Epstein's Luck

 Top of my bedside reading pile just now is a gift from my daughter – the great essayist Joseph Epstein's new memoir, Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life. As I am another who feels he's had a lucky life, in all manner of ways (and is hesitant about saying so, for fear of tempting fate), I am naturally drawn to a book with such a title, and so far  I'm enjoying it hugely, as I always enjoy Epstein's writings. He is a brilliant but unshowy writer, a master of his craft, with a wonderfully light touch and a terrific sense of humour – and of proportion, which is much the same thing. 
  Epstein counts himself lucky on many counts – 'in the time in which I was born, in the parents to whom I was born, in my education, and much more' – and I could say much the same, though there were times when I wouldn't have entirely assented to the second of those. In terms of time, I'd count myself perhaps luckier than Epstein in having been born in 1949 rather than his 1937. This meant I was the right age to enjoy the golden age of popular music that unfolded, or rather exploded, from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. However, it also meant that I was perfectly placed to succumb resistlessly to the various excesses and self-destructive idiocies of what we think of as the Sixties (which mostly happened in the Seventies).
  I certainly see, as Epstein does, the years I have lived through as marked by radical change: 'from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status ... from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel versus print, and much more'. One of the small, but significant, changes Epstein notes is that 'our parents also had a certain decorum missing from parents of later generations. I do not recall seeing my mother not wearing a dress (or at home what was called a 'housecoat') or without makeup. Until his retirement at 75, my father had no leisure clothes. Today, on the streets of my own middle-class neighbourhood, I see older men and women go about in flip-flops, cargo shorts and tank tops, getups my parents wouldn't have worn to take out the garbage.' I'm sure Epstein would not be seen dead in such apparel. Nor, come to that, would I. Some of us, even children of the Sixties, still have a residual belief in the bella figura.