“I don’t want to look.” That’s what Carol Lieberman says about some funds she set up for her grandchildren. She fears the money is shrinking in the current recession and financial crisis.
Carol works in Cambridge as director of a program that helps older people to volunteer. Asked if those people are worried about the situation, she says: “It’s not just seniors – it’s everybody, all brackets of society.”
Finding oneself old continues, day by day, to rank among life’s most astounding events. For me, it came as an unprecedented surprise to discover myself an eighty-year-old. Up until now, this has been something that happens to other people.
Now that it has happened to me, I feel genuinely happy to have reached a kind of eminence. Like many before me, I have been inducted into the army of elders, those who have joined the ranks of the new aged.
Were I ever asked about giving advice in later life, my first rule would be: Don’t.
That’s because hardly anyone welcomes advice or values it. Even when they earnestly ask for it, normal people, deep down, do not really want to receive direction from anyone else.
To celebrate a birthday, I recently ate dinner at a restaurant known as one of the best in town. I looked forward to the meal, confident that it would be delicious.
However, the lamb that I ordered turned out to be loaded with salt, lots of it. Although lamb is my favorite meat, I sent the dish back. I could not continue to eat it without driving my blood pressure skyward.
Several dozen people, most of them in later life, were recently asked if any of them collected stamps. Of that number not a single person does.
Had you asked the same question in the 1930s and 1940s, many adults middle-aged and older would have been proud to identify themselves as stamp collectors. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American president during much of that era, led the way. He was famous for this hobby, as many newspaper photos of the time attest.
Shortly after midnight on election evening, television cameras captured the face of Jesse Jackson in tears. He was shown standing among the huge crowd in Grant Park, Chicago, where Barack Obama was giving his first speech as president-elect.
For me, that image expressed the dramatic character of last Tuesday’s events. Here was Reverend Jackson, a hard-bitten veteran of many civil rights struggles, weeping with joy.
As I write this column, our national elections are about to happen and, unless another stalemate takes place, we will know the identity of our new president by the time you read this.
I hope you have had the pleasure of watching election returns with friends sympathetic to your favorite candidates. From experience I know how painful it can be to find yourself, at such a time, among people whose philosophy differs sharply from your own.