A Softball Game

As I was walking through Prospect Park at about this time last year, I saw a softball game. As usual, I admired the easy grace with which the players would reach out with their glove to catch the ball, without moving an inch from their place, and then throw the ball, in an effortless arc, to the pitcher. And as usual, I thought back to my boyhood when such moves seemed impossible for me to emulate. I was usually positioned in the outfield, where balls rarely reached and where I prayed they never would. When they did come my way I rarely, if ever, caught them.

As I walked closer to the game that morning, I was astonished to find that the players were young women. But they threw and caught just like men! I had thought somehow that such motions were a prerogative of the male race, unavailable if not forbidden to women. So another stereotype crumbled. Women can do it too! These were not “masculine” women, so far as I could see, but their moves – their softball moves – were just like men’s. So if they could learn to do it, why couldn’t I have?

And of course, now that I think of it, I could have. Had I received sympathetic, encouraging coaching, or, perhaps more important, had I been less isolated socially, I would have become an adequate player and not the child inevitably chosen last for a team, since there’s nothing wrong with my coordination. But even the humiliation of always being chosen last did not move me to practice so that I could play better. Somehow I thought it impossible for me to play well and therefore I didn’t try. A friend, who was similarly inept as a child, told me that in one of his schools the coach made it a rule that the children chosen last would be the captains of the next teams. So the fumbling children, normally chosen last, were now chosen first. “The last shall be first” took on a new meaning.

I remember one day in the fourth grade – we had recently moved to Newton and this was my first year at the John Ward Elementary School – when instead of participating in a baseball game during recess, I climbed up onto the hill above the game and simply watched it. Bored (of course), I wondered what would happen if I kicked the loose rock in front of me. What happens when you kick a loose rock that stands at the top of a hill? A boy in the fourth grade surely knows the answer: it rolls downhill. It rolled downhill, all right, and broke the leg of the batter.

My mother forced me to telephone him to apologize. In one of the hardest moments of my young life, I called him. “Wait till I get you!” he said to me. He never did retaliate - greatness of spirit exists even among fourth graders – but I lived in dread for a long time.

It’s too late, I suppose, for me to learn to throw a ball correctly and at any rate I’m unlikely to participate in a softball game again. So I won’t ever again be chosen last for a team and then sent to the outfield to pray that the ball won’t come to me. This is, I guess, one of the advantages of old age.

Soul

A while back, some old friends of ours came for lunch, bringing their son, their first child. Now in his thirties, he’s severely handicapped, a victim of cerebral palsy, and he’s also somewhat developmentally disabled. Although he’s confined to a wheelchair, he lives on his own, in an apartment close to that of his parents. But he will always need supervision and care. His mother has kept up with us by means of yearly Christmas letters, so I have followed the progress of her three sons, and I was glad to meet the eldest, who has been a source of so much concern for his parents. He struck me an exceptionally pure and sweet soul. In fact it was he who convinced me there is such a thing as a soul.

What do I mean by soul? I don’t mean that his soul, whatever it is, would survive him. While it would be pleasant to believe in an afterlife, at least one without punishment, I believe that when we die we cease to exist. All that remains, in my view, is the influence we’ve exerted on others and their memories of us, both of which, of course, necessarily diminish and then disappear with time. That the books we’ve written or the art we’ve created will long survive us, for all but the most transcendent geniuses, is nothing but a fatuous hope. My books and articles will remain in libraries and data banks for maybe another 20 or 30 years, but fewer and fewer people will read and cite them until nobody ever does at all. Maybe that’s already happened.

Perhaps this is a dismal philosophy, but to my mind it makes life immensely precious, behooving us to live each day to the fullest and to appreciate the privilege of being alive. Whenever I start to feel bored by an activity (standing in line, for example), I remind myself that it’s so much better to do this than to be able to do nothing at all ever again.

So when I wrote that our friends’ son convinced me that he has a soul, I meant that the innocence and sweetness that shone out of his eyes is a quality independent of personality and intellect, just as is the color of his hair. It’s a kind of aura. Personality and intellect can be described, measured, assessed more or less reliably. Can the quality of soul, this aura of which I speak, also be described consistently? Would independent judges come to the same conclusion about the character of a person’s soul? If not, then the notion of soul in the sense I’m using it is entirely mystical, and I will have to stand for at least an hour in the corner reserved for lapsed empiricists.

Warming Both Hands

A good friend told me shortly before he died, when he was in his late nineties, that all struggles are ultimately pointless, that life has no higher purpose, that we’re left with nothing at the end. Do you mean, I asked him, that your long life of professional accomplishment, the people you’ve helped, the students you’ve mentored, the colleagues you’ve encouraged matter not at all? Not at all, he said.

It’s true that in an unimaginably long time our sun will have burned itself out and Earth will become a dead planet, and then Shakespeare will be honored no more than a common laborer. So from that point of view life is indeed pointless, especially if you’re an atheist, as was my nonagenarian friend. Believers can derive comfort from their efforts to fulfill God’s plan or God’s commandments or from their hopes of a heavenly afterlife. But if you don’t share those hopes, if you don’t believe in a divine plan or commandments, what’s left?

Atheists, it seems to me, must create their own meaning, their own purpose. For me the purpose of life is to live it as fully as possible. By this I mean being aware of the moment. When washing dishes, for example, I try not to rush through it in order to get to another task. Rather, as I’ve written before, I try to pay attention to the warmth of the water on my hand, the sound of water splashing on the dishes, the sight of the multicolored soap bubbles. The moment, really, is all there is.

Sure, I’ve had some exotic experiences: traveling in a third-class compartment from Beijing to Moscow on the Trans Siberian Railway, sleeping in Ethiopian mission stations, watching, from the deck of a freighter, the sun rise over the Pacific, lecturing in Hebrew with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. These experiences were indeed intense, but you don’t have to go around the world to find intense experience. You can find them in your own back yard. The scent of fresh apples at our neighborhood’s weekly Green Market has given me as intense a sensation as any I’ve ever had.

No, I’m not a hedonist, finding the highest good in sensual pleasure, although I value pleasure as much as anyone. Mindfulness of the moment, though, can help us appreciate that pleasure, and it is paying attention to the here and now, to our actions, especially with respect to others, that can help us realize life fully in all its glory, pain, and complexity. This seems to me to be purpose enough in life, with the important proviso that it can be accomplished without harm to others.

I reached this conclusion relatively late in life, having rushed through much of it heedlessly, it now seems to me, without appreciating the wonder and glory of being alive. I’m trying to make up for that now, doing my best to squeeze as much experience as I can from the time that’s left. I hope I‘ll be able to hold on to that view if my physical abilities and my opportunities for new experience become, like my late nonagenarian friend’s, radically diminished, even though that too would be a new experience.

I hope that what Walter Savage Landor wrote about himself as an old man will also be true of me: I warmed both hands before the fire of life. As for the next and concluding line to his poem, It sinks and I am ready to depart, I’m not so sure.

A Jazz Band, a Chorus Girl, and Six Crap-Shooters

Three men, each a resident of our small cooperative apartment house, have died within the last year. The first was murdered on a trip abroad, the second and third died of cancer. None had reached old age, with the oldest in his early sixties. The widow of the murdered man invited those who had known him to her home. The guests, liberally supplied with alcohol and seated around the walls of a living room filled with the Soviet-era art that he had collected, told stories about the dead man that illuminated his personality and his attainments. If the widow of the second man held a memorial gathering for her husband, she didn’t invite us. The widow of the third man, about two months after his death, invited us to an “Irish wake” to celebrate his memory. We attended it last week.

He had emigrated from Ireland as a young man and immediately found employment in the financial industry, where he worked until the last year of his life, when he was probably too ill to continue. He was a slim, dapper, good-looking man, who, as a volunteer, kept the garden in our building’s courtyard green and beautiful. He always had a pleasant word and a smile when we encountered each other. A graduate of University College, Dublin, he spoke with a charming if slight Irish lilt. I knew little else about him, however, and hoped to learn more at the wake.

The wake’s venue was a watering hole in the financial district, which was devoted that evening to the memorial gathering. A Dixieland band was playing with great brio when we arrived, and it continued playing, with the briefest of intermissions, during the two hours we spent there. We joined about 75 people, crowded into the space, where waitresses brought drinks and hors d’oeuvres to the guests. Beer seemed to be the beverage of choice, although some were drinking wine. Most of the guests were prosperous-looking middle-aged men, probably colleagues of the deceased. At one point in the evening, his widow handed out sheets of paper on which were printed the lyrics of a few popular songs, two of which were sung by female guests to the accompaniment of the band. The atmosphere was loud and lively. Everyone appeared to be having a good time, even the widow and their son, although I felt that sadness continued to puncture their pleasure in the presence of so many friends.

The word wake derives from an Old English word that means “watch.” In a traditional Irish wake, people sit by the body until its burial, a time often marked by the consumption of alcohol and much merrymaking. Although our fellow resident had been buried two months earlier, his wake otherwise corresponded to the Irish tradition, with much jollity and even some dancing. The guests told amusing stories about the deceased, but none of the stories gave us much insight into the man himself, except for one important fact: he had aroused the affection and respect of the many who had come to remember him.

The music and animated conversations that surrounded us reminded me of one of the stanzas from the "St. James Infirmary Blues" - I want six crap-shooters for pallbearers, a chorus girl to sing me a song, place a jazz band in my hearse wagon, to raise some hell as we roll along. That seems a good way to go. I hope my wife will invite all my friends to a festive gathering, give them plenty of booze, and ask them to tell amusing stories about me. A string quartet playing Mozart would be more to my taste than a Dixieland band, but Mozart would probably not arouse the kind of high good feeling that we found at that wake. I like the idea of a chorus girl singing me a song though, but I suppose my wife would veto that suggestion. As for the six crap-shooters, they will have carried me off before the party, raising hell, I hope, along the way.

Links

Our religious congregation is blessed with two beautiful landmark buildings in Park Slope, but these structures are aging, and both of them require major repair. The sanctuary, for example, is now unusable, after its ceiling collapsed. We need to raise three and a half million dollars to make the repairs, to say nothing of what will be required for renovations within the restored structures.

I had seen in the sanctuary only once before, when I attended a general meeting of the congregation, but I was immediately struck by its majesty. We were the beneficiaries of those who long ago contributed to the building fund, benefactors who are no longer alive. We’re now being asked to take on the same role as our predecessors, so that future generations can worship in the same sacred space, just as my generation had been able to do until recently.

No building can stand without repair and renovation. Eventually a new capital campaign will be required, and when that’s inaugurated, members of the congregation who are yet unborn will look back to us as the benefactors who had helped preserve their sanctuary. I’d grown accustomed to seeing myself as a link in the generations, connected to both past and future, but the realms of continuity and connection that I had seen were limited to my family, my professional work, and my religious tradition.

As a family member, I have known five generations, from my grandparents to my grandchildren. I’m unlikely to meet the sixth, but as the grandfather of four, I’m reasonably certain that at least one of my grandchildren will make me a great grandfather, even if posthumously. As a researcher, I’ve built on the work of others, just as my successors have built on mine. And as a Jew, my observance of kashrut and avoidance of work on Shabbat, begun in Jerusalem and continued in Brooklyn, place me in a tradition that preceded me and will continue after me.

But until our congregation’s campaign was begun, I had never thought of myself as a link between past and future in other institutions. I now see, however, that all of us help form a chain linking past and future, within all of the groups, large or small, in which we participate, whether religious congregations, political parties, neighborhoods, work places, or entities as abstract as that of the nation. Those who preceded us have helped to shape them just as we are doing now. Our individual contributions may be small but added to that of others they help construct the frameworks within which future generations will live.

As my wife and I walked down a street in downtown Brooklyn recently, she looked over the fence surrounding an excavation for a new tower, enabling her to see buildings of various heights and ages for several blocks away. “There’s the history of New York,” she said, somewhat exaggerating the swath of time represented by this mélange of structures. It was comforting to reflect, as we walked down that street, a street others had trod for generations, that people as yet unborn will walk down the same street, that they will contribute to the city’s history and its life, just as our predecessors did, and just as we are doing now.

Imaginary Conversations

For years I told the story about a conversation between my parents. We – the three of us children – were patients of a certain dentist, Dr. X, while my father was a patient of another one, Dr. Y. When my father suggested to my mother that he see Dr. X too, my mother told him, “for your teeth, Dr. Y is good enough.”

The anecdote came to life a few years ago, when were preparing to pack up our Jerusalem lives and I was going through letters from my father. In one of them, written to us in Addis Ababa, he said he was amused that I had told this story – apparently I had written to him that I had done so - “but for the record,” he wrote, “it was my eyes, not my teeth.” This gave me quite a jolt. “But no” I argued, “it was your teeth!” For a split second he was in the room with me. I wasn’t talking to a ghost but to him, fully alive, and it was a conversation, one person responding to the other, not the monologue I’d been addressing to him for more than 30 years.

It was then that I realized that I’d been talking to my father ever since he died. I still do. No, I’m not delusional. I know I’m imagining the whole thing; I know I’m speaking to him in a kind of daydream. In these waking dreams my father never responds, just listens. And the dreams are very short – just long enough for a sentence or two. Strange, isn’t it, our communing with the dead? Our parents are never really dead as long as we are alive.

The other strange thing about my father’s letter is the lapse in memory it represents. My mother died in 1951 so the conversation between my parents must have occurred by then. Although my father was writing to me in 1969, I don't doubt that he was right. But I’d been telling my version of the story for so long that his correcting me took me by as much surprise as if he had told me that I was born in Cairo. In The Madwomen of Chaillot, a character says that if you wear false pearls long enough they become real. That’s what happened to me, I guess. Memory is treacherous, which is why some historians rely solely on the written record – letters, minutes of meetings, treaties, etc. - rather than on memoirs or interviews with witnesses. To “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” we may add memory.

My children will probably converse with me in one-sided imaginary conversations after I’m dead in the same way that I talk to my father. And they’ll also probably mix up some of the stories about me and their mother, just as I misremembered that story about my father's eye doctor. I wish I had asked my father if he had talked to his father in imaginary conversations, after his father died, but the question never occurred to me. I’d like to think that he did, however, and that he also told family stories that he had misconstrued. While being dragged unwillingly towards that cliff, the notion of continuity is a comfort.

Zest for Life

The other day as my wife and I walked down the street in downtown Brooklyn, we passed a commercial building awaiting demolition, joining all but one other structure on that block slated for the wrecking ball. The whole area is enjoying a renaissance, with new buildings arising everywhere. “When we take our grandchildren here, “ my wife said, “it will be very different.” After a few seconds she added, “as if we have decades ahead of us.” She went on to say that she's not as conscious as I am that there are far fewer years ahead of us than behind.

She’s right, but on the other hand, she’s five and a half years younger than I am. When I was 74, I didn’t think so much about my life expectancy either. Yet there are people even older than I am who are so engaged, so delighted to be alive that they probably don’t think much about it either. Our friend from Los Angeles, a retired university dean, is a good example of a forward-looking octogenarian. When he visited us in Jerusalem on a Friday evening a few years ago, he had arrived from the West Coast on Thursday, the day before, on a flight that had taken him half way around the world. He spent Friday walking around Jerusalem, and when he left us about eleven at night he seemed as fresh as when he had stepped over our threshold at seven. He was eighty, only four years older than I was at the time, but he seemed twenty years younger. Such zest for life! Such eagerness to learn!

I want to look forward, as he does, not backward. There’s still time to be productive and still time to have fun. My dentist in Jerusalem told me that his grandfather, at 92, feared that he would outlive his money. My dentist’s father looked over the old man’s accounts and financial records. “Dad,” he told him, “you have enough money to allow you to keep spending, without any changes, for the next fifteen years.” The old man replied, “But then what?” That’s the way I'd like to be.

Appearances

About a month ago I saw a grossly overweight teenage girl in downtown Brooklyn walking several paces behind her family, her right hand on the small of her back. “My back hurts!” she cried after them in an aggrieved tone. “If you lost some weight, fatso” I found myself thinking unkindly, “maybe your back wouldn't hurt so much.”

But then I felt ashamed. What did I know about the obstacles she faced, either physical or emotional, that made it hard for her to lose weight? What did I know of her character traits? Would I want others to judge me in the same superficial way that I was judging her? If they did, they’d see me as a bent, old man – a true enough characterization as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. If I don’t want others to judge me on the basis of superficial characteristics, shouldn’t I avoid judging others on that basis?

This train of thought would probably have been derailed if that week my Mussar group had not been considering the trait of judging others favorably, giving people the benefit of the doubt wherever possible. No, I would have continued to cast unflattering mental epithets at those passersby whose appearance was particularly unattractive, as if I were a judge in a universal beauty contest.

I was reminded of this uncharitable habit recently when I received from my friend Spencer Grant an e-mail containing photos that appeared in three two-page spreads of the January 1975 Esquire. Entitled “Bums.” These were pairs of photographs by Jan Michael. His subjects were three derelict men whom he had found in New York’s Bowery, long before that district’s gentrification. He photographed them twice, once as they appeared to him initially and again after he had arranged a shave, haircut, and good clothes for them. It was, as my friend wrote, a clever idea.

The contrast between the photographs in each pair was astonishing. If you encountered on the street the unshaven, disheveled man shown in one of the photographs, you would avert your gaze. But you wouldn’t give him a second thought if you saw him, his hair combed and his face shaved, in a three-piece suit and tie, as he appeared in the second photograph. When you compare the two photographs you can see they’re images of the same man. He has the same features and exhibits the same exuberance (one wonders if he was sober that day). But in the first photograph he looks like what Esquire called, in those politically incorrect times, a bum, whereas in the second photograph, he looks like an ordinary middle class man. We can’t tell from either photograph if he was generous or mean-spirited, intelligent or dull, amusing or boring. We know nothing about him but his most external characteristics.

It would be pleasant to report that my heightened consciousness has led to my abandoning the habit of judging others harshly on the basis of their external appearance. Alas, I still form such opinions, but now when I do so I feel bad. These days I sometimes catch myself in the process of making such assessments, and when I do I usually manage to squelch them before they're fully formed. I haven’t yet reached the goal of abandoning such judgments completely. It's hard to change the habits of a lifetime, but I'm slowly progressing. It’s good to know that even at my advanced age, change is still possible.

The African Queen

About sixty years separated my two viewings of The African Queen. I first saw it within a year of its release in 1951, when I was about twenty. The second time was on a recent Saturday night, when I watched it with my wife at home on a digitally restored DVD. I expected to remember the main outlines of the plot as well as many individual scenes, because I liked the film so much the first time around. It turned out, however, that I remembered practically nothing. I knew, of course, that Humphrey Bogart plays a riverboat captain in Africa, that Katherine Hepburn plays a strait-laced English spinster, and that Robert Morley plays her missionary brother. I also remembered that after her brother dies, the captain helps the spinster leave the mission by traveling down a river in his ramshackle vessel.

But that was all. I had forgotten, for example, that the action takes place at the beginning of the First World War, that the mission was in German East Africa, and, most crucially, that the spinster persuades the captain to use his vessel as a torpedo to destroy the German gunboat that patrols a strategically important lake. From the lush greenery and screeches of parrots in the opening credits, to the ending, when Bogart and Hepburn swim across the lake to safety in the Belgian Congo, I might as well have been watching a different film from the one I saw when I was twenty.

I had remembered one scene, however, and I treasured it over the years. It was just before the missionary is about to be killed. We see the trembling of his multiple chins in profile, an eloquent and funny scene that I looked forward to seeing again. So I was dumbfounded to find that the scene doesn’t exist, at least not in that film, and that the missionary isn’t killed. Instead, he dies from fever. For decades I had been cherishing a false memory.

I don’t have to wait for dementia. Some of my memories have already vanished and others have been altered, phenomena which are probably common to all who reach my age. We are formed in part by our experience and by our memories of those experiences, but if our memories change or vanish, what does this imply about the constancy of our identities? Are we the same people now that we were in the past or do our evolving memories suggest that our identities keep changing along with them? If you replace the handle of an axe, will you hold the same axe as before? And if you then replace the head, so that neither of the original parts is present, can you chop wood with the same axe?

Whatever the answer to that conundrum, my second viewing of The African Queen suggests that our memories are as treacherous as the river down which the riverboat captain and the spinster travel. As we grow older, our perceptions change along with our experience. I’m no longer the person I was at twenty. What I saw in The African Queen when I was twenty is not what I saw sixty years later.

Saturn's Rings

Recently I came across the following paragraph from a letter that I wrote to our son a few years ago.

Tiny particles of matter, possibly ice, are said to compose the rings around Saturn, but I have long held another theory. Saturn’s rings are composed of missing socks. You put four pair of socks in the washing machine and when the wash is finished, you fish out seven socks. That eighth sock is circling Saturn. This simple, elegant theory explains not only the composition of Saturn’s rings but also the location of your missing socks. And, essential for a theory, it’s disprovable. You could disprove it, for example, by finding that eighth sock under your bed.

This meditation on the nature of Saturn's rings reminded me of other losses incurred since that letter was written, such as my wedding ring, about which I wrote a few months ago, and the fur-lined leather glove for my right hand, neither of which likely to be circling Saturn. And when I thought of them, my mind wandered to truly serious losses, the death of good friends. This thought caused me to remember the times that we had entertained each of them in our Jerusalem home, and that train of thought turned to the loss of that home and the life that we had created for ourselves there during our 32-year occupancy.

I miss our Jerusalem friends and the intense sense of community that living in a small, beleaguered society engenders. I miss the morning light on the Ottoman-era building that stood across the street and the eucalyptus trees which threw gently swaying shadows against that building's stone. I miss the blossoming of almond trees in February. I miss the flowering geraniums on our balcony. I miss the gradual lessening of traffic sounds as Shabbat approached and the siren that announced candle lighting time.

But after all, we sold our apartment; we didn’t lose it to a hurricane or a tsunami. Leaving a beloved home is one of the many changes to be expected by the time you reach our stage of development. Loss of friends is also to be expected and so, alas, is loss of a spouse. These losses, incurred in the natural course of aging, can’t be compared to the world-cracking devastation caused by the loss of a child or even to the lesser tragedies of losing one’s home and livelihood to an economic or natural disaster. No, the loss of our friends and our Jerusalem home, while painful, must be viewed as normal. As a wise man once told my friend Elaine Yaffe: life is a matter of letting go: of parents, of children, of friends, and ultimately of life itself.

Revisiting a Childhood Home

The Home section of the Times recently published an essay by Francine Prose about her visit to her childhood home. Although she had not lived there for more than 40 years, it still inhabits her dreams, just as my boyhood home inhabits mine. Since leaving that home, she had driven by it a few times, in order to show it to her husband, and she had imagined asking permission to go inside. Then an essay assignment gave her an excuse to do so.

She called the present owner, explained who she was, and asked if she might see the house. The owner – an elderly widow who lived there with one or two of her grown children - had bought it from the people who had acquired it from Ms. Prose’s parents and by now had lived there for two generations. The owner agreed to receive her, and Ms. Prose spent a pleasant few hours in the company of the widow and her children, although they were unwilling – perhaps because of the old lady’s age - to take Ms. Prose beyond the ground floor.

Her essay recalled a visit that my brother, sister, their spouses and children, and my daughter made to my boyhood home about 20 years ago. They were in town for a family function (which I was unable to attend) and, at my sister’s request, drove past the house, where, on impulse, they stopped. They walked up the front steps, rang the bell, and when the front door was opened by the owners, a married couple, my brother and sister identified themselves as having grown up in that house. The owners were kind enough to invite them – nine strangers! – to see the house.

During my father’s last years, the house had begun to deteriorate, so my siblings were pleased to see that it was now nicely rehabilitated. They found, however, some changes. The third floor's area was now about 50% larger than it had been during our childhood – it had been reduced by false walls – and the chain-link fence that had enclosed an area behind the garage had been removed. In that space, the first owner, a hunter, had kept his dogs.

Alas, my siblings couldn’t tell me whether our magnificently antlered moose’s head had remained. It had been mounted over the great stone fireplace in a high-ceilinged timbered room - an American version of a hunting lodge, complete with gunracks - that the hunter had added to the house. All during my childhood, I felt a strange sympathy for that moose and even now I’m curious as to his fate. And I wish I knew whether it was the hunter who killed that moose.

But I'm not the only one with a question. During my siblings’ visit the owners asked them to explain the lock on the outside of the master bedroom door. Why was it on the outside? Our parents had placed in that room the only television set, and they installed the lock in order to limit the amount of time we children spent watching it. No doubt this was a disappointing answer, for the incarceration of a mad aunt would have been far more interesting.

When I called my brother to tell him about Francine Prose’s article, he informed me that the first owners of our childhood home, the hunter and his wife, had called upon my parents and asked to see the house. I don’t know what my parents’ response was, but I hope it was as gracious as those who received Ms. Prose and my siblings. Once you’ve lived in home that you love, it continues, in some strange way, to be yours.

The "120 File"

For the past ten years or so, I’ve maintained what I call my “120 file,” named after the traditional Jewish blessing, usually offered to an older person, “may you live to 120.” The file is meant to help whichever spouse is still vertical to cope with the disability or death of the other. We’ve placed in this file copies of our health proxies, end of life preferences, and wills. In addition we’ve indicated the identity of our bank, brokerage, and credit accounts, the location of our safety deposit keys, and all our bookkeeping and bill paying procedures.

These procedures are my responsibility, and whenever they change, I revise the 120 file accordingly. But recently my beloved brother innocently threw a monkey wrench into my well-oiled machinery, when he introduced me to a computer program that protects one’s passwords. I had long used my boyhood address as the password for our various accounts, even though I knew that it was not a good idea to employ the same password for all accounts, because if a thief obtained it, I’d be in serious trouble.

The computer program to which my brother introduced me, KeePass, is a free, open source password manager which generates long strings of random digits and letters, both upper and lower case, for your passwords and then locks them in one database, which is encrypted with “the best and most secure algorithms” available, according to the program’s website. The program then helps you paste your password into the website you're accessing. All you need to remember is the master password that unlocks the database.

My brother’s description of the program proved irresistible. After I downloaded it, however, I found I couldn't operate it. So I called my brother. Generous and patient as usual, he walked me through the operation of the program, and I was delighted with it once I started to use it. So where was the monkey wrench? Once a year, at about this time, I review all the procedures in our 120 file, and as I did so I realized that my wife would not be able to gain access to our accounts online unless she learned how to operate KeePass.

So the other day, resolute and firm-jawed, I proceeded to transfer my KeePass data base to her computer, but I immediately ran into trouble. Again, my brother rode to the rescue and with patience and tact guided me through a procedure that after twenty-five years of using personal computers I should have mastered by now. What surprised me the other day, while working with my brother, was not my ineptitude but my considerable anxiety.

Why was I so anxious? The embarrassing truth is that I worried that I might pop off before installing the program and database in my wife’s computer and then she’d be unable to access our accounts online. I knew, of course, that this fear was irrational. After all, the chances of my checking out immediately, while not nil, are still pretty small. Besides, we have theater tickets for next week.

After I confessed my fears to my wife, she gently reminded me that she could always telephone the accounts in question and operate the old-fashioned way, checking balances and paying bills with a credit card over the phone, until she sets up her own computerized systems. My wife is an intelligent woman, in fact smarter than I am (she earned a higher degree of honors than I did from the same college). I needn’t fear that my demise will leave her helpless. True, my 120 file will be useful to her when, as is likely, I die first, but it's not essential. My obsession with keeping it up to date reflects, I’m afraid, an effort to control the uncontrollable, an attempt to act beyond the grave. KeePass will manage my passwords and keep them safe, but it won't allow me to operate posthumously. For that, I'll need a different program.

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The third paragraph of "Tithonus," posted on April 1, is indecipherable. I've copied all of the text here.

Anchises - An Old Man's Journal

An account of the pleasures and perils of old age

Friday, April 1, 2011

Tithonus

In Greek mythology, Eos, the oversexed Goddess of the Dawn, abducted two beautiful Trojan princes, Ganymede and Tithonus, to be her lovers. When Zeus stole Ganymede from her to be his cup bearer, she asked Zeus for compensation. She asked him to make Tithonus immortal, but she forgot to ask that he be granted everlasting youth. So Tithonus became immortal, growing older and older, feebler and feebler, shriveling away, longing for death but never dying.

Greek myth provides two unsatisfactory endings to this cautionary tale. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Eos shut her endlessly aging lover up in a room, where she laid him down, and “there he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.” In a later version of the myth, Eos transformed Tithonus into a cicada, in which form he lived forever and forever begged to die.

Gilbert Meilaender mentions this legend in his essay “Thinking about Aging,” which appears in the April issue of First Things and which my son-in-law pointed out to me. We wish for a long life and a complete one, but a complete life, Meilaender argues, implies a complete life cycle, including old age and death. Few of us would wish to reach an old age like that of Tithonus, in which we are reduced to a ghostly simulacrum of ourselves, our faculties so diminished we become unable to care for ourselves or to extract any pleasure from life.

Instead, many of us aim for what Meilaender refers to as “compressed morbidity,” where we live a long time relatively free of symptoms until we die suddenly and quickly. But, Meilaender asks, “if the idea is that we live – almost up till the end - a life that is vigorous and relatively free of disease or disability, why would we want it to end?” The decline of old age, he argues, “is, in a way, a gradual and (at least sometimes) gentle preparation for the cliff toward which we move.”

In any case, Meilaender wonders, is it possible to die suddenly and quickly after a vigorous old age without there being something wrong with us? No one dies from old age but from diseases to which we become increasingly more vulnerable. But if disease is to carry us off, we will have had to become more vulnerable. “We will still have had to age. Bones must still have become brittle, sensory systems needed for vision and hearing must have deteriorated, our immune system must have weakened.” We must, in short, have experienced the debilities of old age.

So, with respect to our aging, what should we hope for? If prolonged senescence is horrible and if a vigorous old age which ends quickly and suddenly is a chimera, perhaps the gradual decline of our faculties can be a good thing, preparing us, as Meilaender argues, for death. Right now, though, when I enjoy life so much, I'm still digging in my heels as I'm dragged inexorably towards that cliff. As my abilities continue to deteriorate, however, I hope that my diminished state will help me to accept the inevitable. I don’t know, of course, if my hope will be realized, but remembering Tithonus and his terrible fate may help.

Tithonus

In Greek mythology, Eos, the oversexed Goddess of the Dawn, abducted two beautiful Trojan princes, Ganymede and Tithonus, to be her lovers. When Zeus stole Ganymede from her to be his cup bearer, she asked Zeus for compensation. She asked him to make Tithonus immortal, but she forgot to ask that he be granted everlasting youth. So Tithonus became immortal, growing older and older, feebler and feebler, shriveling away, longing for death but never dying.

Greek myth provides two unsatisfactory endings to this cautionary tale. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Eos shut her endlessly aging lover up in a room, where she laid him down, and “there he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.” In a later version of the myth, Eos transformed Tithonus into a cicada, in which form he lived forever and forever and begged to die.

Gilbert Meilaender mentions this legend in his essay “Thinking about Aging,” which appears in the April issue of First Things and which my son-in-law pointed out to me. We wish for a long life and a complete one, but a complete life, Meilaender argues, implies a complete life cycle, including old age and death. Few of us would wish to reach an old age like that of Tithonus, in which we are reduced to a ghostly simulacrum of ourselves, our faculties so diminished we become unable to care for ourselves or to extract any pleasure from life.

Instead, many of us aim for what Meilaender refers to as “compressed morbidity,” where we live a long time relatively free of symptoms until we die suddenly and quickly. But, Meilaender asks, “if the idea is that we live – almost up till the end - a life that is vigorous and relatively free of disease or disability, why would we want it to end?” The decline of old age, he argues, “is, in a way, a gradual and (at least sometimes) gentle preparation for the cliff toward which we move.”

In any case, Meilaender wonders, is it possible to die suddenly and quickly after a vigorous old age without there being something wrong with us? No one dies from old age but from diseases to which we become increasingly more vulnerable. But if disease is to carry us off, we will have had to become more vulnerable. “We will still have had to age. Bones must still have become brittle, sensory systems needed for vision and hearing must have deteriorated, our immune system must have weakened.” We must, in short, have experienced the debilities of old age.

So, with respect to our aging, what should we hope for? If prolonged senescence is horrible and if a vigorous old age which ends quickly and suddenly is a chimera, perhaps the gradual decline of our faculties can be a good thing, preparing us, as Meilaender argues, for death. Right now, though, when I enjoy life so much, I'm still digging in my heels as I'm dragged inexorably towards that cliff. As my abilities continue to deteriorate, however, I hope that my diminished state will help me to accept the inevitable. I don’t know, of course, if my hope will be realized, but remembering Tithonus and his terrible fate may help.