“Fly me to the moon” went the words in the days when the command was still a metaphor and the space program only a possibility. The year 1954 brought this song into epidemic popularity in its most famous version by Frank Sinatra.     

If, by the way, you want to hear the whole song sung by the master, tap into YouTube.com. I count myself among the latecomers to this often fabulous web site: for this column, it helped me to hear and see some singers who were celebrated in the past and still loved now.

The Fly Me song has an honored place in what has come to be called “The Great American Songbook.” This catch-all term includes different types of popular music written in the four decades beginning with 1920 and ending with the Beatles in the middle 1960s.

This music has such variety and quality that it will never die. Those of my age peers who are addicted to show tunes, jazz, and other stuff can be assured of its continuing vitality. It rates as a distinctive cultural achievement for which America can justifiably feel proud.

Last week my pleasure in the Songbook grew richer with a performance by the Boston Musical Theater. This group of two fine singers and a highly accomplished trio of instrumentalists is managed and directed by Newton resident Charlotte Kaufman, herself a musician, who founded the ensemble in 1976.

The performance took place in the Regattabar of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. It was a reprise of their recent gig at Lexington’s National Heritage Museum. They perform at other Boston area sites and elsewhere. Information about the Theater can be readily obtained at (617) 327-2433 or at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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The roster of performers offered homage to the many greats whose first names evoke wonderful memories ─  Frank, Ella, Bing ─ and the underated but superb Bobby Darin.

The composers, cited by last names, included Gershwin, Weill, and Arlen. My favorite, Cole Porter, was not among them; he rates another occasion all to himself.

Cole reminds me of the very English Noël Coward, a similarly witty and somewhat effete composer whose music the American Repertory Theater recently featured in a rich and hilarious show. I saw it in the same week as the BMT performance, experiencing a healthy brew of twentieth-century music.

To hear this music is to recognize the importance of style. The BMT’s David Ripley, a base-baritone with a remarkable voice, is a master of mood, tempo, and the effortless empathy that evokes the great performers of our youth

Though Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” does not immediately come to mind as an example of American music, it proved an ideal piece for Ripley. He sang it first in clear and credible German and then in English, all with an acute sense of its sinister rhythms.

Ripley’s fellow vocalist, the soprano Mara Bonde, for me ranks among the most charming of singers and full of talent as well. Early in the program, she captivated her audience with her rendition of “Beyond the Sea,” as Bobby Darin used to sing it in the 1950s.

She gave special relish to this piece by first singing it in French, in the yearning evocative style of its composer, Charles Trenet. Then, in a change of language, rhythm and outlook, she segued into the Darin style that many Americans remember.

Material from the Broadway theater did not loom large in the revue. Bonde, however, did sing “Hey There” from The Pajama Game. I would have preferred to hear Ripley sing that one because it was originally performed by the male lead, John Raitt, who made it the hit of the show.

However, I was delighted to hear Bonde “swing on a star,” as she performed the song made famous by Bing Crosby in the 1944 hit movie Going My Way. Bing played a young priest, and the great Barry Fitzgerald an old one; their take on the priesthood was light-hearted and droll, and they charmed many movie goers including me.

I’m not as sharply attuned to the great songbook as many readers will be. That’s because, during the heyday of the genre, I was pursuing reality in monastic seclusion. Gregorian chant and other classical forms comprised my musical diet, rather than the popular stuff that was entertaining so many friends outside the walls.

But I love listening to Songbook music well performed. And I must confess that I enjoy my own clandestine piano playing, usually accomplished when no one else is at home and at low volume for fear of putting the neighbors at esthetic risk. My childhood piano lessons ─ which were certainly not my idea ─ continue to produce a paradoxical pleasure.

My addiction to opera and other classical music continues to reign supreme in my enjoyment of musical art. Fortunately, however, you can relish both the pop and classical genres; in fact, I would feel deprived not to have access to both. They count as one of the graces of later life.

Richard Griffin

“We should have had Negro players in 1839, at the beginning of baseball.” This was the answer given by the great Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller when someone  asked him last week in Cooperstown  about his first black teammate.

Feller’s response made me feel admiration for this 83-year-old member of baseball’s Hall of Fame. So, of course, does his great career that began in 1936 when he was only 17. He still finds prideful satisfaction in remaining the youngest pitcher ever to win a big league game.

Another point of pride is his service in the navy during World War II: he boasts of having been a crew member of the battleship Alabama for 34 months and crossing the equator some 38 times.

For me, a first-time visitor to the baseball shrine that is Cooperstown, New York, contact with the greats of major league history stirred nostalgia.  Getting the chance to talk with Bob Feller had special impact on me as a longtime fan. After all, my father took me to games at Fenway Park more than 60 years ago, before I reached my teens.

I recall seeing Bob Feller pitch against the Red Sox more than once in the late 1930s.  His fast ball was already legend, though he now says it took him three years “to learn to pitch.” He did indeed seem to have learned something by 1940, when his record was 27 and 11, with 31 complete games!

Approaching this boyhood idol, I asked him about pitching at Fenway.  He told me about finding the pitcher’s mound different from that in other stadiums and a difficult height. He also felt it to be a challenge to face formidable hitters like Jimmy Foxx, to whom he would sometimes throw pitches sidearm. He denies having feared the close left field wall, and says he worried more about the power alley in left center.

As I studied the face of this octogenarian, I could still see that of the boy who faced the Red Sox so long ago.  His face now is broader and marked by the years, but its basic structure allowed me to connect him with that Iowa farm boy in an Indians uniform. Yes, this is the same person who achieved so many victories in his baseball career and who has lived so many decades since putting away the uniform.

Another great player whom I talked with at Cooperstown belongs to a different generation and remains under a cloud of disrepute. Pete Rose holds the record of the most hits in one career, but still has not been admitted to the Hall of Fame because of the charge that he bet on games. Many of the fans who came to Cooperstown last week did not seem to care: they lined up at a Main Street store to have him autograph balls at 40 dollars a pop.

Pete Rose impressed me as a feisty, defiant sort of guy. I did not want to test his combativeness, however, since he was eating lunch with friends. Avoiding touchy subjects, I asked him about his Cincinnati Reds champion team, whether they were the best ever. The furthest he would go was to call them “the most entertaining.”

I also asked what it was like to play in the famous sixth game at Fenway against the Red Sox in the 1975 World Series. He admitted it was a great game and recalls watching Carleton Fisk’s celebrated home run sailing over his head at third base. “As Fisk was waving the ball to make it stay fair, I was waving it in the opposite direction to make it go foul,” he recalled smilingly.

The third baseball great I had the chance to question is the only player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame this year, Ozzie Smith. This famous shortstop turns out to be an awfully nice guy, handsome, well-spoken, and respectful of other people, even members of the press. Ozzie retired only six years ago and thus represents the newest generation to be enshrined in Cooperstown.

I asked him about the advantages of remaining with the same team. He feels happy about having spent most of his career with the St. Louis Cardinals, playing for an organization and for fans that valued him both as a player and as a person.

I also wondered what his plans are for the rest of his life. In baseball, people judge time differently from those in the real world. “I just feel blessed to have the longevity to have played so long,” he says of his 20 years as a pro.

Only 48 now, he presumably will live for decades longer. His answer suggests that he does not have a clear game plan for the coming years. “I’m just kind of floating right now,” he said, while indicating his interest in a possible movie career.

Three famous players, three different generations, three different marks on baseball – – it all made for a scene of fascination for this veteran fan.

Richard Griffin

When I was a boy, the place where I most wanted to go was New York City. Rare, however, were my actual visits to this fabulous site. My parents were busy, I was the oldest of six children (eventually), and getting there over the roads then available required patience.

My parents took me there for the first time in 1939 when I was 11 years old. Accepting an invitation from my mother’s dear friend Margaret, we stayed at her apartment at 28 East 10th Street, an address I still hold in veneration for her having lived there.

The highlight of that visit was not seeing the awesome Empire State Building for the first time, but rather being taken to a radio show. The famous program that I saw live, Information Please, then ranked as one of the most popular in America.

Its genius lay in combining highbrow culture with a style that attracted many listeners of ordinary sophistication. A prime source of its success was its soliciting questions from people who responded to a challenge to “stump the experts.”

Starting in 1938, the program stayed on the air until 1952.

In a thank-you letter to our hostess a few weeks after my visit, I expressed my appreciation for getting to the program. “Some people wait many weeks for tickets,” I wrote, “so I felt very priveliged (sic) to be there and in the first row too.”

I also told her how “the theacher (sic) selected the best oral composition last week for the school radio.” She chose mine as one of the eight best.

Margaret, or Peg as we called her, must have returned the letter at some point because it has been handed down in family archives. It does not demonstrate much prowess in spelling but otherwise shows some promise in its epistolary style.

The Information Please panelists included three men, all of them well established as cultural figures. Franklin P. Adams, a man of wit often referred to familiarly as FPA, wrote a popular column for the New York Post.

John Kieran, by trade a sports writer for the New York Times, ranged far beyond sports in his knowledge of literature and other fields.

The third panelist was Oscar Levant, primarily a classical pianist but also a person of broad cultural knowledge. In addition, he excelled as a quipster.

Serving as moderator, Clifton Fadiman, the book editor of the New Yorker, brought to the radio show the sophistication of a highly educated person along with much charm.

Fadiman is the reason why I am writing today’s column. Recently I had occasion to hear his daughter, Anne Fadiman, read from her most recent book of essays and talk about herself as a writer.

During the question period, I seized the opportunity to tell her about seeing her father on that long-ago visit to New York. I also asked her what influence he had on her writing career.

In response, she told me and the audience that her father had a strong impact on her essays. This happened indirectly through witty family conversations that featured puns, clerihews, and other word play. Her mother was a distinguished foreign correspondent whose influence Anne still feels in the reportage element of her essays.

Clerihews, by the way, are four-line poems that feature the name of a well-known person and then finish with a witty assertion.  

An example of this form follows:  

Sir Christopher Wren
Said “I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

The above four lines were written by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a British man of letters who lived from 1875 to 1956. He invented this form, and named it after himself..

Given the skills of Anne as one of America’s best essayists, one can easily envision the Fadiman dinner table alive with word playfulness of this sort. Having watched her father lead Information Please, some 70 years ago, I felt a connection with his daughter.

Information Please continues to hold a hallowed place in my memory along with some of the other radio programs my maternal grandmother used to be addicted to. When I would stay with her in Peabody, she let me listen with her to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons; Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour; and A. L. Alexander’s Mediation Board.

These programs did not have the cachet of Information Please but they contributed to my boyhood fantasies about a life wider than my own. It fascinated me to discover that my grandmother, a woman of serious piety among other things, would take such an interest in these somewhat hokey programs.

Information Please wore out its radio welcome in 1952. It was tried as a television show but, in that format, failed to attract a wide audience. To me, however, it remains a loveable cultural monument.

Richard Griffin

If he had wanted to, George Washington could easily have become king of the United States. Only his determination to support the newly devised democratic form of government saved the new nation from monarchy.

What an irony that would have been for the colonies to have thrown off Britain’s monarchical rule only to adopt the same structure themselves!

Even the then king of England, George III, admired what Washington did. When this other George heard that Washington was about to stand down from public life, he supposedly said: “He will be the greatest man in the world,”

Independence Day, July 4th, means more to me than it used to. Part of this increased appreciation of our national holiday comes from a growing interest in history. It’s as if the elongation of my own life history disposes me to place greater value on the aging of the nation to which I belong.. This comparison may not strike you as logical but to me it makes perfect sense.

That’s why the book Revolutionary Characters, published last year by Brown University historian Gordon Wood, has won my attention. In its pages, Wood details the personal characteristics, both inborn and acquired, of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and other founders.

Among these leaders, George Washington stands out, for the historian and for me, as the greatest. Earlier in my life, he seemed to me a pale figure, both literally and figuratively. All those pictures of him with ashen face, and the stories about his moral rectitude, left me cold. But more reflection, and the influence of fine historians like Wood, have brought me to a deeper appreciation of the man’s stature.

First, I have learned more about the uniqueness of the American Revolution. In giving to the people the right to choose its own leaders, and in balancing the powers of the federal government, the founders went against virtually all of previous history. And in separating church and state, they found a workable formula for averting the wars of religion.

But a large number of people in the colonies were left enslaved. Of Virginia’s population, an astounding forty percent were held in bondage. It is to the everlasting credit of Washington that, unlike Jefferson, he left in his will a provision for his own slaves to be freed.

This latter fact points to the character of America’s first president. Character, in fact, was the dominant concern of those who were most important in founding our nation. Gordon Wood, at least, makes it central in his book.

Long ago, my age were taught about the character of young George Washington, who refused to lie about cutting down the cherry tree. Though historians no longer accept it as factual truth, the story attests to the stature that he would attain as an adult.

Not only did the man grow to stand over six feet tall; he also towered over most other political figures in the personal disinterest he brought to his roles in public life. Others among the founders would fight bitterly to maintain their own prerogatives but Washington continued to put the good of the new nation before his own advantage.

When he turned down those who wanted him to accept a third term as president, he again showed what he was made of. Given his presidential track record and the still shaky condition of the new republic, it would probably have contributed to the nation’s welfare to have had him in office for four more years. However, his adamant refusal clearly set an example that was crucial in those early days of the republic.

Even to this latter-day admirer of the man, Washington still appears rather cold in personality. It’s hard to imagine becoming his close friend. But the historical record remains lamentably incomplete.

We know little about his emotional life because of the dearth of his private correspondence. Unfortunately, none of his letters to Martha Custis, his future wife, have survived. In them, presumably, he would have disclosed more tender feelings than we can find elsewhere.

But he never wanted to be a cult figure, at least of the kind we have imposed on us in the age of celebrity worship. He was deeply conscious of his own dignity as chosen leader of the new nation. As a Virginian aristocrat, he cultivated manners that forbade undue familiarity.

Gilbert Stuart, famous for the portraits he did of Washington, recalled having once suggested that Washington, while he posed, forget who he was so as to could be more at ease. Washington stiffly rejected his request on the grounds of his own dignity.

So this Fourth of July brings for me a new appreciation of the birth of our nation with a distinctiveness unprecedented in the world’s history. And a large part of this drama features George Washington to whose leadership all of us contemporary Americans owe much.

We can only hope to discover new leaders who will find inspiration in his character and his abiding moral stature.

Richard Griffin

On this particular evening I felt myself to be face to face with history. This feeling was inspired by the handsome white-haired woman who was a fellow guest in my friends’ home. The history through which she lived remains both tragic and heroic.

That memorable evening gave me the opportunity to talk with someone who witnessed a terrible time in 20th-century Europe. The climax came in January of 1945 when her husband was executed ─ or, rather, murdered ─ for his role in the anti-Nazi resistance.

Freya von Moltke and her husband deserve to be better known to the American public than they are. Dartmouth College gave her an honorary degree in 1999, but most people in this country have never heard of her and her family.

Longtime resident in Vermont, she celebrated her 96th birthday last March. She enjoys remarkably good health and displays the vigor of mind and body of a person much younger.

Her last name ranks as among the most famous in German history. Members of earlier generations would have associated the name with Helmuth von Moltke, the field marshal who led Prussia to victory both in its war against Austria in 1866 and in the Franco-Prussian war that ended in 1871. These triumphs helped to bring about the creation of modern Germany.

When World War I broke out, the field marshal’s nephew, another Helmuth von Moltke, was the general who commanded the German army.

Fortunately, as I was told by Freya’s son, also present that evening, members of the younger generations in today’s Germany are now much more likely to associate the name with Helmuth James Von Moltke, the martyr to peace who died in the spring of 1945. The identities of the military leaders have faded, while the reputation of the von Moltke who was a leader in the resistance to Hitler has bloomed.

In a brief memoir, Freya has written about her husband and the efforts he made to prepare his country for the time when Hitler’s regime would come to an end. Helmuth James himself was committed to non-violence because of his spiritual idealism and his belief in democratic institutions.

Though he longed for an end to the Nazi regime, he believed that the chances of a coup being successful were slim. Ultimately, for the nation’s long ordeal to end, Hitler had to destroy himself.

Helmuth James belonged to a group called the Kreisau Circle. Its name derived from the estate near the eastern border with Poland, bought by the field marshal with money given him for his wartime leadership. It was to that place that Helmuth brought his bride Freya in 1931.

Members of the Kreisau Circle had somewhat differing agenda. Helmuth, for his part, looked toward the day when peace would come; he wanted to work with the allies to create democratic institutions that would renew his country. Unfortunately, his arrest in late 1944 brought his efforts to an end.

After World War II, Kreisau reverted to Polish sovereignty. It has since become an international center for the promotion of peace among nations and their people. Freya and members of her family take great interest in this center, feeling pride in its accomplishments.

George Kennan, the most notable American diplomat of his era, called Helmuth von Moltke “the greatest person morally, and the largest and most enlightened in his concepts that he met on either side of the battle-lines in the Second World War.”

During the years of their marriage, Helmuth wrote frequent letters to his wife and some 1600 of them have survived. Those written during the war, many of them when he was in prison, have been published  

None of Freya’s letters to him have survived, however, a fact that she confirmed on the evening of our conversation. To make sure of that his letters did survive, she had hidden them in the beehives at their estate in Kreisau knowing that the house would probably be searched.

At this stage of her life, Freya von Moltke has outlived her husband by 62 years.. On March 11th of this year, along with the German chancellor, she attended a concert in Berlin in commemoration of Helmut’s birth, exactly 100 years before.

She quietly cherishes the memory of this man of great vision and personal courage, though in conversation she does not indulge in sentimentality.

As I conceive of it, her strength of character draws continuing sustenance from her spouse’s life and death. Hers is a legacy rich in personal and spiritual achievement. She also has the rare good fortune of ongoing contact with an institution that forms part of this legacy.

More than old photos and letters ever can, this peace center, in the place that is now called Krzyżowa, gives ongoing shape to some of the ideals for which she and her husband sacrificed so much.

Richard Griffin

For the last 30 years we have kept in our attic a wooden sculpture that my wife and I have never liked. Its artistic and monetary value is probably slight, but for three decades we have scrupled to throw it away.

Why? Because this art work was given to us by relatives on the occasion of our wedding. Even though the donors have never visited our home, and have indeed passed from this earth, we still fantasize about them coming by with the expectation of seeing the sculpture enshrined in a place of honor.

By way of disclosure, my wife disavows any responsibility for this particular column of mine. As a confirmed kin-keeper, she always takes pains not to give the least offense to relatives. In this instance she fears that word of her true feelings about the sculpture might get back to the artist, the son of the donors.

How many times have you received from friends gifts that you have never liked and would love to get rid of? Chances are that you still have at least some of those gifts because, like us with the sculpture, you would feel guilty about throwing them away.

Those gifts qualify as clutter. They do so by a double title in the definition used by Erica Salloux, a self-styled “personal and business organizer.”

Speaking at a half-day conference organized by the Theological Opportunities Program, she defined clutter as “Anything I am not using; anything I do not think is beautiful.”

For her, the commonly offered definition, “anything that is not useful,” does not fit. Many of the objects that you should get rid of are in fact useful for other people or, in different circumstances, might be for you.

Clutter has a surefire way of complicating life. For most Americans, at least, the amount of “stuff” in their possession rates as a nagging, persistent problem. And it’s not just the physical problem of freeing space in one’s home for comfortable living.

For Salloux and clutter consultants like her, the problem goes deeper. They see it as both a psychological and spiritual issue. For them, getting free of clutter involves putting your internal life in order. As Salloux says: “It’s not sufficient to come in and start throwing out stuff without doing the work of reflecting on one’s life.”

She asks people what has made it possible for them to let go of something before having a replacement. Her answer is trust. In this instance trust means that “what you are letting go of is not essential to who you are.”

But it helps to recognize the various types of stuff that make our lives less free than they might otherwise be. For some of us, paper that has accumulated without a goal looms large. So does electronic clutter in the form of emails and other material saved for no clear purpose.

Many among us have clothes hanging in closets that we have not worn in the last decade. Erica Salloux urges a rule of thumb that makes sense: “With a very few exceptions, if you haven’t used something in the past year, you’re never going to use it.”     She recommends giving yourself a deadline. And, shifting to the esthetic, she advises: “don’t wear things you don’t love to wear.”

My attic also shelters the relics of students who, over many years, have left us books, notes, and other materials with the assurance they would come to pick up the stuff later. That later has not yet arrived. This kind of leavings should qualify as prime candidates for throwing out.

The consultant quoted here believes it important to have the proper tools. Trash bags and boxes are vital for sorting among things that need to be thrown out or perhaps saved.

If you have things that are broken you probably need to decide whether to get them repaired or to discard them. For the first option, it helps to put a date on the thing by which time you will have it fixed.

Similar advice holds for other things that you are undecided about. These can be put in a box, dated, and placed in another room. This allows you to test whether or not you are going to miss the thing.

In writing about “stuff” I remain mindful that people in Dafur and too many other places in the world have no such problems. Would that they did!

Nor do those Americans among us who frequent soup kitchens and food pantries. Most of them, at least, do not have the luxury of suffering from clutter the way their more privileged contemporaries do.

About that wooden sculpture in the attic: One of these days I may pull off a stealthy raid by night, seize it, and put it out on the curb for the trash collectors. Maybe some neighbor will walk down the street and add it to his or her clutter.

Richard Griffin

Did you ever expect to find doctors acknowledging errors? Surely, when you were young, you never thought that the people who wear long white coats would confess themselves to be fallible.

Atul Gawande is one of the new breed who does. Along with Jerome Groopman, Lisa Sanders, and others, Dr. Gawande has gone public with recognition of the mistakes that he himself has made and those made by his colleagues.

A surgeon by training and practice, Gawande also writes well. Like Groopman, he publishes in leading journals and writes books. He must be well organized indeed to combine the roles of active physician and prolific author.

In Gawande’s case, it must help this year to have received one of those generous MacArthur awards that most other high achievers can only dream of. With all this success, he seems a fine person: in one brief conversation in a book store I found him genuine and unassuming.

However, despite the new frankness, I suspect that many people do not welcome the chance to read about physician errors. They would rather take their chances than learn, in sometimes gory detail, what can go wrong in the operating room or the doctor’s office. Though it may be liberating for physician-authors to recognize their own errors, it’s not always comforting for patients to discover what might happen to them.

Writing in The New Yorker for April 30th, Dr. Gawande focuses on old age, the pervasive physical decline that it brings, and what physicians trained in geriatrics can do for their patients.

I quarrel with the way Gawande portrays old age because he describes the march toward late life as relentless decline. First, he focuses on how your teeth, from age 60 on, will soften, making it difficult to eat well enough to stay healthy.

He then goes on to show how, by contrast, other parts of the body harden. The heart, for instance, must cope with stiffened blood vessels. He describes it with graphic realism: “When you reach inside an elderly patient during surgery, the aorta and other major vessels often feel crunchy under your fingers.”

A leading geriatrician whom I asked about Gawande’s article winced and called it “a treatise on decrepitude.”

However, later in the piece he makes a crucial discovery ─ he discovers geriatrics.  In doing so, he acknowledges a major error of judgment of his own. Speaking of geriatrics, he admits: “Until I visited my hospital’s geriatric clinic, I did not fully grasp the nature of that expertise, or how important it could be for all of us.”

As he sits in on a colleague’s interview with a patient, he comes to see how the geriatrician focuses neither on that patient’s back pain nor on a possible threat of colon cancer. Instead, the doctor spends most of the visit examining the patient’s feet. That’s where he sees the greatest danger for her, the chance that she might fall and perhaps break a hip.

Too many doctors, the geriatrician explains to Gawande, treat only disease, and they judge the rest not to be a medical problem. But with older patients, that’s not enough. Geriatricians know how to inquire into details of the patient’s daily life so as to help them avoid becoming more infirm and perhaps unable to continue living at home.

“Most of us in medicine, however, don’t know how to think about decline,” Gawande writes. “We’re good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. But give us an elderly woman with colon cancer, high blood pressure, and various other ailments besides─an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys─and we are not sure what to do.”

Unfortunately, as Gawande regrets, not nearly enough doctors trained in geriatrics are available in the United States. In view of the explosive increase in people past middle age, it is nothing short of scandalous that so few such physicians can be found to treat us.  

From my own experience, I judge that this situation will not change anytime soon. When I have talked with college students headed for medical school, I have never heard even one of them express the intention to specialize in geriatrics. Commenting on this tendency, Gawande attributes it in part to geriatricians getting paid less; but he also claims that “most doctors don’t like taking care of the elderly.”

Of course, I too recognize the power of decline in later life, often so difficult to put up with. But in my later years, and those of many others whom I know, I continue to experience surprisingly rich changes of imagination and affect, among other things. And both the spiritual life and the intellectual life have retained or even increased their vibrancy.

I do not welcome decrepitude any more than other people do. But I take some comfort from the savvy of some doctors who know how to put physical decline into a larger framework of a person’s life.         

Richard Griffin