How do you sum up one's life that spanned over a century? That was born into a world during the Spanish flu and the final months of WW1, lived through the Depression, served during WW2, and a hundred years later, survived another pandemic?

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How do you sum up one's life that spanned over a century? That was born into a world during the Spanish flu and the final months of WW1, lived through the Depression, served during WW2, and a hundred years later, survived another pandemic?

Celebrated author and literary critic, NY Yankees fanatic, a friend of nearly three decades, a mean martini mixer, someone who would indulge me with her stories of friend Studs Terkel, a surprise lunch with Gypsy Rose Lee, her semester in Mexico City as a young college student whose chaperone was surreptitiously attending the political meetings of Diego Rivera and guests - and how she pleaded to go along but was denied, her biggest professional "mistake" as a young proofreader for Mademoiselle magazine in the 1940s, when she was asked to read and review a manuscript, of which she thought very little and tossed into the wastepaper basket, telling me she wished she had read more than the first few pages (she laughed when she said it was Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead).

Grumbach was a prolific writer; the author of seven novels and six memoirs, a biography on Mary McCarthy, and a children's book. Her novels often explored the social hardships of women and lesbian characters, all during a time when uncommon in mainstream fiction. She also worked as a literary critic, contributing to publications including the New York Times and the Saturday Review. She acted as literary editor of the New Republic, a book reviewer for NPR's "Morning Edition" and PBS's "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," and wrote book reviews and literary criticism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar and other publications.

I was one of the fortunate ones to call Doris a friend, and had a frequent invitation to join her for cocktails in her sitting room in Maine. However, it was her stories I'd relish during the cocktail hour at 5:00 sharp, and dependent on month and sunset, could be as early as 4:00, or as many Mainers would say, "when the sun is over the yardarm," which I tended to be after one of Doris' concoctions.

Although a wine drinker, when I was invited to have drinks with Doris, there was never any question as to what would be served - gin martinis only, the "real" martini - and only Boodles gin. She'd drink no other. Doris had fine-tuned the art of martini mixing to something that was equal parts cocktail, alchemy, and rust remover. As she was many decades older than I, and had been drinking and mixing martinis for well over 60 years, she made a formidable one; the kind that kick-boxes your tonsils in the way that makes you inadvertently giggle.

She and I would sit at her picture window overlooking Billings Cove, Eggemoggin Reach, the pine trees, and depending on season, either tall grasses filled with lupine, or blankets of snow that gently gave way to the pink granite shore. It was not unusual to see an osprey or eagle alight in one of the pines. We'd talk about books, politics, travel, and at times, her beloved New York Yankees. Doris, for all of her years as academic, writer, intellectual, knew more Yankee stats than most Yankees - she could rattle off a statistic from decades earlier, and, if crosschecked, was always correct. She could have coached the team.

One early evening while having martinis she told me that her old friend, the author Studs Terkel, had paid her a visit not long before. Studs, even older than Doris, was a long-standing martini buddy. Her story goes, she had mixed him a cocktail, he took a long pull from the chilled glass, smiled and said, "Doris, that's the best martini I've ever had!" Conversation ensued, and not long after, he requested another. He took a sip from the rim, closed his eyes, smiled and said, "Doris, that's the best martini I've ever had!" When he asked for a third, his assistant followed Doris to the bar in her library. "I'd make this one a lot weaker," he said. Doris filled the glass with ice water, an extra olive. Studs, now very relaxed, took the pull, swallowed, smiled and said, "Doris, that's the best martini I've ever had!"

She loved telling that story, and I heard it more than once. I cherished it more each time mostly because of the way I knew that Doris would chuckle when telling it.

For those who didn't know Doris, or know her well, one would not assume that she had a healthy sense of humor. But she did; incredibly subtle and wonderfully dry, so dry in fact, one might say brittle. Often unexpectedly, that dry wit would come at you, out of nowhere, and if you weren't paying attention, that curveball would drop right past you like an infield blooper. You had to be on your toes.

In her essay "The Remains of My Days" for The American Scholar, which she wrote at age 97, she looks back on her early days as a young career woman in New York City: "I got my first job out of graduate school by nepotistical means. My uncle was Arthur Loew, son of the famous theater-building Marcus Loew. Arthur was the head of the foreign division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, so he managed to slip me into the small department where the captions of the spoken soundtrack were made and then translated into French and German." "I was totally inept at reducing the spoken words to single sentences that fit in one camera shot. My boss, who was not happy at my arrival as a relative, was waiting for my first major slip. It came six months after I started. I was using a machine called a tachistoscope on a reel of Red Dust, a steamy film in which Jean Harlow bathed almost nude in a barrel. Clark Gable gazed happily down at the wet Harlow and spoke some complimentary words, every one of which I recorded in the caption." "It was a grave error. When the caption appeared (in Spanish now) on screen, it completely obliterated the view of Harlow's lovely bosom. One Spanish audience reportedly howled at this wall of text. My department was reprimanded, the scene was retitled, I was identified as the culprit, and soon after, whether for this reason or some other, my connection to MGM was severed."

And, in her early 20s Doris was hired as a proofread for Mademoiselle Magazine:

"One day, the literary editor, George Davis, asked me if I would take a friend of his out to lunch because he had an editorial meeting. Always grateful for a free meal, I agreed. But to my dismay, I discovered his friend was the famous ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee. We went to Stouffer's on 57th Street, every Westchester County matron's favorite restaurant before a matinee. Gypsy, swathed in black satin and a matching hat with a feather, was at least a foot taller than I, in my Peck & Peck tweed jacket, skirt, and penny loafers. I tried to get the hostess to seat us in the back of the vast dining room, but she chose a table in the center. We seemed to be the focus of attention. We talked about language, for some reason. I said that at the nearby coffee shop an order of toasted English muffins was called "burn the British." Then, in her customary projecting voice, Gypsy told me about a practice they used backstage. 'Before the girls go on, they dip their breasts in ice water to make them firmly protrude,' she said. 'It's known as "icing the Bordens'. Stunned silence reigned in Stouffer's."

Additionally, as part of her job at Mademoiselle Magazine she was hired to write captions for undergarments photos. She was fired after writing that a girdle "would make you look positively uncanny."

On the occasion of her 80^th birthday Doris and her longtime partner Sybil, held a celebration dinner for family and friends across the sprawling lawn of their coastal Maine home along the shores of Billings Cove. On a warm July evening, family and friends gathered outside beneath pitched white tents and feasted on lobster, corn roasted in its husk, and blueberry cobbler, champagne and wine. My husband and I were part of this grand celebration, which would later become the inspiration for her memoir The Pleasure of Their Company. All of us received a printed invitation, a small pamphlet with photos of Doris throughout the decades, her daughters, and in her words, the "prescription" on aging with grace:

"How does one grow old with grace? There is a prescription, I believe, but it is not easy to follow. We must feel at home in the world, and then reside in peace with ourselves. We must not so much demand to be loved as to love. For if we love, selflessly and unpossessively, we are then loved." "Note in the prescription that growing old with grace must mean that somehow our resentments, selfishness, ambitions, and grudges diminish. Compassion, understanding, sympathy take their place. We sleep in peace, we wake with pleasure to enjoy the music, poetry, and glory of the natural world, rather than to rail against its noise and threat, its clangor and crudeness, its misery, meanness and discord. We sense the spiritual in our friends. We suspect that God is in us." "Growing old gracefully is surrendering vanity and the strident will, for the heart. As the Greek proverb says, the heart that loves is always young."

"The best part of the prescription is not an observation or an order, but a question posed by the immortal pitcher, Satchel Paige: 'How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?' ~ Doris Grumbach

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Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/jbaumgartnerauthorpage/

Authors Bio:

Jan Baumgartner is the author of the memoir, Moonlight in the Desert of Left Behind. She was born near San Francisco, California, and for years lived on the coast of Maine. She is a writer and creative content book editor. She's worked as a grant writer for the non-profit sector in the fields of academia, AIDS, and wildlife conservation for NGO's in the U.S. and Africa, comedy writer for live performance at Herbst Theater in S.F., and as a travel writer for The New York Times. Her work has been published online and in print, both nationally and abroad, ranging in such diverse topics as wildlife and nature, travel, humor/satire, Africa, and essays about her experience as a full time caregiver for her terminally ill husband. Her travel articles on Mexico have been widely published; two are included in anthologies. Since her husband's death", and following her passion for world travel, she has made solo trips to France, Italy, Mexico, the Bahamas, Turkey, Kenya and South Africa. She makes her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico