With the approach of summer, Phileas J. Fogg has taken up a favorite vantage point each morning, lying prone on the sill of an upstairs bedroom window.  This position gives him a fine opportunity to check the activities of other neighborhood cats as well as other beings, human and animal, as the area awakes to a new day.

What actually impinges most on Phil’s psyche, no one can say. Perhaps the call of the cardinal and the warbling of the other birds nearby strikes him more than any sightings. In any event, he often assumes more a meditative pose than a investigatory one as he lies there contentedly.

My own bet about what he experiences is more elemental. I would wager that Phil values most the touch of the soft balmy air currents on his skin. After the rigors of this past winter, he must love to feel the warm contact from the atmosphere, the way the rest of us often do.

Since last report, Phil has been diagnosed for diabetes, an ailment that frequently afflicts cats of his senior status. At first, the vet’s announcement came as a shock, an apparent death knell of our household member. Without insulin shots, Phil’s future seemed short indeed, and there was no way we could imagine ever giving such shots to this ornery beast.

But, if he is now terminal, it does not show. Of course, in the long run Phil is doomed to death like all other living beings. However, he does not allow  disease to cramp his life style unduly. He still moves with a tiger’s sudden speed on occasion and, like his other feline relatives, sleeps contently during much of the day.

The one noticeable difference in his habits comes from his new craving for water. Often he will leap from the floor up to the kitchen faucet hoping to slurp from its flow.  He will even poach on the water glasses of his masters, in our place settings at table. Recently he even indulged himself in a helping of black bean soup before his unvigilant masters put an end to this surprising theft.

Susan threw the rest of the soup out despite my making to eat it. She appeared horrified to envision me downing food that Phil had been into. But is he really any dirtier than we?  Would our eating what had become cat food do us in?

I am reminded of an anecdote from a niece’s childhood. She was once discovered to have been eating some dog chow.  When confronted by her aghast mother, the child confessed and promised not to do it again.

“By the way,” her mother asked, “how did it taste?” “Just like cat food,” her daughter answered.

Among Phil’s traits I most admire is his contemplative stance on the world. I actually feel envy that he can do absolutely nothing for hours on end. Why has he been given this gift and not I?

His stance reminds me of lines in T. S. Eliot’s 1930 poem “Ash Wednesday.” “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” If only I had better learned sitting still. The balance between caring and not caring is another and subtler issue, suitable for longer discussion.

I often gaze into Phil’s eyes when he rests in his meditative mood and wonder about his inner life. Then the words of another poet, William Blake, always come to mind: “What immortal hand or eye / Framed thy fearful symmetry.” Of course Blake was talking about a tiger, but Phil qualifies as my tiger.

There are no escape attempts to report on here. Perhaps age has reconciled Phil to the vocation of the cloister. If given the choice at this stage of life, maybe he would even opt for the interior life of our house. After these many years, it is also his house by now, imprinted with his escapades and daily routine.

What I hope for this summer is many bright days. There is nothing Phil likes more than the play of the sun’s rays over the inner surfaces of our house. Perhaps this response to the light is to be expected in a contemplative. If enlightenment looms large in the world’s spiritualities, then Phil is in his element.

I often watch him respond to the rays as they come toward him when he lies on the master bed. He will roll over, seemingly in order to focus the sunlight to its best advantage. When, as happens too often, the morning clouds over, I grieve with Phil for the loss of the light.

I leave off here so as to go play with Phil. This I do despite my fear of having got the situation backward. When it comes right down to it, isn’t it Phil who is playing with me?

Richard Griffin

Certain days in our lives bring with them events that will mark us for the rest of our time on earth. This is the kind of dramatic event that arrived for me, some three weeks ago. My life will never be quite the same.

Shortly after one Friday midnight I awoke feeling intense pressure in my chest. I quickly became convinced that I was either then having a heart attack or was about to suffer one. Alarmed at the danger, I enlisted my wife to drive me to the hospital without delay.

Despite strong reluctance to pass even one night hospitalized, I agreed to be admitted, was quickly tied up to a heart monitor, and underwent tests to diagnose my problem.

For months previously, evidence for heart disease had remained unclear. No one had diagnosed clearly the reason why I so often experienced, on my daily walks, feelings of constriction in my chest.  

As soon as a veteran cardiologist at the hospital examined me, however, he was sure I needed a angiogram, whereby dye would be sent through the major arteries leading to my heart. Though I had always hoped to avoid this procedure, I was anxious enough about my condition to agree to have it done. However, I would have to wait until the following Monday, which meant a longer hospital stay than I had bargained for.

The angiogram began easily, with the wire inserted through the groin up to the heart. It quickly revealed blockage in one of the arteries. The surgeon then asked me which of two choices I wanted to make: bypass surgery or the implanting of a stent, or small metal mesh tube placed in the artery to hold it open for blood to flow unimpeded to the heart.

The stent was an easy choice because it could be inserted right then and there; bypass surgery, clearly much more drastic, would have had to be scheduled for another time.

I share these perhaps unwelcome details with the reader in order to suggest the impact on me of this sudden emergency. The revelation of having a serious heart problem shocked me into a more sober view of myself in the world.  

Now on the way to recovery, I feel myself to have entered into a new era in my life. “As you get older, life humbles you,” says my social worker friend, Wendy Lustbader. I have been humbled and now have a different self-concept as a result.

In addition to my native bones, muscles and other natural parts I now bear within myself an artificial product, a piece of technology. Though I am told the device will not set off airport alarms, I am eerily conscious of having foreign matter within my chest.

Up until two years ago, I never took any medication regularly. To me, it seemed an ideal to stay clear of prescription drugs and I believed that many other elders took too many. As a result of the new experience, however, I have become a walking drug store and take a pageful of pills every day.

I also prided myself on my low weight and my exercise disciplines. My diet, if not perfectly in accord with enlightened nutritional guidelines, was to a large extent free of junk food (with the exception of cookies, a longtime  insurmountable addiction.)

Though the oldest of six siblings, I considered myself to be the most healthy overall. My brothers and sisters had suffered some health problems that I had escaped. I qualified as something of a model elder at large in almost never having to spend a day in bed sick.

Now I have tasted vulnerability and I must continue to live with a vivid sense of my own mortality. Only by luck did I escape sudden death from a heart attack. During walks full of chest pain, I could easily have dropped dead. The intervention of a highly experienced cardiologist in response to my need for help has saved my life.

My expectations for the future have also needed trimming. The surgeon has told me that his work should bring me ten more years. Is that all? What about that online test I took two years ago that projected my living to 95.3 years of age?

However, the changes in my mentality are by no means all negative. I have gained a lively sense of the love that family members and friends hold for me. On hearing of my ordeal, they have all expressed concern for me and have rejoiced at my escape from mortal peril.

The care given to me by the hospital staff also makes me feel valued. Nurses, doctors, blood drawers and others worked hard to ensure my rescue and recovery. They have shown me that in a crisis, I can indeed count on the kindness of strangers.

I now feel a new appreciation for the wonder of ordinary life. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.” Each day of life has become even more precious to me than it was before.

Richard Griffin

“Don’t listen to people like Tom Perls, George Vaillant, Betty Friedan, William Shakespeare, and Simone de Beauvoir. They were all between 40 and 70 when they wrote about aging.”

So says George Vaillant, one of the people he warns about. Instead, he uses a favorite simile to suggest a different approach: “Old age is like a minefield; if you see footprints leading to the other side, step in them.”

In his experience, those footprints will belong to people 85 and over, not to young pedants. “Don’t pay attention to know-it-all professors who try to teach you golf or to fly a plane without ever having been up in it,” he advises.

Dr. Vaillant freely admits having been one of those know-it-alls himself, but his studies of older people have led him to learn humility. A psychiatrist focused on human research, he has a leading role in the famous Harvard University Study of Adult Development, a project that has lasted 50 years.

In a recent talk at the Cambridge for Adult Education, this 68-year-old researcher shared with an audience of mostly older people, from many cities and towns around Boston, some of what he has learned about growing into old age.

Among the possible ways of thinking about the subject, he finds human development by far the most interesting. The only reason why Americans tend to think negatively about later life, he says, is that disease becomes more frequent then.

The same thing happens with automobiles: even a hundred-year-old Rolls Royce will have a bad drive train. “You just accept the fact that the last year of life, whether you die at 7 or 107, is going to be kind of a bummer,” he says. “You pay attention to the other 106.”

The study with which he has been involved has followed three groups of people during almost their entire lives, from teenage through old age. This longest study of aging in the world has taken three separate groups of people – – a total of 824 individuals – – and interviewed them intensively. Building on this work, Vaillant in 2002 published the book “Aging Well.”

In the Study’s web site Vaillant describes the individuals followed by the researchers. The first group is made up of 268 socially advantaged Harvard College grads born around 1920. The second contains 456 socially disadvantaged men from Boston’s “Inner City.” Finally, the third comprises 90 socially middle-class, intellectually talented women from California’s Bay area, born about 1910.

On that same web site, Vaillant lists, in his own personal and characteristic language (including parentheses), some of what he considers the most significant findings thus far:

• It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us; it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age;
• Healing relationships are facilitated by a capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness, and for taking people inside. (By this metaphor I mean becoming eternally enriched by loving a particular person.)
• A good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at 80. But, surprisingly, low cholesterol levels at age 50 did not.
• Alcohol abuse – – unrelated to unhappy childhood – – consistently predicted unsuccessful aging, in part because alcoholism damaged future social supports.
• Learning to play and create after retirement and learning to gain younger friends as we lose older ones add more to life’s enjoyment than retirement income.
• Objective good physical health was less important to successful aging than subjective good health. By this I mean it is all right to be ill as long as you do not feel sick.

Young people, Vaillant believes, have to be self-centered. “You will never have a self to give away,” he says, “if you don’t start out life by being selfish.” A woman who studied biographies and autobiographies calculated that, when subjects were 25, a whopping 92 percent of their wishes were directed toward the self. But by the time they got to be 60, only 29 percent of their wishes were self oriented.

Adult development occurs very slowly and there is no surefire way of speeding it up. But, when it comes, this inner growth moves us toward empathy for other people and altruism. What Vaillant calls the “emotional brain” gets increasingly well connected to the forebrain and we learn to control our passions.

This student of human change considers retirement as one of the great gifts of modern times. In 1900, only one percent of Harvard grads were retired; now 15 percent are. “We have the opportunity, not to live forever, but to retire and do something different.” Vaillant considers longevity as offering the chance to experiment and to use play to discover  ourselves in new ways.

About the awful things that happen in old age, he reminds listeners that they happen in adolescence too. He quotes the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn: “Aging is in no sense a punishment from on high but brings its own blessing and a warmth of color all its own.”

Richard Griffin

It was appropriate for Ruth Abrams to open her latest art exhibit close to Memorial Day. This 79-year-old Brookline resident has made memory the central focus of this display of collages, assemblages, and video. The 20 different pieces of her art recall some of the people and events most important in her life.

One of the collages memorializes Phil Ross, a fellow college student at Ohio University in Athens, who became her boyfriend. After he had given her his fraternity pin, he went off to the Army and was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ruth remembers vividly how she learned of his death. Her roommate met her after class and walked back to their dormitory. There her sorority housemates gathered around her and broke the awful news to her, what she calls “hollow, blank history.”

Soon after, she went off by train to Wilkes-Barre to visit Phil’s family whom she had never met before. They were in mourning and she joined them in their Jewish ritual. One of her preoccupations was wondering whether to give back Phil’s fraternity pin.

In a collage entitled “Trains and Memories,” Ruth uses photos of Phil in uniform, recently sent her by his half brother. In the words written on the display she poignantly asks: “Was it 58 years ago? Why do I still have tears?”

Another collage allows the artist to express her philosophy of later life. It bears the title “Lobster, Take a Risk,” and quotes author Eda Le Shan who sees in the lobster–which needs to shed its shell in order to grow–a model for growth through the courage to change.

“Aging can be a time of change,” says Ruth Abrams, “and a time for growing. The secret of successful aging is to go on to explore life, learning, shedding the old for new challenges.”

Asked if this indeed expresses her philosophy, Ruth agrees. Disarmingly, however, she laughs and lightheartedly refers to herself as “this crazy lady.”

The exhibit “When I Grow Up” features a box enclosing the doll Ruth received when she was six years old. Her family was poor; the doll was given her by a family friend. On the outside of the box, she lists all the things she wanted then. Among them was a bicycle, something she finally acquired at 14. However, she parked the bike on her back porch and it was stolen. Never again would she have another one.

I enjoyed seeing again “Father’s ‘Golden Hands’,” a small display of some tools that Ruth’s father used for various repairs. The term is a tradition Jewish expression for suggesting a person skilled with his hands. Ruth’s father, who owned a gas station, would respond to neighbors hinting at their need to have something fixed. This he would do much to the disapproval of his wife.

A more complicated display  requires lifting a veil to discover words used as stereotypes of old people. “Old” suggests “lonely” or “self-centered,” for example. The artist here delivers the message that old things as well as people are valuable and should not be tossed aside.

Commenting on the value she finds in creating the parts that go into a show like this one, Ruth says: “There’s so much learning that goes on when you’re working physically with a piece.”

She feels the creativity in herself but also complains about some loss. “the trouble is I’m also forgetting,” she regrets. However, she does see this process as a kind of balance.

When she turns toward a collage that centers on outrageous older women, she refuses to include herself in this number. “I’m not outrageous; I’m pretty conservative,” she claims. Of course, she is correct literally in so far as the material in her show comes from what she has conserved or saved, rather than thrown away. Whether this artist is conservative in her world view, however, seems much less certain.

Before this show ends, Ruth plans to reach out to the multicultural community of area residents. She has prepared voice-overs of her “Fabric of Life” video in four languages – – English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian (and soon, Spanish) for use with the various linguistic groups.

She will invite them to come to the exhibit and give their reactions to her work. Presumably, these reactions will show differences in mentality that may reveal a variety of responses to aging. Ruth hopes to interest gerontologists in analyzing these differences.

The show is on display through June 18th at Newbury College. The college gallery is located at 150 Fisher Avenue, Brookline. My reason for taking notice of this event is the inspiration I derive from seeing one of my age peers display to the public her continued creativity. Ruth Abrams offers just one more proof of the spirit shown by so many people as they sift their later years for value.

Richard Griffin