People, some well known, others not, and bringing  many different life experiences, inspire  my spiritual reflections in this Christmas season. Having had the privilege of seeing and hearing all but one of them in recent weeks, I take pleasure in sharing their insights.

The movie and stage actress Glenn Close, speaking to students and others, confesses: “I get bored talking about myself.”  And, when she talks about acting, she says: “You have to stay vulnerable.”

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, discussing the likely war on Iraq, warns: “War is always a violation of human rights.”  He worries about the effects of war not only on those who are killed and injured but on those who do the killing. “When we dream of hate, we destroy who we are – the image of God.”

Like the prophet he is, Bishop Gumbleton calls on Americans to make a “major shift in our thinking and then in our public policy.” Only then can we move away from destroying our environment and impoverishing further the poor of the world.

Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, after reading his poems with great charm to a packed auditorium of students and others, is asked about war on Iraq. He replies: “Poetry is anti-terrorist, pro-life, and poetry is a home for ambiguity and uncertainty.”

Columnist Alex Beam, at a morning prayer service, speaks of this moment as “a time of great darkness and pessimism.” Nonetheless he believes that, when they can, “people will choose generosity of spirit.”

Retired editor John Bethell quotes approvingly the words, written in both Gaelic and English, on a tombstone he has discovered in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia: “We look to the future, but we do not forget the past.”

Becca Levy, a young researcher at Yale, has discovered how thinking positively about growing old has an impact on the experience. “The effects were much greater than I anticipated,” she told me about the results of her questionnaires. Having positive attitudes toward life enhances the aging experience significantly, she finds.

Management guru, Warren Bennis, speaking at MIT,  his alma mater, quotes the Hollywood entertainer George Burns when he was 100 years old: “I can’t die, I’m booked.” For his own part, Bennis, at 77, speaks of “the pleasure of finding things out.”

Cultural historian and fellow gerontologist Tom Cole, writing out of the Jewish tradition, shares with me something of his own spiritual journey: “I came to see aging as a path that leads to the light.” He draws inspiration from Rabbi Abraham Heschel who argued that “authentic existence requires work and celebration, ritual and prayer, and an appreciation of the nature of time.”

My friend Tom quotes another piece of the rabbi’s wisdom : “Time is the presence of God in the world of space.”

Another old friend, Frank Gross, writes of volunteering in a small house in Kalamazoo where terminally ill people come to be cared for free of charge. “I have learned to sit quietly by the bedsides of our people, not speaking, just sitting there, perhaps quietly holding a hand. I have learned that our people often want the comfort of a hand in their hand or an arm around their shoulders.”

A three-hour performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio ,gives awesome expression to the beauty of the events commemorated in this season. Bach’s language set to glorious music displays an impressive mystical approach to Christmas.

The conductor of the concert, Craig Smith, calls this Christmas music “the profoundest thoughts on the matter ever uttered.”  He must be referring to such passages as the chorale that says (in a translation that limps): “Here is born a God and also a human being.”  And later, the alto sings of where the new born is to be found: “He lives here (in my heart), to His and my delight.”

The words of all the people quoted here can serve as motive for probing the meaning of Christmas and other religious feasts of this season. These sentiments of thoughtful people prod us to go beyond shopping and busyness  to what lies beyond. At root, Christmas celebrates human life raised to a new level. Yes, we remain fragile, capable of betrayal of ourselves and others, and our peace is threatened by war and rumors of war. But the human heart is capable of unselfish love that redeems the world.

This is a time for being thankful for everything that makes our lives precious. It is a season for rising above the infighting with family members and others that so often deprives everyone involved of peace and happiness. Christmas at its best is a summons to recognizing the divine in us and in others.

It is also time for compassion toward those who, for whatever reason, are barred from the feast. The poor, among them those who are employed in one or more jobs for inadequate pay, need active concern for their well-being. So do those who have been reduced to isolation.  The values behind the Christmas celebration belong to the whole human family.

Richard Griffin

“After the age of 30, it is unseemly to blame one’s parents for one’s life.” This is one of the rules laid down by Roger Rosenblatt in a new book called “Rules for Aging.” In smaller print, just below the head, the author lowers the age:  “Make that 25,” he adds adjusting the age of maturity.

At a time in history when badmouthing one’s parents after age 30 or more, has become epidemic, a lot of people need  this rule. Especially do they need it if they happen to be clever with the written word. Among others, the daughter of J. D. Sallenger, who published a book about her father this year, could have spared us all the bashing of the famously reclusive author.

There was a time when I felt tempted to violate the rule. From the vantage point of an adolescence that stretched altogether too long, I became too critical of my parents, as my brothers and sisters recognized before I did. For a time I yielded to the temptation to judge my father and mother adversely by reason of their decisions about me and the rest of the family.

Such rash judgments now seem to me in large part a failure of imagination, a failure understandable in a very young adult but not in someone older than that.  I was unable to see my parents as human beings like myself, trying to achieve good things for themselves and their family in a world that they found difficult as everybody else does. It took me too long to sympathize with their struggles the way I would like others to sympathize with mine.

What does this have to do with the holyday/holiday season upon which we have entered? To me Christmas, a day that my spiritual tradition celebrates with intense feeling, always brings me back to childhood. For me, this day is forever connected with parents, family, and times altogether special in forming the values by which I live.

My main association with Christmas has always been abundance. In memory, I recall the earliest days when we gathered in a living room strewn with toys and other gifts. Even the small presents that dropped out of upturned stockings contributed to the general profusion of good things.

This abundance was connected to the goodness of God who, in the faith that my family received as a legacy, had given us the gifts that made Christmas so special. The gifts always turned out to be more numerous than I expected, a sign of profligacy that impressed me from the time that I could first register such impressions. Yes, God loved us – so did my father and mother.

Mind you, the gifts were not lavish or wasteful. They were not intended to outdo what other families gave their kids on this day. And we were made conscious by our socially aware parents that plenty of children around the world had parents altogether too poor to give them what we received.  And, of course, we went to church to thank God, the source of it all.

Christmas, celebrated this way, should have stood as proof that my parents’ love for me was large. The arrangements they made each year to surprise me and their other children testified to they way they felt about us. They were parents who put our well being before their own as they coped with the challenges of each day.

Looking back now, I see them as successful in child raising far beyond that of many other people. They raised six of us and gave us the good physical and mental health, education, and the skills to cope with the challenges of our own lives. The adults that we have become give credit to what our parents gave us.

Of course, I am conscious of their faults too. Looking back at them from early old age, I can easily see how they failed at certain aims. But that makes them like me and like everyone else. If they found life hard, at least sometimes, they experienced what we all encounter. And maturity for me ultimately made me recognize this and put it in context.

So, if someone were to ask What does Christmas mean for you?, I would have to bring my parents into the answer. They taught me to recognize abundance as a sign of human and divine love. The outpourings of gifts that they stealthily arranged for us each Christmas showed forth the meaning of their lives.

This recognition does not sentimentalize my parents. It simply sets them off in the tradition of Christmas celebration when they showed best what they were all about.

Richard Griffin

“Shooting stays with you, it’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget it.” On this subject George MacMasters speaks from recent and deadly experience.

A few months ago, this soon-to-be-50-year-old Harvard aquatics instructor returned home from the war in Iraq. He was physically unscathed, though for weeks after his arrival back in the U.S., he felt nausea every morning.

That phenomenon he attributes to seeing “a lot of dead bodies, heads blown off, brains blown out, and limbs torn off, things like that.” He feels bad especially about the loss of so many young people and knowing that “they had hardly lived yet.”

His son, stationed in Falluja, only 15 minutes away from his father, was among the seriously wounded. Still in his early twenties, he suffered drastic burns in both hands, along with wounds in his face and ear. “Shrapnel was coming out of his head weeks and months later,” says his father.

Despite his desire to go there and fight in the front lines, getting to Iraq was not easy for George. From the beginning he emphasized that he could speak Arabic, but the Army and National Guard brass seemed not to value this asset. Nor did they apparently care that he had served in the Marine Corps from 1976 to 1986, the latter four years as an officer.

After getting a waiver for his age, George, a tall, strapping, athletic middle-ager, was accepted into the active reserve and volunteered for Guantánamo where he spent the next six months patrolling the hills near the U. S. base. Only at the end of this duty did the head of the intelligence unit discover his proficiency in Arabic.

For the remaining five months of his sojourn in Guantánamo, MacMasters spent his time striking up conversations with the prisoners held by American forces. “A lot of times they would talk and they didn’t want to tell me anything. But slowly, as you get talking, they would volunteer information.”

“We got some good intelligence,” George reports, some of it leading to certain prisoners being released from the most difficult confinement. But others would try to get intelligence from their interrogator. “It was a kind of chess game: They would be working on me while I was working on them.”

But George still hoped to serve in Iraq as a private and a rifleman because “that’s where the real fighting is done, right on the fire team.” Unable to get released from his unit back home, he called up the Pentagon. “I got to full-bird colonels,” he says, and pressed his case.

The brass inquired who was pressing them and heard “Oh, it’s Sergeant MacMasters and he’s a pain in the ass, that guy.” Finally, he got his way and ended up in an Iraqi police station in Ramadi. If you wanted action, it was the place to be. Among other things, “we were mortared every morning and every night, all the time,” he reports.

During his 12 months there, he engaged in two dozen firefights and three major attacks. “I actually got to see the enemy and I shot at them. I knew I hit a few of them but I have no idea how many I killed.”

A Marine rifle company was based next door to help provide security. George would eat with them regularly. One day when the company went out on patrol in a 7-ton truck, George heard explosions 500 yards away. Six of the marines were hit: “One marine was killed, four had two legs blown off, one had one leg blown off,” according to George.

He saw them brought in: “These were all kids – 19, 21, 22.” When the grievously wounded were brought to a hospital, a navy corpsman reportedly joked with them later about them now having to learn how “to pick up girls from a wheelchair.”

About other casualties, he observes, “When you looked in their faces, they looked like babies, not men.” Of himself at their stage he observes: “I knew nothing at that age, I had learned nothing, what I wanted or even what the world was about.”

He holds it against civilian and military leaders whose policies are responsible for these casualties. “Their policies result in the deaths of young people,” this veteran says boldly. “To me staying the course meant accepting the death of so many young people killed each month as an acceptable loss to maintain a policy.”

George believed that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing. “What I didn’t agree with, over time, was the lack of preparedness of the leadership in conducting the war; right from the get-go I wanted them to have more troops.”

He hates the thought of American troops leaving. But he considers “pretty absurd” training up the Iraqis to defeat the insurgency. “If we can’t defeat this insurgency with the greatest military in the world, how can we expect a rag-tag bunch of light infantry Iraqis to defeat it?”  

Richard Griffin

“We represent a phenomenon that never existed before,” says Mary Catherine Bateson of herself and her age peers. She has been interviewing a lot of them and they tell her: “I don’t feel like someone who’s 60, or 70, or 80.”

This she explains by observing that “we all carry the mental picture of our own grandparents, what they were like when we were children.” But they lived in a different world and they aged differently.

Author, educator, and cultural anthropologist, Catherine Bateson sees today’s older people as “something new.” Not only do more of us live longer but we live in an era of radical change.

This change has not merely altered technology and introduced new material objects such as emails, cell phones, and i-Pods. More profoundly, our generation has had to change attitudes on basic human realities─relationships between men and women, attitudes toward sexuality and gender, views about race and the environment.

Our era also has made it possible to bring together two realities that often used to be in conflict: wisdom and activity. Many older people are now volunteering, taking courses, traveling, and eloping (the latter much to the surprise of their children and others.)

As for wisdom, it’s the one word about aging that most of us like, observes Catherine Bateson. And we like to think it comes almost automatically with age.

It used to. Viewing the past with and anthropologist’s eye, she observes that in older traditional societies people knew the rules, and by age 40 they could prove useful by providing memories that were important to the community.

However, she points out, it no longer happens this way. What brings wisdom nowadays is not mere experience or length of years; if you wish to become wise, you have to take your experience and reflect on it

This means valuing a “kind of learning that takes place outside of the classroom. Something happens, delights you, scares you, tweaks your curiosity. That’s what wisdom consists in: not just years, but years of experience.”

When you combine the two, activity and wisdom, you produce something of which the world stands in sore need.

Our new longevity has extended the life span of families. Formerly, children were lucky to see one grandparent, more often than not a grandmother.

But now, Catherine, observing the structure of the extended family, says, “I’ve known kids with seven or eight grandparents: the grands, the great-grands, the ex-grands, the step-grands, and the grands-in-law.”

“They have enough grandparents to choose from,” she adds, “so a bit from this one and a bit from that one and they get their full share of grandparental love.”

Another new phenomenon has given children great-aunts and great-uncles who, by virtue of good health and mobility, display a vitality that used to be rare.

But Bateson sees most of us as still “stuck in an old imagination.” This prevents us from claiming the influence we could have in society.

As for politicians, “they are dead wrong: in thinking that just because a person is 60 or 70 or 80 they don’t care about the future.” Social Security, prescription drugs, and other such issues are by no means the only ones that interest us. We should be confronting the politicians more broadly and telling them “What you’re doing is going to make the world worse for my grandchild.”

Many Americans who are in early or middle adulthood typically do not have time for the future. In Bateson’s view, they tend be “incredibly busy and they have fewer assets than they thought they’d have, they are really scraping economically.”

This is where older people can be of help and also help themselves in the process. “The world is full of parents, couples working two jobs who would be grateful to have an honorary aunt or uncle or grandparent tactfully involved,” Catherine suggests.

She feels strongly about intergenerational bonding, as do I. “If you don’t have a child in your life, get one,” she advises us elders quite bluntly.

To the excuse of persons who say they cannot establish such contacts, Bateson sees volunteer activity with organizations as a helpful way of getting in touch with younger people. So are joining organizations, taking courses, going to church.

You might also reach out to the grandchildren of friends who live far away, perhaps inviting them to eat with you. Ours is a society that indulges in segregation by age and thus squanders opportunity and sets limits to what we can do to change things for the better.

Bateson believes strongly in the value of volunteering. She does so not merely because it helps to build up society and improve our communities.

She also considers volunteer activity important to individual development. That is why she urges those involved to “use your volunteer work as a way of framing and reflecting on what it means to be wise and active, both at the same time.”

Richard Griffin

Thomas Perls, M.D., a prominent geriatrician at Harvard Medical School, calls it “huck-sterism.” Of its practitioners he says, “I think they do our field and our society a great deal of harm. I think they’re very dangerous.”

With these scathing comments, Perls takes aim at the anti-aging industry. His par-ticular target is people with M.D.s after their names who go around selling the idea that aging can and should be stopped.

These purveyors of the anti-aging gospel belong to a larger American industry that reaps billions of dollars from its products and services. Dubious drugs, ill-advised plastic surgery, food fads, new spiritualities, diet regimens, and many other gimmicks conspire to persuade Americans that they can put a stop to aging, at least for a while.

The hidden assumption of doctors who practice “anti-aging medicine” is that aging is a disease. They would like everyone to think that aging is something bad.

Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, the two founders of the Chicago-based American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, are, in their own words “at the center of it all.” They are not shy in their claims: Klatz has told an interviewer from Penthouse, “Within 30 years we will have a shot at immortality.”

Last October I talked with Bob Goldman whose medical degree caught my attention: it comes from the Central American Health Services University, Belize Medical College.

In his talk at the Harvard School of Education, Goldman delivered his message with great personal pizzaz. “Aging is not inevitable,” he asserted. “If we don’t solve the aging process, we are going bankrupt, we will become a nation of nursing homes.”

If there is any single danger for Americans now, he stated, it is the water most of us drink. “Tap water is poison,” Goldman claims. Instead, we should all be drinking distilled water. It is hard to believe anyone would say this, but Goldman asserted that brain loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and other such bad things happen because of tap water.

You have to wonder about anyone who proclaims, “there is nothing graceful about grow-ing old.” When he asked members of the audience, “Who would like to live to be 150?” more than a few hands went up. Not mine!

According to Goldman, anti-aging medicine is the coming thing. Of himself and his col-leagues, he says, “we’re practicing the way everyone will in the future.” He expects that “surgical de-aging” will become routine along with replacement of body parts.

Following our meeting, Goldman sent me two of his books, co-authored by Ronald Klatz. The first “Stopping the Clock,” presents “dramatic breakthroughs in anti-aging and rejuvenation techniques.” Goldman does not practice the soft sell: here he shares with readers “why many of us will live past 100 – and enjoy every minute!”

The second, “7 Aging Secrets for Optimal Digestion and Scientific Weight Loss,” among other things teaches readers how to “detox your inner core and shed unwanted pounds in the process.” On page four, incidentally, the authors treat seriously reports that a Chinese man, Li Ching-Yun, was born in 1677 and died in 1933!

As must be evident, I find this doctrine intellectually shoddy and socially harmful. To me, it’s a kind of propaganda that serves the interests of big money rather than the common good. It is unscrupulous to prey on people’s fears about change.

Yet, it enjoys amazing respectability in American society. In his publicity materials, Goldman displays a photo showing him a as a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. International conferences, medical textbooks, and contacts with Capital Hill, all help raise the profile of the cause.

The anti-aging folks throw around impressive names as endorses. These people know how to wield the media in order to convince the public of their professional prestige.

Yet, they are peddling a doctrine that is noxious. Certain kinds of anti-aging ideas are basically anti-human. It sounds almost banal to say so, but growing old is a fundamental human experience that brings with it rich rewards as well as trials. To try and do away with this expe-rience means twisting out of shape what it means to be a human being.

Of course, I favor measures that have proven themselves by increasing our chances of living longer well. It remains scandalous that only an estimated 10 percent of Americans over age 65 do any significant exercise. And too many of us continue to eat junk food. For our own self-respect we need to take better care of ourselves, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

But that does not mean buying into quick-fix, unreliable, and often downright dangerous schemes that promise what no one can actually deliver. As baby boomers advance in age, it’s only going to get worse. More hucksters will appear ready to promise us youth and happiness.

Richard Griffin

Father Robert Bullock was a friend of mine for 61 years. Starting as high school classmates in 1943, we stayed close until his death in 2004. For the gift of such a friendship I continue to feel grateful.

My vantage point gave me abundant chances to appreciate Bob’s fine personal qualities. From early on, I valued the traits of character that made him easy to be with and that produced good work and good works.

But, though I esteemed him from the beginning, I confess having underestimated his potential for both intellectual development and spiritual leadership. With time, I came to see that his talents in both these areas were outstanding.

It delights me to see how many other people recognize those characteristics, and love Bob for who he was and for all that he accomplished in his ministry as a university chaplain and parish priest.

They also continue to hold him in high esteem for his insight into one of the most crucial issues of our time. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg has said of Father Bullock: “He was our mentor and role model because he understood what is demanded of us when you face an event of such evil.”  

As a prime mover in the agency Facing History and Ourselves, Bob helped create a vital bond between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community.

Over the last 30 years, the Brookline-based  Facing History has become national and international in scope as it works to teach young people and others the awe-full lessons of the Holocaust. Two and a half years after his death, Father Bullock continues to be acclaimed for his part in promoting understanding of what the horror of those event means for everyone.

The occasion for this renewed focus on my friend is a recent commemoration of his life and work held at Boston College, his alma mater. Presented in the Burns Library, this celebration marked the first display of his archive. The collection includes his sermons, letters, photos, and other memorabilia that help document Bob’s career.

I take pleasure in seeing how the university where my friend did his undergraduate studies has recognized the value of his personal stature and his accomplishments. The collection housed in the library, now being prepared for eventual showing to the public, will preserve a record of his legacy for the indefinite future.

In the program prepared for this event, Father Bullock is quoted for the value he set on wisdom. “It (education) talks about trying to acquire wisdom─not just knowledge,” he said, “but the intelligent application of knowledge, to try to see below the surface of things, to try to achieve the moral balance.”

That quest for wisdom, for seeing below the surface and achieving moral balance, expresses one of my friend’s central themes. That is why he read so avidly and explored these themes in conversation with friends and those who specialized in the study of history.

From 1978 to 2004, Father Bullock was pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows parish in Sharon, Massachusetts. There he ministered to the Catholics of the town and reached out to the Jewish residents, becoming personally known and a friend to many of them.

His ties with the Jewish community enabled him to continue the work he had begun during his time as chaplain at Brandeis University. During the turbulent 1970s, he had served the Catholic community of Brandeis while developing a deeper understanding of the Catholic Church’s treatment of Jews and holding his own church to account.

During this same period, Bob was also director of campus ministry for the Archdiocese of Boston. In this capacity he helped many, including me, to carry out their ministry in the midst of continued turmoil in church and academia. He managed to stay cool in the storms that whirled about us in those troubled (but also dynamic) times.

Starting in the middle 1970s, he served Facing History as its prime Catholic figure, working to bring about deeper understanding of the church’s historical role and trying to reverse the lethal prejudices that had brought about such unspeakable harm to the Jewish community in Europe.

Many of us older people think, at least sometimes, about the legacy we will leave behind. My friend Bob’s life serves as a model of one that clearly made a difference and will endure.

Few of us, perhaps, will have made the same impact on our larger society as he did. But inevitably we too will have had our own distinctive impact.

We all have the capacity to make a difference. Figuring out the best ways can prove a fine agenda for one’s later years.

What may count most in the long run is our character. The capacity to be our best selves, being courageous and, most of all, compassionate toward others, makes us important, no matter how the world may ignore us.

My friend Bob was a person of character, and this explains best why so many people continue to honor him after his death.

Richard Griffin

This past year, Walter Sobel received official notification of his promotion to the rank of lieutenant. The notice came 60 years after this U.S. Navy veteran would have received it had he not been in Great Lakes Hospital recovering from wounds. If we may attach a further meaning to the word “senior,” this is indeed a Lieutenant of the Senior Grade.

He also belatedly received the Purple Heart and seven other medals commemorating the campaigns that he went through on the battleship New Mexico.

Along with others who served on this ship, Walter Sobel took part in the 49th annual reunion of his shipmates, as they met in St. Louis this fall. On Jan. 6, 1945, during the battle of Lingayen Gulf, he was on the New Mexico's bridge when a Japanese Kamikaze pilot crashed into the area where he was standing.

As Officer of the Deck for General Quarters, Walter had been standing near the captain of the ship, Robert Fleming. The latter was killed, as were 30 others, including two British officers on board as observers. Walter himself was hit in the head by shrapnel, bled profusely and was carried unconscious down seven flights to the sick bay.

Later, he was transported to a hospital ship and ultimately back to the United States. The New Mexico, having managed to withstand the Lingayen Gulf attack, took part in several further actions, including the invasion of Okinawa, and finally sailed into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender.

At the reunion, Walter learned that the New Mexico had been especially targeted because it was the flagship of the American fleet and was carrying high-ranking officers. In fact, the Japanese radio propagandist, Tokyo Rose, as she was called, announced on the day before the attack that this ship would be singled out as principal target.

Lucky in his survival of the attack, Walter also proved lucky at the reunion. In a raffle of memorabilia, he took chances and won both a larger and a smaller model of the ship on which he had served. The larger one, some 15 inches long, will have an honored place in his home.

After the war, this veteran of the Pacific campaign resumed his career as an architect. Based in Chicago, he has been highly successful in his field, a fact recognized by his being named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He also continues to teach at the Illinois Institute of Technology and, in his 90s, remains active in professional affairs.

My source for much of this information is Richard Sobel, Walter's son. He accompanied his father to the reunion and was struck by the spirit of the old veterans there. Looking back on the traumatic events of 61 years ago, they feel proud of their part in the Allied victory over a determined and often fanatical enemy.

Four years ago, in honor of Veterans Day 2002, I wrote a column about Walter and his English friend, Geoffrey Brooke, the latter a hero of the British Navy. Among other exploits, Geoffrey survived the sinking of the battleship Prince of Wales.

As that ship was sinking, he rappelled his way by rope across the oil-dark sea to a British destroyer standing alongside. Shortly after he reached the safety of this ship, the captain had to give the command to cut the rope because of the danger to the destroyer.

A transoceanic friendship between Geoffrey and Walter has continued, though they have met only once, when I had the privilege of talking with them.

Asked about his survival, Walter now says: “The Lord was watching out for me, that's all you can say.” As to remembering the experience itself, after so many decades, he says: “It's indelible. It makes such an imprint on your memory that you can't forget.”

About age, Walter shows himself guarded. The birthday he celebrated last July he takes as the anniversary of his 39th. Of his fellow veterans at the reunion he observes: “They didn't seem old except for my former roommate. In general, they showed their age, except for a few. I have to use a walker, and that's a bummer.”

This one veteran, energized in old age, shows forth the spirit that animated so many members of the armed forces in World War II. Though I distrust the modish phrase “The Greatest Generation,” I admire the qualities of heart shown by a great many of that war's veterans. An extraordinary number of them demonstrated the personal qualities of courage and resourcefulness that still bring credit to this nation.

Virginia Woolf once wrote: “The present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper.” That truth may well apply to this veteran of war and long living. As I understand it, his life continues to be made psychically rich by memories of experiences both hazardous and dramatic.

Walter Sobel does not live simply for these moments long ago but he does appear to draw from them material that help make his current life, itself not without trials, rewarding.

Richard Griffin