Georgeann Murphy

Today is another glorious autumn afternoon in Madbury NH, a fortnight past celebrating my 70^th birthday with good friends on an equally fine day, fall color ablaze outdoors, afternoon light raking through the west windows as supremely talented Parisienne pianist Mathilde Handelsman played a program of Schumann, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Gershwin, ending with a hilarious rendition of variations on “Happy Birthday” first composed and then performed by Cyprien Katsaris at the White House on the occasion of Yehudi Menuhin’s 70^th.  Prosecco flowed, followed by platters of excellent sushi and the two birthday cakes I had baked, one lemon curd/mascarpone, one orange creamsicle.

So many wonderful conversations finally ended in a talk circle of visual artists, charming Mathilde, and the two Honors students I had hired to help, Ram and Yuri, who, it turned out, were happy to chat about jazz.

My little introductory speech had gone over well—a brief meditation on (1) “how amazingly unlikely” (pace Monty Python’s “Universe Song”) my being 70 was, (2) my up-till-then favorite birthday party (number 9, a pirate party enhanced by my namesake Grandpa George Anthony Murphy, a commercial artist who decorated my treasure chest cake and had once introduced my young father George Edward to fellow Daytonian Orville Wright), AND (3) how amazingly unlikely it was that after surviving a global pandemic and the annus horribilus x 4 that was the Trump administration, 27 lifetimes of choices, accidents, coincidences, and serendipities had all for the moment brought this group together in one home in Madbury NH.  All the planning that had occupied me for weeks paid off with an even better celebration than I had imagined, only the second time since my darling David’s death I have felt completely happy.  (The other time was standing with the rest of Symphony Hall to applaud the astonishing performance by Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, and Leonidas Kavakos of Beethoven’s No. 6, the Pastoral, one giant symphony convincingly, ecstatically rendered by three extraordinary musicians).  It was, indeed, a Happy Birthday.

My elevated spirits lasted three days as I slowly put the house back in order and determined to leave the big library table set with birthday cards for the rest of the month.

And then came, as if by some natural law, the post-party depression:  I was OLD, David was gone, my body ached.  I actually sprained my left thumb struggling to put on support stockings.  Oy.  I’d not worked on my Shakespeare book for weeks, and lamented having lived long enough to see even one Shakespeare course dropped as a requirement for English majors.  I rehearsed and nursed the various slings and arrows I’d suffered in my 25 years off the tenure track at UNH, grieving the many degradations of a liberal arts education.  And that was just MY microcosm!  The threat of senseless nuclear war, revived after so many years of détente; global inflation; the January 6 insurrection; a nation seemingly irreparably divided by the lies of self-serving liars; COVID lurking; the second Elizabethan era ended, the Queen seemingly taking with her the values I was raised to believe universally applicable:  it was all troppo.  I learned from linguist Jennifer Geacone-Cruz on NPR’s Hidden Brain a Japanese phrase that seemed an apt descriptor of my emotional state:  mendokusai, meaning “something between ‘I can’t be bothered’ or ‘I don’t want to do it’ or ‘I recognize the incredible effort that goes into something, even though it shouldn’t be so much of an effort.’”  I was in what my mother Virginia, famous for her malaprops, would call “the dooldrums.”

What turned that around?  People, ideas, art, nature, getting up and doing what needs to be done (pace Garrison Keillor).  In short order, I had another of my always novel, always engaging weekly phone conversations with my dear friend Cameron, a baby step toward normal preceded by a lunch date with a new acquaintance, Martha, beginning at her elegant apartment.

The lunch that followed at an Indian restaurant in Portsmouth, Taaza, featured delicious Punjabi cuisine and the delightfully philosophical conversation of the owner Waheed and his assistant Omar.  I attended an entertaining (if facile) public lecture by Eric Klinenberg (Mr. Social Infrastructure) recapping his book Palaces for the People, the Oyster River Community Read happily discussed the following week by us, four women previously unknown to each other, meeting at the lovely Madbury library, where I could recommend to them an accidentally complementary book, Jenny Odell’s erudite and transformative How to Do Nothing:  Resisting the Attention Economy, itself a gift from another good (and erudite!) friend, Michael.

Then came a spur-of-the-moment decision to book a good seat for the closing matinee performance of Boston Ballet’s season-opening program, “My Obsession,” at the Opera House.

The program included a pas de deux ballet of irresistible attraction, Helen Pickett’s 2009 TSUKIYO, so beautiful it brought me to tears.  Just moving through the past two weeks running quotidian errands has meant driving though the stunning October foliage of New England:  more beauty!

And then my birthday present to myself arrived:  two wrought-iron railings to make accessing our front door’s four granite steps—that passage to the elevated-in-every-sense space of Gnawwood’s piano nobile library—much less hazardous.  Welder Bryan and assistant Gary not only prepared the steps for the railings’ final installation post powder coating, but also cheerfully helped me get the 66-pound patio umbrella stand down off the deck, another step in preparing for winter.

Then yesterday I successfully navigated the tricky business of painting the south-facing deck railing with penetrating oil, climbing up and down the 10-foot ladder and ambidextrously handling the brush without strain or incident, completing that fall task, and again GETTING SOMETHING DONE:  the opposite of mendokusai.  With literal railings north and west prepared, I was back ON the rails, not stuck on some metaphorical mendokusai sidetrack.

Yesterday my friend Carol sent me a photo she shot while hiking in Bryce Canyon, both delighting me and renewing my longing for the tonic effects of confronting geological time among the red rocks of Utah David first introduced me to.  How can the “problems” of one self-absorbed, privileged person be important when all of human history amounts to a few sedimentary inches on the earth’s crust?  Salutary nature bathing:  always a good idea. 

So.  I’m back, older but not over.  Seventy is not so bad.