Search for romance

I have been sick for more than a month. I’ve had a terrible hacking cough that turned me upside-down. I did not realize it but it shook my brains thoroughly, upsetting my ability to think clearly and isolating me from most of my friends because I did not want to spread such an inconvenient disease. My night table was cluttered with cough syrup, homeopathic medicines, a bottle of ginger juice with honey. I finished a bottle and a half of honey taken with apple cider vinegar sometimes, other times with cinnamon. Finally I am much better, still with a small mild cough, but even my mind is clearer.

How does one nurse oneself through such a terrible episode? You need distractions. I tried computer games — jigsaw puzzles, successfully finished those and still coughed terribly. I tried other games but didn’t particularly enjoy them. Then one day I went to a meeting of women and someone much younger than me, maybe in her 30s or early 40s, raved about the book Fifty Shades of Grey. You gotta read it, she said, her eyes sparkling. 

I looked at her and smiled. That’s my style. Then I thought, what do I know about Fifty Shades of Grey? It’s touted as an erotic book for women. Is erotica still important to me? I watched an interview of the book’s author and she didn’t impress me. She seemed embarrassed about how successful her book was. Then I heard — my TV is on all the time though I don’t watch it, I listen — that in America women were buying a lot of tape from their hardware stores because of this book. Okay, I thought, I will read it. Let’s see what it does to this old broad.

I began Fifty Shades of Grey. Christian Grey is the name of a mysterious young man, the hero. Ana, short for Anastasia, the heroine, goes to interview him in place of her bestfriend, who happens to be sick with the flu. Christian Grey is a 27-year-old billionaire, an astoundingly successful businessman who turns out to also be extremely tall, exceptionally good-looking and very mysterious. That description already gives me a sense of how fictional this book is, sort of a sophisticated Emily Loring (in my day). If you don’t know Emily Loring, think about Mills & Boone. Anyway she literally stumbles or falls into his office and that is the beginning of the story. He falls in love with her and will not stop until he has her.

I begin to be fascinated with the book. Between all the erotica — and there is a lot so that after a while you get indifferent to it since the language is always the same — is a pretty good story about the way this young man grew up. All the while that I’m reading the first book, I keep thinking – this reminds me of something I used to read in my 20s. Then suddenly it hit me – Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins and all the subsequent Robbins books that I grew crazy about then. Come on, your 20s are the years when erotica drives us mad. After all, they are our best childbearing years. We women are designed that way. In our 20s we are most susceptible to romance because those are the best years for making and having babies.

In our 30s we have a mid-life crisis or, in other words, that’s when we peak. If we haven’t had children, we fall in love with any guy, usually the wrong one, and we get pregnant because our biological clocks are ticking wildly. Last call for babies, it seems to say. Going on 40, our chances for having wonderful babies diminish. So better do it now. Or you face the fact that the man you had babies with in your 20s is a heel and you have to change your life. These things are all mid-life possibilities. Women hit mid-life earlier than men. Men hit their mid-life at 40.

But back to Fifty Shades of Grey. It is a romantic, sophisticated book. I would have loved this book in my 20s and 30s. In my 40s to around 65, I might have disdained it as fluffy. But now that I am slowly pushing towards 70, I find it differently nostalgic. It is a romantic book and you know what romance does to women. It turns us soft, smiley, softens our eyes though in our 20s we would be starry-eyed. The notion of romance makes us want to fall in love again.

Do you think I stopped in Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One? No, of course not. I have finished Book Two and now I am on Book Three. Now all I can do is wonder — what will I do after I finish Book Three?

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