Augustin Roques, now 69, remembers vividly the day in 1944 when American soldiers marched by his part of Paris. As they came by, they threw packages of gum to the people, along with cigarettes. He recalls the sweet smell of the Camels, the brand of smokes favored by the troops.

I met Augustin, his wife Raymonde, and their dog Rocky at the approaches to the Arenes de Lutece, an ancient Roman ruin located behind my hotel in the 5th arrondisement of Paris. Raymonde was sitting in a wheelchair because of the lower body paralysis she has suffered over the past five years. Each day brings her pain, a difficult burden for which she looks to God for relief.

For his part, Augustin seems happy as he provides care for his wife and takes her on outings in the vicinity of their home. “Moi, je suis tranquille,” he tells me, attesting to his own inner peace.

In search of spiritual help, this couple has been to Lourdes, there to pray for a restoration of Raymonde’s health. In inadequate French, I suggested spiritual healing as a benefit more likely to come from such a pilgrimage, a distinction with which they seemed to agree.

Retired now, Augustin used to work as a locksmith and was a skilled maker of keys. Using my notebook, he drew for me pictures of some locks and keys that were his stock in trade. As a professional, he branded my house key as worthless, not worthy of his manufacture.

This genial Frenchman obviously took pleasure in out conversation, as did I. Only his wife’s appointment with a visiting nurse brought our exchange to an end. However, I promised to send him this column and thus continue the dialogue at long range.

Monsieur and Madame Roques were only two of the many age peers I took note of during a recent two-week vacation in France. Among them was a 76-year-old gentleman with whom I sat on a park bench next to St. Julien le Pauvre, the city’s oldest church. Conversation with him proved more difficult because he remained fixated on the dangers posed by local pickpockets.

“Attention!” (Watch out) he warned me several times, concerned that the roving robbers would find this tourist easy pickings. “The old do not have the strength to defend themselves,” he observed as he fingered his cane, a likely weapon of self defense for him.

After a while this man broke off conversation, got up from our bench, and walked out the gate. He left me with the impression that, just maybe, he felt this strange guy, so interested in conversation and so nosy, might himself be a suspicious person up to no good.

Near the river Seine, I stopped at a quirky English-language landmark. “Shakespeare and Company” is a famous bookstore, eccentric but breathing the aura of literature lovers. There I talked with the proprietor, 90-year-old George Whitman, who happily presides over the place.

Though he expects soon to relinquish some of his duties to his daughter, George takes as a model Frances Steloff, a friend who worked in a similar trade in New York City. “She was the owner of the Gotham Book Mark,” he told me, “and, when she was 100 years old, she was still helping out.”

At Mont-Saint-Michel in Brittany, I ran into other age peers, these not French, but American tourists full of spirit. Caroline Coopersmith from Minneapolis, a game 80, had just climbed to the top of the great hill with only two stops for resting. She reported everything smooth on her trip except, she said with a laugh, at the airport “I set off all the bells; I have two hip replacements.”

Al Berman, a 75-year-old gentleman from the Philadelphia area, and I felt immediate rapport. He had just read the novel “Empire Falls” with much relish, as had I. In semi-retirement from the toy business, Al takes history courses at Penn and also takes a lively interest in his grandchildren and baseball.

Later, I observed a couple of parish priests of advanced years. One of them, the celebrant at Sunday Mass in the magnificent 13th century Gothic cathedral in Rheims sang nobly in a voice weakened by age. But his homily showed spirit and vision as he spoke about the mystical bonds united by God’s love.

In that same lively city of Rheims, an old lady entering the church of St. Jacques caught my eye. As she tried to navigate the raised threshold, she received a helping arm from a young man who formed a striking contrast with her. He sported a Mohawk haircut, had rings hanging from his ears, and wore black leather. The lady took his arm and they happily disappeared together within the church.

All in all, the “third age” in France appears to be giving a good account of itself. Like their juniors, elders there seem to take delight in their language, their food, their ancient monuments, their Euros, and, above all, the peace that now reigns among former enemies in the new Europe.

Richard Griffin

“Joe Kennedy was one of the ablest undergraduates Harvard ever had.” So says Ken Galbraith of the oldest of the Kennedy brothers who was killed in World War II.

Galbraith, now in his 94th year, was a Harvard tutor when he first got acquainted with Joe and his brother Jack. Of the latter, he observes: “He was intelligent, attractive, and not given to an excessive amount of work.”

These are among the memories shared by this celebrated economist with  an enthusiastic crowd of students and others gathered at the Kennedy School of Government. Quite deaf now and physically suffering from the effects of various health crises, the almost 6 foot 8 inches tall Galbraith still talks in a booming voice as he recalls personalities and events from a remarkably varied career in academic and public life.

Reacting to an introduction bordering on the fulsome, this giant of a man acknowledges his pleasure with typical wit: “I have to recover from deep delight in the account of my life.” At this stage of his career, he can enjoy without shame hearing himself praised to the rafters.

About the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor, he says, “They looked at all the states as an extension of Hyde Park.” But he distinguishes between the two: Franklin’s concern was human, not ideological; Eleanor was a liberal.”

The latter became one of Ken Galbraith’s closest and best-loved friends over a lifetime of involvement in Democratic politics. In 1960, he helped bring her around to support Jack Kennedy for the presidency, support she had stubbornly withheld up till then.

During his presidency, Kennedy sent Galbraith to India as United States ambassador. While in that often sensitive position, the ambassador felt frustrated in communicating back to Washington through the State Department.

Ultimately, he took to sending messages directly to the president, bypassing normal channels. Often delightfully witty, these now published messages violated normal protocol. In one of them, he told JFK that “trying to communicate through the State Department is like having sexual intercourse through the blanket.”

With a mischievous grin, the speaker, however, acknowledges that the original language in this message may have featured “somewhat rougher” terms.  

Asked to comment on Lyndon Johnson, Galbraith says, “He was in some ways the most misunderstood man we ever had in the White House.” But he goes on to call LBJ “a wonderful companion.” Until the Vietnam War developed, the two were good friends, as a visit by Galbraith to the president’s Texas ranch suggests.

On that occasion LBJ took his visitor out on a shoot. Riding in separate jeeps, the president and Galbraith took aim at the birds that were their targets. The visitor had never previously handled a gun and managed only to fire into the air. “The doves in Texas were never so safe,” he says recalling the adventure.

The break between the two over the Vietnam War was personally painful to Galbraith. Among other things, he especially regretted that “Vietnam covered up LBJ’s commitment to the poor and the working community.”

Galbraith acknowledges not having known personally either Nixon or Reagan. In recent years, however, he discovered that Richard Nixon had been on his staff when he headed the Office of Price Administration in FDR’s presidency.

About Ronald and Nancy Reagan, this confirmed Democrat comments on their one great virtue: “They enjoyed the job much more than they were concerned with policy.” With wry understatement, he adds that he would prefer Ronald Reagan “to the present situation.”

When discussion turned briefly to economic issues, Galbraith recalled the powerful impact exerted on America by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. The Harvard professor admits that after his first book had gone to press in 1937, he read Keynes and realized that the book was wrong. Under the force of Keynes, Galbraith changed his mind and adopted views that went against those prevailing among his colleagues.

At that time, he says with irony, the economists at Harvard fell into two main groups: the first were professors “living in the 19th century and very keen to get back to the 18th.” The second was made up of believers in capital monopolies.

Besides these two groups, there were only a few who espoused positions on the left. Among them, of course, Galbraith would loom large, to the discomfort of many of his colleagues.

Anyone who thinks that old age deserves more respect would have been gratified to be at this session with Galbraith. The young people in attendance were positively worshipful, greeting his entrance with a standing O, and responding to his jokes and witty remarks with much appreciation.

Yes, they were applauding an American icon, the only citizen to have received the Order of Freedom medal twice. But they also seemed to be recognizing the aura that advanced age can bring when it comes with sparkle and grit.

Richard Griffin

You never know what schemes clever people are devising. The folks at MIT’s Age Lab, for example, are currently enthused about a “biosuit” which, among other things, might protect people from the effects of falling.

Worn under clothing, this lightweight “space suit” would have shock-absorbing material designed to safeguard the vulnerable parts of the human body. In addition, there would be compact motors and other systems making it easier for those with disabilities to walk and navigate obstacles.

Such futuristic devices always stir my imagination and enlarge my thinking about “what if.” Inventors like those working on the space suit remind everyone how much the world can be improved, if only we dare to think “outside the box” of conventional ideas.

The effort to prevent falls, in particular, deserves applause because so many people, especially the older ones among us, fall down so often and with such devastating results. I would wager that individuals reading this column know of someone who has fallen recently. I do.

One of my neighbors fell in her home a few weeks ago and broke a bone in her shoulder. When I inquired from her close friend how my neighbor was doing, she reported that three other people she knows had recently also fallen down.

This past week, I walked into a local bank and approached a teller with whom I like to do business. Not having seen her for a while, I inquired for her health. She informed me that she had fallen at work and broken her shoulder. Just now, after a few weeks recuperating, had she returned to her job.

If this sounds to you like an epidemic, you have come close to the mark. One in every three Americans over age 65 falls each year. This equals 12 million elders who have the misfortune to fall down, most of them from a standing position rather than from a height.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency concerned about the problem, reports some frightening statistics. About 13 thousand Americans die each year because of falls, about 10 thousand over age 65. Another 340,000 break their hips, with half of the older adults unable ever to return home to a life of independence, many of them dying within a year.

Hearing such statistics has been enough to make me more careful in recent years. Like many of my age peers, I tread streets and sidewalks much more carefully than when younger. Experience of past falls has made me wary of tripping over obstacles in my path.

Even more than many others, I have reason to take precautions: because of a birth injury to my left arm, I can break falls only by the use of one arm, not two. So on my daily walks out-of-doors, I take care.

This concern has also made me more aware of hazards at home. Small rugs attract my attention to make sure they present no danger. When going downstairs, I always grab hold of the rail. Moving into places poorly lit, I resolve to hire an electrician to install an extra light fixture. Meanwhile, I make a point of navigating those areas slowly.

In the face of dire statistics like those noted above, the need for action on the problem is urgent. Fortunately, we do not have to wait for the space suit to come off the drawing board on to the market. These protections may not have the same high tech pizzaz as the bio garment but they are at hand right now and are of proven value.

Chief among them is physical exercise. Regular exercise provides many benefits, one of them being improvement in balance. A noted researcher into longevity, Dr. Thomas Perls, calls exercise “the number one intervention for the prevention of frailty.”

If you welcome a suggestion for getting started on a modest but effective exercise program, I have a recommendation. You can call 1-800-222-2225, as I did, and the National Institute on Aging will send you a videotape, free of charge.

The exercises it shows you how to do are simple and do not require special equipment. A woman named Margaret Richard performs each one, slowly and clearly, inviting viewers to join her at each step. A detailed guidebook comes with the tape with helpful illustrations and additional information.

If, as this guidebook reports, “more than two-thirds of older adults don’t engage in regular physical activity,” I like to think a chief reason is incorrect ideas about what exercise requires. We think that it will hurt us, or that we need special equipment, or that we have to go to a gym. Others of us labor under the impression it’s for young people or for those who look good in gym clothes.

Starting regular exercise is like giving up smoking: no matter how late in life you begin, you will benefit and the benefits start immediately.

Richard Griffin

“My worst admission unless I admitted being a serial killer,” 84-year-old writer Doris Grumbach calls her confession about being a New York Yankees rooter. Speaking to a Boston audience she knows this addiction unlikely to win much favor. By way of easing the shock, she reveals that she has been a Yankee fan since age nine.

For fear this revelation may seem frivolous, the speaker emphasizes the importance of having passionate interests in old age. Baseball is one of hers. She knows the game intimately – batting averages, personalities, potential of players still unproven. To her Derek Jeter is a household name, along with all the other Red Sox slayers on her favorite team.

When she talks about how best to grow old, Doris Grumbach has clear convictions. Ever the imaginative writer, she uses the metaphor of a house. “I have to live in a different house in my old age,” she says, “and it has to be furnished, and what I have stored up there will serve me well.”

Some of what she has furnished the house with is spiritual activity: “I practice meditation, read the Psalms, I think a lot about Him or Her. I am in search of God.”

In fact, “life for me now is mainly interior,” she tells her audience, most of whom are people of mature years. “The grace one gets from being alive so long is a spiritual one,” she believes. This grace helps her to appreciate the value of the life she has lived.

“It’s not so important to live long as to live well,” is Doris’ conviction. Part of that involves preparing for what she calls “that long physical emptiness,” a time when the body refuses to function properly.

The arts also provide furnishings. Literature, opera, ballet, she mentions specifically. Natural scenery counts also, especially in old age: “ I have a beautiful place to look at,” she says of her seacoast site in northern Maine.

Having found this home, she feels reluctant to travel. “My own place gives me satisfaction,” she explains to justify her staying home.

Learning from others receives high marks from Doris Grumbach. Her daughters – theologian, radiologist, and arts scholar among them – have enlarged her appreciation of the world.

This woman, now so encouraging about later life, did not always feel this way. “I hated growing old,” she recalls. “I despaired every ten years,” as she detailed in her journals, diaries that became published books.

A large part of her discontent came from an ideal of physical excellence. Her idol was the great swimmer Gertrude Eberle, a woman who inspired Grumbach to relish ten mile swims.

All her adult life Doris Grumbach has been committed to social action. As a volunteer at the Catholic Worker where she came to know Dorothy Day, she served food to poor people and sold the organization’s newspaper at a penny a copy. Of this experience she says, “It changed my life.” She also much values her four years in the U. S. Navy, serving as an officer.

When she reached 80, old age set in, she says. “I substituted checks for real service and one never gets over the guilt for that.” The ideal of volunteer work on behalf of others retains its grip on her.

Doris Grumbach strongly believes that the secret of life is to have a task, something that you can’t possibly exhaust. If it is something to which you have devoted much of your life, so much the better. What matters most is that you feel a passion for it.

This accomplished writer gives examples of people who never surrendered their passion. Among them is the artist Monet who, when he grew old and could no longer hold a paintbrush, used to strap it to his hand in order to work. “Nothing ever managed to stop that passion,” she says in admiration.

Another such was a sculptor so disabled as to be confined to bed. But in that position he learned to make finger-sized figures of wax and thus he, too, continued to indulge his passion.

Someone asks the speaker whether she appreciates a different kind of humor now. “Far more things seem funny to me now,” she replies. “You take yourself less seriously because you know yourself not that important.”

Someone else wants to know how she is preparing for death. “I used to fear it greatly,” she confesses. “Now I no longer fear it, but I don’t think one is ever prepared for it – ever.”

Her faith helps, to some extent: “Though I have a strong faith, I don’t have the accompaniments.” By that unfamiliar word she seems to mean clear ideas about heaven and life there.

And about the dying: “It’s like travel,” she says. “I want to get there, but I don’t like the trip.”

Richard Griffin

Justin danced with Marilyn Monroe, “gently kneading the little tire of baby fat around her waist.”

Anne hosted William Faulkner, in prospect “as daunting as if I were the village priest informed the pope was about to show up for dinner and all I had in the house was cabbage stew and black bread.”

These are two of the many memories recalled by Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays in their newest book, Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York. This husband and wife team of versatile writers and influential literary figures were both natives of Manhattan who came of age there when the scene differed radically from the present one.

“Our habits, manners, language, attitudes in the 1950s were so different from what they are now that in some respects we could almost as well be writing about the era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Gibson Girl.” So the couple writes in the introduction.

Throughout the book, Bernays and Kaplan regale readers with their adventures, separate and shared. I found their stories consistently compelling and often hilarious.

They let a lot hang out, each detailing, for instance, romances with previous boy and girl friends, along with sessions in the offices of their shrinks. Explaining this frankness, Kaplan told me, “I owed it to the reader  –  –   to gloss over that would not be really truthful.”

After they met and determined to marry, the couple learned how to deal with Anne’s parents. Her father, Edward Bernays (who enjoyed one affluent reputation as “father of public relations” and another as a double nephew of Sigmund Freud) and her mother Doris Fleischman, at first disapproved of the match. Their daughter’s intended came from a Jewish family with roots in Russia, not in Germany, the only kind of Jewish origins the parents welcomed.

The wedding itself, an event micromanaged by Edward and Doris, took place in the Bernays home, and featured as officiant a judge unknown to the bridal couple. The photo of the affair suggests some of the discomfort of the bridegroom, wedged into a formal suit and sweating profusely. “Rivers of perspiration, inspired by heat and terror, coursed down his face and soaked the rented suit,” writes Anne of that event in July of 1954.

Whatever the apprehension connected with that day, the match has turned out to be beautifully successful. Though of markedly different temperaments, he reserved and slow to speak, she more spontaneous, they made a marriage proof against the blows that have claimed so many other couples.

The marriage flourished despite, at its beginning, Anne’s almost complete lack of household skills. She was unfamiliar with food shops and supermarkets, and did not know how to cook anything. In time, she had to learn how to cope with know-it-all obstetricians.  

Part of the couple’s success, it seems, stems from a wise decision they made in 1959 to leave their native city and move to Cambridge. By that time they had two young daughters and needed an atmosphere less fevered. As Anne describes the move, “Having lived for almost thirty years in a city with the world’s fastest pulse, I was ready for a change, for a place whose dazzle resided in its slow heart rate.”

The Cambridge of 2002 has, of course, rendered that description quaint.

Anne’s parents, incidentally, also eventually moved to Cambridge. Edward Bernays, as he neared and then surpassed age 100, became well known as an advocate for elder citizens in Massachusetts. The state Office of Elder Affairs used to consult him often and he seemed to take on a late life career as a model centenarian. A local writer of distinction, Larry Tye, has chronicled Bernays’ life in the 1998 book, “The Father of Spin.”

As almost always in a memoir, the photos stir fascination. I found myself scrutinizing them, seeking to find continuities and to trace changes in my friends Justin and Anne over the decades. These pictures alone, scattered throughout the book, provoke reflection about the impact of time on human life.

Without shame, the authors namedrop throughout the memoir, much to the delight of this reader, at least. Hardly a figure famous in the literary world escapes mention, it seems. Norman Mailer became a familiar party companion; they ran into the famous humorist James Thurber, tipsy and boring, at another affair. Justin’s account of Max Schuster, the publisher for whom he worked for a few years, is often richly comic.

Parties were a way of life in Manhattan, providing opportunities for contacts in the literary business and the more personal rewards of friendship. Opting later for a less frenzied, more recollected life allowed Justin and Anne both to raise their three children in relative peace and quiet and to become remarkably productive.

The book will be in the stores by the end of this month; I recommend it to readers at large, but especially to those who feel about New York the way Dr. Johnson felt about his capital city: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

Richard Griffin