When David Snowdon finishes a talk to an audience of older people, frequently the first question they ask is: “What can I do to improve my chances of aging successfully?” His response comes in a single word: “Walk!”

He also recommends much else, such as keeping your brain active, eating good food with other people, and developing your spiritual life.

Dr. Snowdon knows a lot about successful aging. An epidemiologist, he founded the “Nun Study,” a now celebrated research project centered on the School Sisters of Notre Dame. This Catholic community of nuns agreed to take part in 1986 and, by this time, hundreds of them have participated.

In the first few years, while Dr. Snowdon worked at the University of Minnesota, the research was directed toward the connection between education and health in later life. When in 1990 he moved to the medical center at the University of Kentucky, Snowdon’s focus shifted to Alzheimer’s disease. Since that time, his work and that of his associates have become famous among researchers in the field of aging and have also received considerable media attention.

Snowdon rightly considers himself lucky to have found a congregation of religious sisters willing to cooperate with him. They are a researcher’s dream because they share so many life features in common. All unmarried, they live the same style of life and, moreover, their community has kept careful records of each of their members going back to the time they first joined.

It also has helped that David Snowdon was acquainted with nuns from childhood on and had some as teachers in elementary school. He has brought to his research a deep respect for the sisters, with many of whom he has developed close friendships.

At first he felt nervous about proposing to the nuns that they participate in his research. But the way was eased when one of the leaders of the community told him how to deal with the older sisters: “We treat them with the care and respect they deserve. We will expect nothing less from you.” And, to judge from “Aging With Grace,” the book Snowdon authored last year, he has followed through.

The researcher felt even more nervous when he made another, more threatening request of the sisters. He asked them to donate their brains to his study. To his relief, the sisters responded generously, with 678 agreeing to have their brains studied after their death. They based their decision on spiritual motives fundamental to their faith. One said: “It is the spirit that is important after death, not the brain.” And another added: “Resurrection does not depend on how our bodies are in the grave.”

The donors saw the decision as expressing the service of their neighbors to which their whole life had been dedicated. One leader explained this orientation: “As sisters, we made the hard choice not to have children. Through brain donation, we can help unravel the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease and give the gift of life in a new way to future generations.”

Each sister who takes part in the study is given a series of physical and mental tests each year. In this way Snowdon and his associates keep track of the nuns’ health as they age. Through these tests, scrutiny of the records of each sister, and other diagnostic methods, the researchers have been able to draw some conclusions about aging. And, of course, rigorous examination of the brains of those sisters who have died have also revealed significant information.

Among these latter findings was the discovery that many of the women who continued to function adequately in old age had brains with some symptoms characteristic of Alzeimer’s, such as plaques and tangles. But even though they would seem to have had the disease, it did not impede their activities and they were judged to be mentally intact.

Snowdon summarizes this way: “Alzheimer’s is not a yes/no disease. Rather, it is a process – one that evolves over decades and interacts with many other factors.” So the evidence coming from examination of the brain can sometimes prove misleading.

Two factors that Snowdon considers important in the life of the sisters lie outside his scientific testing but deserve attention. The first is spirituality and the second is community. Of spirituality, he says: “My sense is that profound faith, like positive outlook, buffers the sorrows and tragedies that all of us experience.”

Of the second factor, he writes: “The community not only stimulates their minds, celebrates their accomplishments, and shares their aspirations, but also encourages their silences, intimately understands their defeats, and nurtures them when their bodies fail them.”

Ultimately, for Snowdon, the most amazing lesson from this study is that “Alzheimer’s disease is not an inevitable consequence of aging.” This lesson can offer some hope to people who feel anxious as we all await the scientific breakthrough that will free one day free the human family from this terrible affliction.

Richard Griffin

Have you seen the television ad showing a little old lady getting a helping hand from a young man as she crosses a parking lot? Normally, I am ad-adversive, but this one has caught my attention several times and held me fascinated.

The lady has just been food shopping and is presumably walking toward her car. When she meets the nicely dressed young professional, who works in a Citizens Bank branch at the supermarket, she asks him to lend her his arm. This he gladly does, assuming her automobile to be parked nearby. When she delivers her punch line, he has been clearly one-upped: “Oh, I don’t have a car,” she says sweetly.

This ad, I have discovered, was filmed last January in California. This information comes from the woman who stars in it. Last week I interviewed her by telephone in Forest Hills, New York where she has lived for a long time.

Her name is Mildred Clinton and she describes herself as a “character actress.” Over the telephone she sounds just as charming as she does in the ad. The extent of her work as an actress surprised and impressed me. She played the mother of the Al Pacino character in the film Serpico and she has appeared in three movies directed by Spike Lee.

Early in our conversation I told her my age of 74, hoping this would make it easier for her to tell me hers. But “women can’t tell their age,” she informed me firmly but sympathetically, thereby revealing she’s in a certain range. Also her frequent use of “Jiminy Cricket” as her expletive of choice suggests that she was not born the day before yesterday.

As the ad shows, Mildred is short in physical stature. “I always had a good figure,” she says of herself, but she was only five feet three-and-a- half inches in height. By now, she has become shorter still, she volunteers. In some of her ads and films she appears taller, however.

What most impressed me about Mildred Clinton is her zest for life. “I fall in love with whatever I’m doing because it’s always a challenge,” she says of her work.

Mildred is determined to resist negative thinking. “I think each of us is our own most severe critic,” she told me, “and some days I feel positively negative.” However, the personal dynamism of the woman became almost tangible to me in our phone conversation.

How does she feel about growing older? “I am very lucky,” she replies, “to be busy with work that I love. My whole life was set in a way in which you do interesting things.”

Her interesting things began long ago. She appeared in a play that featured Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne when it tried out in Boston decades ago. “They were amazing people,” she says of the Lunts. Remembering a certain by-play between them during a rehearsal, she still marvels at their exchange.

Sitting in the theater, Alfred Lunt called out to his wife “You’ve got too much eye makeup.” Lynne ignored him for a while but finally gave in. “Oh Alfred,” she exclaimed as she left to brush away some of the make up. Mildred still feels the music of Lynne’s voice in those two words “Oh Alfred.”

Mildred worked with another famous theatrical couple – Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. She thinks it was in a television drama rather than a performance on the stage. “You could have hugged them,” she says, as she recalls feeling tempted to ask Cronyn if she could.

Mildred Clinton appreciates late life in other ways as well. “Everything makes me feel rich,” she says. “When you’re young, 13 or 14, these things seem unreachable.”

The only downer in Mildred’s life is widowhood. She lost her husband to an early death, at age 42, and has lived by herself in Forest Hills since that time. She boasts of being a “distinguished alumna” of Brooklyn College where she majored in French.

Talking with this woman buoyed up my spirits. And that was without being able to accept right away her invitation to take me to lunch at Sardi’s,the famous Manhattan restaurant. At the end of our conversation, Mildred told me, “You’ve made my day!”  Those words exactly echoed my own sentiments.

For an appraisal of the ad, I turned to my favorite advertising guru, John Carroll. He appears on Boston’s public television show “Greater Boston,” for which he is executive producer. He thinks this ad “works” in delivering its message effectively.

Of Mildred Clinton’s performance, Carroll says, “She delivers a great punch line,” a sentiment that no doubt the veteran New York character actress and her fans will be happy to hear.

As to the view of aging presented here, Carroll gives this ad high marks. “It casts older people in a reasonably positive light,” he says. “I find it kind of endearing,” he adds.

So do I.

Richard Griffin

André at age 90, and nearing the end of his life, decided to write some recollections of his early years for his grandchildren and other family members. Each week for almost a year, he would send them installments, in longhand, describing his experiences during World War II. Last fall, these installments were collected and became a printed memoir of 60 pages entitled “Memories from the Time of War (1939-1945.).”

André lived in Ottawa where he his wife had emigrated long after leaving their native Poland. Writing in French, his second language, he intended the memoir for his descendants; however, his daughter Maria has allowed friends as well to read its pages and me to use the material in this column.

On September 1, 1939, André was a lawyer living with his wife and two-year-old daughter in Warsaw when German military forces unleashed their lethal attack on Poland.  In response to a national radio broadcast calling on men to join a military unit, André fled Warsaw a week later in a car owned by his father, a physician. The capital was to be declared an open city, so he and his wife thought it better for her and their daughter Maria to stay behind.

André, his sister, and his father arrived the next day in the city of Lublin where they experienced their first German air raids. From there he traveled east and south, looking for military sites where he could help defend his country. When that proved infeasible in Poland, they drove across the Romanian border all the way to Bucharest.

There he discovered Polish friends who were driving to Milan, from which city a train took him to France where he would spend the rest of the war. It was an agonizing time, filled with worry about his loved ones and marked by narrow escapes from the Gestapo.

On one such occasion, he had a nine o’clock appointment to meet his contact with the French resistance but felt so tired he needed to postpone the meeting. Later he discovered that the Gestapo had raided his contact’s apartment and took him off. “This was the first time that I felt myself saved by Providence,” he wrote.

Various jobs with the Polish Red Cross in exile enabled André to help many fellow Poles and to collaborate with the French resistance. In the war’s latter stages, he was responsible for listening to radio broadcasts from England and other countries for information helpful to the French freedom fighters. It was dangerous work but he managed to evade detection and capture.

Getting his wife and daughter out of Poland and into France in the spring of 1940 greatly helped his morale, though concern for their wellbeing continued to preoccupy his thoughts. Before leaving, his wife (whom he refers to throughout as “Babcia,” the Polish word his grandchildren always used for their grandma), had been arrested by the Gestapo but she managed to persuade her captors to let her go and even drive her back to her house!

When the liberation of Paris happens in August 1944, he describes the ecstatic scene of American and French troops at the Champs Élysées and finds himself unable to sleep much on that memorable night.

But André’s joy in the Allied victory is mixed with bitter disappointment over decisions made at the Yalta Conference. There Roosevelt and Churchill sold out to Stalin, he feels, and allowed the Soviet dictator to subjugate his beloved Poland. “All our hopes of seeing the victory of the Allies as a true liberation of Poland were evaporating,” he writes.

Despite the war and its mortal dangers, André continued to enjoy his many friendships, French cuisine, and movies. A professional interest in films was to mark his whole life and his work as a lawyer was largely oriented toward the people who made movies.

Now that André has departed this world, his children and grandchildren as adults have a document that will help keep his presence vivid. He lived courageously through times of great upheaval, and he saw his native land devastated by forces practiced in horrific brutality.

He had the gift of long life and so was given the advantage of being able to look back on the events of 1939-1945 with the perspective of almost six decades. Among other things, he lived to see a fellow Pole become pope and to enjoy friendship with him. And the eventual liberation of his native country from the stranglehold of Communism cheered his heart.

Longevity does have its advantages, especially if you learn to draw on the events of your past for perspective on the world and your own life. Old age is not just for recollecting one’s past life but it is certainly for that also. Those of us who, in whatever form, put together a record of at least some of our days almost invariably benefit ourselves and usually please other people too.

Richard Griffin

For its emotional impact, no event of this summer has impressed itself on my psyche so strongly as my visit to a longtime friend who has Alzheimer’s disease. Though this visit lasted only some 15 minutes, it has left me much to reflect on.

Jack and I first met when we began high school together, 55 years ago.  In our new small school, we quickly bonded together through common interests in academic achievement and in sports. After graduation from high school, we went to the same college.

From early on, Jack and I were familiar visitors in one another’s homes. I remember his family taking me on my first visit to Canada. My parents and siblings came to know Jack well and recognized his outstanding intellectual talents.

Despite this close association, however, our friendship always had something edgy about it. Perhaps it was a fondness for arguing, shared by both of us. Whatever the reason, we often disagreed, especially as we grew into adulthood and middle age.

On both politics and religion he would take positions at odds with mine, differences not important enough to fracture friendship but sufficient to hinder intimacy. I would have preferred simple friendly exchanges; too often, we would get enmeshed in debates that grew burdensome.

After completing his studies with distinction, Jack went on to the successful career everyone expected him to have as a lawyer with a leading Boston firm. He was blessed in his family life as well, with a vivacious, caring wife and five sons. In time, there were daughters-in-law and grandchildren.

Several years ago, however, family members and friends became aware that Jack was losing his mental sharpness. That led to his retirement from law practice and to a slow but sure decline in his ability to function independently. Eventually his condition required more care than he could receive at home and he recently had to be hospitalized.

As a person who served in the army, Jack qualified for admission to a Veterans Administration hospital where he is receiving first-rate care. On the beautiful Sunday afternoon of my visit, many of the patients were sitting outside the building with family members. Jack’s wife, who visits every other day, had taken him out for an ice cream cone and I had to wait for their return.

When I saw Jack this time, my spontaneous feeling was sadness that it has come to this. As we walked together, his wife holding one of his arms to support him, I the other, I could not but regret the loss of so much competence. Here was one of the smartest persons I have ever known reduced to largely unintelligible utterances. The tragedy of it all!

And yet, his wife assures me, she experiences lighthearted moments with him. Jack still plays the piano and, amazingly enough, remembers some song lyrics. And he seems to appreciate the outings his wife takes him on, such as the ice cream break.

Still I feel deeply sorry for what has happened to Jack and would do anything to reverse his downward trajectory. Would that edgy remarks and uncomfortable debates still marked our exchanges!

Contact with Jack inevitably makes me wonder if I, too, will lose brain function. How can I not fear this dementia that has afflicted some four million Americans, most of them in later life?

And the mystery of it all strikes me anew. Why Jack and not me? Is this blind fate, or does a loving God permit this for some reason unknown to believers? Or, as some theologians and mystics might suggest, does God also suffer in the terrible diseases of his creatures? Can something be going on the mysterious depths of Jack’s soul that eludes the understanding of other people?

Even with my limited insight I can discover some good coming out of this awful experience. Jack’s illness brings out deep spiritual qualities of love and caring from his wife and family. The community of support that surrounds Alzheimer patients testifies to the best in human beings, the way they respond to dire need.

And Jack’s fate, along with that of millions of others, spurs scientists and researchers to work relentlessly to discover how this dread disease incapacitates the human brain. Already they have developed drugs that have proven helpful in mitigating some effects of the disease, though no medication has yet been able to reverse, much less prevent it.

Despite my experience of fear and pity when I am with Jack and others with his disease, visits with them help me appreciate more deeply my own life. Each day, past and present, appears to be more of a gift than ever and provokes my gratitude.

What better can we do than try to accept the present as a gift and to face the future with hope?

Richard Griffin

Summertime requires yet another report on Phileas J. Fogg, our resident cat. As usual, Phil has been up to some of his old tricks although hot weather has slowed his zeal for activity.

Even if you did not feel the heat yourself, you could tell the weather was sultry by simply looking at Phil's summer posture.

On humid days he stretches his long body prone, as if searching for air currents lurking close to the floor. He looks like a rug as he presses himself  as low down as he can. When this bid for relief discovers little or no circulation, he appears close to despair.

He also seeks relief by crawling under the piano bench but that, too, is not cool. And hiding under a bed, another familiar refuge, must prove even worse. He does have access to our fans but seems not to trust them. Wearing a heavy fur coat may be a blessing in the winter months, but right now Phil clearly regards it as a burden.

Whether he blames his human masters for the heat, I cannot tell. But he has had other quarrels with the management of late. His dissatisfaction finds expression in a kind of “erk” that he utters, especially on emerging from his lair in the cellar. “Use words,” we often exhort him but, thus far, we haven’t heard any.

If he did use words, they might express irritation at our summer travels. The sight of suitcases raises his anxiety level visibly. Though we think it a pleasure for him to be fed by friendly young neighbors, for a change, he apparently still holds our absences against us. When we arrive back, a cat not at all gruntled is waiting at the front door.  

Two recent events in Phil’s career deserve special mention. First, he escaped through the front door of our house and spent a few moments outside on the sidewalk. But for the first time, he gave no indication of wanting to go further.

Why he did not climb a tree as he has done in the past, or run down the street, beats me. Would it betray enlightened gerontological principles to suggest that, as he ages, Phil has lost the desire to exercise freedom and explore new fields of dreams?

The second event is even more dramatic. A vet who makes house calls visited Phil at home to administer shots and give him a checkup. That sounds routine and easy. You would never say so had you seen how Phil responded.

He fought as if the vet had been an assassin. This kindly woman attempted numerous times to pet him and reassure him with sweet words but nothing worked to reduce his terror. This was one wild animal, hissing and spitting in the effort to save his life.

Finally, the vet gave up, vowing to come another day. This she did a couple of weeks later, fortunately in my absence. In preparation for this latter visit, Susan had slipped Phil a mickey to reduce his anxiety. It worked to some degree, and the vet was able to carry out her mission without having to fight off the beast.

Meanwhile two of Phil’s habits continue to raise questions for me. Why will he not look at himself in the mirror? He has the opportunity to see there another image of a cat and yet takes absolutely no interest in the prospect. Perhaps he is practicing the virtue of not being narcissistic but I still find it strange.

And why does Phil exhibit no interest whatever in watching television with us? Even when ads for cat food come across our screen, he ignores them. As a television watcher of some addiction, I cannot understand why the tube has not become an object of fascination for our fellow householder.

Meanwhile, I continue to play with Phil, sluggish though many summer days find him. He still enjoys my politically incorrect practice of gently kicking him around. He even allows me to use him as a broom as I sweep him across the kitchen floor.

And he positively grooves on my tickling him under the chin, an activity I engage in somewhat gingerly, given the always present possibility of him seizing the opportunity to bite or, at least, scratch me.

Or, do I perhaps put the matter of play wrongly?

In one of his essays, Montaigne asked: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” I like to think of Phil and me as taking some pleasure in this ambiguity.

As I conclude this essay, Phil has just run by my office door. Perhaps his action gives the lie to today’s forecast of steamy weather. And, though I strongly doubt it, maybe he is on to something the poet Stevie Smith once wrote: “Oh I am a cat that likes to/ Gallop about doing good.”

Richard Griffin

“Today promises to be one of the most significant events for the laity in the history of the Catholic Church.”

In making this statement about their July 20th conterence, leaders of Voice of the Faithful cannot be accused of excessive modesty. After all, the history of which they speak stretches back some 2,000 years and includes at least a few other events of note.

However, these leaders and their associates have certainly begun with a bang that has resounded across the Boston area and, they would say, the country and the world. To sit in the Hynes Auditorium, as I did, among the 4200 Catholics who took part in the conference,  was to feel an excitement at something unprecedented in the life of this faith community.

Being there for a day of impassioned speeches and theological reflection was heady. So were personal contacts with friends long experienced in social action. And so was the enthusiasm expressed in the Mass that concluded the formal program. These features reminded me forcibly of the peace movement of the sixties and seventies, and especially of the atmosphere created by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.

If, as reported, people over age 50 were in the majority at this gathering, many of them could remember the excitement Catholics felt when Vatican II brought about radical changes in the church. I, for one, recall being astonished by the decision of the council to substitute the language of each country for the Latin with which I had grown up. And that was only one such change among many.

Those days were different from the decades that have followed. The open-hearted John XXIII was pope, far-reaching change –  – in both mentality and practice –  –  filled the air, and many church  members felt the future full of promise. For people like me, at least, the first half of the 1960s was the most dynamic time we had ever known as Catholics.

The years since then have brought great disappointments through retrenchments of the hopes held out by Vatican II. Of course, they have also brought events deeply gratifying to most people, especially Pope John Paul’s reaching out to the Jewish community in apology and love. But the spirit of openness that so marked the Council has been replaced, in the Vatican and elsewhere, by a narrowing of outlook.

What is distinctive about the Voice of the Faithful is its character as a movement of  Catholic laity. Beginning only five months ago in the basement of a Wellesley church, it has already grown to some 19,000 members (in large part through the adroit use of the Internet.)  This new organization arose from outrage at the abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic clergy and the cover-ups of these criminal actions by the bishops.

Though outrage at what happened to the young victims fueled its formation, Voice wants to accomplish much more than to express indignation. Among its principal goals, it lists three: to support the abused; to support priests of integrity;  and to shape structural change within the church. This last purpose is obviously highly ambitious and will be sure to bring determined resistance from church leaders.

The radical change that Voice most wants to bring about was laid out at the conference by Jim Muller, the founding president. Dr. Muller is a cardiologist who shared in the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War in 1985. Using graphs, he contrasted two models of church, the first from the top down, and the second from the bottom up.

The top-down structure is what Catholics have been used to since the church’s early centuries but that has to change, says Dr. Muller. Currently, all the power and authority is centralized and that includes the basic three kinds: executive, legislative, and judicial. The pope and the bishops have it all and members of the laity have virtually none.

Other speakers echoed the same call for lay people to take power in the church. Father Tom Doyle, the canon lawyer who first called attention to clergy sexual abuse 18 years ago, portrayed this disaster as “the deadliest symptom of the unbridled addiction to power.” With applause-provoking irony, he spoke of the bishops as themselves suffering from  that addiction, and welcomed the opportunity to “help them free themselves from their chains.”

Jim Post, current president, envisions nothing less than the time when there will be a Voice of the Faithful chapter in every parish in the whole world. “We will not give the bishops a free ride,” he promised. And he claims Voice will hold fast: “We will not negotiate our right to exist, to be heard, to free speech for American Catholics.”

Is Voice of the Faithful going to succeed with its ambitious agenda and bring about a radical change in Church structures? At this point, no one knows what its chances are. A prudent person would not place a heavy bet on this David and Goliath struggle. Members and supporters will no doubt have frequent need to remind themselves who won that epic biblical battle.

Richard Griffin

“It’s almost an out-of-body experience. We’re still floating.” This is what Helen Pfeltz of Bloomington, Indiana says of the feelings she and her husband Cliff still have about a Elderhostel program earlier this month.

She is talking about the six days they spent at Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, some 20 miles from Des Moines. Not only did they take two courses, one focusing on opera, the other on Islam and the Middle East, but they also attended “Candide” and “Turandot,” and heard other music as well.

Helen generalizes about the experience with enthusiasm: “There couldn’t be a better time to grow older and to go to Elderhostel, wherever it may be.” And she quotes her son approvingly: “That’s the way aging ought to be.”

Though I did not take part in this Elderhostel experience myself, I did travel independently to Indianola on the previous weekend and saw all three of the operas staged by the Des Moines Metro Opera Company this summer. “Candide,” “Turandot,” and “Salome” pleased me immensely and made me glad for having accepted an invitation to visit a longtime Des Moines friend, Nick Tormey.  

If anything, Nick is even more enthusiastic than I about his local opera company. He often sees the same production several times, sometimes preparing for the formal performance by watching the dress rehearsal. If it is good to have a passion for something in later life, as wise elders often suggest, then opera, full of passion itself, is a fine candidate.

This year marks the thirtieth since the Des Moines Metro Opera Company’s founding. The founder, Dr. Robert Larson, a music professor at Simpson College, continues to be the driving force behind the success of organization. His skill at bringing together dozens of singers and coordinating complicated stage business in extravaganzas like “Turandot,” all the while conducting the orchestra, excites admiration from just about everyone who sees the performances.

This is Elderhostel’s fourteenth year at Simpson College; that means older learners have been part of the opera scene there for almost one-half the company’s life. Michael Patterson, another member of the music faculty at Simpson, has taught participants for all of this time, much to his satisfaction.

Of the Elderhostelers he says enthusiastically: “They infiltrate this place; they talk to everyone; people like them here.” Professor Patterson admires these elders for their spirit, citing the determination of a woman in a motorized wheelchair who keeps coming back despite less than adequate facilities for her. “They shove their physical difficulties aside,” he says.

Michael Patterson also loves teaching these older learners. Because he starts class at eight o’clock in the morning, he wears bright shirts to help wake people up. “I enjoyed your classes, but hated your bright shirts,” wrote one woman in an evaluation. Undeterred, he says: “I get a kick out of the group dynamics, which change from year to year.”

The educational experience for this professor – – a relative youngster at age 49 – – has offered him much stimulation. Of his adult students, he says: “They may have an observation that I may not have noticed.” They also keep him honest: “I can tell when I become too pedantic in class,” he confesses.

Opera was not the only reason the Elderhostelers I interviewed felt enthusiastic. They also benefited from the second course called “Muslim Middle East Background of Conflict.” A feature of this experience for Mimi Nord, a 75-year-old resident of Park Forest, Illinois was the visit to the Islamic center in Des Moines and the opportunity to learn more about the worship and teachings of the Muslim tradition.

But music remained the chief focus of the week, with extras thrown in such as performances from young apprentice singers who put on scenes from various operas. A Des Moines Metro Opera trademark is the way singers make themselves available in the lobby at the end of each performance. There you can talk with them and snap pictures, posing with them, as I did.

Clearly the participants in Elderhostel had fun. The people I talked to also liked the food, with one mentioning meals featuring prunes and oatmeal. “They waited on us hand and foot,” reports Helen Pfeltz’s husband Cliff.

But they also took the learning experience seriously. The beauty of it all can be found in older people discovering the rewards that always come with taking in new knowledge for its own sake. And the social dimension of learning remains vital. As Mimi Nord told me: “You’re missing something (if you don’t have this experience), especially if you like people.”

Further information about the program at Simpson College is available online at www.elderhostel.org. or at 877 426-8056. The cost this year was $534 for a shared room, $584 for a single; these prices include everything but transportation. Elderhostel does give scholarships based on need, judged on a case-by-case basis for expenses other than transportation to the site of the program.

Richard Griffin