SEPTEMBER 18, 2024 – If you follow the same daily walking route over the years, you inevitably become acquainted with people along the way. On Monday I wrote about one such acquaintance, a retired engineer. Today I met another amiable guy—Phillip—with whom I’ve chatted at length on multiple occasions over the past decade. We hadn’t seen each other or talked since last fall, so naturally we stopped to catch up.
A retired master carpenter, Phillip reminds me of me in many ways, except his Minnesota accent is a lot stronger than mine. He lives in the neighborhood adjacent to Little Switzerland, and in his yard is an ancient luxurious burr oak, which stretches well over the adjoining lots. He loves to scout the area for photo ops—birds, flowers, trees—with his high-end, old-fashioned SRL. “I have over 14,000 slides,” he said. “I’m going through them, trying to organize them, but who’s ever gonna care? My family won’t, and if my family won’t care, who else is there? . . . But it’s my hobby. I love taking pictures, so why not?”
Phillip hunts grouse too, and he’d just returned from his annual trip to “grouse grounds” near Two Harbors on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
“’Was 80 degrees up there,” he said, “if you can believe that. My hunting buddies and I’ve been going up there together for years. We stay at an old cabin in the woods. We’re all getting old, though. The guy who owns the property died a few years ago, but his son says we can keep hunting there until we die. This time around, one guy arrived using a cane; couldn’t hunt. That left two of us, and who knows how much longer we’ll be able to hunt.” He laughed in his resignation to the inevitable.
“This getting old business isn’t easy, is it?”
“No. Sure isn’t. Whenever you get together with people our age, all they can talk about are their ailments.”
“I know. But there’s something reassuring about that,” I said. “It’s a reminder that I’m not the only human being around.”
Phillip was right. Whenever we assemble with friends and acquaintances our age, after exchanging a shared disbelief in the state of American politics (as Phillip and I inevitably did later in the conversation), we deal with knees, hips, eyes, ears, internal organs, diseases and syndromes and an array of medical specialties and sub-specialties. In planning out-of-town trips and stays at the cabin, scheduling revolves around medical appointments.
As I continued on my way home, I pondered further the phenomenon of aging . . .
My parents and in-laws had their fair share of medical issues—and appointments. In their most advanced years, I accompanied Mother and Dad to some, though not as many as my sisters did. I’ll never forget an appointment with Mother’s ophthalmologist. In the preliminary exam, an assistant presented Mother with the usual eye chart and asked, “Can you read the third line down?”
“Yes,” said Mother with a deadpan look—at the assistant, not the eye chart.
“I think she wants you to read the letters, Mother,” I said.
“Well now,” Mother said, giving me her “gotcha” half-smile and acting as if the woman was no longer in the room. “If she wanted me to read the letters she could have asked me, but she didn’t. She asked if I could read them—which I can—and I said ‘yes.’”
To her credit, the 20-something assistant took it all in stride. No doubt Mother wasn’t the first smart alec or alec(sa) senior patient of the clinic, and perhaps the assistant had feisty elderly grandparents whom she visited occasionally in some facility for the aged. But to myself I warned, “Whatever you do, don’t act that way when you’re old.”
At the time “getting old” still seemed largely theoretical to me. Old age and the baggage it bears—failing sight, hearing, energy, alertness, mobility, flexibility, and mental and physical capacity— were conditions that happened to other people. I’d be different somehow, and lost in arrogant denial was the possibility that I might not even get to be old.
I had even less empathy for my grandparents when they were in their 90s and I was in my 30s. In the first place, they didn’t seem to need empathy. They never complained, and though my grandmother was pretty much confined to a wheelchair for the last quarter of her century-long life, I didn’t associate her confinement with old age. She’d had Rickets as a child, and by her mid-70s, her knees were shot. If she’d had knee replacements as so many people do nowadays, she would have ambled about freely instead of having to rely on ramps and inclinators, walkers and wheelchairs.
During the four months following the bar exam, I lived with my grandparents and uncle (and worked for my grandfather and uncle) in Rutherford, New Jersey. The Sunday afternoon routine was to board Grandpa’s over-sized (for him, anyway) gold Cadillac, load Gaga’s[1] wheelchair into the cavernous trunk and drive to an elegant, fine-dining restaurant for old folks in nearby Lyndhurst. My uncle and I sat in the back of the Cadillac. My elderly grandparents had shrunk so much by that point in their lives, the only way I could tell they were still in the car was if they talked.
Upon arriving at the restaurant, Grandpa maneuvered the car under the front awning. Uncle Bruce would then retrieve the wheelchair, unfold and wheel it up to the passenger side and help Gaga into it. If Grandpa was the chauffeur, I thought, Uncle Bruce was the butler and personal valet (he and Gaga were always very close), and Gaga was Queen Victoria. Me? I was the car door closer and restaurant door opener, as the chauffeur parked the royal carriage.
The maître d’ knew us and with menus in hand led us to Gaga’s preferred table. Other than some of the staff, I was by far the youngest person in sight. Uncle Bruce was the next youngest. Grandpa always wore a suit; Uncle Bruce, a sport coat and tie. Gaga always looked her best, with jewelry matching her dress. Lamp chops were her favorite entrée.
Surrounded by geriatric diners, I hungered for younger company. What I didn’t appreciate was the total absence of any table talk about the ailments of age. My grandparents were complete stoics or extremely lucky, but in either case, they simply didn’t talk about their eyes, ears, knees, et cetera the way my wife and I and our peers do today—still many years younger than my grandparents during that summer of 1980.
Maybe there’s something to learn from the uncomplaining old folks who were in our lives long ago, but on the other hand, I find a measure of profit in lending an ear, sharing burdens, and exchanging empathy. And then there’s what Phillip told me is the most important thing about growing old: a sense of humor. “Ya gotta have a sense of humor,” he said, “that’s the most important thing.” Maybe that’s what I have to focus on more, I thought, as I quickened my (aging) gait.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1]The name that our oldest sister, when she was a toddler, assigned to our maternal grandmother. The name stuck.
