The narrator of this story was sitting in a Manhattan bus one day when he noticed an old fellow getting on with difficulty. The man walked haltingly and his arms shook as if he had Parkinson’s. The story teller felt immediate concern about the fellow finding a seat.

Not to worry, the seat next to the story teller became free and the fellow struggled over to it. But he did not stay long; after a few stops he got up, went to the front of the bus, and promptly got off. The story teller noticed that the fellow now walked much more confidently and without any signs of the disabilities that had been so evident a few minutes before.

Then the narrator suddenly remembered something. For a few moments, the fellow’s left arm had disappeared from sight.  This memory prompted the narrator to feel for his back pocket. It was then he discovered that this pocket was now empty.

This urban tale appeared a few weeks ago in “Metropolitan Diary,” one of my favorite sections in Monday’s edition of The New York Times. Since that time, I have moved beyond the humor of the story to ponder its significance.

The story carries punch because of the stereotypes that almost everyone has about elderly people. If it had been a young man who pulled off the scam, no one of us would have been surprised. In fact, there would have been no story.

But no one expects an old man to do anything criminal. We think such a person inoffensive by reason of age. Even though you do not have to be rippling with strong muscles to commit a crime, still we assume that people of advanced years will never rip us off.

In fact, we may go beyond and assume that older people never do anything  wrong. It’s as if the aged have lost the capability of sinning because they are too debilitated for committing acts of immorality.

This view, though it at first seems favorable to older people, in fact robs them of something basically human. The capability to do evil marks our humanity to the very end of our days. So much so that, if we cannot do evil, then we cannot do good either.

Virtue remains a choice for us up through age 100 and beyond. We are not forced to be good; the invitation merely remains open.

Some older people remain remarkably nasty, perhaps the way they were earlier in life. They are not pleasant to be with because they are so filled with harsh emotions. I remember a woman who used to call City Hall when I worked there. Nothing ever pleased her; she would harass city officials like me as her daily recreation. She seemed thoroughly estranged from virtue.

It does not serve older people to sentimentalize them, to make of them children below the age of reason who are incapable of sin. One of the great dramas of age is to see what will become of us morally. I like to quote Jesse Jackson who is fond of saying “God is not through with me yet.”

Like everyone else, we elders must struggle against temptation. No matter how debilitated we might be, we cannot take a vacation from the moral battle. Most of the sins, at least, that were available to us earlier in life are still at hand. And some new ones have come along as well.

The new ones tend to be much more subtle than pick pocketing or shoplifting. One of the most insidious is selling ourselves short. A morose conviction that we aren’t worth much any more is a temptation that assails not a few elders. We are seduced into internalizing what we take to be society’s view of us, that we are has-beens, mere relics of usefulness.

This is a kind of desperation, I suppose, that in our secret heart drives us down in-to low spirits. We lack the power to make a moral statement of our own value. For us, it would be an act of virtue to assert both within ourselves and to the world at large that we continue to count for something.

How the mischievous fellow on the bus felt about himself, I have no idea. Perhaps he went home feeling that he had struck a blow for age. More likely, he was content to splurge using the ill-gotten cash from the unlucky man’s wallet.

But, whatever he did with the loot, he proved to himself and, thanks to “Metropolitan Diary” the world, that he is still a moral agent or, in this instance, an immoral one. There may, after all, be something better about such a condition than there is in despair at one’s ability to do anything meaningful at all.

Richard Griffin