Sometimes simple pleasures prove the best.

A recent Sunday afternoon gave me ample reason to endorse this dictum.  With virtually no preparation, I walked from home to a beautiful university theatre nearby, for a concert that had  not been widely advertised .

For ten dollars (senior citizen discount!), the box office sold me a ticket. Then, at exactly two o’clock, the listed starting time, I settled in a seat only a few feet from the stage.

All three selections on the program were well known to me. However, the star attraction of the event was Joseph Silverstein.  If you are a fellow classical music lover, you may be acquainted with his name.

From 1962 to 1984, he was concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Many of us regretted his departure from the BSO to become director of the Utah Symphony.

On this occasion, Silverstein was performing with a student orchestra: all of the players were enrolled at the Boston Conservatory.

Before the soloist came on stage, they had shown their skill and youthful dynamism with the program’s initial piece, Rossini’s delightful overture to his opera La Gazza Ladra.

Now they were ready for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, a marvelous work tht has long since enjoyed warhorse status in the repertory.

Silverstein is now 80 years old.  I fantasized him growing up under his father‘s tutelage (the latter taught music in the Detroit public schools). The future violinist may well have encounter Beethoven’s masterpiece when he was nine or ten years old.

As a gerontologist fascinated by the interaction between the 80-year-old soloist and young orchestra members.  The latter were virtually all either undergrads or graduate students, and all working for degrees in music.

The students performed like pros, acting like the members of a first-class adult symphony orchestra. And Silverstein took them as musical colleagues, despite the great gap between his age and their beginning adulthood.

I admired the poise of all involved, a poise that made the age gap irrelevant.  They had banded together, soloist and players, to give us audience members a fine esthetic experience.

I like to take this one collaboration between old and young as a model for what should always mark our society.  We all would be better off if we had easy access to people of all ages sharing community.

Of course, many, if not most, older Americans have frequent contact with grandchildren and great grandchildren.  Some of the technologically competent among us stay in touch with faraway family members by using Skype, that marvel of modern invention.

But I’m focused on the advantages of intergenerational contacts with the people who live near us. It can be exhilarating to come close to younger people and, I like to think, also rewarding for them.

All forms of gated communities offend my sense of our belonging to one another.  Perhaps my long religious training has skewed my sense of the real world but I see it as highly desirable in old age to mix with youth, providing we can do so.

Put me down as an unremitting opponent of age segregation. Of course, when disabilities converge, many older people have had to change their living arrangements. Then, we hope they have as much access to the outer community as possible.

Back to Joseph Silverstein. His continued musical activity is obvious. But whether he has other contact with young people, I do not know.

I regret not having had the opportunity to talk with him about intergenerational contacts.  Does he agree with my general approach to age relations? Does he spread the word about its rewards?