Until You Die

Kat of the Crescat has a crush on a Young Fogey. She observes that she is 35 and asks if she isn't too old for crushes. The answer, of course, is no.

The incomparable Nancy Mitford once wrote a letter (actually she wrote so many letters that it would take me hours to find it and copy it here) about being interviewed by a lovely young lady. Nancy had won international fame as the author of In Pursuit of Love and, as an aristocratic Englishwoman who lived in Paris and dressed beautifully, was a heroine to younger literary ladies. (They did not know, as Nancy did not know, that her lover would up and marry her rival, the beast.)

This lovely young lady asked all the professional questions and then, as you or I certainly would do, got to the important, personal stuff and shyly asked at what age feelings of unrequited love went away. "Never," said the almost-elderly Miss Mitford. The lovely young lady was bowled away by this remark.

This reminds me of when I was about 30 and terribly fit and the nurse examining me told me I had the heart of a fourteen year old.

"Tell me about it," I said.

And this also reminds me of my wonderful Canadian grandmother. My American grandmother never struck me as ever having been a girly-girl; food and family quarrels were much more her interests. But my Canadian grandmother was very chic and outgoing, hung out with a gang of friends, did her nails, had her hair done, and went away on holiday to a Muskoka resort, where she drank cocktails. She had been enormously in love with my grandfather, and although she was pursued by the occasional widower, she had no interest in marrying again.

However, when I was grown-up and divorced (and invalidated, as they say in Poland, not that my Protestant granny could ever get her head around that), and my grandmother was quite elderly, I discovered that this lack of interest in marrying again was not because Grandma had packed in her appreciation of the caffeine in the cappuccino of life. Not at all.

Grandma--my mother will kill me for telling this story again--Grandma on two or maybe three occasions panicked in the middle of the night over some pain or other and summoned an ambulance. The ambulance would arrive promptly and young male paramedics would rush to my grandmother's aid.

"And I said, 'Well, you're all very handsome'," related Grandma after one such episode.

"MOTHER," said my mother in an awful voice, and Grandma giggled.

"Why not?" she said. "And it all gave me quite a thrill."

"It all cost two hundred and fifty dollars," growled my mother.

"What?" cried my Scottish-Canadian grandmother. "Two hundred and fifty dollars?" She meditated on this and sniffed. "Huh. Some thrill."

Eventually Grandma "temporarily" moved from her house to the local nursing home for round-the-clock care. Instead of young paramedics, the place abounded with young orderlies, and even--as my Grandmother related with a twinkle--a handsome young masseur. I think the idea of therapeutic massage would have been absolutely scandalous to my grandmother when she was younger, but as it seemed to be one of the very few perks life offered to the 80+ set, she enjoyed it.

It delights me to no end that as an eighty-year old my grandmother had the freedom and confidence to flirt with the paramedics loading her onto an ambulance. I doubt, however, that she ever actually lost her heart to a paramedic or masseur, so maybe the pains of arthritis, etc., do cancel out the pains of unrequited love.

But it would appear that the feminine appreciation of masculine youth and beauty does not necessarily flee with the approach of old age. Thank heavens for that.

Update: Samantha drops another brick. Obviously she never read the works of Nancy Mitford. This report made me howl. Dear, dear. How odd to make money by soliciting hatred of oneself.