“Rules for Old Men Waiting” does not meet my standards for a felicitous book title. Almost every word carries connotations that many browsers will take as off-putting.
First, who will get excited about rules? They bring back images of classroom discipline or, perhaps, military demands.
And does anyone want to read about aging? People in the publishing business will tell you that the word “old” is toxic.
Thirdly, “waiting” suggests passivity, something no true-blue American wants to be accused of, especially when the waiting is for death.
Despite this handicap, however, the book turns out to be well worth reading. It took Peter Pouncey, its author, 23 years to write it. Getting the book published when, as he says, he was “two thirds of a century old,” counts as a notable achievement for this late-blooming novelist. His academic duties, first as dean of Columbia University and then president of Amherst College, delayed the birth of this work.
“Rules” features a novel within a novel, a tricky device for a writer to pull off. Its chief story, in the inner framework, is a grimy and suspenseful tale of British soldiers in the trenches of World War I. A rich diversity of character among the troops looms large in this account of deadly conflict within their ranks.
But I find myself most taken by what the narrator tells us about a man’s life in its later stages. I zeroed in on the way Pouncey’s chief character, MacIver, manages his physical decline. He does so in large part by formulating the set of rules referred to in the title.
The man has lost his beloved wife and now faces life alone in the rustic Cape Cod cottage where they had chosen to retire. Margaret was a beautiful person and MacIver desperately misses her. Her loss followed the death of their only son in the Vietnam War, years before, when MacIver and his wife were still in middle age.
The old man feels himself slipping into the abyss of isolation and, even worse, self-neglect. Soon he realizes that he must do something to arrest this frightening descent. That is what moves him to formulate a set of rules for his daily effort to regain hold of himself.
Here is his seven-point agenda:
- Keep personally clean;
- Make bed every morning, and clean house twice a week;
- Dress warmly, and light fire when necessary, burning least important things first;
- Eat regularly;
- Play music and read;
- Television only in the evening, except for weekend and seasonal showdown sports;
- Work every morning. Nap in the afternoon if needed.
This agenda speaks to me. In fact, I implement most of it myself by long ingrained habit. However, I do not clean the house at all, much less twice a week. That seems to me excessive, though, perhaps for MacIver it serves as a kind of therapy.
Nor do I light fires or burn. But that practice would help reduce the rubble of paper in my office to manageable proportions.
Yes to television, under exactly the same conditions the man sets for himself. How would I ever have deprived myself, this season, of the late-game heroics of Big Papi and his Red Sox compadres? And without watching the news on public TV, I would find world and national events much less vibrant.
The virtues of naps, taken in moderation, prove hard to exaggerate. A half-hour’s sleep, in the afternoon slump time, counts for me as a sovereign remedy for the trials of soul and body.
Surely the most glaring omission in the list is contact with other people. Like the rest of us, MacIver badly needs to be in touch with others who can relate to him.
Of course, physical exercise deserves explicit mention as well; MacIver’s making the bed and cleaning the house provide some muscular exertion but these activities fall far short of the mark.
Not everyone desires to follow MacIver’s agenda, of course, and many could not do so. Many of my age peers have developed other schemes that work well for them. They may include prayer, for example, an activity (or passivity) that rates no mention in MacIver’s list.
This fictional person, however, does write, a pursuit that often seems to me an extension of prayer. Writing factual material or fiction can be taken as a service to others, at least if they have the opportunity to read your stuff.
Spiritual exercise is an important component of a well-rounded daily schedule, it seems to me. Contemplation adds a vital element to later life, one too little noticed by the seers who discourse about aging.
As chapter one concludes, MacIver has fined-tuned three of his rules further and winds up with ten. “On the whole,” the author writes of his protagonist, “he felt he had brought some order to his abject life. These were tough, good rules─tough but fair.”
Richard Griffin