Terms of Address

At least since the age of forty, I’ve resented doctors and nurses and their receptionists calling me by my first name, as if I were still twelve years old and not, as was often the case, older than they.  It reveals, I’ve always thought, a basic lack of respect for the patient – for me, in other words.  And now that I’m 80, to have twenty-somethings call me by my first name, when they’ve just met me, is doubly annoying. 

But on Friday, when I was being prepared for a minor surgical procedure at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, my nurse asked me how I’d like to be addressed.  Briefly I considered “Mr. Anchises” (“Dr. Anchises” or “Professor Anchises” outside an academic setting and especially in a hospital setting would have been both confusing and absurd), but I rejected “Mr. Anchises” as somewhat pompous and asked to be addressed by my first name.  It’s one thing to be addressed by your first name when you’ve given permission for it.  It’s another when the other person assumes the right without asking if he or she may do so.  The nurse wrote down my first name on the form that asked for my preferred mode of address, but neither she, nor anyone else on the staff addressed me as other than “sir,” or “Mr. Anchises.”

And then I realized that in all my dealings with Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital over the past year, I’ve never been addressed by my first name.  It’s always been “sir” or “Mr. Anchises.”  This is another example of the scrupulous care taken to make visits to the hospital as pleasant as possible.  The carpeting is luxuriously deep.  The waiting rooms would not look out of place in a new boutique hotel.  There you can make yourself a cup of coffee or tea and nibble on graham crackers.  The current editions of popular magazines are scattered about on end tables.  The examining room gowns are substantial – they don’t look as if they’ve been worn by ten thousand patients before you or that they’re being held together by their holes -  and, before a surgical procedure, you’re given in addition a most respectable navy blue bathrobe.  The staff, from surgeon to sweeper, is unfailingly pleasant and polite. 

And no one will call you by your first name, at least not if you’re twice as old as they are. 


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Flirting

One of the pleasures of old age is the ability to flirt with attractive women.  I took advantage of one such chance a few days ago when I dropped into the Urgent Care Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering to receive a catheter. The nurse who installed the device was in the first bloom of her loveliness.  Had she not been beautiful, however, she would have been enchanting purely from the nature of her personality -  sweet, attentive, light-hearted, yet devoted.  She acted as if I were the only patient in the world.  And if that wasn’t enough, she was as competent as she was delightful.  I fancy myself a connoisseur of catheter implantations, and this was as painless and fast as possible.  In addition, the catheter was comfortable to wear.  And now I could go home.

But not so fast.  My blood pressure had risen to 221 over 87.  The hospital would not release me with such a high reading.  My nurse returned and gave me an intravenous infusion of a drug designed to bring down my pressure.  It didn’t work.  She then gave me an infusion of another drug with equally null results.  At this point, it was time for the nursing shifts to change.  She came in to say goodbye and to wish me luck.  “It’s your fault I’m still here,” I told her.  “I didn’t want to say goodbye to you.”  I wouldn’t have dared make a remark like that twenty years ago, for fear that the object of my admiration might think I was hitting on her.  No female would think so now, especially in my present condition.  “Well, I’m going home now,” she said, “and I hope you can too.”  Smiling, she patted me affectionately on the knee and left.   

I told her replacement, who was twice as old and half as attractive, that I hadn’t yet taken my evening hypertension pills.  She requisitioned them from the pharmacy and gave them to me.  An hour later my pressure had fallen to 181, still high but not so high as to incarcerate me for the night.  “That’s more like it,” she said, when she saw the results, and then she took my face in both her hands and gave it a firm, maternal squeeze.  Well, even an 80-year-old likes a bit of mothering in situations like that.  But even so, she might as well have patted me on the head and chucked me under the chin.  My career as a Lothario had ended almost as soon as it had begun.


2010-2012  Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

What's in a Name?

My daughter, a palliative care social worker and a volunteer scout for this blog, sent me a link to an article by a gerontologist about the proper term for designating older adults (http://www.geripal.org/2012/03/elders-older-adults-seniors-language.html).  

The press refers to us as “seniors,” the author tells us, whereas the medical and geriatric literature refers to us as “older adults” or “the elderly.”   He told about being interviewed by a reporter in her seventies who writes about matters of interest to the old.  “I never use the term ‘elderly,’” she said. “My readers don’t respond to ‘older adult’ either. They don’t want to be ‘older.’ We prefer the term ‘senior.’ That’s the phrase I use in all my writing.”

In that case, the gerontologist concluded, those who write for the professional literature should use the term “senior” on the principle that “we should use the term that people use to describe themselves.” 

If the reporter is correct that her readers don’t want to be called “older," it suggests that they view the terms “older adults” or “the elderly” as derogatory.  It’s true that we live in a culture obsessed with youth and the appearance of youth, but I for one refuse to capitulate to it.  Why should I  be ashamed that I'm old?  I’m delighted that I’ve reached 80 and whenever anyone asks me my age (invariably a doctor or nurse), I tell it with considerable pride.  I refer to myself as “old.”  What’s wrong with that?  And if I manage to reach 85, I’ll be happy to refer to myself as “very old.”   The only time I refer to myself as a “senior” is when I request a senior discount.  But now that I think of it, from now on I’ll ask for an “elder’s discount.”  To effect a change in language usage, you have to start somewhere.

2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

The Loneliness of Extreme Old Age

In the last Times Sunday Review, Louis Begley, a 78-year-old retired lawyer best known for his novels, published an essay entitled “Age and Its Awful Discontents.”   He had nothing good to say about old age, terming its gifts “bitter.”  He attributes his dread of the “ravages and suffering inflicted on the body by age and illness” to his having no role models of successful aging in his family when he was growing up.  Those older relatives who could have provided models for him perished in Poland during the Second World War. 

The chief witness for the ills of aging seems to have been his mother, who died in her 94^th year, a widow for the last 40 of them.  In her final years, her pain, poor hearing, physical disabilities, unwillingness to use a wheelchair, and inability to manage a walker kept her at home, unable to visit museums, attend concerts, or even sit in the park.  Those of her friends who had escaped from Poland and lived in New York had “one by one became homebound or bedridden, lost their minds or died.”  During her last decade, she was, writes Begley, “very lonely.”  It has taken him until now “to feel in full measure the bitterness and anguish of my mother’s solitude - and that of other old people who end their lives without a companion.”

When I read this grim conclusion, I remembered an incident last week in which my wife and I were holding hands as we walked down the street.  A neighbor, who saw us, said it was nice to see us holding hands.  “We’re holding each other up,” said my wife, which raised a laugh from our neighbor and from me.  But as my wife and I continued down the street, the thought struck us both that in truth we were holding each up, not physically of course, not yet anyway, but emotionally.  I count her presence in my life as my chief blessing.  Still, I doubt I would be as lonely as Mr. Begley’s mother in the unlikely event I became a widower.  Our daughter and her family live in the other wing of our building, and my wife and I are making new friends among our neighbors and the younger members of our congregation.  Mr. Begley’s article increases our resolve to strengthen these friendships, because friends of our own age will inevitably drop away, one by one, if we reach extreme old age. 

Louis Begley’s essay reminded me of another essay, Montaigne’s “On the Length of Life,” in which he writes that “dying of old age is a rare death, unique and out of the normal order and therefore less natural than the others.  It is the last, the uttermost way of dying; the farther it is from us, the less we can hope to reach it.”  This was true towards the end of the sixteenth century, when these essays were written, and it remained true until very recently.  But according to the 2000 census, there were more than 50,000 centenarians in the United States, where centenarians comprise the fastest growing age segment of the population, and in 2008 seven-tenths of one per cent of the American population were in their nineties.  The loneliness experienced by Louis Begley’s mother will become an increasing problem. Broadening one’s friendships to include the young may mitigate the loneliness. 

To paraphrase Johnson, while old age has many pains, death has few pleasures.  It behooves us all to broaden our circles, which may reduce the pains of extreme old age, should we attain it.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Lost Keys

Two days ago, I lost the elevator key that allows you to ride to our building’s basement, along with the key to one of our building’s basement locker rooms and the key to the padlock that secures our locker.  All of them hung from the same key ring, which I kept in a bureau drawer devoted to my keys.  Ultimately I found them inside the pockets of the pants I was wearing when last I used the keys.  Had I not found them, I would have had to request a new elevator key from our building’s superintendent, for which the building would charge a substantial fee, and I would have had to invite a locksmith to break our locker’s padlock and to sell us a new one.  Frightened at this possible future prospect, I determined to make duplicate keys. 

Nothing is as easy as you think it will be.  First of all, the elevator key cannot be duplicated without some sort of official permit that only the building’s administration possesses.  Second, while the locksmith’s copy of the key to the locker room worked, the key to our padlock did not.  I returned to him and asked him to adjust the latter’s cut, which he did.  Had I thought of it at the time, I would have brought the padlock too so I could test his work.  As it turned out, his second cut was no more successful than his first.  Well, tomorrow’s another day, I told myself.  I’ll return the next day, this time with the padlock.

But yesterday, when I looked for my keys, I could not find them.  I found the duplicate keys where they should have been, in my dedicated drawer for keys.  But where were the originals?  The originals and copies should have been together.  I know the originals are somewhere in the apartment, because when I went to test the locksmith’s second attempt yesterday, I had to use the elevator key.  I checked the pockets of the clothes I was wearing yesterday but they were empty of keys. 

Lady Bracknell said something to the effect that losing one parent is a tragedy but losing two is carelessness.  The opposite is true for keys, at least for this octogenarian.  Losing them once is carelessness, losing them twice is a tragedy.  Thirty years ago, had I lost my keys twice in two days I would have been irritated with myself, but now I felt despondent.   Was I losing my mind?  Was this a sign of diminished cognitive capacity?  Was my wife going to have to hire a caretaker for me?

Well, there was no point in walking to the locksmith yesterday, so I would take my daily walk in Prospect Park.  Diminished capacity or not, I could still walk and I felt reasonably confident that I could obey the traffic lights on the way and afterwards find my way home.  The park is beautiful in every season, but yesterday it was astonishing in its beauty, with a variety of trees and bushes in bloom, including ornamental pear, magnolia, cherry, and forsythia.  A foreign couple with children asked me the way to the zoo, to which they were headed in the wrong direction.  I helped them find their way, which made me feel better, suggesting that my mind was not entirely gone. 

That encounter, the oxygen intake from my walk, and the beauty of the flowering trees and shrubs calmed me down.  I had lost my keys.  I hadn’t lost my mind.  And if all I could worry about were those keys, I was a fortunate man indeed.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

"What Are You Doing Now?"

After services on Shabbat morning, Roger, a much younger man, asked me, “what are you doing now?”  He didn’t ask me “what are you working on?” the question my colleagues and I always asked one another when we hadn’t seen each other for a while.  We assumed that of course the other was preparing a paper, a talk, a book, collecting or analyzing data, and so forth.  But the truth of the matter is these days I’m not working on anything: I’m writing no book, I’m writing no paper, I’m collecting no data, I’m taking no notes.  Perhaps intuiting this, Roger asked me not “what are you working on?” but “what are you doing?” 

“Visiting doctors,” I told him, which was true but only partially so, since that week I had seen only two.  Recognizing the feebleness of my reply, I added that I prepare occasional commentaries on the bible portion of the week (I had prepared two in the past two weeks) and that I’m writing a blog.  I didn’t tell him that I also write a weekly letter to each of our two children, each letter a little essay that sometimes finds its way, transformed, into my blog. 

My response to Roger’s question made me feel bad, like a slacker, as if I spend my days on a park bench, dozing in the sun.  The fact is I’m very busy.  For six days a week I have few idle moments, unless you count the time spent walking in Prospect Park for exercise.  Except on Shabbat, I read little of the Times.  I rarely watch television. Two Netflix CDs have been sitting next to our television set, unopened and unwatched, for at least six months.      

Why am I accomplishing so little?  I’ve added more household tasks to my routine since retiring, I probably work more slowly than I once did, e-mail gobbles up more time now than it did when I was working, and I spend much more time in doctors’ offices and in submitting to medical tests than formerly.  Those changes would account in part for my accomplishing so little at the end of each day.  I wish that performing everyday tasks like folding laundry and balancing checkbooks counted as accomplishments, but since these are taken for granted, the background of everyday life for most of us, I can scarcely list these among my activities.

I might not feel like such a slouch if some of my friends and colleagues, the same age as I or older, were not still writing and editing books.  When I ask them what they’re working on, they have a ready answer.  Perhaps I should dream up another answer to Roger’s question, an answer that would sound as if I’m accomplishing something but at the same time be true.  For in response to the question about what I’m doing now, the answer “nothing much” won’t do. 

But it occurs to me just now that the five essays that I write each a week plus the occasional bible commentary I produce are not "nothing much." They're a reasonably respectable accomplishment for an octogenarian, who's fully entitled to spend his time on a park bench, his face turned to the sun.  So the next time Roger or someone else asks me what I'm doing, I'll tell them what I'm doing and not feel bad about it.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Selling Yourself a Bill of Goods

My nose starting running last Friday, when I was shopping on Park Slope's Seventh Avenue.  Upon reaching for my handkerchief, I found it was gone, and then I remembered, too late, that I had used it to blow my nose earlier that day while walking in Prospect Park, that I had placed it in the laundry and then neglected to put another in my pocket.  What should I do?  Surely a man of my advanced years to say nothing of my superb dignity could, in public, wipe his nose on the back of his sleeve. 

As it happened, I was standing in front of Yogo Monster, a shop that dispenses frozen yoghurt in various flavors and toppings. You serve yourself in the large containers the store provides, weigh it, and pay accordingly. Rescue was at hand!  I would just walk in and take a few napkins, walk out, and blow my nose.

I walked in, approached the napkins, and then paused.  How would it look for an apparently respectable elderly man to walk into a shop, steal a few napkins, and then walk out?  Well, I thought, yoghurt is only 49 cents an ounce.  I’ll just buy a bit.  I took one of the store’s huge containers (there’s only one size), and poured what I judged to be about a cup’s worth of frozen vanilla yoghurt into the container.  Over that I poured a generous amount of maple syrup.  After all, what could maple syrup weigh?  To my amazement, the yoghurt plus the syrup plus the container weighed about 7 ounces, but what the hell, in for a penny in for a pound, or in this case 7/16th of one. 

I found an empty table and chair, sat myself down, and slowly consumed the yoghurt, carefully distributing syrup onto each spoonful.  Nothing could be more delicious, especially at four in the afternoon, when such a treat was slightly disreputable.  And then I remembered a Helen Hokinson New Yorker cartoon, which shows two substantial middle-aged ladies standing in front of a patisserie.  One says to the other, “Let’s just walk in and see what happens.” 

Of course I knew what would happen if I walked into the Yogo Monster.  But for the half second it took to walk in, I fooled myself into thinking that it didn’t have to happen, that perhaps it wouldn’t happen, and that maybe I’d escape with only two napkins and without buying any frozen yoghurt.  This is known as selling yourself a bill of goods.  Life would be intolerable were one not able to do that from time to time.


2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal  All Rights Reserved