So Beautiful

“Beautiful, beautiful!”

Carmen is reacting to photos from a recent trip Lady Jay and I took. But she might as well be sharing her philosophy of life.

“Oh, look at this!” she cries out. “So beautiful!”

Although Carmen has lived in New York City for more than 60 years, she retains the accent that forever ties her to her native Argentina. This makes her “beautiful” sound more like “bee-YOO-tee-full.”

Carmen is 94. She’s lived in the same rent controlled one-bedroom apartment — just down the hall from her 93-year-old baby sister Luisa — since arriving in NYC those many decades ago.

She sometimes hosts us for charcuterie and Champagne, always making sure my plate and glass are full.

“Daniel, I have another bottle in the refrigerator,” she instructs me. “Pour yourself some more. And give me a splash too.”

Carmen has traveled around the world, sometimes on a single trip. She has a seemingly endless supply of friends of all ages (her phone dings with text messages almost constantly). She loves going out for a martini at the steakhouse Smith & Wollensky. She’s an aficionado of international soccer, professional motorcycle racing, and the Dallas Cowboys. She listens to Metallica and collects all manner of mementos — particularly anything with skulls on it.

Carmen has never been married but tells tales of suitors who’ve come and gone (they’ve mostly gone when she’s grown tired of them). She’s camped in more national parks, visited more countries, and had more adventures than anyone I know.

“Beautiful, beautiful!”

---

Carmen kept coming to mind as I watched a recent showing of Agatha’s Almanac, an award-winning documentary by Canadian director Amalie Atkins.

The subject of the film is Agatha Bock, the filmmaker’s aunt. She spends much of her time on her family’s 54-acre farm in rural Manitoba, growing fruits and vegetables, doing daily chores, living a modest, self-sufficient life.

(A typical meal, she tells us, is a sandwich consisting of homegrown radish slices between pieces of homemade “brown” and “white” bread. Though the strawberries, watermelon, carrots, beets, green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and white cherries she grows and harvests point to more variety in her diet.)

Agatha lives alone but assures us, “I’ve never really been very lonely because I always have something to do.” And we get the pleasure of watching her do some of those things.

During six years of filming, Agatha turns 90. She’s stooped but undeterred, sharing bits of well-earned wisdom throughout the film (how to tell if a watermelon is ripe, how to make pierogies properly, how to use a combination of masking tape and duct tape to weatherproof a failing door).

Shot on luminously saturated 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac looks like a picture from another age. And that’s fitting. Agatha doesn’t own a smart phone or much technology of any kind beyond a traditional telephone and a microwave. She even spent a recent decade with no running water. It’s not hard to imagine someone living largely like her a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago.

On the surface, Agatha and Carmen lead very different lives. Radish sandwiches for one, martinis for the other. But what they have in common is far deeper.

“It’s a privilege to be alive, every day,” says Agatha.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” says Carmen.