This is the story of a person who used the dreaded O word to get ahead.

During an intermission of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at the Metropolitan Opera, my sister Carol joined a long line of women waiting to use what she calls “one of the woefully inadequate ladies’ rooms.” While standing there, she observed her fellow ladies-in-waiting and was struck by their patience.

Among them was a visibly pregnant young woman just behind her. My sister briefly considered offering the mother-to-be her place in line but rejected this option, realizing the gain would be slight and the woman might resent it if she thought my sister was judging her to have a disability.

As Carol neared the entrance to the ladies room and was still pondering her decision not to relinquish her place in line, another woman came from nowhere and attempted to squeeze herself into the space between my sister and the pregnant woman.

The newcomer had no obvious physical condition meriting special consideration nor did she appear to be in any kind of distress. If either had been the case or if she had simply asked to break into the line, Carol would have been glad to accommodate her.

The intruder spoke not a word, just smiled sweetly. The body language of the other women in line suggested they were reacting the way my sister was feeling, namely annoyed at the boldness and presumption of the interloper.

Given these feelings, Carol was surprised that no one else challenged the woman, so she decided to do it herself. She turned toward the woman and explained that this was a line she was breaking into. In response the woman said: “But I’m old.”

Though astonished by this reply, Carol took no more than a half-note’s time to reply: “So am I!”

Pursuing the matter, as if she were a child on an elementary school playground, the woman said: “I bet I’m older than you.”

Carol then pointed out that this was a line of waiting women, not a contest to see who was older. Intent on arrival at her destination, my sister then lost track of where the woman went.

However, she has continued to be intrigued by the incident, an instance, unprecedented in her experience, of someone appealing to a personal characteristic usually left unmentioned, if not disguised in the other direction.

How might one understand the action of the woman who determined to break protocol? Was she every Bostonian’s stereotype of the pushy New Yorker, the person who feels entitled?

Or was she too shy to confess, even among women, the pressing need that drove her to get ahead in this particular line?  What still seems unreal about the story is the blatant appeal to age. Most Americans avoid the word “old” at almost any price.

Perhaps she has experienced age discrimination in employment or in personal relationships and seized this opportunity to get some value out of her advancing years. If people are going to put her at a disadvantage because of her age, she may reason, I will use the power that I have to my own advantage.

She may be attracted to a certain mystique that has caught on with some older women. They have determined to wear purple, they say, and to become outrageous. If society is going to downgrade them, they will stand ready to avenge themselves by acting with a greater freedom than they exhibited when younger.

To the claim “I am old” coming from this woman, the other women might reasonably, if not politely, have replied “So what?” The presence of others in line who themselves looked comparably mature took away the edge in that claim.

Old age may have its privileges, but invoking it to break protocol is not one of them, at least not in my book.

I confess feeling tempted, at times, to indulge my elder status. At buffet dinners, for instance, when I am starving and everyone in line is moving so slowly, I want to elbow my way forward. But these are feelings that I have had since I was six; do I really have an excuse to indulge them now?

Need is valid; age in itself is not a reason for much of anything. Common sense allows a certain leeway to people obviously far advanced in years. By common agreement, those in their 80s, 90s, and 100s can be accorded a certain deference paid to age.

Still, there is something disedifying about an elder pushing herself ahead of others. It does not fit with the graciousness that some of us believe comes with age. We like to think ourselves above that kind of selfishness.

Surely the interloper at the Met could have said something to justify her breaking protocol. My sister Carol’s guess about the woman is this: she makes a habit of doing this just for the satisfaction she gets in exercising reverse ageism.

Richard Griffin

Few experiences absorb our attention the way illness does. Yet, when you talk about it with others, even close friends, their eyes soon grow glassy and begin to rove. How can something be of such pressing interest to us and of so little to others, I often wonder?

Despite awareness of this hazard, however, I write this week about a recent bout with shingles. This I do, not on my own initiative, but in response to a suggestion from my pastor, Dennis Sheehan. He urged me to share this experience with readers so as possibly to encourage others in coping with what can be a painful ordeal.

As a person of classical bent, I never feel myself in possession of a word’s meaning unless I know its roots. In this instance, the word “shingles” refers, not to the wooden boards that provide the exterior of some houses but rather to quite a different image.

When used to name the disease, “shingles” comes from the Latin word “cingulum,” that indicates a girdle across the middle of the body. Speakers of English in the Middle Ages with their fondness for variation apparently wore away the opening letter “c” in favor of the “sh” beginning the bizarre word that we know today.

The word describes the experience aptly because shingles sufferers usually feel themselves covered in a zone of pain that stretches part way across their body. Mine, however, has been located on my forehead, just above my left eye.

Though you do not need to have lived long to get shingles, age often brings it on. What most fascinates me about it is how this virus can have been lurking in our body since childhood. Its origin is the virus that causes chicken pox that so many of us had as kids but which may have lain dormant for decades. One member of my family got shingles in her 80s, some 70 or more years after the root disease first took hold in her body.

With this disease, our nerve ends become exposed, thus making us vulnerable to oftentimes excruciating pain. What causes the virus to erupt is still not clear, though medical authorities often point to stress. If that is the trigger, you can easily understand why shingles abounds in the general population.

If shingles carry a certain advantage, it may be the disease’s power to win sympathy. Most people know two things about it: first, it is usually very painful and second, it is not life-threatening.

That frees people to express condolences with the sufferer, a benefit I have been gathering in over the last several weeks. You can tell a person about being sorry for his trouble without worrying that your words might be inadequate. You know that the sufferer will get well.

For me, the illness has brought some other benefits as well. The most important of them for me is, once more, an acute sense of the kindness of strangers. In this instance, I mean mostly members of the medical staff at the clinic run by Harvard Vanguard.

In illness, you have to trust others to respond. My constant experience is that they do. You learn to practice a reliance on others that ultimately can enrich your own life.

Almost all people with whom I had no significant contact previously, these medical staffers have reached out to me in caring and sympathetic ways. This style of applying the healing arts has upped my morale and given me the confidence of finding relief from the disease’s effects.

That these caregivers are mostly women, some people of color, makes for a medical staff much different from what I knew earlier in life. Nurses, physicians, technicians, and others bring a diversity more representative of the world at large than in the past. I welcome the changes and believe us improved by the special gifts that women bring to the healing ministry.

Entrusting myself to the care they offer brings me to face my own dependence. Contrary to the great American cultural myth that we don’t need anyone, we all depend on one another. As a lady once told the author Mary Pipher, “Honey, life ain’t nothing but strings.”

Though not life-threatening, shingles has brought me further experience of my own mysterious vulnerabilities. How complicated we continue to be, defying all simplifications of human life!

Even at the most painful times, I try to ward off the unlovely emotion of self-pity. The heroic examples of friends who are engaged in long-term struggles with death-bringing diseases such as cancer shame me into placing limits on my own narcissism.

More positively, shingles speaks to me of the value in each day. Feeling unwelcome pain on some days enhances the joy of living on other days.

In this connection, I never tire of quoting Rabbi Abraham Joseph Heschel because his sentiments reinforce my continuing experience of life: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”

Richard Griffin

The conference speaker told about his wife providing help for an 84-year-old woman hospitalized after a heart attack. His wife still considers the older woman a member of her extended family, though she is only the mother of her first husband from whom she was divorced 34 years ago!

Such is the continuing power of family ties, suggests Vern Bengston, a professor at the University of Southern California and a researcher well known in the field of social gerontology. In March he served as one of many distinguished presenters at a Boston College conference entitled “Public Policy and Responsibility Across the Generations.”

Bengston took another example of tenacious family ties from his own experience with his mother. Over her last decade, she lived in a nursing home that took some four or five hours for him to reach by car. Yet he made it a point to make this trip every few weeks even though, in her last two years, his mother could no longer recognize him.

This California researcher also cited the changing roles of grandmothers within so-called broken families. He told of one such situation in which a grandmother is raising eleven children. Several of the parents have had trouble with the law and at least two are currently doing time in prison. This qualifies as what Bengston calls “one of the strongest examples of unplanned parenthood.”

Another extension of parenthood, admittedly less dramatic and less uncommon, is taking place now within Bengston’s own family. His adult children, among them a 31-year-old daughter, have come back home to live with their parents.

Yet a further example of continuing strong multi-generational bonds, cited by Bengston, is that 40 percent of his college students have grandparents contributing to the cost of their education. He and his wife have put aside money for their own grandchildren’s schooling.

From these examples and his research findings he concludes that the nuclear family will prove to be lasting. Twenty-five years from now it will remain vital and members will be less isolated than they are currently. He does not envisage a future conflict between generations, despite pressures that may be created by changes in Social Security.

These conclusions come as a surprise, however, in view of the sweeping changes that the same researcher foresees. He admits the growth of many new stresses on family life, among them the shakiness of so many marriages, the complex challenges involved in balancing work and family life, and the difficulty of finding caregivers for the elderly.

Despite what he calls “the astounding changes” that have taken place in a single generation, he finds remarkable staying power in family ties. Members of the so-called “Generation X”, compared with the Baby Boomer group, display surprisingly similar feelings.

Bengston displayed a graph showing that, over a 26-year generation gap,  young people feel as much solidarity with their mothers as mothers now middle-aged felt with theirs. Feelings of connection with their fathers remain almost as great.

Some other professionals at the conference, however, did not buy into Bengston’s rosy scenario. Philosopher Harry R. Moody responded by questioning what he called Bengston’s “relentless optimism.” “What if massive trends are undermining the system?”he asked.

Moody sees little to celebrate about a grandmother needing to take care of 11 children, some of whose parents are in prison. He also worries about a global culture increasingly inhospitable to family life.

Jack Cornman, a consultant with wide experience in the field of aging, sees the basic question as “to what extent society should help cope with pressures on families.” He criticizes social policies that “consist of throwing more choices at people.”

A researcher from Harvard’s School of Public Health, Norman Daniels, also made a sober judgment about the larger picture. “Looked at globally, the family situation is very threatening,” he warned.

Unless people like me, nested in our middle 70s, break the 100 mark, some of these issues may have no immediate practical impact on us. They will perhaps remain questions for the social policy wonks to cope with. Meantime, I hope we can enjoy two-way communication with and support from younger members of our extended families.

As you can judge from the snatches of the discussion relayed here, the Boston College conference provided no one dominant view on family issues. But it did raise questions that will remain central as our society continues to face changes that will help shape the future of family life in America.

Incidentally, it struck me forcibly that a conference for which professionals came from various parts of the country to Newton in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not a single presenter said anything about the impact that the legalization of gay marriage might have on family care.

I will not soon forget the photo last month of a lesbian couple, Del Martin 83 and Phyllis Lyon 79, who have been partners for 51 years and, at San Francisco city hall, joyfully presented themselves to get married. What effect would or will the legal blessing on this and other monosexual unions have on elder care within their families?

Richard Griffin

The setting for the music lesson is an austere sixth floor studio. This spacious but underfurnished room features a piano with a large blue/green exercise ball underneath it. Two faded rugs cover some of the floor and a motley collection of prints adorns the walls. The best thing about the room is its picture window looking out over Boston Common, the buildings beyond, and a gray sky.

This is the setting in which the singer performs for his teacher, a dignified professional in his mid 70s who sits at the piano guiding his student. The student, a tall man  with blondish hair, small beard, sideburns and a slight mustache first sings the usual voice exercises, O’s and E’s up and down the scale as the teacher strikes the appropriate notes.

Then come further sounds that draw praise from the teacher: “I thought that was damn good.”

This preparation leads into the singing of the first four songs of Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” that the student is slated to perform soon at a meeting of a Germanic interest group. After each song, the teacher makes suggestions such as “You have to internalize this tactus” and “You will need rubato,” both followed by explanations of these technical terms.

The teacher’s admonition –“that nasal sound seems effortful” – requires the student to repeat a phrase. So does: “You’re singing an E instead of an F sharp.” As an encore, the singer renders a song called “To Celia.”

The teacher completes the session advising the singer: “Practice with the metronome beating and you conducting.”  

Such is the routine that the singer, 64-year-old Vernon Howard, undertakes each week as he pursues his retirement goal of resuming his interrrupted career as a professional singer. This new career will bring him back to his original ambition, one inspired by his father, a lead tenor with the Royal Danish Opera.

Although he often performed in earlier adulthood, usually in a lecture/recital format, in time he turned away from music toward a career in academia. He had become concerned about finding himself without the financial resources needed for a secure life. That anxiety drove him to get a doctorate in philosophy from Indiana and to seek a university appointment. Ultimately, he had become a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching there until he retired in 2000.

Starting over as a professional singer is not easy in one’s sixties. Vernon Howard himself confesses to his questions and hesitations in a manuscript that he hopes will be published in the near future:

“From the time I first heard the Siren’s call beckoning me back, I was plagued with doubts and many of them. Was I too old to start over? What toll does age extract from the voice? Do the vocal cords lose flexibility? Do they atrophy and grow brittle like rubber bands in the sun?

“If I couldn’t run like a 35 year old anymore, maybe I couldn’t sing like one either. The issue of age and neglect haunted me from the start and came back vengefully with every setback, with every cracked top note, with every loss of endurance. Yet I was determined to reclaim my vocality.”

Howard knows what he is getting into but relishes the challenge. He savors the rewards that come “when you get it right.” That is why every day, he does his vocal exercises and structures his time so as to make himself into the best singer possible.

At the same time, he continues to keep a journal that details his experiences. The weekly voice lessons figure large in the pages of his diary. His teacher, Mark Pearson, demanding but sympathetic, guides the aspiring singer within the framework of a structured adult-to-adult relationship.

It’s possible, of course, to exaggerate the difficulties encountered by retirees like Vernon Howard. Former Harvard professors have certain advantages, being able to afford the expenses required to start a new career and blessed with the personal connections they may need.

Nonetheless, I draw inspiration from Vernon Howard and his like because they summon up within themselves the courage to try something different. They belong to a huge legion of people all across this country who show how initiative and guts can enhance later life.

A retired first-grade teacher, now 65, told me recently with enthusiasm: “I consider retirement the best time of my life. I have met so many new people and have discovered new activities that have given me great pleasure.” She cannot understand why some of her age peers find the time empty.

Vernon Howard plans to sing as a tenor soloist in Handel’s Messiah in New Brunswick next winter. One of the other soloists has a well established professional reputation that tempts Howard to feel intimidated. But then, he gets a hold of himself and says: “I’ll just do it.” And he will.

Richard Griffin