too old to do this anymore?

And the follow-up: Says who?

I hiked for over an hour outside Pienza, got lost twice, doubled back, and finally arrived at the end of the path and the last bench — the 13-foot Guardian of the Valley, whose eternal job is to keep watch over the Val d’Orcia. Then I hiked back down, under his benevolent gaze, because I am, like I said, active.

A couple of months later I was in line at a neighborhood bakery, wearing my Columbia Journalism School baseball cap, a proud souvenir of having taught there for 10 years.

The young guy in front of me took note.

“Are you still a journalist?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

If he had been wearing the cap, would I have said, “Are you yet a journalist?” No. That would be disrespectful.

Which brings me to a solution. Rather than assume limitations based on age, at either end of the spectrum, we could approach each other with the assumption of competence. How about, “That sounds like an adventure,” in reference to Pienza, rather than “That’s crazy,” which was one of the reactions I got. How about “How’d you learn to do that?” rather than warnings about bike accidents and broken hips.

I may be old, but I’m not stupid. There will come a day when I stop pedaling and skating and traveling alone.

It’ll come. Don’t rush me, is all I ask.

In precarious times, an old restaurant idea makes new sense

Los Angeles Times

Back in the 1980s, the norm-busting adman Jay Chiat liked to pose the question, “How big can we get before we get bad?” as his Los Angeles-based boutique agency attracted clients like Apple and Nike.

It is all too easy, he figured, to do more and accomplish less.

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The DiCaprio effect when dating after 50

Boston Globe

Men prefer younger women. If you’re a woman over 60 — maybe even 50 — you know I’m right.

Read more.

Should we say this term of endearment to friends?

AARP

It happened without warning.

A friend and I were nearing the one-hour mark on a meandering phone call, the kind of catch-up we depend on now that we don’t live in the same city, but I had to get back to work.

“Listen, sweetheart,” I said, “I have to go.”

“Okay,” she replied. “Love you.”

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My lonely boycott hasn’t hurt In-N-Out Burger, but our small decisions do add up

Los Angeles Times

In-N-Out Burger is the most popular fast-food restaurant in California, according to a data-tracking site.

Maybe it’s a great burger, and maybe that’s why it’s so popular. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never had one. For that matter, neither had my grown daughter, for the first 12 years of her life, because I refused to sign her up for the In-N-Out Burger truck that showed up at her elementary school on Fridays to give parents a break from packing lunch.

Not me. The other kids got burgers and fries, but my daughter got pasta and an apple. It made her feel left out, which made me feel bad, and yet I did not fold.

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Family dishes

The New York Times

My father was truly a fool for love. I was born with 10 fingers and 10 toes, a big thing to a man who had 10 fingers but only nine toes, the second and third on his right foot fused together . The doctor thought that the standard “You have a healthy baby girl” would suffice, but no: My father insisted that he run back to the delivery room — run! — to inventory my hands and feet.

I could breathe on my own, a common enough feat among newborns, except that my parents’ first child, a boy who arrived too early and spent a single day on earth, could not.

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Restaurant baby

It is 11 a.m. The empty bar at this hour seems about 40 feet long, curved mahogany polished to a high sheen, like the shinbone of some extinct woodland giant. The mirror behind it reflects row upon row of bottles, the popularity of their contents revealed by the level of liquid in each one. The room smells of leather, cigarettes, and last night’s perfume. My drink sits on a napkin in front of me. Down at the far end of the bar, the owner huddles with a friend over bottomless cups of coffee. On his way to refill their cups, he smiles and wordlessly plunks another maraschino cherry in my glass.

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Brisket brought us together

I grew up after the crinoline and before the slip dress, on propriety's waning edge. When I was little, I wore a dotted-swiss and organdy party dress to Passover Seder at my aunt's house, and I dutifully scanned my patent-leather shoes for nicks while I waited for the service to end. But by the time I graduated to a kilt with matching sweater and knee socks, questioning the status quo had become the politically correct attitude, and so my sister and my cousins and I perfected an array of disaffected expressions to let everyone at the table know that we had far more important things to do.

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