Ma ride ben chi ride/ La risata final.

So sings Falstaff in Verdi's opera--"He who has the last laugh has the best laugh"is more or less the translation. It is a thought which is how a friend would describe my triumphant ride to the exit of life.  When he began reading my blog he counseled me against yielding too often to the morbid tone as in Horace's famous poem the first verse of which is
Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume                            Alas, Postume, oh, Postume the years are flying by,
labuntur anni, nec pietas moram                              they drop away, and no amount of goodness
    rugis et instanti senectae                                      will hold at bay the wrinkles of old age
        adferet indomitaeque morti;                             nor grant delay to death that conquers all.
Anyone who has watched the documentary of Joan Rivers will shudder at the intensity with which she is determined to follow Falstaff's advice.  I found the film quite exhausting and her as one of those monstres sacrées better viewed than known.  I cannot imagine what her legendary Thanksgiving dinners could be like.  Living in Sarasota which is often jokingly called "God's waiting room" has been a revelation for me who has spent almost his entire life in university precincts where the average age of the resident population must be twenty.  I really never noticed old people before that even though as time progressed I had ample opportunity looking into a mirror or talking with my husband, not to mention lunching in Cambridge with friends from graduate school days.  But nothing really settled it for me until I began to work out at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club which is famous for its many tennis courts always in operation from early morning until the evening hours.  They are filled with energetic people darting about and returning serves with a fluency that belies the age they reveal in repose which has to be well up into the high eighties, the women whose naked arms and legs in shorts reveal skin hanging in subtle folds, having lost all the flesh that once provided the padding for the skeleton.  The energy and enthusiasm of their glance shows that they are going with Falstaff not with Horace.  I can see that it was my mother who kept me in thrall as a child to the morbid view of things.  She never got over losing her first husband to influenza four months after their marriage, her subsequent marriage to a dynamo who impregnated her twelve times in his zeal for family, her horrifying discovery that she was utterly alone some sixteen years later when he died in a sudden car crash and left her with the six that survived to birth far from her natural family and friends.  I remember once making these observations to a crabbed old lady as we sat in a limousine going to the funeral of my first wife, a proper time for melancholy thoughts, to which the old lady responded furiously and angrily "Well, with all her money I'm crying for her."  My mother was so witty, and gracious, and fun at table, while introspective and melancholy over cocktails when we were alone.  She died at sixty one; the melancholy won out.  As you can see, she has quite a hold on me.