Of the more than 1,300 people who died because of Hurricane Katrina, more than 70 percent were over age 60.

The elderly population of the New Orleans area was hardly overwhelming: perhaps 15 percent. But they made up almost three-fourths of those who died.

How can people still claim that the era of ageism ─ discrimination against the elderly ─ has passed. These stark facts should have scandalized public officials and the general public more than ever before.

With the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina upon us this week, we can seize the opportunity to reflect on these deaths. Moreover, we can ask what is being done to protect us against other disasters taking a similarly large toll of older people.

I will not soon forget the photo of sick old people, mostly women, lying on flimsy stretchers, with their legs exposed, aside or on the baggage area conveyer belts as they awaited evacuation from the New Orleans airport. And accounts of the drowning of 34 residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home will continue to haunt many of us who read about it.

A recent issue of Public Policy & Aging Report focuses on disasters, both natural and man-made, and their impact upon the older members of the population. Several knowledgeable contributors claim that the nation is still badly prepared to safeguard elder citizens when such events strike again.

Veteran readers of these columns may recall two previous ones that I wrote about catastrophes that victimized many elders. The first was the heat wave in Chicago that claimed the lives of more than 700 older residents in July of 1995. An excellent book by Eric Klinenberg of New York University analyzed the reasons for that disaster.  

The second took place in Paris when an astonishing ten thousand people, most of them elders, were estimated to have died during a heat wave that engulfed that city in August 2003. Though Paris experienced very hot weather this summer, officials seem to have learned in the interim how to take better care of their oldest citizens.

Despite the lessons learned from these human and natural disasters, they have sparked too little planning and research on the subject. “Older adults represent a blindspot in disaster planning and research,” according to Johns Hopkins professor Thomas Glass.

“In times of disaster,” Glass says, “older adults, many of whom may be functioning well in their communities, are challenged beyond their reserves.” He regrets that “little attention has been paid to the question of how best to plan for and respond to the needs of older persons in a disaster.”

Hence the continuing debacle for elders in New Orleans.

Even now, a year later, “very few recovery initiatives have specifically addressed the needs of older adults,” reports Jennifer Campbell, director of the Hurricane Fund for the Elderly. In fact, she says, older people without money and family have been explicitly told not to return to New Orleans.

Another academic, Share DeCroix Bane, emphasizes the mental health needs of elders who have been displaced. She feels concern about both “the initial chaos of the disaster and the ongoing stress of the aftermath.”

For those fortunate enough to have survived, stress about the loss of their homes and neighborhoods must be a continuing problem. In fact, more than 1,300 elders in Louisiana who used to live in the community now reside in nursing homes. For them, normal living in their later years has been shut off, even as a possibility.

A journalistic colleague, Paul Kleyman, recalls covering the story of the 1989 Loma Prieto earthquake in the San Francisco area. He tells of rescue workers trying to contact many elders cut off from food, potable water, medication and other forms of help. “Without a map of where to find vulnerable people, he remembers, “rescuers had to go door-to-door, sometimes not finding elders or people with disabilities for several days.”

Kleyman also reminds fellow journalists that “most disaster rescue and recovery plans hardly─if at all─mention older people.”

I see the failure of governmental and other agencies to include elder citizens in disaster planning as a failure of imagination. Like many other adults, most planners cannot see themselves ever being in the same situation as their seniors.

Instead, if they think of them at all, these professionals implicitly consider people much older than themselves as a race apart. Their consciousness does not envision older people as their future selves. This inability serves as a solid mental block that prevents them from working out what a civilized society must do for its senior citizens.

But many of my age peers could do more to cultivate people of all ages in the communities where we live. We especially need to make friends with our juniors who will remember us in our times of need. This reaching out I do not consider selfish because those younger people who do help us will benefit also.

Being compassionate brings its own rewards.

Richard Griffin

In March of 1784 Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a close friend in which he described what it was like for him to be 78 years old.

“I still exist,” he told Mrs. Mary Hewson, “and still enjoy some pleasure in that existence, though now in my seventy-ninth year. Yet I feel the infirmities of age come on so fast, and the building to need so many repairs, that in a little time the owner will find it cheaper to pull it down and build a new one.”

In an era when medicine was still primitive, you have to wonder what “repairs” might have entailed. In any event, Franklin would go on to live another six years, so the building would hold out for a considerable time against the deterioration that had begun to set in.

As a person who has just entered into his 79th year, I can identify with this extraordinarily creative man of the 18th century by acknowledging some of the infirmities of which he took note. Like him, I also find pleasure in living, though I would put this fact more strongly than he did. His word “some” suggests that he felt a strong admixture of distress.

This great Bostonian-turned-Philadelphian, by contrast with me, had exceeded the average life expectancy for people of his day by a wide margin. In 18th century America, I would guess that men lived not much beyond age 40 on average, though such a statistic would be skewed by a great many deaths in infancy and childhood.

By contrast, I have moved past the current average life expectancy of 75 or so for men. To catch up with women I will have to reach 80.

The longevity that we have come to expect in the 21st century ranks as one of the great achievements of modern times. Thanks to public health measures and to improvements in medicine, we look upon advanced years as something normal rather than exceptional.

True, the longevity of present-day Americans is often presented as a problem rather than a triumph. We read gloomy forecasts of insuperable economic and social crises that will be caused by the aging of the population. But the extension of human life, no matter what problems it brings, deserves to be seen as one of the major breakthroughs in history.

Still, all this does not make age 78 sound sexy. This number 78 lacks charisma, cachet, or any kind of mystique. It’s an awfully flat numeral that serves merely as a way-station on the road to the 80s.

To look back, 75 has a lot more punch to it, as does the staccato 77 with its echo of numbers once regarded as sacred. And the 80 or 85 that I hope are lying ahead can be relied upon to stir enthusiasm. But no one gets excited about 78.

Yet, every birthday comes as a gift, and I cherish each one. I identify with the dictum of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said, “Just to live is a blessing.” It surprises me to have lived this long, to have survived so many threats to continued life.

Despite its bland numerical character, I have special reason for welcoming 78. This birthday comes after a winter of unexpected physical affliction that sometimes made me wonder in what state my body would be on this date. Fortunately, though that body bears the scars of surgery, it functions remarkably well.

I often think about those who did not make it this far. It sobers me to think of the close friends and family members who did not reach 78.

On this birthday, I mourn the loss of some who were close to me. The two Bobs who were my friends for six decades, and dear extended-family members Joanne and Gregory: how can it be that they are gone while I am still here?

My relish for life must also be modified by the terrors of the world in which we live. Of course, all of my age peers survived the unprecedented horrors of the 20th century, with its mass murders and other insults to human dignity. Still, this new century has already proved productive of new levels of fear and human suffering.

The state of advanced adulthood, I find, bears a close resemblance to the other stages of life. It has its satisfactions and its burdens. The main difference, I discover, is a change in the balance physical burdens and satisfactions. On the present scale, ailments have become weightier.

The other factor, of course, is one’s vision of the end. It seems much closer than it used to. I do not expect to rival the world’s record holder for longevity, the French lady who lived to 122. But, as they lengthen, I do hope to continue feeling grateful for the days of my life.

Richard Griffin

George Washington, in retirement at Mount Vernon, subscribed to ten of them. One of his biographers, Joseph Ellis, shares this fact as an indication of how important newspapers were to the first president.

Several generations later, Abraham Lincoln was an avid reader of newspapers. Like other public figures of the time, he would seize on these publications for reports of what was going on both locally and in the country at large.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her recent historical masterpiece Team of Rivals, underscores the importance of newspapers to Lincoln and his fellow citizens.

As the son of a life-long journalist, I became addicted at an early age to reading newspapers, a habit that has lasted to the present. In particular, I recall reading with fascination each day the paper for which my father worked, the Boston Post, with its accounts of the great events of my young life. In particular, my teenage years were filled with vivid accounts of the fighting in both the European and the Pacific theaters of World War II.

Occasionally during these years, my father gave me tours through the Post, where in his office I met his fellow journalists and, down below, was awed by the giant presses spewing forth the day’s papers.

When in college, I served one summer as a copy boy at the Boston Globe, then a sleepy publication housed on Washington Street’s Newspaper Row. There I saw for myself up close the workings of a large newsgathering organization with all of its traditions and its technology.

Of course, I was on a low rung of the journalistic ladder. Mostly I picked up copy from the editors’ desk, folded it, and stuffed it into a metal tube, and then sent it on its pneumatic way to the composing room.

In those days when big cities typically had half a dozen major papers, I could not have imagined the shrinking that has reduced them to only one or two in most cities across America.

My attachment to newspapers, however, is not merely sentimental. Instead, I regard them as essential to society and its needs.

In my later years, I feel less troubled by the decline of many big-city newspapers than by the habits of many non-newspaper reading Americans, especially the young. Of course, I am aware of many who read news online, but often this material is far less informative, reliable, and incisive than newspapers.

Even students at intellectually demanding colleges and universities are often not well informed about their own country and the wider world. I meet some who have no clear information about matters of great domestic and international import. This condition may, I fear, become habitual, lasting well beyond their student days.

This bothers me because of my conviction that the well-being of our national community depends to a large extent upon citizens being aware of the actions taken by various levels of government in our name. Unless we take steps to keep informed, we can easily be manipulated and our real interests ignored.

Last spring, John S. Carroll, formerly editor of the Los Angeles Times, gave a talk reprinted under the title “What Will Become of Newspapers?” Speaking to fellow editors from across the country, Carroll asked a series of questions about the current  journalistic situation and prospects for the future.

One of the questions he posed was: “If newspapers disappear, should the public care?”  By pointing to the central function of newspapers his answer goes to the heart of the matter: “This is our role: Newspapers dig up the news. Others repackage it.”

As Carroll observes, search engines on the web have no staffs of reporters; neither do blogs. He estimates that 80 percent of America’s news “originates in newspapers.”

In keeping us informed, newspapers continue to be essential. Even when television, the Internet, and other media provide information, they commonly fail to present enough background to give us the knowledge we need.

Newspapers, at their best, also offer reasoned analysis of events that we ought to know something about. Issues on the national and international level ─illegal immigration, the minimum wage, fundamental changes in Social Security, the wars in Iraq and the Middle East, allowing India technical assistance for nuclear weaponry─demand reliable information and evaluation.

On the state and local level, we citizens need to know about many other issues─ public transportation and the condition of our public school systems, to mention only two. To me, community newspapers like this one serve an indispensable purpose. We need to know and, so far as possible, to understand what is going on.

Carroll urges his editor colleagues to take action: “It is important for us to explain to the public why journalism─real journalism practiced in good faith─is absolutely essential to a self-governing nation.” Sharing this belief, I continue to hope for more people to gain this insight.

Richard Griffin

“Poor Little Rhode Island,” is a jaunty ditty that was featured in the Hollywood film “Carolina Blues” in 1944. For some reason, both its first line and its tune have remained lodged in my memory ever since.

Were I to quote its other lines, you would appreciate the song’s overall fatuousness. For example, in stanza two, the state is addressed (without a noun) as “You’re such a teentsy weentsy.”  Affectionate, possibly, but definitely smarmy.  

A two-week vacation in Rhode Island this summer prompts my reference to this absurd relic of the World War II era. Any time spent there serves to belie the condescending attitude of the song’s creators.

This season’s experience, like that of a sojourn in Matunuck, R.I. two summers ago, makes me wonder why so few Great Boston residents appreciate the virtues of that state as a vacation site. I’m no real estate flack but I value stylish houses and graceful shore lines when I see them.

Rhode Island’s beaches rival those of Massachusetts for beauty and grandeur. Where it has the advantage is the accessibility of these sites, at least by comparison with the notoriously jammed approaches to Cape Cod. Traffic sometimes causes delays on I-95, the main drag through Providence heading south, but these tie-ups seem exceptional rather than the rule.

One of our motives for visiting Rhode Island was the opportunity to be near a favorite cousin who lives in the town of Wakefield. Spending time with her always brings pleasure to us and other family members.

Our vacation this year meant house-sitting in our cousin’s neighborhood for people not previously known to us. Part of the experience involved getting to know the workings of a home quite different from our own. The challenge of finding this structure’s virtues and coping with some of its surprises proved a continual source of fascination.

The presence of the family’s cat, Java, offered a special challenge. He, it turns out, is remarkably vocal and insistent on his own ways. My general approach was to give him as much time outside the house as possible. But my wife, who served as interpreter between us, was charmed by his affectionate temperament and exotic good looks.

Some readers will remember that we had 13 years of previous experience at home with an ornery cat, Phileas J. Fogg, by name. Phil was never cuddly and would often pose non-negotiable demands. We missed him when he was gone, though, and our recent experience reminded us of the joys and frustrations of having a pet.    

Wakefield is a charming place, by and large. The neighborhood where we stayed features houses with large porches that often curl around the whole front of the structure. Part of the daily pleasure of being there turned out to be the breezes that, almost invariably, cooled the porch. It proved to be the best site for reading and conversation.

Early mornings, I would stroll down to the local old-fashioned shopping center where I bought newspapers at Healy’s store. The proprietor, with whom I share a first name, proved a genial fellow with whom I immediately found common ground. A procession of customers, most of them male, would also come in to get their newspaper. Sales of the Providence Journal boosted my morale: newspapers continue be a vital, if ancient, technology.

Papers in hand, I would often proceed to “Appetites,” a local coffee shop, for morning tea and muffin. There, more of the town’s old boys would sit and exchange local gossip.

One of them, Tom, announced one morning that he was not at the top of his game. He was definitely not feeling his best.

“What’s wrong?” I asked with the innocence of a visitor. “My dog died,” Tom replied. Summoning up such sympathy as this canophobe could muster, I expressed condolences to the man.

Soon after, he informed me that he was “just kidding.”

With a next door neighbor I fared much better. Born in 1924, this tall slim man immediately seemed to me remarkable for his physical abilities. Conversation revealed that he left college in his freshman year to enter the Army Air Corps. After training, he piloted a B-17 over Italy, bombing German positions in the north.

It fascinated me that he could take on such responsibility at age 19, commanding an 11-man crew and managing such a large plane. With modesty typical of the man, he dismisses these feats, quoting one of his flying instructors who told his pilots-in-training: “It’s just like driving a car.”

This veteran also dismisses talk of “the greatest generation.” Instead, he feels that the war gave to his age peers a definite structure for their young lives. It was easier, he thinks, for them to find themselves in the world than it has proven for many young people these days.

Who knows? This Rhode Island sojourn may at last root out of my head both music and lyrics of that silly old song.

Richard Griffin

Someone asks you the identity of a friend with whom you have recently spent time. Despite yourself, you cannot come up with her name. A quick mental review of the women you know best produces no results.

You feel frustrated at being unable to remember a person you know well. Why, you wonder, must I struggle with a label for such a familiar face? What is happening to me that I have failed to recall someone so close?

Shrugging it off, you pronounce it to be a “senior moment.” You have long since concluded that it is one of aging’s most typical experiences. Society has invented this term, and you hear it used often.

For the last few years, I have been carrying on a vigorous one-man campaign against the expression. I believe it to be in the best interests of my age peers to stop speaking of memory lapses this way.

Though it may seem harmless, even playful, to label our temporary inability to recall words as senior moments, it actually does harm to us in the long run. This conviction of mine has been strengthened of late by two women psychologists who have reported on their research.

These scholars, Laurie O’Brien and Mary Lee Hummert, took three groups of middle-aged men and women and gave them a memory test. The people had two minutes to study a list of 30 words. Then they were asked to write down as many as they could recall.

The first group was told they would be compared with people over age 70. Participants in the second group were told they would compete with people in their 20’s. Finally, members of the third group were not to be tested against any others.

You might expect the second group to have been intimidated by being compared to young people. After all, those in their 20’s reputedly have sharp memories with few deficiencies. It seemed, for all the world, an uneven contest.

But, to my surprise and apparently that of the researchers, the test takers who did worst were those pitted against people over 70. These middle-agers could remember only 12 words or so, whereas those compared with the twenty-somethings scored more than 14 words. They did just as well as the test takers who were not compared with any other group.

Erin Linn, a friend and neighbor who is an active scholar in psychology, says of this type of research: “I think it’s very important. It adds to our knowledge about the importance of stereotypes.”

Dr. Linn has hit on the central meaning of the experiment discussed here. Those who fared worst in the memory test were those who shared stereotypes of the later years. They have bought into the widespread idea that people 70 and above have memories like sieves.

Just being associated with the oldest generations was enough to make middle- agers falter in recalling the words in the test. The researchers also reported, from other sources, that these same people, some of them still in their 40s, felt anxious about growing old.  

This stereotype finds dramatic expression in the words senior moment. It implies that my age peers have a stranglehold on forgetting and ignores the fact that people of all ages have lapses in memory.

The goal of my campaign is not to drop the phrase “senior moment” from the American vocabulary. Rather, I want to retain the words but change their meaning.

These words ought to let everyone know how later life can prove to be a season rich in thought and affect. It can be, and often is, a time for harvesting the beauty and meaning that mark the life of virtually everyone who has lived for decades. Fascination is the appropriate response to much that we have experienced.

My friend Frederick Buechner has written: “Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep within us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface in bits and pieces.”

So much of growing older is psychic and dramatic in ways that others cannot see. The senior moments in which I recall the richness of my world and my life are what make later life so precious. These moments live on with us and enrich our spirit, turning growing older into an inner adventure.

That’s why it makes sense to empty out the expression “senior moment” and fill it with new material. Why should we willingly downgrade old age, a time in our lives that deserves respect for its power to renew our appreciation of human existence?

Senior moments, yes, but only if they suggest the virtues of later life, not its deficiencies.

Richard Griffin

After arriving back at Logan Airport from a recent trip to Iowa, I decided to travel toward home by the MBTA’s new Silver Line.

It marked a first for me, taking the bus from the Delta terminal to South Station. I wanted to see for myself how well this new feature of the T’s transportation system works.  The results must be judged mixed.

I did save money. My fare was only 35 cents, as contrasted with the more than 40 dollar total cost of a taxi. Thanks to the senior discount shared with my age peers, I traveled most of the way home for a pittance.

However, the term used by the T to describe the vehicle turned out to contain a false claim. It took what has been named the “Bus Rapid Transit” a whole half hour to travel the few miles from my airport terminal to South Station.

There was nothing rapid about the trip. Surely, there must be a better way to cover this short stretch of tunnel and roads.

No wonder that the Association for Public Transportation, a group that advocates for improved services, continues to oppose the use of the term Rapid Transit “for service that is anything but.”

After picking me up, the bus stopped at Logan’s every terminal. Lots of passengers got on, mostly young people loaded with suitcases and heavy packs of various shapes. It made for a packed vehicle with inadequate space for the luggage and with some riders (fortunately not I) forced to stand.

What surprised me were all the other stops after we cleared the tunnel. It made for painstakingly slow progress with some people getting on and off at stops unfamiliar to me such as the Federal Court House and Convention Center.

It soon dawned on me that I would have probably made faster progress by taking the old shuttle to the airport subway station. Then, of course, it would have been necessary to change transport twice before I could catch the Red Line. But that inconvenience would be counterbalanced by getting to the subway much faster.

All in all, the Silver Line bus deserves the rating it receives from my friend, the transportation expert Christopher Lovelock. He calls it “a cheap way of not having a rail line to the airport.” The Silver Line bus that I took would have made traveling impossible or, at least, uncomfortable for many of my age peers.

One obvious temporary solution to the Silver Line time problem would be to make at least some of the trips express runs from the airport to the South Station. The T could add more buses and designate them as non-stop. However, the T rejects this approach: spokesman Joe Pesaturo told me the agency believes this would not shave off time from trips.

Unlike me, some other passengers bound for commuter trains at South Station may not object to the current system. They may regard the bus ride to their connection as worth the half hour. Others may fault me for looking for gold when silver signals progress over what the MBTA offered before.

However, to get people in general to use public transportation, you have to make it fast, reliable, and efficient. Otherwise, they will resort to private means if they can afford to do so.

What really needs to be done is first to extend the Blue Line in a loop to the airport. Secondly, the Blue Line needs to be connected to the Red Line. That has been long planned, with a link between Bowdoin Station and Charles promised as a condition of the Big Dig construction.

However, the Commonwealth has reneged on this promise, claiming that the Silver Line takes care of the matter. That forms the basis for a lawsuit currently brought by the Conservation Law Foundation.

The Silver Line in its current format may well be attracting lots of passengers but, from my observation, it is not providing the level of express airport service that many people need.  

These issues connected with public transportation need much more discussion than they receive. Why, in the current debates among the candidates for governor do we hear little or nothing about airport access?

In reviewing the web sites of the four major candidates, I found no mention of public transportation as an issue. Those who seek the office of governor should present proposals for improvement in this vital resource for citizens at large.

Older people, many of whom may suffer at least minor disabilities, are likely to hold public transportation to a higher standard. If we cannot foresee that buses and subway trains will provide us with seats and offer us other forms of security, then we may choose to stay home.

The Silver Line bus that I took would have made many of my age peers unable to travel or, at least, uncomfortable because of crowding and the overly long duration of its short route.

Richard Griffin

In the dark of the movie theater, a significant moment has come. Across the screen comes action that I have seen before, some three hours ago. It's time to leave.

I lean over and whisper to my companions: “This is where we came in.” So we stand up, and shuffle past the other kids who are sitting between us and the aisle, perhaps spilling some of their popcorn on our way out.

As Roger Angell observes in his new memoir Let Me Finish, the phrase “This is where we came in”  has dropped out of use long since. People no longer arrive in the middle of a film. Almost everyone takes pains to show up at the time when the film starts, if not earlier for the previews.

Angell adds: “Walking into the middle of movies was the common American thing during the double-feature era, and if one stayed the course, only minimal mental splicing was required to reconnect the characters and the plot of the initial feature when it rolled around again.”

Looking back, I feel astounded that we did not care about getting to movies at the beginning. How could we feel content with watching them from some mid-point to the end, and then from the beginning to the middle? It now seems nonsensical even if, as the memoirist recalls, the mental splicing demanded no great effort.

But, if nothing else, it meant that people were coming in and searching for seats in the dark, with the fuss that usually entails. Even then, I did not like kids crawling over me just as the tough guy with the gun was forcing bank employees to open the vault.

From the vantage point of six or seven decades later, I suspect the practice reflected the mentality of us moviegoers. It was not merely an ingrained habit to arrive at any old time. Rather, we did not look on movies as art but rather as simple entertainment, served to an American public that loved Hollywood stars with all their glamour and allure.

This habit of untimed arrivals also says something about the kind of movies Hollywood was making when I was a boy. Often, they were B films, those that a studio would turn out quickly without investing much money. They were meant to fill out the double bill and keep you in the theatre for a while longer.

However little went into them, I used to enjoy these potboilers, the equivalent of cheap novels. Commonly, the ones I saw revolved around crime and featured the low life of gangsters, their loves and their rise and fall. The actors I remember in films of this genre ─ Jimmy Cagney, John Garfield, and Humphrey Bogart ─ turned out to be more talented than I knew, as their work in other films would demonstrate.

The second-rate films also had the virtue of being short. In those days you would not have to sit through productions that lasted two and a half hours. Predictable they may have been, but you could be confident they would lead from a beginning and move toward a middle and a reasonably timely end.

Of course, there was a second movie that, combined with the other one, would mean a total of three hours or so of viewing time. Two for one seemed like a bargain: for your 15 cents, you could take in a lot of worlds different from your own.

The main feature I frequently found less interesting than its accompanying film, however minor-league the quality of the latter. In  the principal films, I remember interminable love scenes with Bette Davis and other stars whose prolonged kissing or teary confrontations with lovers would thoroughly bore me. When would the real action begin?

Nowadays film connoisseurs have a higher regard for the films of the 30s and 40s than I would ever have expected. They often admire productions that seemed to me at the time of their release to be just ordinary.

Of course, during my boyhood, I had only a vague concept of how a film was made. I did not realize how much technique went into the fashioning of movies, nor did I know of the talents required to direct a good film. And watching them from some mid-point till their end could not have helped me to appreciate them.

I regret that so many of my current age peers have given up going to the movies. (Less than one-quarter of the audiences last year were over age 50.) The many fine films I continue to see offer to those of us who see them both imaginative stimulation and new angles on the world. As fodder for conversation they also strengthen bonds with other people, especially the younger generations.

It’s been a long time since I last whispered “This is where we came in.” Beginning to end suits me a whole lot better.

Richard Griffin