Looking back at his life, Hob’s wife Olivia speaks of his “hard edges which softened with his age; he had a beautiful soul.”

These words come from a new video, entitled “Hob’s Odyssey,” that family members and friends have been viewing recently. It has been a year since Hob’s death last Thanksgiving Day at age 78. As we celebrate the same holiday again this week, I am giving thanks for the life of this friend who provided much inspiration to me as he did to many others.

What strikes me most about his life as shown in the video is the transformation of character he shows from early adulthood to his middle and later years. Seeing him as a jaunty and debonair young man in New York City, I found it hard to connect that person with the friend I came to know decades later.

The changes in him happened in large part because of the spiritual quest on which he entered as he grew into middle age. It was a searching shared by his wife Olivia as the two traveled widely together, on both external and interior journeys.

Olivia’s sense of adventure supported Hob as he experimented with truth. “How can you not rejoice to see your partner jumping into the new?” she asks. The sober answer is, of course, “Easy.” Many partners would be made unhappy seeing the person closest to them constantly looking for change.

But Hob’s partner saw the “transformative influences” of  the spiritual practices that he adopted. She later observed that as his spirituality took hold, “the depressions vanished and the volatilities.”

A crucial event occurred in 1982 when they visited India for the first time. While there, Hob became crippled by dysentery making it impossible for him to walk. In Bombay they met a charismatic woman healer named Sree Chakravarti who, in front of 200 onlookers, touched Hob and commanded him to stand up and walk. “It just blew all his circuits,” says Olivia of this event. “I saw him the victim of a miracle.”

In India the couple became friends with Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine who had established an ashram there and lived as both a Catholic priest and a Hindu holy man. This friendship was to take hold and last the rest of Father Bede’s life while exercising a creative influence on Hob’s search.

Other spiritual leaders helped Hob find his way toward enlightenment. Among them, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han was perhaps the most significant. At his hands, Hob was ordained a senior teacher in the Buddhist tradition, an office he felt honored to hold.

Others from whom Hob drew inspiration were the Dalai Lama, Jean Vanier, and Father Henri Nouwen. Vanier, a Canadian who founded L’Arche, a network of communities uniting people with developmental disabilities and their helpers, opened new insights for Hob. For a time he worked as a volunteer in a L’Arche house in Erie, Pennsylvania, an experience which contributed to his spiritual growth.

Father Nouwen, the Dutch priest whose spiritual writings have moved many, helped Hob to find value in suffering. Within fragility of heart lies great strength, Nouwen taught, a reality that Hob was to show forth in the last years of his life.

Those years were the time when Hob had Alzeimer’s disease. This he managed to accept with remarkable grace, though it would be a mistake to underestimate the difficulties. “What made it doable, and even light at times, is we’ve chosen to do it together,” Olivia said of the ordeal. “That’s not to gloss over the losses,” she added. “The depth of his pain and rejection surprised me.”

As the video confirms, the support that Olivia gave her husband then was crucial. I never tire of repeating what Hob once told me when I asked him a question that he had forgotten how to answer. Turning to Olivia, he told me: “She is my memory,” beautiful words I continue to treasure.

No wonder Olivia says “Hob is one of the most intriguing persons I have ever known.” She also speaks of what they had together –  – “intertwined Karmas off the charts.”

Seeing a person’s life whole, as “Hob’s Odyssey” enables one to do, stirs thoughts too deep for expression. The adventure, the beauty, the surprises, the pathos, the twists and turns, –  –  all contribute to a richness that goes beyond easy expression. The 78 years have a power in them that lasts beyond the confines of mortality.

The video concludes with a song by Leonard Cohen that celebrates what Hob and Olivia held together. “Dance me to the panic till I’m safely gathered in,” says a verse. “Dance me to the end of love,” goes the refrain.

Hob has been safely gathered in. This love, however, does not end. In touching  family members and friends, this love remains a present reality.

Richard Griffin

“When I don’t feel like doing housework and I don’t feel like reading or writing, I love to make music.”  This was the answer given me last week by Violet Myvaagnes to my question about why she plays the recorder. Ms. Myvaagnes,  who lives in Mt. Vernon House in  Winchester  was obviously enjoying that activity on the evening when we met.

At age 91, she enjoys coming together with others to play regularly. She took up the recorder when her boys were little and now, many decades later, she continues to find pleasure playing this instrument.

She is in good company as a member of the Boston Recorder Society that meets monthly at the New School of Music in Cambridge to make music together. Invited by Laura Conrad, Adminstrator of the Society and a regular reader of this column, I visited the group last week and enjoyed talking with several of the players among the 15 or so gathered for music and fellowship.

Incidentally, when I identified the title of this column, Violet Myvaagnes saw its point and related to it immediately: “Growing Older, .  .  .  OK, we’re all doing it!” said this elder, a woman full of vitality.

Judy Demarrais, a resident of Needham, boasts, “I’ve been a member forever.”  Forever turns out to be since 1972 when she was 40. “My husband said to me I was too old to learn music,” but she went ahead anyway. Though he has a very fine ear, she says that  he cheerfully puts up with her playing despite its deficiencies.

Judy is one of several members who play instruments other than the recorder. “I read early music to keep my brain active,” she says.  She performs with the group on the dulcian, az reed instrument like the early bassoon. “I think this group is the sort of thing that can really contribute to community spirit.” “This is so participatory,” she adds.

Duncan MacDonald, a retired space engineer who now lives on Beacon Hill, plays the flute. He also belongs to a  nation-wide  association of flutists whose members once played the national anthem at an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game. “Seven hundred flutists lined the field from first base to third base in the outfield, with the conductor at second base,” he recalled. When I called this unique performance much preferable to hearing some pop singer murder the national anthem, Duncan readily agreed.

Talking with him was Marleigh Ryan, who took up the recorder on the last day of 1998. That was the day on which she retired from her position as a professor of Japanese literature in New York.  A Cambridge resident, she has enough enthusiasm to have moved her to join another group of recorder players, this one in Framingham.

Tobi Hoffman, a middle-aged computer programmer,  finds playing all-absorbing.  “Even if I come to a session with a headache, while I’m playing, I will not notice that headache.”  I ask how she likes playing with people older than herself. “Music is community,” she replies; “It’s part of something bigger than yourself.”

Ann Murphy of Brookline has been playing for more than twenty years. Before her retirement, she was a social worker at Children’s Hospital and a part-time teacher at Salem State College. When she was younger, she wanted to play an instrument,  but regrets that she never found the time. About the recorder, she says, “You can do something with it a little sooner.”  The sessions of the Society she sees as “a nice opportunity to get together with other players.”

This sampling of amateur musicians, younger and older, indicates the potential the playing of music has to enliven personal life. For older people in particular, this activity seems to have a rejuvenating effect, especially because it throws them into meaningful contact with those younger than they.

Though the players at this session took their music seriously, the atmosphere was relaxed and no one needed to feel on the spot. In this non-ageist, not competitive environment, people were free to do their best without anxiety about the outcome. The relish they felt in the music itself was obviously a powerful force making them feel good about themselves.

The members of the Boston Recorder Society consider the recorder a good instrument to start in later life. It can give some satisfaction much faster than a more complicated instrument such as the violin. And the learning experience differs sharply from the music lessons of children, in the bad old days, when they were subjected to tiresome drills.

I recall my own piano lessons when my teachers, though not unkind, did not provide me with much gratification. They made me respect the instrument but not love it. Only the prospect of a Red Sox or Bees game, promised as a reward to follow the lessons, gave me the motivation to persevere. The love that the Recorder Society members feel for their instruments makes for a joyful contrast.

Richard Griffin

“I’m the luckiest guy you can possibly envision,” says Henry Walter, a resident of North Hill, the retirement community in Needham. He is talking about his experiences as an army officer in World War II. About to turn 86, he looks back on his military service as a time that brought him lifelong benefits.

He has summarized the events of his life in a private memoir of some 150 pages that has been read by family members. Stirred by a recent “Growing Older” column  focused on the wartime memoir of a Polish lawyer, he sent me a summary of his that covers six densely packed pages.

He was born in Vienna in 1916 and grew up in that city, though his father was a Czech citizen. Henry was a member of the Czech army when Hitler invaded and dissolved that force. Escaping across the border, Henry reached Poland and sailed from there to New York.

In 1941 he was drafted into the U. S. Army, eventually becoming an officer with the Tenth Mountain Division. Soon, however, he was transferred to s newly created army branch – Military Government. Taking part in the invasion of Normandy, he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day plus 1, wading to shore through waist-deep water. Once in France, he began functioning as a civil affairs officer, helping to evacuate French civilians from the areas in front of American battle lines.

After many other adventures, some of them extremely hazardous, Henry took part in the Battle of the Bulge, crossed the Rhine at Remagen, and eventually ended up in southern Bohemia as the war in Europe came to an end. He then served as chief military government official in a small county of Bavaria before returning to the U.S.

This brief summary leaves out many details that enrich Henry’s account of his wartime life and the period following VE Day. Most important among these events was his meeting Ruth Sumers, a former Navy officer, whom he met traveling in Europe and married in 1947.

Looking back at this period, Henry Walter most values his marriage and his rapid rise in military rank until he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. This military experience made him eligible for the GI Bill covering his graduate studies at Harvard and setting him on his career path.

Asked about present-day Germany, Henry says: “It seems like quite a different country than it was in World War II.” But he is not surprised because he regards Germans as “very intelligent people.” And he feels proud about his role in Germany’s restoration: “We played a very important role in that.”

Though he has kept his uniform, he has never marched in a veterans’ parade. But he feels patriotic, especially valuing “knowledgeable and courageous people who speak up for justice.”

Another person who comes to mind, in the week when we celebrate Veterans’ Day, is the late Celia McLaughin. Her daughter, Pam McLaughlin, a resident of Somerville, has written about her mother’s wartime years in a small book published last July and entitled “Celia: Army Nurse and Mother Remembered.” Making abundant use of wartime letters from her mother, Pam McLaughlin shares the experiences of this army nurse who served in the North African campaign and later in Italy.

A native of Tamworth, New Hampshire, Celia trained as a nurse at Hale Hospital in Haverhill. Joining the Army in 1942, she was sent to North Africa where she endured difficult conditions, such as 140-degree temperatures. Later, based in the outskirts of Naples, she cared for sick and wounded soldiers in the Italian campaign. Of her work, she said in an understatement: “It’s not a bad record because we’ve cared for over 3,000 patients.”

In reflecting on her mother’s mentality at that time, Pam says: “Her thoughts were always of home, of the White Mountains, and of Lake Chocorus in which she used to swim.”  

Not until the last ten years of Celia’s life did she talk with her daughter about her wartime experiences. Those conversations solidified her appreciation of her mother as a person: “I always remember her so strong, so solid, so faith-filled.”

By the 1970s, her daughter began to gather her letters because of their historical value. “This is a piece of American history,” she told herself, “and I just can’t let it go to waste.”

In a recent letter to me, Pam writes: “We must remember our veterans and what they sacrificed for our nation,” I agree and in that spirit have shared the stories of these two very different veterans of World War II. Pam also emphasizes that the veterans who have grown old and vulnerable deserve our best care and treatment.

Henry and Celia in their distinct ways show the devotion to duty that brought eventual victory over the forces of tyranny. Along with the millions of others who have served in America’s wars they deserve credit for bravery and commitment.

Richard Griffin

Do you believe that people who are stinkers at age 30 will still be stinkers at age 80? I, for one, don’t want to but the best scientific evidence suggests that we should.

This evidence comes from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Human Aging. This fall, at a week-long seminar for journalists working the age beat, I visited Baltimore and learned more about this celebrated study.  

Begun in 1958 (three years before the California Angels were born), this study calls itself “America’s longest-running scientific study of human aging.” The study is based on 1,200 men and women volunteers who range from their 20s to their 90s. A program of the National Institute on Aging, the BLSA is funded by our tax dollars and would appears to be a sound investment.

What “longitudinal” means is that the same people take part over the period of the study, although individuals are free to drop out at any time. This contrasts with research focusing on a series of different people and is considered more productive and reliable by the social science community.

During the first 40 years, researchers reached significant findings about a range of physical and psychological issues. Of these, I will consider only three.

As indicated above, the first asserts the stability of people’s personalities in adulthood and later years. “Analyses of long-term data show that adults as a whole change little after age 30,” the researchers state. They makes this concrete by adding: “People who are cheerful and assertive at age 30 are likely to be cheerful and assertive at age 80.”

My reason for feeling reluctant to accept this finding is that it smacks of predestination. What about free will so prized by human beings? Why must we continue be nasty toward other people just because we started out that way? Cannot Scrooge be converted and become a nice guy in time for later-life Christmases?

The scientists take some of the curse off their finding by strategic use of the phrase “as a whole.” Thus they do not assert the finding applies to absolutely everybody. They seem willing to admit exceptions.

The example they give, of course, would incline many to favor the thesis. Who, starting out as cheerful and assertive, would not wish to continue so in late life? Even there, however, I would incline toward the side of freedom: should not old people retain the freedom to become more misanthropic if they wish? After all, misanthropy is frequently recognized as a factor in helping some of us survive to longevity – the tough, grumpy old man or woman phenomenon.

The second finding of the BLSA researchers goes like this: “Older people cope more effectively with stress than young adults.”

This one fits in with my experience. The older people I run into tend to be remarkably resilient in coping with the insults, small and large, that so often come with age. The traditional view held elders to be rigid and lacking in coping abilities, but the Baltimore scientists suggest this generalization may not hold water.

My only problem with this finding is possible stereotyping of young people. Everyone knows young adults who cope courageously with illness and other threatening issues. The BLSA, in fact, recognizes how, health aside, older people “experience less stress than younger adults (who must juggle work, marriage, and children.)”

The third general proposition from BLSA asserts “Happiness is more predictable from a person’s disposition than from the special events he or she encounters.”

People often assume happiness to come from events such as getting a raise, staying healthy, or taking a dream vacation –  – three cited by the study. But the researchers have found psychological well-being to come from character rather than circumstances.

“People quickly adapt to both good and bad circumstances,” they assert, “so the impact of special events can be fleeting; but people who are sociable, generous, goal-oriented, and emotionally stable consistently report higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression than others.”

Yes, but I wonder how many of the 1,200 men and women studied in BLSA live in desperately poor circumstances, without adequate financial resources for a decent life. It would be a mistake to think happiness out of reach for such people, but its availability cannot be easy or assumed, however stable their character may be.

And, again, this finding sounds a bit deterministic as if a person’s character is not subject to change. Is it not possible for people as they grow older to modify their outlook on the world and let their new experiences work a transformation in some of their basic attitudes?

I do much welcome emphasis on the importance of character in the life of older people. As the Jungian analyst James Hillman says:  “Without the idea of character, the old are merely lessened and worsened people and their longevity is society’s burden.”

But despite quibbles like mine, the three findings discussed here point toward the dignity of later life and the value of core personality.

Richard Griffin