"Don't Just Sit There"

That’s the title of an article in Sunday’s Times, which reports the baneful results of inactivity, particularly sitting (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/sunday-review/stand-up-for-fitness.html?_r=1.)  A National Cancer Institute study that followed almost a quarter million Americans over eight years was one of the studies that the article cited.  At the beginning of the study, none of the study’s respondents was suffering from diabetes, cancer, or heart disease.  After eight years, many were sick and many had died.  As might be expected, those who were most sedentary – defined as those who watched television for at least seven hours a day - had a higher risk of premature death than those who watched less often. 

What astounded me is that “people in the study who exercised for seven hours or more a week but spent at least seven hours a day in front of the television were more likely to die prematurely than the small group who worked out seven hours a week and watched less than an hour of TV a day.”  A new Australian study estimated that if an average man watched no television as an adult, his life span might be 1.8 years longer and a television-less woman would live another year and a half.  Watching television can be dangerous to your health. When the author of this article read these results she canceled her cable subscription.

My wife and I, who have just added seventy more channels, including two movie channels, to our cable subscription for a very small added fee, ought to follow suit except that we hardly ever watch television, cable or otherwise.  We like the idea, though, of being able to watch whatever and whenever we want.  It’s a bit like the feeling I had as a university teacher that, as my own boss, more or less, I could go to the movies in the afternoon whenever I wanted to, but in my entire career as an academic I never did it once.

But I digress.  The Times article also reported a study by researchers at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne that compared the effects of sitting completely still for seven hours and breaking up the sitting every twenty minutes by either walking or jogging for two minutes.  When the subjects sat without getting up, their blood sugar levels spiked and their insulin levels went haywire.  Blood sugar remained stable, however, when subjects broke up their sitting with walking or jogging.  Jogging didn’t improve blood sugar levels any more than standing.  “What was important, the scientists concluded, was simply breaking up the long, interminable hours of sitting.”

I’m probably like many of my readers in spending “long, interminable hours” at the computer.  I’ve long known that a sedentary life style is unhealthy, but I thought that my seven hours of exercise per week would shield me from its ill effects.  Now I know I was wrong.  So from now on I’ll try to rise from the computer every twenty minutes and walk or stand for two minutes.  I won't jog, however, since it would disturb the neighbors downstairs and besides I'm too lazy and old. 

My wife asked me what I’ll do with the extra minutes of life that breaking up my sitting might give me.  “I’ll do what I’m doing now,” I told her, “only I’ll be able to do it longer.”



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

Old Age Fantasies

I’m probably not alone in imagining that I’ll continue into the indefinite future with my faculties, strength, and energy more or less intact.  And then, one morning I simply won’t wake up.  That’s one imagined scenario.  Another is that I’ll suffer a quick and painless decline, after bidding a smiling farewell to my nearest and dearest and organizing my files. 

That these are fantasies, I’m well aware.  To hold on to them means that I must banish thoughts of those friends who have died from Alzheimer’s disease or are currently suffering from it. I must cast out memories of visits to friends in nursing homes in which I pass inert patients, slumped in their wheelchairs, staring ahead unseeing or asleep, waiting to die.  I must forget the bitter complaints of a very old friend whose dependency on others for his daily care was almost complete.  When such memories surface I tell myself “it can’t happen to me.”  But why not? 

These gloomy thoughts arose the other day when I learned that the reason my legs ache when I walk any distance is because I’ve become severely anemic, probably due to loss of blood after a surgical procedure but possibly also because of renal insufficiency.  It’s likely that my body will restore the requisite hemoglobin all by itself but in case it does not, medical intervention can restore my blood count to what passes for normal with me.

In the meantime, though, I have an inkling of what it might feel like to be very old, when you have to ration your energy and think about every step.   Of course, I’d have to be lucky enough to live another five years to classify myself as very old, with 85 generally accepted as the boundary for that venerable stage of life.  Actually, if this is what I’ll feel like if I reach 85, I won’t complain.  I can still read and write and listen to music; I can still kiss my wife and hug my grandchildren; I can still meet my friends for lunch.  And if I find it hard to walk to the restaurant, I’ll borrow the scooter from the little boy next door.


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

Falling Petals

Last Shabbat, we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a ten-minute walk from our home.  It was a warm, sunny day,and almost all the visitors to the garden were smiling with pleasure from the loveliness of the spring day and the spectacular display of flowering plants all around us.  My wife remarked that it reminded her of the public’s reaction to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “wrapping” of Central Park, “The Gates” project, which installed thousands of orange fabric sheets  through the park, several years ago in February, the year’s most dismal month, when you think spring will never return.  Walkers in the park were delighted.

There also was much to delight the crowds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden: azalea, wisteria, lilac, dogwood, crabapple, and cherry were in bloom, the bluebells had begun to blossom, and the peonies were as large as cabbages.  Most of the cherry tree varieties had passed the zenith of their colorfulness, and so we walked under a light rain of cherry blossoms, with drifts of silky petals all about.  The falling petals reminded us of the day of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.

That was in November of 1995.  We were in Oamaru, New Zealand then, conducting research for a book on Mark Twain’s world lecture tour of 1895-6.  He had performed in Oamaru 100 years before and we were staying in the same hotel.  Shocked by the news of Rabin’s assassination, my wife and I took a long walk through Oamaru’s botanic gardens, where chestnut trees were in bloom.  We walked under their falling blossoms, which increased our sense of elegy and sadness.

We felt a similar sadness the day after our visit to the Botanic Garden, at a performance of Dan LeFranc’s new play, The Big Meal.  It takes us through four generations of the same family, with the roles assumed by younger players taken by increasingly older ones.  The effect is something like that of watching a time-lapse film.  Here we see in the space of ninety minutes, young people morph into the generation of their parents, then their grandparents, and finally their great grandparents, with the actors assuming multiple roles.  At the end, the great grandmother, whom we had first seen as a young woman, declares that it all happens so fast.  

Her comment reminded me of my grandfather’s telling me more than once, “it’s all a dream.”  I didn’t understand him at the time, but now I do and all too well.  Spring succeeds winter, the blossoms fall, our children succeed us, and it all happens before we can turn around, before we know what's happened.  Still, if we’re lucky we’ll see another spring. We’ll return to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, walk under the falling blossoms, and think both of “The Gates” and that morning in Oamaru.  But we don’t have to wait for next spring to be grateful that we’ve seen so many springs until now.

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

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Public Bench

After almost a week of walking again for exercise, following an outpatient surgical procedure, I’ve increased my stamina.  Still, the other day, having walked no more than 200 steps, my thighs began to ache.  As I approached the Grand Army Plaza, I found one of its benches irresistible.  I sat down on it heavily and basked in the sun.

“It’s come to this,” I thought to myself, “an old man sitting on a public bench in the sun.”  How long have I looked down at such men, figuring they had nothing better to do?  It had never occurred to me that they were sitting there to gather the strength to continue walking.

How could I have forgotten my own father?  He'd flown out from Boston to spend a week with us in Jerusalem.  Accompanying me on my evening walk of our dog - a Eurasian Terrier, as my late friend Bob Werman called him - Dad asked mid-way if he could sit down.  He was in his early seventies at the time, suffering from a variety of maladies, if not yet from the pancreatic cancer that would kill him a few years later.  He sat down gratefully and remained sitting for what seemed to his impatient son a long time but was probably no more than the time I spent on the Grand Army Plaza bench thirty-five years later.

I hope that in the future I’ll be more tolerant of old men sitting on public benches.  And that includes me.


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

Loony Bin

Most days you can find, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, a tall, thin, African-American beggar of indeterminate age.  Sitting on an upturned box opposite the entrance to the Key Foods supermarket, he jiggles a cup with a few coins on the bottom.  They’d make a pleasant sound, a bit like castanets, were not their associations so bleak.  He was sitting there last Thursday as I was making the rounds of my pre-Shabbat purchases.

I was surprised to see him because he told me the week before that he was going away for four weeks.  He’d be at the Downtown Medical Center for a psychiatric evaluation.  He needed one in order to receive a social security disability pension.  But there were no beds for him, he told me on Thursday, speaking surprisingly distinctly for a man with more gaps between his teeth than teeth.  He could have gone to the VA hospital at Ft. Hamilton, he said shuddering, but he’d never go there.  The waiting list’s for Downstate’s not long, he said. 

When he’s admitted, he told me, “I’ll say I hear voices and I’ll jump up and down and hide under tables, until they think I belong in a loony bin.”   I said nothing, thinking that his scheme was not right.  Perhaps he read my mind because he continued, “I hear my mother saying right now, ‘that’s not God’s Will. Thou shalt not steal.’  But will a few hundred dollars a month break the government?  Some of my buddies’ve done it.  I should’ve done it in 1968, when I came home from Viet Nam.”

He’s entitled to a social security pension of over $800 a month, he told me, but he’s not enrolled in the system.  Once he’s at Downstate, though, the administration there will register him, so even if the psychiatrists  see through his parody of insanity, he’ll still receive a pension.  They might not, of course, see through it, presuming that all the patients there are a bit nuts.  Besides, he probably is a bit nuts.  Service in Viet Nam left a lot of emotionally damaged vets.

So maybe his charade will not really be a charade.  But even if it is, who am I to criticize him for it?  It’s easy to feel morally superior when you’re in a superior material position, when you’re not driven to desperate straits, when you've been given every advantage, possess a private income, and feel financially secure.

“Hey, that’s a nice shirt,” he said, reaching out and fingering the blue and white fabric covering my arm.  “It would match my shoes.”  He raised his right leg to show me the blue-trimmed gym shoe on his foot. “If you have one of those for me, you can leave it at Palma’s.”  That’s the drug store across the street on the next corner.  “That’s where people leave clothes for me.” 

He may or not be crazy, but there's no question he's smart.   I gave him a dollar and wished him good luck.


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

Sol Packer

A few weeks ago I underwent a simple prostatectomy, an outpatient procedure that’s not a big deal.  It was the third reduction, over the past twenty-one years, of my prostate, that almond-shaped organ that continues to grow even as my need for it has diminished.  According to the instructions received at the hospital, I was not to exercise or to carry anything heavier than ten pounds for two weeks.  The two weeks passed a few days ago, so the other day I ventured forth for a walk in Prospect Park.  It would be a greatly truncated version of my usual walk, I decided.  I’d walk only to the first traffic light on the West Drive and then return by a parallel path. 

The park, at the height of its spring brilliance, with flowering dogwood, azalea, magnolia, and cherry, seemed an ideal place in which resume my career as intrepid walker, but the mild inclines upward from the Grand Army Plaza that I had ignored but a month ago now appeared as formidable obstacles to my progress.  My thigh muscles began to ache and I had to stop to catch my breath.  A walk that would have taken me no more than 20 minutes a month ago, now required at least twice as much time.  I received a vivid lesson in the adage, “use it or lose it.”

Feeling slightly sorry for myself, I sat down on a bench facing the Long Meadow.  On one of the bench’s back slats was a small plaque:

In memory of Sol Packer

who played volleyball with his friends

on the Long Meadow

1982 – 2006

No more than 24 years old when he died, the young man was probably still unmarried, probably still childless, probably at only the beginning of his career.  Even today, he’d be no more than 30, still a kid.  He’d hardly lived before he was taken from those who loved him.  My self-pity vanished as I felt pity for him and his family and realized how lucky I’ve been to have lived so long, able to feel my muscles ache and my breath come short, able to admire the flowering trees on the other side of the Long Meadow.  If my walk in Prospect Park reminded me of the importance of continued exercise, it also reminded me of the unfairness of life.  I can’t do anything about the young dying prematurely, but I can keep myself vertical for a little bit longer by returning to regular exercise.  And from now on, I'll look for Sol Packer's bench as a reminder of the fragility of life and of its preciousness even at 80.


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

Aging Gracefully

In his review of Louis Begley’s new novel, (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/schmidt-steps-back-by-louis-begley.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=ron%20carlson&st=cse), the third in which Albert Schmidt, now 78, is the central character, Ron Carlson quotes a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks, “No such thing as graceful old age.”  Fitzgerald’s perspective was skewed, since he died at 44.  Perhaps he would have changed his mind had he been privileged to become old.

One hears often enough that an individual is (or is not) aging gracefully, but until I read Carlson’s review, I’d not thought much about what it means.  Albert Schmidt, the protagonist of Begley’s novel, has, according to the reviewer, aged gracefully.  A rich, retired lawyer who lives in the Hamptons and oversees the philanthropic foundation of an even richer friend, he’s fallen in love with the widow of a former colleague.  Schmidt is “capable of a sobering empathy,” writes the reviewer, “has a withering understanding of the recent Bush regime, knows how to prepare a martini and sends his retired cleaning ladies an annual check.”  None of these qualifications is essential for graceful aging, of course, not even being rich, although surely that helps.  The point, it seems to me, is that Schmidt fully participates in life.  What matters to him, writes the reviewer, “is love, self, gossip, philosophy, insult, rivalry, mortality and yes, kindness and grace.”

But there’s more to aging gracefully than continuing to engage in the world outside oneself.  Those who age gracefully do not rail against the limitations that age imposes.  They do not try to appear younger than they are, nor do they pretend that their strength is undiminished.  Gracefully aging women do not dress in the fashion of the young nor do they plaster their faces with makeup in an effort to conceal the ravages of age.  Gracefully aging men do not employ combovers nor do they marry women who are their daughters’ contemporaries.  Those who age gracefully, in other words, accept themselves for what they are.  This is a formula not only for graceful aging but for graceful living as well.