Summertime finds Phileas J. Fogg, our veteran indoor cat, unusually  lethargic. The heat lies heavy on a creature already wearing a fur coat. Phil looks as if he needs a cold shower but the closest remedy he finds comes from stretching flat out on the floor in hopes of finding subtle air currents close to the ground.

If only we could train this longtime familiar to seek other relief, perhaps in the form of the daily swim that is my own response to heat. However, idealist that I am, even I have given up hope of training Phil to do much of anything. Having failed to teach him to speak French, among other things, I now have accepted my severe limitations as a cat trainer.

For this pessimistic surrender, I have excellent authority to back me up. The New York Times for July 20th carried a fascinating obituary of Gunther Gebel-Williams, the most celebrated animal trainer in the world, who died after a long career with the Ringling Brothers circus.

The obit writer, after reviewing Gebel-Williams’s exploits with lions, tigers, leopards and other wild animals, mentioned a limitation that even this master of the ring labored under:

“After more than five decades in training and performing with all sorts of animals, Mr. Gebel-Williams concluded that there was just one animal that might be close to impossible to train: the house cat.

‘They do as they please,’ he said.”

How true this statement is, the millions of Americans who live with domestic cats have abundant reasons to know. It is indeed sobering to think that the famous trainer could cope with the challenges of the great beasts but was defeated by the likes of Phileas J. Fogg.

Yes, Phil does as he pleases. He stubbornly refuses to take direction from his housemates even when we assure him of our good will. Like an immature human being, he would rather do it his way than to be right.

But this is not to say that Phil’s habits are entirely fixed. Of late, I have noticed him doing something that he would never have done in his youth. He now will rub up against the legs of family members as if in token of affection. It’s still hard to think of him feeling any affection for us; we are always prepared for him to bite or scratch us instead.

However, there can be no other explanation of this new rubbing against, except at those times when Phil’s food bowl registers empty. Otherwise, this physical contact must be a sign that he cares something about us. Perhaps the approach of old age has taught him that we humans are more than mere providers. Phil is recognizing that we too need love and affection and he has determined to give them to us.

For fear this seem an unjustified leap of faith, what other interpretation can one reasonably attach to the leg rubbing?

Does it give Phil body heat? But in summertime, he surely does not want to be any hotter than he is. Does it reassure Phil that he exists? But he has always shown a strength of character that precludes existential doubts. Granted, we sometimes think that Phil would profit from a few visits to a cat shrink, but not because he harbors doubts about who he is.

Phil has occasionally allowed himself to back off from a stand based on principle. That has happened when he has agreed to eat food that has been in his bowl for a while rather than continue to demand that we put out stuff fresh from the canister.

Backing down like this, however, may indicate that, with age, Phil has found a new flexibility. When younger, he might have refused compromise but now he has attained a willingness to reach an accommodation with us. Seeing him yield encourages me to think that his last years will make him even more companionable.

Another instance of Phil’s new flexibility comes to light when we allow him to make a cameo appearance before guests. When friends visit, our practice has been to bring him up from his cellar lair and carry him in to greet the visitors.

On these occasions he is almost always on his best behavior, especially when children are in the house. Despite his relative seniority, Phil recognizes a certain kinship with the kids and he determines not to take advantage of their vulnerability. So he allows them to stroke him with impunity. They need not fear that he will spring to the attack as he might with older humans.

So the record is mixed. Gunther Gebel-Williams was certainly right about the untrainability of household cats. But, had he known our Phil, he would have recognized in this beast a creature with more flexibility than his sweeping statement would seem to allow.

Richard Griffin

Ascribe it to my age, if you will, but I am becoming a fancier of obituaries. The newspaper pages that carry them do not rival my addiction to those pages devoted to sports, not yet at least. But I confess loving to read accounts of people’s lives seen from the vantage point of their deaths.

This pleasure, of course, increases when the obituary is written by a master of the genre. The writer who can combine incisive appreciation of the person’s distinctive traits with the well-turned phrase delights me. Anyone who can bring out the departed’s uniqueness, appreciate the person’s gifts while not omitting relevant faults, and treat readers to fine prose makes me happy.

You may be relieved to hear, however, that my obit love does not approach my maternal grandmother’s. As a young boy visiting her house in Peabody, MA, I would be sent downstairs to pick up her Salem Evening News. The first question she would ask me when I returned was “Who’s dead?” Then she would open to her favorite page and read about local friends and acquaintances who had passed on.

In recent weeks an obituary that I discovered in the Tablet, which calls itself an international Catholic weekly and comes out of London, provided me with warm delight. It dealt with the life of Herbert McCabe, a priest who belonged to the Dominican Order, and served as theologian, writer, and editor. Having had some association with him in the1960s added to my relish while reading his obit.

My bias is that the English write better obits than we, their former colonists, do. Or, if not, they have better material to work with. That’s because of the proud tradition of eccentricity that the Brits have maintained for so long a time. Surely they produce more characters per capita than we Americans can ever hope to do. And members of the clergy may number more of them than those of other professions.

Herbert McCabe belonged to that great tradition, as his obituary brings out. Written by Cambridge University historian Eamon Duffy, this obit in fact calls McCabe one of the British Catholic Church’s “most gargantuan characters” and then goes on to show why.

Early on, Duffy gives the flavor of the man: “To the end of his life his personal appearance with his wild shock of hair and his ancient and rarely washed sweaters, remained redolent, in more senses than one, of the student chaplaincies of the Sixties.”

Not glossing over McCabe’s faults, the obituarist says: “He was never an easy man to live with, relentlessly tenacious in argument and, especially as the evening waned and the level in the bottle dropped, sometimes cruelly scathing to those he judged guilty of woolly thought or moral evasion.”

You would not expect a man like this to rely on conventional transportation and he did not. “McCabe roared into his friends’ lives on a beaten-up motor-bike, booted and duffel-coated and ready to talk till the pubs closed, and preferably later if anyone had a bottle in their bag.”

For fear these quotes make McCabe seem merely an eccentric or even a drunk, the writer recognizes in him marvelous abilities and fierce loyalty to friends. Yet he was also what Duffy calls “essentially lonely” and often unsure of himself.  

Toward the end, the writer of this obit speaks of a fall that left McCabe enfeebled. Of his response, Duffy says “he endured this affliction with an endearing gentleness which amazed those who had known only the theological gladiator of his prime.”

Summing up with a broad sweep, Duffy finally says of his subject: “He was a rare and lovely man. God rest his mighty soul.”

This obit strikes me as a work of art. In a few hundred words the writer has given us another human being, full of achievement yet plagued by problems and personal insecurity. The writer shows rich appreciation of his colleague but also shows us that he was merely human.

This kind of obit serves as a mini-biography until someone decides to write a full one. Like skilled biographers, Eamon Duffy has the virtue of refusing to oversimplify the life of a man perhaps even more complicated than the rest of us. Without being judgmental, he brings out his subject’s contradictions, inconsistencies that mark every human life.

Growing older has given me more sympathy toward other people both living and dead. For the dead, if they have the good fortune to receive a skilled obit, it becomes easier perhaps to appreciate a person against the backdrop of their whole life course. “Nothing became him in life like the leaving of it,” words spoken about the Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, sometimes apply to others. The ending of a life in itself can commend the person to us most, as it did for me with my friend, Herbert McCabe.

Richard Griffin

Rarely does a book make me laugh out loud. But “Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” did. It also seduced me into that often unwelcome practice of reading parts at other people.

The author, David Brooks, is one of the cleverest journalists in captivity. He brings to his writing a sharp eye for social detail and an ability to generalize provocatively.

Continue reading →

Faith Witte, the mother of an eleven-month-old baby girl, tells what she gets from contact with members of the oldest generation. “I have drawn encouragement from them for looking ahead,” she says. “They lived through it and they’re enjoying their later years.”

Of one older woman in particular, Jennie Glass, who is almost ninety-two, she says, “I thought she was around seventy-five. I really hope I can be like her. It gives me encouragement for getting older.”

These remarks sound like a gerontologist’s dream, eloquent testimony to the advantages of personal contact between generations. People who are decades younger can indeed find inspiration from older people.  And, of course, older people can in turn draw stimulus from those much younger than they.

On the afternoon of my conversation with her, Faith Witte was one of five mothers sitting on the rug and playing with their children in a living room on the top floor  of Cabot Park Village, an assisted living community located in Newtonville. This gathering place is called the Nurturing Room and is the site of an unusual, perhaps unique, set of social interactions.

The generations come together as participants in the “Nurturing Rooms for Mothers and Infants” program sponsored by Jewish Family & Children’s Service. The group at Cabot Park Village, comes together two afternoons each week. The space is filled with the noise of small children chattering, gurgling, and sometimes screaming, along with adults talking animatedly with one another. Some half dozen residents of the retirement community are usually there, among them Jennie Glass, the lead volunteer.

The program at this site is one of  only two groups thus far; the other is located in Randolph. A third is scheduled to begin in October at the Youville House, an assisted living residence in Cambridge. To credit the remarks of the people taking part in the Cabot Park setting, the nurturing room seems to be having a remarkable effect.

With well-organized succinctness, Faith Witte summarizes the impact the nurturing room has had on her: 1) her daughter gets to associate with other kids of different ages;  2) it gives the mothers a chance to relax; and 3) her grandparents do not live nearby so it makes association with older people possible.

An entirely unexpected effect on at least one older person was dramatized for me when I interviewed a woman whose name I have agreed not to publish. When I asked her what the room meant to her, she said “It’s delightful because the children are so sweet.” She went on to tell me about having had two children herself a long time ago when , she said, things were very different. Though this woman did not have much else to say, she often laughed sympathetically as she observed the children playing.

Then, I moved over to talk with a gentleman who turned out to be the woman’s husband. When he heard that his wife had talked with me about being there, he was astounded. He could not believe that I did not suspect anything about her condition. “She has Alzheimer’s,” he revealed. “I don’t know how she made out with you.”

The husband also described the good effect that coming to the nurturing room has on his wife: “When she comes here, her face lights up like she’s a new person.” Confirming the value of her visits, he adds: “It’s only because of her that I’m here.”

This exchange was instructive for me. It makes me wonder if settings like the nurturing room might be the best kind of environment for some people with dementia. Maybe contact with young children enables them to draw upon mental and emotional powers that otherwise remain inaccessible. Of course, the woman in question seems to be in the earlier stages of the disease.

Another mother, Sarah Bengelsdorf, pronounces her own grandmother “the wisest woman I know.” But the grandmother lives in Atlanta so they don’t get to see one another very often. That’s why Sarah values contact with the residents of Cabot Park.

“It’s nice to see the people from that generation,” she tells me. “They really enjoy the children and vice-versa.” With disarming humility, she says of them, “They know a lot more than I do about families and children.”

A woman whose apartment is the closest to the nurturing room, Dorothy Bronstein, enthuses about the chance to take part in the activities. “What could be better than to see the kids?” she exclaims. “It brings back wonderful memories.”

The person who invited me to visit is Diane Nahabedian, Director of Marketing Communications for JF&CS. A reader of this column, she feels pride that her agency has taken the lead in establishing the Nurturing Room.

The agency has kept up with the times in recognizing the importance of providing support for early nurturing. And yet, she says, this program is traditional and has some continuity with other services offered by her agency, founded in 1864. “It’s a program that is catching on,” she says as she looks ahead.

Richard Griffin

As a child, I used to feel disappointed whenever we traveled from Boston toward western Massachusetts and passed by the signs pointing toward New York City. Almost always my father continued driving straight to Holyoke, the city where he had grown up and where some of his family members still lived. How much more exciting it would be to visit New York, I always thought, instead of the dull place where my relatives lived.

This memory floats back when, as an adult, I do take the New York City exit and visit that metropolis every once in a while. Seeing the skyline as I approach Manhattan still evokes in me a sense of wonder that so much dynamism can be packed into one small island.

My attitude toward this place is like that of Samuel Johnson toward the London of his day. “When a man is tired of London,” he told his industrious biographer Boswell in 1777, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” And when you are celebrating a significant anniversary as my wife and I were, where better than New York?

I love the variety of people one sees on the streets of Manhattan. Millions of them come at you displaying all the colors of the human family and speaking many of the languages in use throughout the world. And at all hours of day and night; pulsating human life never retires from the streets. Yes, I realize that those streets are mean for many: you see wrecks of humanity scraping out mere existence from an environment not friendly to them.

But you also see surprising pockets of mercy. While traveling down Second Avenue on a municipal bus, I was intrigued to see the driver stop the vehicle, get up, and walk toward the back. There he lowered a platform and then raised it, accommodating a man with disabilities sitting in a motorized chair. Public transportation halted during rush hour, delaying dozens of people in their journeys home, in order to provide a place for a person who could not otherwise get where he wanted to go. The Americans with Disabilities Act had proven itself once again.

Shamelessly, I love to listen as New Yorkers converse. Sitting cheek by jowl with two ladies in a restaurant, I could not help but take mental notes of their conversation for my folder on practical gerontology.

“Most women our age have a lot of problems,” one of the ladies told her companion. As a possible remedy, she spoke approvingly of some anti-wrinkle stuff costing 45 dollars a jar. “She’s had her face done,” she reported about a mutual acquaintance. Of another she said, “When she drinks the night before, she looks older.”

The same speaker’s chief concern, however, was not aging, but where to get her hats blocked. No one seemed to be offering this service anymore but she thought a cobbler’s shop might be worth trying. She also wondered about taking a risk management seminar offered by an investment firm but was hesitating because, to quote unladylike language, “they’re all bullshitters.”

On another occasion I asked a cop the best way to get from our hotel to Lincoln Center. He replied in perfect “poy and koughee” New Yorkese, suggesting a taxi. I do not yet need subtitles to understand the language but I do consider it a subspecies of English.

The view of the East River from our 38th floor room was spectacular and ever changing. We looked over the United Nations buildings with their flags representing the peoples of the world. To the side, a ninety-story tower purporting to be the tallest residential building in the world, testified to the vaulting ambition of its developer, Donald Trump. Gazing at this monument to pretension, I saw manifest the daunting power of this island’s movers and shakers.

A play by Edward Albee stirred in me once more the power of dramatic art. “The Play About the Baby” has something of a gerontological theme that held me fixed, as did the marvelous performances of two veteran actors, Marian Seldes and Brian Murray.

The two younger actors appeared naked, fleetingly alas, in a display that I associate with New York sophistication. These two parents of new baby receive from their elders, what a New Yorker capsule review calls “a harsh taste of what life has in store .  .  . the ravages of adulthood.”

This column does not intend to serve as a mini travelogue nor an ad for tourism. It’s just that New York ties together some themes that have run throughout my long life and renews my appreciation for vibrant living. The cliches about the city are true: it’s altogether too crowded and many people living there are brash. But, as Dr. Johnson suggested so memorably of London, you’ve got to be tired of living not to love New York.

Richard Griffin

The number of book groups across America exceeds 250,000. At least, that is the heady figure arrived at by educated guess. I am glad to belong to one such group, as I have for more than thirty years.

I also feel happy that our members are both male and female. That makes ours different: an estimated 80 percent of this country’s book groups are made up solely of women.

Our most recent selection was a novel by the South African writer J.M. Coetzee. Titled simply “Disgrace,” this work focuses on a professor deep into middle age whose sexual liaison with one of his students plunges him into crisis. The novel also introduces readers to the turmoil of post-apartheid South African society, with its violence and shifting values.

We also enjoy reading nonfiction works. One previous selection, for example, was James Carroll’s “Constantine’s Sword.” The friendship that some of us share with this author did not prevent us from bringing some objectivity to our appraisal. Most of us appreciated Carroll’s painful historical expose of the injustices visited upon Jewish people by the Christian Church, while some members felt critical of him for mixing autobiographical episodes into the history.

For the summer, our custom has been to read a blockbuster, a long book, usually a classic novel, that we can sink our teeth into. Our choice this year came down to either “Pride and Prejudice” or Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” Surprisingly, given the abiding popularity of Jane Austen in our group, the latter won the majority vote.

Not everyone finishes all the reading every month; in fact, some have been known not to have read the book at all. However, we encourage members to come to the meetings and, without shame, honor our dubious tradition of talking articulately about unread writing.

My reason for devoting a column to our reading group is not merely the joy found in good books. I am also convinced that, of all the devices that enhance the experience of getting old, social networks rank among the most important. Studies reinforce this conviction by showing that elders tend to flourish when they interact with friends, especially friends all along the age spectrum.

This conviction finds support in the words of George Vaillant, the 66-year old psychiatrist who directs what the Harvard University Gazette calls “the world’s longest continuous study of physical and mental health.”

The June 7th issue quotes his advice: “Life ain’t easy. Terrible things happen to everyone. You have to keep your sense of humor, give something of yourself to others, make friends who are younger than you, learn new things, and have fun.”

Most of this advice has been repeated so often as to have become almost shopworn. But one phrase leaps out by reason of its freshness: “Make friends who are younger than you.” This imperative, for those of us who can put it into practice, has the potential for transforming our experience of later life.

To me, at least, having friends of all ages offers precious support. People with whom you can share insights and exchange views of the world become a rich resource for living in later life. If you are comfortable enough with these friends to make mistakes and try out ideas that may not fly, so much the better.

It is of considerable benefit to me that some members of our reading group are more than thirty years younger than I. They bring a different perspective to the discussion and often offer insights that I am incapable of. That they take my views seriously and seem to appreciate my longer life history also brings me pleasure.

It gives our group cohesion that members share the same spiritual tradition. This common heritage provides a base of shared understandings that give us a head start in discussion. But it does not act as a straitjacket; rather it frees us to talk in terms that everyone can grasp, though they may disagree with points being made.

With the passage of time, our group will undoubtedly change. I hope, however, that we do not ever split over ideology the way an ancestor of this group did. That liberal/conservative falling-out sliced the membership into two, with the Charles River becoming the water of separation. The Newton/Boston members chose to stay on their side of the stream, while Cambridge and other communities remained on theirs.

In her charming book of essays “Ex Libris,” Anne Fadiman regales readers with this brief anecdote: for her forty-second birthday, her husband stealthily took her on a half-hour train ride from New York City to a weather-beaten little shop in the suburbs where he bought her nineteen pounds of used books. She felt overcome with delight at the surprise gift.

Our book group, in its most recent incarnation, probably equals this poundage in a single year. And while doing so we continue to enjoy one another’s company.

Richard Griffin

The two following paragraphs come from one of the many journals I have kept in the course of what is becoming a long lifetime. Written in July,1971, this passage describes my experience driving across the country for the first time and by myself. In addition to the external adventures of this journey, interior events crucial to my future were occurring as well. The fateful questions raised then were to find a decisive answer five years later when I left the ministry.

“Week-long search for America and myself. The idyllic moments: driving
in the evening through a plain bordered by mountains, all of the landscape
lit by a brilliant sun out of clear sky. The rhythm of the trip: sometimes
sheer speed, with the feeling of piloting a light plane; other times,
laborious plowing through roads under repair.

“The issue is clearer for me now, though not the solution. Is celibacy a culturally determined thing foisted upon me for which I have no calling? Or is it simply the background to a call which must be accepted bravely and lived austerely in faith? This is the central and agonizing question which this trip with its distance has made clearer.”

As an enthusiastic journal keeper, I hardly stand alone. Journal writing is wildly popular in America. Each year some ten million blank journals are sold in stationery stores; another four million keep journals on computers, it is estimated.

These facts and much other information I have learned from a fine new book written by Alexandra Johnson, whose knowledge of journal keeping is surely unsurpassed. Entitled “Leaving A Trace,” this inspirational yet practical volume shows how journal or diary writing can enrich the life of just about everybody. I found fascinating her excerpts from the journals of people both famous and ordinary and her commentary on them.

In her introduction, Johnson, a veteran teacher of writing and an author resident in Medford, shares her own fascination with the diary of Elizabeth Howe, a woman who, in the late nineteenth century, lived in the house where she herself now lives.

As Johnson tells it, “The pages chronicle a twenty-one-year-old music teacher secretly thrilled by solitude, love letters, fresh peaches wrapped in tissue, ice storms filigreeing the windows at night with crystal spiderwebs.”

More important, Johnson discovered in Howe's entries a woman trying “to find a narrative shape for her life, a way to tell her story, if only to herself.” That theme recurs often in “Leaving a Trace” – – the way keeping a journal or diary leads to the understanding of one's life.

Journal writers, even those who content themselves with modest efforts, almost invariably learn more about themselves than they thought possible.

The author Gail Godwin puts if this way: 'During the act of writing, I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.” The British writer Katherine Mansfield knowingly understated the case, “It's very strange, but the mere act of writing anything is a help.”

As Alexandra Johnson's title suggests, she finds in most journal writers the desire to leave behind some relic of their having lived. Though by no means always conscious, this desire for a certain kind of immortality drives them to bequeath traces of themselves.

Journals and diaries begun or continued in later life have special value. I strongly recommend this kind of writing to people of any age; to those who have reached mature years, I judge it possibly worth even more . As a woman named Julia Houy says, “I am eighty-one. It helps me to age well.”

But many people feel intimidated about beginning. A frequent question that Alexandra Johnson hears is: “Who could possibly care about my life?” The first answer, of course, is “You.” The second is possibly “family members, friends, and a whole lot of other people.”

Though it often seems forbidding to begin, it pays off quickly. Since, as Alexandra Johnson says, “at their core, journals are about sharpening consciousness,” they help us get more value from our lives.

Part of my motivation in keeping journals is to gift family members and friends with a better knowledge of who I am. After my great leave taking at the end of life, I want my daughter( and, possibly, her descendants) to discover some day, if she wants to, the experiences that shaped my personality.

That day of her taking a deeper interest in my life will come, I feel sure. For many years I have regretted not having such a document from my own father. Though not everyone has interest in developing a journal further, Johnson emphasizes how it is a fine take-off point for a memoir.

For professional writers keeping some form of journal or diary is probably a must. Alexandra Johnson's experience is instructive: “In dry seasons, all I have to do is open an old journal.”

If you want to make your later life more rewarding, here's a sure-fire way to make it happen – – keep a journal.

Richard Griffin