“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

The emeriti – dozens of retired faculty members of Simmons College – were festively garbed in their academic robes for the occasion. As their names were read, they came from their seats on the stage of Jordan Hall, one by one to be greeted by the audience’s applause and to receive a large commemorative medal.

With their names came a citation tailored especially for each. With grace and wit, a group of current faculty and an alumna had crafted a statement for each emeritus and emerita, describing their special gifts. The large audience – students, faculty, alums, family, and friends – responded with enthusiastic ovations.

Incidentally, this gala event was held at the distinguished concert venue Jordan Hall for a reason. It was there that Simmons held its very first commencement back in 1906.

I found this convocation in honor of Simmons College’s 100th aniversary a moving tableau of graceful aging. Even among these retired women and men there was a surprisingly wide range of years. Some traveled the short distance to center stage with uncertain agility, but with obvious spirit.

Among those honored, one stood out in particular. Ruth Leonard, associate professor of library science, brought down the house when the year of her arrival as a freshman was announced.

After college graduation and later graduate studies, she served as a faculty member for 34 yearsa. But that was just the start of her service to Simmons. Even now, at age 96, she continues giving time and talent to the college.

Her citation reads as follows: “Alumna, library science professor, devoted volunteer and a vital part of the Simmons scene for decades, Ruth Leonard came here as a freshman 75 years ago this fall! To this day, she continues to volunteer for the College, and is currently at Simmons one day a week archiving Alumnae Association minutes.”

Small in physical stature, this dynamic nonagenarian thanked the college “for giving me this opportunity to be of service.” Back in 1994, the college had awarded her an honorary degree in recognition of her work and placed her in the college’s hall of fame, but the Simmons community never tires of honoring her.

When I talked with her later, Professor Leonard was sitting with Eleanor Gustafson, a retired librarian who expresses high regard for her former teacher. Asked how she herself feels about her long career, the most Ruth Leonard will claim is: “All I can say is I enjoyed teaching.”

I also asked her attitude about growing old. “I don’t think about it,” she replied. However, she does admit: “I’ve slowed up. I’m unsteady on my feet.”

Not that any of this stops her. Using the MBTA’s Ride program, she now commutes from Goddard House in Brookline to Simmons for her volunteer chores.

Though I have no official connection with Simmons College, another reason makes me feel  tied to the life of the place. First, my beloved aunt, Mary Barry, was a student there in 1905 and 1906. A future public schoolteacher, she was then enrolled in the School of  Secretarial Studies.

Since the very first students did not arrive until 1902, my aunt can be numbered among the pioneers. She was the kind of student envisioned by the founder, John Simmons, who left money to start a college for women planning to enter the world of work, a novel idea at the time.

Secondly, my wife has been a Simmons faculty member since 1964. Now a veteran with almost unrivaled seniority, she continues to teach with relish, and to serve the college in other ways as well.

At the convocation, what held my attention most was the spectacle of generation succeeding generation. I reflected on the way each group of faculty comes along, people who build upon the work of those who have served and later stepped aside.

To me, recognizing the women and men who contributed their working years to the teaching enterprise is one of the most meaningful action an educational institution can take. This kind of event gives former teachers a sense that their service did make a difference, that they did in fact touch the lives of others.

It is true that former students will sometimes pay tribute to former teachers. But, often, retired teachers must believe in themselves without this kind of external support. That’s why the Jordan Hall ceremony was so heartwarming – it showed that, though the people who once taught at Simmons no longer frequent the classrooms, they are not forgotten and still count.

Perhaps the students who attended the convocation profited from seeing, in the honors accorded the retired professors, a model of how people who have served an institution well should be treated. They might have realized how it’s good for the community to recognize later life as a time appropriate for honoring dignity, merit, and service.

Richard Griffin