Ghosts

This is the story that a good friend told us. After she sold her apartment in Jerusalem, she went to live near a small college town in Massachusetts. There she rented a 100-year-old house, while she looked for a place to buy. The rental was a charming place on 200 acres, but the only source of heating was an open fireplace. And whenever she lit the fireplace she felt an anxious presence nearby, a tall, thin man, dressed all in black. She didn’t see him so much as visualize him. She would talk to him, telling him that she would eventually get the hang of lighting the fireplace. Once she felt a breath on her neck and told him sternly to stop flirting with her.

After her lease ended, her former landlords, an elderly unmarried brother and sister, invited her for tea. She told them about the presence she had felt each time she lit the fire. “It was our father,” they told her. “He built that fireplace and never allowed anyone to light it but himself.” When she asked them about that breath on her neck, they replied, “he had an eye for the ladies.”

I might have been prepared to attribute her intimation of a ghost to the product of a lively imagination, if I had not had an unsettling experience. Shortly after my father died, I saw him on our balcony in Jerusalem. It was dark outside. What I saw was an indistinct shape standing or moving slowly outside the windows and somehow I “knew” that it was Dad. Of course he was on my mind and the shape I saw may have been nothing but my own reflection in the glass. When I told my spouse about this experience, she told me that once she had seen, in the very same place where I had glimpsed my father, a vision, a shape, a something that she interpreted as the presence of death but that she had never told me because she felt that this force was directed towards me.

Evidence for the existence of ghosts is solely anecdotal and sometimes fraudulent. Still, if the laws of natural phenomena cannot explain the existence of ghosts, neither can they explain extrasensory perception. The late Gertrude Schmeidler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the City University of New York, spent her entire career trying to disprove the existence of ESP and failed. Her repeated experiments under laboratory conditions revealed the ability of some people to consistently guess the occurrence of random events, such as the sequence of cards from a deck, at better than chance levels. Further, she found that such ability to be positively correlated to belief in the existence of ESP, whereas belief in its non-existence was negatively correlated with success. Since ESP is inexplicable in terms of what we know so far about the physical world, perhaps the existence of ghosts – the perception of departed souls – is not so far-fetched. Perhaps there is still an undiscovered dimension in which this can occur, or perhaps past and present time can exist simultaneously, as in Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia.

Still, if some people are able to detect the presence of a departed spirit, this is not to say that the dead soul experiences anything at all. I still believe that when you’re dead you’re dead. If I’m wrong, and I return to earth as a ghost, I’ll do my best to hide. I wouldn’t want to frighten or upset anyone. I will have done enough of that while I was alive.

Heartburn Sufferers, Rejoice!

Recently I saw Dropping Acid on my doctor’s bookshelf. Wondering what such a book could be about, I looked more closely at the book’s spine, and read its subtitle: the reflux diet cookbook & cure. I was suffering from acid reflux in spite of taking anti-reflux medicine. Perhaps help was at hand. I bought the book and read it right away. It’s by Jamie Koufman and Jordan Stern, both distinguished physicians – Dr. Koufman is an expert on laryngopharyngeal reflux and Dr. Stern is an otolaryngologist. Marc Bauer is a “master chef” who provided appropriate recipes (gorgeously photographed) to accompany the text.

The authors explain that it’s not your stomach acid that causes heartburn, but pepsin, a digestive enzyme. Imagine that your stomach is full of seawater and lobsters, write the authors. The seawater is acid, and the lobsters (big, aggressive ones with mighty claws) are the pepsin molecules. When you reflux, the seawater splashes around. Some of it splashes upward into your throat. The lobsters ride this wave of seawater and attach themselves to the shore wherever they land – the shore being the delicate tissues and membranes lining your throat, larynx (voice box), esophagus, and lungs. Once a pepsin molecule is bound to, say, your throat, any dietary source of acid can reactivate it: Soda pop. Salsa. Strawberries.

Anti-reflux medicine reduces the amount of acid your stomach produces when you eat, but so far no medicine has been found to reduce the pepsin. The authors recommend modifying your diet to keep those lobsters away. First, they recommend that you “wash out” the pepsin in your throat, larynx, etc. by following a strict low acid, low fat, low caffeine diet for two weeks. Then you can follow a less constrained diet, but you will always have to me mindful of what you eat and drink.

For the “washout” phase, which the authors term an “induction” or “start-up” diet, they provide a list of forty permitted foods and drinks, from Aloe Vera to whole-grain breads. Afterward, you can broaden your culinary possibilities. As a guide to what items to choose, the authors indicate the acidity (pH) of common drinks and beverages, from Coca-Cola (pH=2.8) to avocado (ph=7.8). (Note that heartburn sufferers should avoid this last item because of its high fat content.) In addition, they provide the pH values of some common prepared foods, dressings, and condiments, from Texas Pete hot sauce (3.1) to Best Brand black pitted olives (7.3). The pH scale is logarithmic, with lower values indicating greater acidity, so that, for example, a food with a pH value of 4 is ten times more acid than one with a pH value of 5. A pH value of 7.0 is neutral, neither acid nor alkaline. The pH values of stomach acid vary from 1 to 4, so nothing below 4 is recommended. The authors provide further guidance in www.refluxcookbook.com.

After a few days on the induction diet, my heartburn disappeared, and I put my bottle of TUMS back into the closet. Having followed the induction diet for two weeks, I’ve started to broaden my diet, choosing according to the pH values that the book presents. So far I’ve suffered no acid reflux. Heartburn sufferers rejoice! Deliverance is at hand.

Growths

When I began this blog last June, I aimed to write a series of posts describing aspects of growing old. If these essays are to reflect my own experience, at least some of them must present the medical issues with which, like most people my age, I have to deal. The ones that concern me at the moment are cancers.

After a routine physical examination uncovered a colon cancer in 1991, it was quickly removed before it could penetrate the colon’s wall. I thought that I’d be similarly lucky with the prostate cancer that was found in 2007 and radiated for 42 sessions. For four years it seemed as if the radiation had beaten the cancer into submission, but last September, a malignant growth in my urethra was discovered. The prostate cancer wasn’t dead after all. My urologist excised the new tumor. Last Friday, he discovered two more tumors near the one he had taken out and even that one presented evidence that it might be growing back.

“These will have to be removed,” he told me, “because they’re highly aggressive and if they’re not cut out, they’ll penetrate the wall of the urethra.” They can be taken out now and subsequent ones removed from time to time. Alternatively, the entire urethra, as well as the prostate through which it travels, can be removed. The latter operation is a big deal, one not to be undertaken lightly at any age. It would require lifestyle changes, including weekly emptying of a small external bag into which urine would flow through a tube constructed from a piece of small intestine. But if it is to be undertaken, sooner is better than later. My urologist will, he said, present my case to a group of his colleagues and solicit their advice. If there’s a consensus in favor of the major procedure, he will call me. Otherwise, I will see him in three months. He said that the removal of the growths can wait until then.

I’m the one who used to present papers at conferences, but now I’m becoming accustomed to being the subject of a conference. The conference on my urethra will not be the first at which one of my medical problems is to be discussed. The first concerned a large pancreatic cyst that has long existed and was found to be growing. If I were a lot younger, my primary doctor told me, my pancreas would be removed, “but this is a very major operation,” he said. “It would require removing not only your pancreas but also several surrounding organs, and at your age and with your many other medical problems, it’s not clear you would survive the procedure.” He sent me to a gastroenterologist, who told me he would consult his colleagues. After some time, I learned that their consensus, with which he agreed, is to do nothing. So now I know of growths involving two different organs, one of which is clearly malignant and aggressively so. If the other is malignant, it is, at least, growing slowly.

Friday night, after digesting the news about more growths in my urethra, I slept poorly. But Saturday, Shabbat, I determined to concentrate on living each day to the fullest and to stop worrying about what will come in the days after. Worrying won’t help, after all, and there’s still much to be enjoyed.

Abraham & Straus

More than 50 years ago, I worked as an assistant buyer of men’s furnishings at Abraham & Straus, in its elegant downtown Brooklyn flagship store on Fulton Street. It was, according to Wikipedia, “the unrivaled gem of New York City department stores.” During my time at A&S, as it was affectionately known throughout Brooklyn, I recall no African American employees, although the white-gloved female elevator operators – among the last in the city’s department stores - may have been African American.

Not only were there few if any black employees, there were hardly any black customers. So few were they, in fact, that I still recall two light-skinned middle-aged African American women, perhaps sisters, who came in to shop. Although they behaved no differently from our other customers and looked as if they could well afford the store's merchandise, they attracted attention.

In 1994, A&S was acquired by Macy’s, which the next year replaced the A&S brand with its own name. Only a plaque at the entrance recalls the store’s original identity. But more than the name has changed. When we moved to Brooklyn a few years ago and I walked down to Fulton Street, I saw that the street’s customer base had altered completely. The Fulton Street Mall, which attracts 100,000 shoppers a day, reminded me of a downtown street in Africa, with few white faces to be seen. Brooklyn now, in fact, contains the largest black community in the United States, and it constitutes more than one third of the borough's residents. Most of the pedestrians I saw were not only African American, but also poor. Indeed most of the stores on the Mall seemed to provide goods at cut-rate prices. And not only were the Macy’s customers black, so was the sales staff. I noted not a single white employee on the several floors on which I shopped.

But the nature of the street is changing and along with it the character of the store that was once A&S. In the past few years, downtown Brooklyn has seen the construction of many upscale residential towers, and these are now sprinkled on both sides of Fulton Street. Our temporary apartment is in a similar building, although it’s not new, but an office tower recently converted into residential condos. Most of the stores in our immediate neighborhood are of the low-priced variety. The fish market on the next block, for example, does not sell wild salmon. But the new supermarket a few blocks from here sells the most luxurious produce and products, much of it organic, and nearby Atlantic Avenue now offers many shops that sell expensive clothing and home furnishings. The customers in these stores, like the residents of most of the new apartments, are young and prosperous. This clientele is bound to attract more upscale stores as well as more upscale merchandise in those stores that remain. A $15 million program to improve the Fulton Street Mall with landscaping and additional seating is underway.

So downtown Brooklyn is once again becoming a destination for the middle and upper middle classes. Like other sections of the city it continues to change. Harlem is again attracting many middle and upper middle class residents, for example, and residential housing is returning to the financial district after more than 160 years, although its residents now live in towers rather than in brick town houses with back gardens. Nothing stays the same forever except change.

The Hour

Have you read Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: a cocktail manifesto? It was published in 1958, three years after his death. Tin House Books has recently reissued it, and I’ve only recently discovered it.

A comic manual on drinking like a gentleman, it converts the author's preferences into absolute rules, the violation of which mark you as a heretic or worse. He issues imperial proclamations. The following are typical: There are only two cocktails. The bar manuals and the women’s pages of the daily press, I know, print scores of messes to which they give that honorable and glorious name. They are not cocktails, they are slops. They are fit to be drunk only in the barbarian marches and mostly are drunk there, by the barbarians. The only two drinks he considers proper cocktails are a slug of whiskey – whether rye, bourbon, Scotch or Irish doesn’t matter – and a martini, for the preparation of which he gives detailed instructions. Whiskey and vermouth cannot meet as friends and the Manhattan is an offense against piety. With dry vermouth it is disreputable, with sweet vermouth disgusting. It signifies that the drinker, if male, has no spiritual dignity and would really prefer white mule [moonshine]: if female, a banana split. The only alcohol mixture he permits is gin and dry vermouth.

His tributes to the beauties of the cocktail hour are funny but nonetheless they ring true. Here’s one example: This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. I have, in fact, seen the unicorn once or twice, but no more than that. Mostly I achieved a quiet glow, a sense that my day had, after all, been a good one and that the next one would be too.

Alas, I write of my drinking in the past tense, for I’m now on the wagon, a lamentable place from which to view this fallen world. I used to love a drink before dinner, looked forward to it all day. I’d prefer to drink with one or two friends, but that was hard to arrange every day, and my wife doesn’t drink. So usually I would drink alone, while listening to music, preferably one of Nancy Lamott’s solo CDs. Just one slug of whiskey – an ounce and a half of Scotch - drunk at room temperature, in violation of DeVoto’s stricture that drinks must be served cold. Well, nobody’s perfect.

I would still be savoring a scotch before dinner had not a cruel fate betrayed me. Whiskey and acid reflux disease are even more incompatible than whiskey and vermouth. My heartburn became so painful and persistent, in spite of powerful anti-reflux medication, that I was forced to adopt a diet of low fat, low acid foods, and of course I had to stop drinking alcohol.

It’s not been a total loss. That half hour that I devoted to a drink can now be put to more productive use, and after dinner I’m able to continue working if I want to. In the good old days, warmed by a drink, I’d say the hell with it, I’ve worked long enough, and would read a novel or the paper after dinner, and go to bed feeling that the world was not such a bad place after all. I was wrong, of course: the world is a bad place when you can’t have a drink at the end of the day.

Escape from the Masculine Mystique

The other day I came across a letter I wrote to our son in February of 2000, in which I related two incidents that served “to remind me that I’m getting on.” I had asked a cab driver in Jerusalem to let me off in front of our apartment house, which would have required him to take a circuitous route back to the main road on which he had been driving. He asked me if he could drop me off a bit before having to make that detour. “I really didn’t have time to pick you up,” he explained, “but I did you a favor because you’re elderly.” And only a few days later, after I had bought a ski cap, the proprietor called out to me as I was leaving his shop, “I don’t suppose you’re going to the Hermon [a ski resort].” While I thought of myself as "getting on," I didn’t think of myself as old. It was beginning to be clear, however, that strangers thought otherwise.

There had been an earlier indication of how I appeared to others. Seven years before, when my wife and I were touring New Zealand, a young waiter at our hotel asked us where we were going next. Queenstown, we told him, and then asked what there was to do there besides walking amidst the spectacular scenery. “Bungee jumping,” he said without hesitation. He then looked at me and said, “but I guess you’re beyond that now.” I was indeed beyond it. On the other hand, I had probably always been beyond it. I laughed and told myself that no doubt he considered anyone over 40 as old.

The signs of how we appear to others are usually abundant, but we often ignore or deny them, as I did with the waiter, the hat shop proprietor, and the taxi driver. Though it’s clear that for many years I’ve appeared to others as elderly, it’s only recently that I’ve finally acknowledged the fact that people look at me as an old man, and that I can no longer kid myself that I’m in “late middle age” or even in the stage known as “the young-old.”

I’m glad that people see me as old because I sometimes need their help. These days, because a broken bone in my foot has hobbled me, I wear a soft cast and get about with the aid of a walker, which helps me to keep pressure off the injured foot. This means I must travel by taxi to go any distance. I’ve been impressed by the alacrity with which most cabbies leap out of their cars to take my walker, fold it up, and put it into the car’s trunk, and then help me into the car. They offer the same assistance when we reach our destination. I’ve also been impressed, during the past two months of using a walker, by how many total strangers go out of their way to help me on the street. They steady me over snowdrifts and hold doors open for me. Had I broken my leg at twenty and been walking with crutches, I don’t believe I would have received as much consideration. My benefactors clearly view me not only as disabled but as an elderly person who needs a great deal of help. They’re right and I ‘m grateful for that view of me.

So I’ve escaped at last from the masculine mystique. People no longer expect me to be strong and self-reliant, and I no longer feel ashamed to ask for help. This is a liberation, an unexpected gift of old age.

Diorientation

A few days ago, six hearty men packed up the contents of our apartment, prior to its renovation, and delivered most of them to a storage facility but some of them to us here at our new quarters. We expect to live here for the next five or six months, and although it's fully and handsomely furnished, we needed yet more storage space. So we came with three bureaus and three small filing cabinets, along with numerous cartons containing the contents of our kitchen, dining room, and linen cupboard (we had asked the owners to remove their dinnerware, cutlery, cookware, and linens), plus all our clothes, a dozen or so books, our files, office supplies, and so forth. As far as material goods are concerned, we're now fully equipped for life in our new surroundings.

It would be pleasant to assume that my mental equipment is equally sufficient, but after the first few days here I have my doubts. I keep looking for things in the places that they occupied in our former home. At breakfast, I reach behind me for the sideboard drawer in which I keep my pills, only to remember that the sideboard is now in a warehouse and that the pills are now in a cupboard across the room. When preparing for bed I go to our bedroom to organize my clothes for the next day, before remembering that my clothes now occupy a dresser in the hall and a closet in the study. I spend the day looking for things in all the wrong places.

Perhaps that's understandable. Habits form quickly and die hard, after all. But what habit can account for my losing one of my hearing aids? Suddenly my right ear felt naked. Where was my earphone? I had been opening boxes, stooping and lifting and putting things away, hampered by my still having to use a walker to protect my broken foot. Perhaps my hearing aid fell out while I was engaged in these unaccustomed acrobatics. "It must be somewhere in the apartment," my wife said, as we stood amid the crumpled white wrapping paper covering the floor and that she had been periodically carrying out to the recycling bins. What if the device had fallen onto a pile of papers, only to be hidden by yet more papers as these were thrown onto the floor, then scooped up, and taken away?

To replace the device would cost more than two thousand dollars and in the meantime I'd be even deafer than I am now. I felt guilty and depressed. What a start to our new life here! But there was no point in indulging in self-flagellation. I would look for the missing hearing aid. I wasn't exactly searching for a needle in a haystack, but the device is very small, the apartment large, and the number of places it could have fallen seemed to me almost infinite. First I checked my clothes, to see if it had fallen somewhere in there. Then I looked around all the boxes on which I had been working. Finally, I gave up. "It will appear or it won't," I told myself, "so pull yourself together and continue to unpack." This I did, but with a heavy heart.

But in the end I did find it. It had not left its little box. I had neglected to put it into my ear in the first place. When I opened its box and saw it, I felt immense relief and not a little chagrin. I understand that the elderly are often disoriented by a move. I hope that it was disorientation and not mental decline that caused me, for the very first time, to put in one hearing aid but not the other. Time will tell. In the meantime, I will continue to unpack.

What Do You Do?

Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer, is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. In an interview with Krista Tippett, broadcast last week, she recalled that when she was recently asked at a dinner party “what do you do?” she responded, “about what?” She believes that it would have been so much better to have asked her “what do you see?” or “when was the last time you were afraid?” These questions probe the essence of a person, in contrast to the question “what do you do?” which she considers superficial.

The unfortunate person who asked Ms. Williams “what do you do?” expected of course a response such as “writer,” but that's only part of what she “does.” She’s not only a writer of books and op-ed pieces, but she’s also an educator and a campaigner for the preservation of the environment. Those are some of her public roles but she must have private ones too involving her family, friends, and neighbors.

Her remark might not have resonated with me were I not retired, no longer teaching, directing dissertations, writing academic articles and books, or addressing professional conferences. In the past, if someone asked me what I did, I would say I was a university lecturer and give my departmental affiliation. The question may have been superficial, but my answer, I felt at the time, defined me.

I retired young enough for people to continue asking ask me what I did, a question that persisted for another five or ten years. It seemed pretentious to say I was a writer, even though I devoted much of my time to writing, since my writing earned little money and I published little after I have retired. So I would respond by talking about the book I was currently trying to write. Now that I’m no longer writing books, I can't do that. It doesn’t matter, though, because nowadays no one asks me what I do. No one asks me the universal question that academics at research universities ask each other, “what are you working on?” I’m too old, I guess, for people to assume that I’m doing much of anything at all.

But in fact, I’m occupied all day long, carrying out various clerical and domestic tasks, writing letters, fulfilling familial obligations, maintaining friendships, keeping abreast of current events, reading novels, and so on. Of course, I also did those things while I was employed, even if I allotted less time to them. (They require more time now. A few years ago, a college classmate observed that he spends more and more time doing less and less.) As Terry Tempest Williams implies, I did much more than carry out my professional obligations. We are more than our careers.

If someone were to ask me how I occupy my time now, I'd say that I'm trying to squeeze as much experience as I can from each day. I'd also say that I'm trying to maintain and strengthen my friendships and family relationships. Pursuing these goals, which I once viewed as tangential to my "real work," are now a central occupation. Had I said so thirty years ago, people would have looked at me askance. And it would have been an odd response, for men defined themselves, still define themselves, by their careers. Perhaps it would still seem odd, but it would be the truth. My perspective has changed, now that I'm acutely conscious of how little time is left. That consciousness drives some former colleagues to write one more book, one more article. Not me. I no longer view those academic goals as crucially important. I no longer aim to accomplish anything beyond experiencing as much as possible and strengthening my most important relationships. Those would be accomplishments enough.

Electronic Devices

A month or so ago, as my wife and I traveled up to Boston on an express train, we noticed the extent to which the young people sitting near us were immersed in their electronic devices – i-phones, laptops, e-readers, i-pods, and i-pads – typing, texting, reading, listening. Sometimes, it seemed, they were doing several of these at once. Deftly, swiftly, and with complete nonchalance, they operated these devices as if they had emerged with them from the womb.

Not so with me. The older I get the more resistant I’ve become to adding yet another electronic device to my repertoire. It’s not just a matter of age. Some of my elderly friends are as tech savvy as the youngsters, and they operate their devices with the same élan. But as for me, I’ve found that each new device complicates my life and exposes me to one more set of technical problems, many of which I’m unable to solve by myself.

But technical problems are not the exclusive domain of new-fangled electronic devices. They’re found in even plain vanilla instruments such as the telephone. My wife and I spent many hours over a three-day period last week talking to representatives from Verizon, the company that provides our telephone service. The trouble began before that, although we didn't know it at the time, when we placed an order with Verizon. We asked them to change the date at which they would transfer our telephone service from our present address to a new, temporary one. Verizon assured us, when we inquired at the time we placed the order, that the original date had been canceled and replaced by the new one. It turns out that Verizon did change the date for connecting the phone to the new address but it did not change the date for disconnecting it from the old one. So last week, while still at our old address, we were unable to receive incoming calls.

To reinstate our service, we engaged in at least 10 time-consuming conversations with Verizon agents. A few times we were cut off in the middle of our interaction and had to begin again. Once I was put on hold for more than one hour (thank goodness for speaker phones, which allow you to continue working while waiting for someone to come on line). Finally, we found a representative who fully understood the problem and provided a solution. From what she told us, it was clear that none of the previous agents had fully grasped the company’s automated system.

As frustrating as was our recent experience with Verizon, it gave me a perverse sense of satisfaction. It’s not just an old person like me who is confounded by technology. The Verizon technicians were confounded too. The automated system which they had to operate had become so complicated that they had not mastered all of its parts. So those young people we saw on the train, with their fancy devices, are just as apt to run into technological walls as I am.

If it’s true, as a wise person once observed, that there’s never been a labor-saving device that saved anybody any time, the same is also true of electronic communications devices, whether telephone, cellphone, i-phone, fax, or computer. One can accomplish more with their help, true, but they also consume inordinate amounts of time, even when they're trouble-free. But few of them are trouble-free. Rare is the electronic device that has not made its owner want to throw it out a window at least once during its life. I hope Verizon's agents finally learn the company's system before it becomes even more complex. In the meantime, I derive comfort from the knowledge that I'm not alone.

Words: beautiful, kind, and unkind

When he was about my age, my father used to say that the most beautiful words in the English language are “come back in three months,” at least when he heard them from a doctor. When you reach our stage of development, you no longer take it for granted that you’ll still be around.

But those aren’t the only beautiful words. “I love you” is perhaps the most beautiful, and “come back in three months” the next most beautiful, at least for people of my age. But a close runner-up to these is “you’re right.” As Laura Belgray writes in a recent blog post (www.talkingshrimp.com), it may be painful to admit you’re wrong, but it costs nothing to say “you’re right,” and it makes the person you’re talking to feel good.

Almost as good as “you’re right” is “perhaps you’re right.” My mother taught me the usefulness of that expression. Not only does it end a fruitless argument, it pleases the other person, because you’ve shown that you’ve listened. Besides, maybe the other person is right or partly right. There’s usually something positive to be said for the other’s point of view, even if you don’t agree with it.

If “I love you,” “you’re right,” and “perhaps you’re right” are pleasant to hear, “you’re wrong” strikes the American ear as unnecessarily harsh. But that’s in America. In Israel, as the linguist Eddie Levenston pointed out, saying in Hebrew the equivalent of “you’re wrong” is not thought to be overly abrupt at all. Israelis are dugri, a term they've borrowed from Arabic, which is to say that they're uncompromisingly frank and direct. So Israelis view the American practice of saying something like “are you sure?” in place of “you’re wrong,” as wishy-washy.

“The kindest words I’ll ever know are waiting to be said,” wrote Richard Rogers for the musical No Strings (1967). What are the kindest words? When your wife has fallen in love with her new dress and asks you if you like it, what do you say if you don't? My grandfather, when faced with that question, would say “I’m no judge,” but that’s the same as saying “no.” I suppose you could say, “now that’s a dress!” (This technique works well when proud parents show off their ugly infant. You can say, with perfect truth, “now that’s a baby!”). The kindest response to your wife’s question, since after all she’s already bought the dress, is to say that you like it.

Kindness calls for tact. At the conclusion of a freighter voyage across the Pacific, where I was the only passenger, I told the Head Engineer that I’d like to treat the officers to wine before our last dinner. That tactful soul didn’t make me feel bad by saying that this was not such a good idea. Instead, he said, “even better would be to pick up the tab for their drinks before dinner.” He was right, since in this way everyone could have what he wanted, but he implied that my original idea was good.

The kindest words, of course, depend on the context. But the unkindest words of all are clear. Unfortunately they're as hard to repress as it is cruel when you don’t, but you must repress them at all costs. Those awful words? “I told you so.” Sometimes it's kindest to say nothing at all.

Turkeys and Change

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his best-selling The Black Swan, provides an instructive analogy. A turkey is fed and watered for 364 days, so the turkey would be justified in assuming (if it could assume anything at all) that the 365^th day would be like all the others. Conditions may continue for a very long time but, as demonstrated by Thanksgiving Day, to say nothing of the current revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, they don’t last forever.

In a recent broadcast of Krista Tippett’s interview with the physician Jon Kabat-Zinn, he spoke of our “somnambulism.” The founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, he said that we go through life without realizing that change is the basic condition of life, that stability is illusory. For years our homes and our retirement portfolios increased in value and we assumed they would continue to do so. We extrapolated those trends into the indefinite future, so the Great Recession shocked us. We were unprepared for the change.

Aging is, of course, a universal product of change. So why are we surprised to find these changes operating in ourselves? Sometimes we rail against them, sometimes we even deny them. We’ve seen our grandparents and our parents age but somehow don’t expect that our own old age will be accompanied by some of the same physical, emotional, and mental changes.

The 365^th day will arrive for all of us, but in the meantime, our last years will not be like the last days of the turkey, which are more or less all the same except for a continual increase in its weight. Year by year, our medications and visits to doctors increase just as our strength and energy decline. Yet at the same time, we have greater opportunity for reflection, greater opportunity to reach out to others, greater opportunity to consider our actions and to be mindful of our surroundings, and best of all, greater opportunity to appreciate the wonder and glory of being alive. If change is a necessary condition of life, it’s worth it.

Geezer

In my last post I wrote about the Geezer Bandit. The story of his exploits aroused my curiosity about the origin of the word geezer. According to worddetective.com, geezer derives from an English dialectal term guiser, which referred to a person of any age who dresses up in costume. In costume a person assumes a new guise, acting in a way that is out of the ordinary. The word gradually changed its meaning from a person wearing a costume or disguise to one who is simply odd. The meaning kept on changing, from an odd person to an old person to simply an old man.

The original meaning of geezer, it seems to me, remains at its core. The old are odd, different from the rest of the population. In general, we don’t work for a living, our memories weaken along with our physical strength, our health has declined, our life expectancy has drastically contracted, and in reaction we’re often crotchety. If the referent of geezer has changed from all old people to old men only, perhaps the reason is that old men are even odder than old women. After women retire from employment, they continue in the domestic tasks that they have always performed, and they often find satisfaction in helping to care for their grandchildren. This may give old women a greater sense of continuity and purpose. In any case, retirement seems not as disorienting for them as it is for men, whose identity is often bound up in their work.

The closest equivalents to geezer that I can find for old woman are crone and hag, but these terms are highly pejorative, yet another instance of sexism. Geezer is not so much pejorative as condescending. The picture it arouses is that of an unkempt, somewhat wayward old man. If crone demonstrates sexism and geezer condescension, both reflect agism.

So, old people of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our derogatory and condescending terms. Demand to be called what we are: not geezers, not crones, but old people. There’s no shame in that.