“I wouldn’t take a million dollars to do it again, but I would give a million for the experience.” That is how Walter Sobel of Wilmette, Illinois sums up his service in World War II.

Now 88 years old and still at work, he is happy to talk about the battles in which he was involved as a naval officer aboard the battleship New Mexico in the Pacific. His ship took part in all the invasions of islands in that war theater except for two. The New Mexico served as what he calls “sea-borne artillery,” pounding the shore to soften the defending forces for the landing troops.

Never did his ship take a hit until the Philippines campaign when a Japanese kamakazi warplane dove onto the deck. Both Walter and his captain were wounded in this attack and extensive damage done to the ship.

Asked to sum up his dominant reflections about this wartime experience, Walter lists three:

1. The way that a group of 2000 people took responsibility and made the battleship function so effectively. He still marvels that such a diverse group of people became melded into a formidable fighting machine.
2. “The will of the Lord to let me live.” Another of the New Mexico’s captains was killed in action and Walter knows that could easily have happened to him.
3. “I feel grateful for having had the opportunity.” Already a practicing architect before the war, he did not enter the navy until he was 29. After a few months’ naval training at Princeton and Ohio State, he soon found himself an officer of the deck on a battleship.

Walter expresses surprise at how the world has changed since those days. “When I left the service, I had a great animosity for the Japanese,” he confesses. This feeling was strong enough to make him refuse opportunities to visit Japan in later years.

However, the time came when his wife told him: “Forty years is long enough to hold a grudge,” a sentiment that moved him to visit and develop friendships with former enemies. He now foresees a new world in which relationships will be transformed further.

Another veteran of epic naval encounters in World War II is Geoffrey Brooke, an 81 year old Englishman who is a long-distance friend of Walter Sobel, their friendship based in part on shared memories of shipboard warfare in the Pacific. Reached at his home south of London, Geoffrey spoke freely about his wartime adventures at sea.

Unlike Walter, Geoffrey Brooke was a career officer, serving in the British navy. When only thirteen years old, he went off to the naval college for training and was a midshipman at age nineteen when the war began. So psyched was he for the coming conflict that he says now, “I would have been disappointed if there hadn’t been a war.”

Steeped in this seagoing military tradition, Geoffrey has an encyclopedic knowledge of naval warfare and the lore of the people who made the British navy preeminent.

This fascinating gentleman describes his wartime experiences in two books, both of them published in the 1980s. The first, “Alarm Starboard!,” covers his entire war, with detailed accounts of his service on the battleships Nelson and the Prince of Wales, as well as on aircraft carriers and other ships.

His memory for events is truly remarkable, although he gives credit to his mother for having saved his letters home. His dramatic accounts of battles at sea, for example the encounter in which the Prince of Wales took on the formidable German battleship Bismarck, held this reader entranced.

Asking him the same questions that Walter answered, I received from Geoffrey one general conclusion and two detailed memories of events:

1. “I was incredibly lucky on about six different occasions to have survived at all.” He then lists the times when those about him were killed and he could have been easily killed himself.
2. “The cold on the Russian convoys.” When on a destroyer escorting merchant ships to the Soviet Union, he recalls shivering in the frigid temperatures.
3. “On the Prince of Wales when it was sunk.” Like other desperate crew members, he had to haul himself along a rope attached from the deck of the doomed battleship to a destroyer alongside. He vividly remembers feeling exhausted and tempted to let go and drop into the sea below. But “I looked into the water filled with black oil and I thought that’s not for me.” Shortly after he reached the destroyer’s deck, the destroyer captain had to order the lines cut, thus dooming many other crew members.

The two seasoned veterans I have chosen to write about here in honor of Veterans’ Day carry on a flourishing exchange of letters sharing memories of dramatic days. This correspondence will now, perhaps, take on a new resonance as the two old allies, the United States and Great Britain, take on together the daunting new challenges posed by international terrorism.

Richard Griffin

“We are not looking for warm bodies,” says Robyn Stone talking about the crisis in finding enough skilled and reliable caregivers for older people. To her, retention of current workers is more important than recruiting new ones. “I would put almost all my eggs in the retention basket,” she announces.

Among the professionals who have expert knowledge of care-giving for pay, Robyn Stone stands out. Formerly Assistant Secretary for Aging in the federal department of Health and Human Services, she now does research for a national agency focused on caregiving issues. Dr. Stone spoke in Boston recently at a conference of the Massachusetts Gerontology Association entitled “Worker Shortage: Who will Provide Care Today and Tomorrow?”

Keeping current caregivers is a formidable challenge, given what they are paid. You can compare them to the much discussed security workers at airports who are notorious for their rapid turnover. Both groups are paid about the same: as recently as 1998, the hourly wage for nurse assistants in nursing homes was only seven and a half dollars.

In Massachusetts, about one hundred thousand people are currently dependent on long-term care services. That number is expected to grow much larger ten years from now. Nursing homes are having trouble getting sufficient staff and home care agencies find it difficult to recruit workers. And yet, according to Frank Caro, director of the UMass Boston gerontology center, policy makers do not seem much concerned about the situation.

These officials could profit from what Rosalynn Carter has written about the subject. “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers; those who currently are caregivers; those who will be caregivers; those who will need caregivers.” The fourth and last category is about to get much larger.

The statistics about professional caregivers will dismay anyone concerned that older people receive the attention they need. Thirty-eight percent of home care workers and one-quarter of nursing assistants have less than a high school education. And yet, they are expected to handle stressful situations that make great demands on both their professional and their human resources.

“We can’t underestimate the level of intensity of this work,” says Stone. Somewhat indelicately, she dismisses the widespread idea of this caregiving as merely “butt wiping.”

Instead, this job involves intimate and personal involvement that can be emotionally challenging. Stone compared placing an inexperienced person into a long-term care world to “dropping a Martian into another planet.”

Contrary to the general impression, most professional caregivers are white, typically middle-aged women who are living at or just below the poverty level. Often, they are single mothers who have turned to this activity for lack of better paying opportunities. And, yet, much more often than not, they provide services that are much appreciated by the families of those cared for. A recent study shows how families that communicate honestly with the caregivers and keep at it develop good relationships with them.

Family members of those who receive professional care, ideally should prove the strongest advocates for improving the lot of those providing the services. They know from personal experience what a difference is made by devoted home care workers and others in the field.

Improved training for caregivers is one of the vital needs that demands attention. Robyn Stone believes that the most significant way of doing this is to help these people “to own their work.” That means taking pride in doing a good job and developing the confidence to meet challenges.

In response to Dr. Stone, three panelists added to the case for action. “Our retention rate has always stunk,” Susan Eaton said bluntly. A Harvard Kennedy School researcher, she suggested ways to treat nursing home staff members differently, as by allowing them regularly to take care of the same people and including all of them in meetings for discussion of their work and its problems.

Another respondent, Barbara Frank, agreed that the key issue is “how we care for the caregiver.” She labeled it a “cruel irony” that so many of these staffers in nursing homes do not themselves have health insurance.

Returning to the original question, we do not know who will provide care today and tomorrow and the experts cannot tell us.  However, we do know that most care will be provided by family members, as it has been for generations. A promising development here may come soon when and if the Commonwealth implements a long-standing proposal to pay members of low-income families who take care of their own relatives.

We also can expect the Commonwealth to shift expenditures for care away from nursing homes and other institutional settings to care given at home. But the need for more professional caregivers will certainly grow, as the baby boomer generation becomes old in unprecedented numbers. And the caregivers themselves will still need care, a need that our society does not show signs of meeting anytime soon.

Richard Griffin

Pearl Sabat, now age 84, is happy to call herself a “Forsyth Kid.” She qualifies for that title because from 1925 through 1929, Pearl took the bus twice a week from the Benedict Fenwick School in Roxbury to the Forsyth Clinic for work on her teeth. It was not a matter of cavities alone: “my teeth were marshmallow fluff,” she explains.

I talked with this lively woman at a celebration held at Forsyth for a large number of “kids” who received dental treatment sometime between the 1920s and the 1960s at this famous clinic located in the Fenway section of Boston. Founded in 1910, it was known for several decades as the Forsyth Dental Clinic for Children. In the 1950s it shifted emphasis to research and became affiliated with the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

In 1999, they changed their name to The Forsyth Institute, in keeping with a greatly expanded research agenda. A striking example of this research came just two weeks ago when Forsyth announced development of a new vaccine that could be sprayed into the noses of young children and protect them against cavities for their whole lives.

During the last few months, Forsyth has been searching for the former children who were its patients, in order to enlist their support for a new campaign to improve the dental health of current children. The kids who received dental care decades ago tend to live in Boston’s suburbs now, in circumstances dramatically different from the poverty in which they grew up.

Another kid, Ralph Shuman, went to Boston public schools located in his neighborhood of Mattapan. Not without emotion, this 68 year old, recalls going to Forsyth starting in 1943. “Every time I go by Huntington Avenue, I remember those days.” Some of the details, such as the people in white coats and the needles, stay fixed in his memory. So does walking into the clinic: “Oh, boy, I sure do remember the turnstile.” Like other old timers, he recalls having to push a nickel into the turnstile at the entrance to the clinic.

Their families were mostly poor, struggling because of the Depression , and glad to have their children treated for problems with their teeth. Often the kids themselves did not know they were poor because everyone else in their neighborhood was in the same situation.

Among the kids who received dental care at Forsyth are Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston; Kevin Fitzgerald, state legislator from the Mission Hill area; and John Harrington, president of the Red Sox, and his wife Maureen Harrington.

To receive care a child did not have to be enrolled in a public school; parochial school students were included. Donald Hann was a pupil at St. Patrick’s school in Watertown when he came for treatment in 1929. Coming with one of his parents, he would get off public transportation at the old Boston Opera House and walk to Forsyth. He remembers the fillings and instruction in the use of a tooth brush. His sweetest memory, however, was going over to the Museum of Fine Arts after the dentistry.

Roman Micciche serves now as vice-chair of the Forsyth board of trustees. In the late 1940s he came to Forsyth on a bus from St. Joseph’s School in Medford. One of the nuns would accompany the kids to preserve good order. About being in the dental chair, he claims to be now “too old to remember the pain.”

During the formal program at the recent festivities, the Forsyth CEO, Dr. Dominick DePaola, emphasized that dental care involves much more than filling cavities. Dentists also respond to infections which can turn deadly and they deal with oral cancer as well as birth defects. These threats to good health need intensive care, something that Forsyth pledges to provide to the low-income children of Boston.  

In his judgment, the best people to spread the word about children’s dental health care needs are the Forsyte kids and their families. He wants them to become “ambassadors of oral health,” spreading the word wherever they go.

When I commented on the rich sugary deserts served at the reunion and  asked Dr. DePaola whether a statute of limitations on such food was in force, he playfully answered, “For these kids, it’s not a problem.” And, indeed, no one among them mentioned the candy of their youthful years.

If you look at the current situation of our nation’s children, the statistics might make you think of the most deprived countries on earth. Nearly one-third of American children have little or zero access to oral health care; among the states, Massachusetts ranks a shocking thirty-fifth. Up to 48 percent of the children living in Boston, Cambridge, and Lawrence need restorative dental care. At one Boston high school, students have four times as many cavities as the national average.

If you are one of the half million Forsyth kids but missed the reunion, the institute would still like to hear from you and get you involved in its children’s oral health campaign. The number to call is (617) 456-7733.  

Richard Griffin

“Yesterday the ancient truth came home. We all live in a sukkah. How do we make such a vulnerable house into a place of shalom, of peace and security and harmony and wholeness?”

These words came from Rabbi Arthur Waskow on September 12th of this year, the day after the devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon. They describe precisely the new atmosphere of insecurity, first forced upon us by the raids on New York and Washington, and now reinforced by the warfare over Afghanistan.

Rabbi Waskow also asks the basic question facing all of us, young and old. How is it possible for us to find the basic human qualities that will enable us to live with interior peace and outward harmony with others? Is there any remedy for the tangled feelings that make so many of us lose sleep at night and force us to fret during the day?

I, too, have found inspiration in the sukkahs constructed by Jewish friends and neighbors. As Rabbi Waskow suggests, these fragile structures stand as images of vulnerability. Since they have roofs open to the sky except for slender wooden slats festooned with flowers and fruits, they provide only inadequate shelter. Storms with heavy winds and rain could devastate them.

In this vulnerability, sukkahs are meant to remind believers of sacred history. Specifically, they evoke the memory of the people of Israel who wandered in the wilderness after being rescued by God from their slavery in Egypt. The Jewish community has always looked back to those days when they were vulnerable to the dangers of homelessness and had to look toward their faith and one another for survival.

Other great spiritual traditions have always taught the same message: there can be no foolproof security on earth. At this point in history no one needs to be convinced of this fact. What we do need is light on how to live in such an insecure world. We want to know how to adjust to a new situation marked by threats that cannot be identified in advance.

In some ways we elders have an advantage. Many of us have become used to living with vulnerability. Disabilities have made us aware that it might not take much to do us in. We realize that a simple fall on the floor of our kitchen might be enough to start in motion a chain of events that could result in our becoming physically incapacitated.

Years of coping with physical problems that cannot be solved and chronic illnesses that cannot be healed have accustomed us to coping. Reverses in health that seemed in prospect devastating have become familiar companions. We have learned to make the best of situations that continue to be uncomfortable and threatening.

This experience may have taught us to be more patient with ourselves and more compassionate toward other people. Paradoxically enough, a new wholeness may have emerged from our brokenness and an unexpected peace of soul from our suffering. We may have become veterans in the warfare against personal disintegration, emerging with surprising victories of spirit.

As people familiar with the vulnerability brought on by age, perhaps we older people can cope with the new environment of anxiety in which many Americans suddenly now live. Having wrestled with the demons of inner terror we may have the experience needed to face bravely the outer terrors of the world. At least, we can recognize that we need not have scruples about preserving our inner peace when so many people around us seem to be losing their cool. We can assert our right to stay calm despite the chaos abroad in the land.

That means we can find ourselves equipped to resist letting the latest report upset us every time we hear a broadcast. Allowing the many rumors that circulate at a time like this to throw off our inner equilibrium surrenders our own wisdom. Losing our peace of soul does no one any good and robs us of one of the precious fruits of later life.

All of this does not argue for complacency. The threats to our nation and to the whole world are real. Suddenly we Americans have been introduced to the terrors that have afflicted the other peoples of the world for generations and have become familiar conditions of their lives.

However, we have good reason not to surrender the inner and outer gains of later life. In fact, these qualities, wrung out of long and hard experience, can benefit those people with whom we come into contact. This response may be our best to Rabbi Waskow’s question about how to turn our vulnerable house into a “place of shalom, of peace and security and harmony and wholeness”

Richard Griffin

Whoever chose the site of last week’s conference “Redefining Retirement Communities” was clearly inspired. This two-day meeting, organized and conducted by Chellis Silva Associates Senior Housing, was held in Newton at Lasell College, the location of a new kind of retirement community, perhaps unique in the nation.

This residence opened in July, 2000 under the name Lasell Village, a continuous care retirement community with fourteen buildings and 162 independent living areas. Already the Village houses 205 people whose average age is 79, and has almost one hundred others on its waiting list.

These statistics in themselves will not surprise anyone familiar with the world of retirement housing. What does astonish most people the first time they hear about it is one of its entrance requirements. Those admitted to the Village must sign an agreement obliging them to “create and complete a personalized learning plan of 450 hours a year.” That means committing themselves to courses, lectures, surveys, and collaborative planning.

As Thomas DeWitt, president of Lasell, explained, “The dominant culture is learning, and learning is seen as not just a requirement, but an opportunity.” He admits that the venture was a gamble and he feared for what it might do to the young undergraduates in the college. In fact, the number of students has soared to some 1900 and many of them are engaged with their elders in the Village.

Paula Panchuck, the Village dean, says that the educational program created “almost instant community” among the residents. That’s because the structure of the program encourages people to interact with one another. Residents can choose among 33 courses this semester. Education is “the heart and soul of our community,” according to the dean.

To make sure that what the president and dean told the conference was not simply hype, I asked questions of an old friend and colleague in human services, Hilma Unterberger, formerly of Cambridge, now resident in the Village. Her immediate response was, “I’m absolutely crazy about it.” She loves the location, the classes, and the academic level of her peers. Summing up, she enthuses, “I’m busy as hell.”

In addition to demonstrating, through the Lasell site, new thinking about retirement communities, the conference offered an array of speakers with fresh ideas. Robert Chellis, a distinguished planner and veteran advocate for creative elder housing, skillfully summarized the 2000-year history of senior housing and then posed a series of challenges for current planners. The main challenge, he said, is “to create a retirement community with such a wide range of resources and attractions that, like a favorite camp, or college, people can’t wait to go there.”

The message delivered by Marc Freeman, author and president of an agency that promotes community involvement on the part of older people, was similar. He thinks that the Baby Boomer generation will revolutionize retirement and transform America. Current retired people have been spending half their time watching television, he claimed, thus wasting one of our society’s extraordinary resources  –  their experience. But, he said, we have arrived at a turning point: people now want meaning in their lives and wish to form a legacy to leave behind them.

Another speaker, Dr. Kenneth Minaker of  the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, provided fascinating details of an unprecedented collaboration between Harvard and the Accor Health Group. Accor operates 2465 hotels in 126 countries and receives 150 million travelers a year. The chief idea behind this partnership is health education, delivered in the hotels through printed materials, exercise facilities, healthier restaurant menus, and many other activities. This will make travel for older people and others into an experience of ways to improve their health.

Among the other speakers, Richard Pais, an environmental scientist based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, registered highest on the applause meter. His slides showing the badly designed landscapes of retirement residences were devastating. But he also demonstrated what creative planning can accomplish to improve the environs.

Pais works with a landscaping principle radically different from the conventional approach. He believes in focusing on what residents of a building see when they look from the inside out and ensuring them the pleasure of watching birds, butterflies, and other features of friendly and inviting landscapes.

Despite the exciting ideas that retirement housing evoked in this conference, I have a problem: most professionals address themselves to housing that only the wealthy can afford. To buy a place in a continuing care retirement community, for instance, you need considerable assets and income. As Tom Dewitt says, “The problem of retirement living facilities is that they serve the wealthy and middle class but not the poor.”

To the credit of conference planners, they scheduled presentations by two Boston-based leaders who have developed innovative programs in low-income retirement housing. James Seagle of the Rogerson Communities and Ellen Feingold of Jewish Community Services explained how innovative housing with an impressive array of services can be developed for older people of modest means. It is not easy to do, they will tell you, but much needed.

Richard Griffin

Brilliant, graceful, inspired, and esthetic.  These were some of the words that sprang to mind when, last week, I visited “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” an exhibition now on view at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston.

For fear these words in response to Jackie Kennedy’s clothes seem merely conventional, you should know that normally I hardly notice what people wear. Nor would my credentials as a fashion critic impress anyone.

In fact, my ignorance of clothing, for both women and men, extends far and wide. Without tutoring, I do not even know the difference between an A line and a cockade. It’s excusable: for many years as a young man, I wore the same costume every day, a somber unadorned black cassock.

Fortunately, my sister – a highly qualified tutor – agreed to accompany me to the exhibition. There I found the clothes featured by Mrs. Kennedy during her time in the White House to be objects of beauty. They showed her to be indeed, as the museum material says, “a woman of commanding personal style and one who had an unerring sense of history and her place in it.”

Approaching the exhibition, I felt uncertain whether Jackie’s clothes, now some forty years old, would equal the memories that people of my age have of them. We remember the way that she dazzled America, along with the leaders and citizens of many other nations, with her style and flair.

She embodied what my niece Jennifer Griffin has identified as “Bouviessence.” In her book, co-authored with Kera Bolonik and entitled “Frugal Indulgents,” Jennifer memorably coined the term Bouviessence explaining it thus: “In honor of the queen of grace, this word signifies glamour at all times for all occasions.”

What impressed me most about the array of dresses, gowns, and hats worn by Jackie is their variety. The exhibition displays, on mannequins carefully crafted to look like her, a brilliant array of colors, both striking and subtle. She wore bright yellow at a state dinner, for instance, as well as an ascetic black for her visit to Pope John XXIII.

And the variety of styles struck me also. They range all the way from  wool suits that served for less formal occasions to a green evening gown designed by Oleg Cassini and described in the exhibit as a “liquid columnar dress that also suggested an ancient statuary.” And, as my sister observed, “she looked fabulous in all of them.”

Jackie’s clothes remain in remarkably good condition after the passage of four decades. However, the gown she wore at the Inaugural Ball on January 19, 1961 shows signs of deterioration, enough that this will be the last time it is shown publicly. The colors of the other clothes have held fast and still give viewers a strong sense of the impression they made on those who saw them on Jackie herself.  

Surprisingly, Jackie’s clothing did not excite much negative criticism at the time. Instead of badmouthing her expensive tastes, most Americans apparently felt gratified by their first lady showing such style. By and large they liked having in the White House a woman who knew how to be beautiful, poised, and intelligent all at once.

These words may seem gee-whiz, the product of a publicity agent. However, the exhibition stirred in me, as it will in many others, warm memories of a person who went beyond mere style. She did in fact serve this country extraordinarily well, for instance as an effective good-will ambassador to other nations.

When Jackie visited India in March, 1962, the U.S. ambassador, John Kenneth Galbraith sent an “Eyes Only” message to the President. “Your wife’s speeches model of  brevity and syntax and urge copies be put in briefing kit of all new senators,” wrote the ambassador with typical wit.

The dignity she habitually displayed inclined people everywhere to respect America. In November 1963, at a time of crushing loss, both personal to her and also to the nation and world, that same dignity ensured her a lasting place in our shared history.

By themselves, clothes do not make the woman but my own consciousness has been raised by seeing how Jackie dressed. The ugliness of garb and general appearance of so many among the rest of us now strikes me forcibly. It’s not a matter of  poverty, as a rule, but of imagination.

Most of us could look a lot better than we do and that might help us to feel a good deal better about ourselves, no matter our age. The specter of retirees, both male and female, wearing short shorts that I have seen in Florida churches makes me shudder at how tastelessly many of us dress.

The exhibition runs through February 28, 2002. I take no pleasure in reporting the cost of tickets: 15 dollars for adults, 13 dollars for “seniors” and students, and 8 dollars for children ages 13 – 17. These prices strike me as high but they do include admission to the permanent collection of the museum. You can call (617) 695-2JFK for reservations.

Richard Griffin

Despite receiving a press release filled with compelling language, I failed this month to attend what was billed as “The First Annual LifePart2 Festival.”  Held in San Diego, this happening was a “combination educational event, spiritual retreat, and vacation for those who are reluctant, skeptical, fearful, and intrigued by their own aging process.”

If you are any of the above, perhaps you, too,  missed something you should have been at. For a registration fee of a mere $575 plus a discounted room rate at the Town and Country Resort Hotel and travel costs,  you could have enjoyed four days of feeling groovy about your own aging.

You and I should be chastising ourselves for not making the trip to a festival designed as “a spa for one’s Mind, Body and Soul.” Where else are you going to find a spa for your constituent parts? And imagine gaining what the festival promises – “a complete understanding of the interrelationships of the mind, body, soul, and environment!”

Surely we would have come away from the event with our bods soothed and streamlined for LifePart2. Among the exercises offered were: “Aqua Aerobics (low impact jumping with deep water interval training), Watsu Therapy (deep body work therapy done in water),  .   .   .  Instinctual Movement (guided movement exercises accompanied by live drumming), Salsa Aerobics (a combination of exercise and dance that connects with the spirit), Qigong (a powerful ancient Chinese healing technique), Meditation, Chanting, Yoga, Belly Dancing, Tai Chi, Running, Power Walking and more.”

How can you have reached whatever age you are without having employed at least several of these therapies, preferably each day? I must, however, confess never having done any belly dancing at all, though I have on occasion watched graceful women with considerably more comely bellies than mine doing it. And salsa, to me, means food rather than music.

In case you think the festival people put too much emphasis on the body, you should understand their philosophy. “Our bodies are literally the framework of the soul,”  they announce. Literally? I would have thought the soul, being spiritual,  had no literal framework at all. For  myself , I tend to find a deeper unity: “I stink, therefore I am.”

Going to the festival might have filled definite lacks in your life, as it would have in mine. Do you, for example, consider yourself successful? Or, like me, do you perhaps give yourself only middling marks in this regard? Festival organizers scheduled a keynote speech that might have done you and me a world of good. It was given by “professional success expert” Cheryl Richardson.

I am so benighted as not to have known there was such a profession as success expert.  Instead, I have long believed, perhaps ignorantly, that success cannot be taught. I also hold the outmoded position that success is made up of things other than money, celebrity, and power.

Other speakers gave keynote talks as well. Among them were “some of the most revered thinkers of our time.” When I mention the names of certain among them, you will surely recognize how well they deserve this reputation. Author Marianne Williamson, poet David Whyte, and AARP Executive Director Horace Deets will undoubtedly register in your household among those revered thinkers.

What? You have never heard of them? That’s simply another reason why you should have been in San Diego last week.

For fear you did not recognize the importance of these speakers and others on the schedule, they are also called “some of the most influential, provocative, and innovative thinkers of our era.” Left to myself, I would have thought that these superlatives belong more to the inventors of the artificial heart or the author of the Harry Potter books than to the three people mentioned.

Discussion was to form part of the agenda also. It would “cover the many ways to enjoy a richer, longer, and healthier life.”  Presumably that would touch on how those of us who are barely getting by can find more economic support.

Sometimes we can forget that our growing older lends itself to hype and hucksterism, often pitched with the most sophisticated techniques of Hollywood and  Madison Avenue. Clever people who know how to  make slick presentations can shape aging into an elite enterprise. They can make us feel that aging must be made into a mindful, modish business if we are to get anything out of it.

“Get a Jump on Life,” they urge us in the festival brochure, forgetting that some of us are already on.

When I was a sophomore in college, the university president once came to visit the large house where many of us students lived. I will never forget the message he left with us. “Be skeptical,” he said. At the time,  this message scandalized me in part because of my still youthful illusions. Since then, however, I have come to appreciate the wisdom in this advice. It’s not enough to guide all of life but this wisdom covers more than a little.

Richard Griffin