How did I ever get to be 75 years of age? It’s a long story from which only a few highlights can be shared here. But the secret behind my success can be summed up in one word – survival.

The first important event was my being born. A fill-in-the-data-book entitled “Baby’s Days and Baby’s Ways” records this birth in Peabody, Massachusetts on August 19, 1928, “the Little One” measuring 22¾ inches.  

Getting born, I am still persuaded, is fundamental if you want to achieve longevity. You simply must survive the event to give yourself a shot at reaching the three quarters of a century mark or beyond.

Later on, in kindergarten, I had to defend my manhood against one of my classmates (a boy, you should be reassured) and gave him a bloody nose. This encounter, so satisfying to me as the solitary pugilistic triumph of my life, also qualifies as a survival event. After all, the other kid might have had enough machismo to fell me with a mortal blow to my nose.

While growing up, I also survived tons of nutritionally incorrect food. At the risk of shocking you, let me report consuming a whole lot of Spam. That does not mean spam, the stuff that comes unbidden to your computer screen, but the alleged food that comes in a can. Like my brothers and sisters, I used to eat it all the time and, if I may confide a shocking fact, actually liked it.

Almost as bad, for supper we used often to open cans of Franco-American spaghetti. Scoop it out, heat it up, and we quickly had what my taste buds approved as a delicious meal.  If only I could have had a tall rich chocolate frappe to wash it down with!

Moving to college was something that was to prove especially hazardous to my survival. That’s because my first-year survey course in English literature exposed me to J.B. Munn. Professor Munn, if not the worst teacher I ever had, is still right down there fighting for the title.

Fortunately, he bored me only to tears. Many other students around me were bored to death, something that could easily have happened to me. Observing rows of my peers, all of them fatally overcome by boredom, served me as an object lesson of the fate that could have cut short my life.

Another professor, Harry Levin, during his lectures on the novel, was always coughing. Ritually, at the end of every second sentence, this brilliant academic would fetch a handkerchief from his pocket and hack into it. Who knows what contagion I might have contracted had I ever allowed myself to sit close to the master’s throat?

Another survival threat came when I discovered sex. At about age 20, I learned some details of what sexual partners do with one another. It came to me as such a shock that I almost died of astonishment.

Fortunately, during most of my life, sickness has played only a bit part. But other medical factors have posed challenges. Nosocomial exposure, danger coming from hospitals, I have come to recognize as bad for my health. This started in boyhood when I entered a Boston hospital for a bad case of the mumps and was there infected with scarlet fever.

The same is true for iatrogenic disease, the illness that comes from doctors. I have learned that you have to be wary of them taking out your gall bladder instead of your appendix, and various other blunders. A dentist to whom I was once referred took out of my head the wrong tooth. His apologies and those of my regular dentist, a personal friend, failed to move me deeply.

In my days as a student of theology, I also faced serious dangers. As the Latin term “odium theologicum” (theological hatred) suggests, the level of venom felt by theologians against one another is right down there with that of politicians, and even academics.  

During this era, I took a special interest in liturgy but soon discovered mortal danger lurking there too. I should have been warned in advance but did not know the answer to a question celebrated in church circles : “What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist?”  The answer: “You can sometimes negotiate with a terrorist.”

Then as a columnist of many years’ standing, I sometimes reflect on all the grief I have received from deeply disgruntled readers. I don’t want to exaggerate here but some, at least, would have liked to see me rot in prison for my allegedly disloyal views. Escaping assault and battery from those readers, with its potential for limiting longevity, is a blessing for which I am thankful.

From all of the above dangers, you can easily judge how lucky I have been to reach 75.  Any one of these threats could have done me in, but here I am at the three quarter mark of an ever faster-moving lifetime.

Richard Griffin

Bob Spaethling has never forgotten details of a horrific event that happened when he was only 16. Walther, a young friend and fellow German army recruit, was shot dead in front of him, not by enemy soldiers, but by SS troops at the order of an officer. The unfortunate victim had run from the army truck that he drove. When it was disabled, he had failed to blow up the vehicle as standing orders required.

That was in 1944 and, though things were going badly for the Wehrmacht of which he was a member, this teenager from a small town in Bavaria had felt glad about going into combat. In fact, years before, he had refused the chance to join relatives in California because he looked forward to being in the army.

On arriving at the front lines, it took him less than 30 minutes of enemy shells raining on the members of his platoon to realize how unrealistic his notions of warfare were. He had entered hell, where human life was agonizing and desperate. As a regimental runner this teenager faced hazards on every side. That he survived the traumatic experiences to reflect on them and share his recollections with me some 60 years later has to qualify as a kind of miracle.

“How do you forget a war? How do you forget the sights of men killing each other, or the sounds of dying?” These are questions Bob asks in the unpublished memoir he has written for family and friends.

Flashing forward a few years to as new setting, he tells me about joining the American army at age 25. To his own amazement, in 1953, he found himself drafted to serve in the armed forces of the nation to which he had emigrated after the war. “I’m a peace-loving man,” he says, “but I’ve been in two different armies.” When he explained to the American recruiting officer that he had already fought in a war, the man said to him: “Son, that was the wrong side.”

Fortunately, his service in the army of the United States did not require him to fight. Though he could have been sent to the Korean War, instead he was shipped to Mannheim in his native Germany, to a unit responsible for tending huge cannons aimed toward the Soviet Union and capable of firing atomic warheads.

A theme that emerges strongly in conversation with Bob is his love of America and his fellow Americans. It started at the time of his first contacts with American soldiers, right after the war. “I felt total amazement about the humanity of the American soldiers,” he says. “I could not believe it: they did not want anything.”

And about us as a national community he speaks with conviction: “The American people have a sense of common decency that will never go away.”  At the same time, he still cares about his original country, though it no longer feels like home. One of his life goals is to be “a decent American and a German at the same time.” He wants to reconcile the two cultures, a tall task that he describes as “endless.”

Bob does not hesitate to reply to questions that many people regard as still sensitive and painful. Asked what drove his people to accept Nazi domination, he replies: “Most Germans were not evil but they were cowards.” When I asked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor and prisoner of conscience who was hanged for rising up against Hitler, Bob answered: “He is a person there should have been more of.”

Was there something in the Germans that made them especially vulnerable to dictatorship? “No one in those days,” Bob says, “could imagine the depths of depravity that Hitler represented. They totally underestimated the power that was coming through the Nazis.”

His fellow Germans had a distorted view of obedience. In Bob’s view, they had internalized a teaching of Martin Luther, centuries before. “Your body belongs to the State,” is the way Professor Spaethling puts it.

He can claim that title as an academic retired after a long career on the faculty of two universities. From the vantage point of age 76, Bob regards as one of the best decisions he ever made an action that all of his friends and colleagues disapproved of: he gave up tenure in the German department at Harvard to join the faculty at UMass as that branch of the state university was starting.

In retirement he continues his scholarship and calls it the best time for him. “I’ve had my best writing energy as an older person.” In 2000, after working seven years on his major opus, he published “Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life.”

As I gaze on a photo of Bob Spaethling in his German army uniform at age 16, I feel yet again a sense of awe at the astonishing changes of fortune in his long life.

Richard Griffin

At age 100, Bob Hope has left this world. Presumably he is entertaining all comers on a new, and higher, stage. He made it there despite the moral strictures that my mother, along with some other like her, leveled against his moral standards.

My mother was not one of Bob Hope’s fans. In fact, she would not allow me to see his movies.  To her, they were too sexy, though she would never have used this word to convey her objections. However, she gave no explanation of her reasons for trying to keep me away from the comedian’s films.

But I knew why. The way Hope joked about women and girls as alluring to males was enough.  Add to that, the sight of Dorothy Lamour wearing a sarong, as often happened in the famous Road films, was too titillating for me to be exposed to.

Sex was in Hope’s face, especially his eyes. He would look at women with a comic leer that indicated a lustful appreciation of them. When not explicit, he was suggestive, a word that the Legion of Decency, the Catholic film review agency, used in finding a film objectionable.

The Pilot, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, went further. As Boston Globe writer Martin Nolan recently recalled, in 1943 the Pilot criticized Hope for endangering the very salvation of the GIs to whom he had told filthy jokes. It would prompt them to go into battle and perhaps die with impure thoughts in their minds, thus exposing themselves as unprepared for God’s judgment.   

As noted, I largely escaped contagion by humor coming from America’s most famous funny man. Of course, I did not miss Hope altogether – no one could in the 1930s and 1940s when I was growing up. But when I did see him in a movie or hear him on the radio, he was someone whose taste my mother had made me feel wary of.

My mother’s hard line about Hope and some other entertainers came from her belief in the teachings of the Catholic Church. She took seriously its doctrines on sexuality, the way fewer and fewer Catholics seem to today. It wasn’t only the church that laid down her attitudes. Growing up in the backwash of the Victorian era, she inherited rigid attitudes from her family about anything to do with sex.

Her church taught then, as it still does now, that the least indulgence in sexual thoughts or actions on the part of an unmarried person is, in itself, seriously sinful. Yes, there could be mitigating circumstances, and less than full consent to venereal pleasure diminished the sin, but sexual activity of any sort was forbidden to anyone not married. And even if you were, there were strict limits as to what you could do, especially if you enjoyed it.

It could not have made my mother happy to serve as an ever vigilant sexual traffic cop, always ready to intervene for my protection and that of my brothers and sisters. She would seem also to have invested much energy into fending off “suggestive” incursions on her own psyche, from Bob Hope as well as others who failed her standards.

How my father felt about Bob Hope I never discovered. Since he did not take the role of prime moral arbiter in our household, his views about sexuality did not matter. Judging from the one time he spoke to me about the subject, very briefly at that, I assume that he shared many of my mother’s inhibitions.

Long since, I have felt free to laugh at Bob Hope’s jokes, even those formerly considered off-color. One of the many benefits of growing old is perspective. So many of the taboos of the past now seem trivial, not worth the effort that went into supporting them.

I now appreciate the man who, as cultural critic Roger Rosenblatt has said, “could turn an ordinary line into a howler.” Extending his praise, Rosenblatt adds: “He could do everything, like a con man should.”

Count me now among those who give “thanks for the memory” of this joke teller, singer, dancer and entertainer extraordinaire. When grown up, I had only one quarrel with him-his apparently uncritical backing of the Vietnam War. Though I can appreciate his sacrifices and courage in traveling far to entertain American troops, I saw him as supportive of our government’s determination to pursue a misbegotten war.

Even there, however, I appreciate some of the jokes he told: “I was on the way to my hotel,” he informed the soldiers, “and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction.”

This fabulous man, a native of England, reportedly has 56 American streets named after him. His mark on the American experience of the twentieth century, though not profound, will endure in history. Even my mother, were she still in this world, might now forgive him for having posed a danger to my youthful morals.

Richard Griffin

“I would not wish to be a burden to my children.”  This was reportedly said by a woman about to enter the hospital for a series of tests. It was her rationale for keeping from her adult sons and daughters news of her health crisis. She did not want them to know of her health crisis.

The identity of the woman is not known to me, only that she is a retired person living in Florida. But she could be a whole lot of people because her underlying attitude is shared by many Americans. They think it unreasonable, even wrong, to expect their younger family members to take responsibility for their care.

You can understand some reasons for this attitude. Parents in the older generation may wish to respect the freedom of adult children to live their own lives without being inhibited by burdens imposed on them by others. These children may have children of their own who need their constant care and attention and may be pressed by work responsibilities.

Members of the older generation may feel it only fair to give their daughters and sons the same scope to find their way through early adulthood that they themselves had.  They may also remember how, in the old days, it used to happen often that women, especially, would lose marriage opportunities because their parents expected them to take on their care.

As the father of a young woman searching for her life’s work, I recognize this impulse in myself. I would not relish having my daughter’s family life or her career diverted by her feeling the need to take care of me. An only child, she might feel obligated to respond to me at a time when important opportunities lay before her.

In some instances, relationships between adult children and their parents are often troubled. Unresolved family tensions dating back many years may have reduced confidence on both sides that care giving could work. People may fear it a source of possible damage to the family at large.

And, still another reason, some parents may have reason to fear their children taking advantage of them. Personal history can have taught them to be wary of the motives of their offspring. Long experience of selfishness and self-seeking may justifiably make them suspect what their children might do to them.

And yet, when you look at the situation critically, you wonder how much American individualism is mixed into the attitudes indicated here. Does not the retired woman’s withholding of information about her health crisis come from her seeing herself as a person appropriately left to her own devices? Is that not often the impulse behind the move to retirement communities in Florida or Arizona, to get away from dependence on others?

In many other countries of the world, the issue would not exist. There, members of the same family take it as normal and natural to assume the burdens of one another. I allude to this different approach, not to portray it as the Garden of Eden, but rather to suggest that the typically American attitudes toward independence are not a universal norm.

My basic attitude toward parent care may be thought counter cultural or, perhaps, just old fashioned. However, I like to think of it as grounded in sound anthropology and in enlightened spirituality. Care of other family members in general and parent care in particular, I am convinced, expresses the vital connection we have with one another and can offer precious opportunities for personal growth.

Among my favorite writers on the subject is Mary Pipher. Her insights in “Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders” continue to inspire me. Here’s what she says about taking care of her own parents: “Helping parents get through these hard times is one of our best chances to grow up. We are no longer helpless children; we become truly helpful. If we say no to this challenge, a part of us stays forever young and helpless. Our  own growth is truncated.”

Pipher scores a direct hit, spotting the best reason why parents should go slow in refusing to be a burden to their children. You may be depriving them of a fine opportunity to grow and develop into mature persons. If you deny them care giving opportunities, you may also be giving up the opportunity for yourself to become a more loving person.

Admittedly, the situation is often not as straightforward as I have presented it here. But my main point is to hold up for examination a set of attitudes that frequently work against our own best interests. Interdependence, I am convinced, is the most ennobling approach to life. We need one another, and in the same families our welfare often lies in finding ways to share one another’s burdens.

Richard Griffin

Donald Hall is a writer I can identify with. Not because of literary talent, which he has in abundance, but for other reasons. He is my same age; he gets up early in the morning; and, most of all, he loves his work.

This year he issued another edition of his book “Life Work,” first published in 1993. Since that time, his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, died at age 47, and he himself has survived cancer that seemed sure to kill him.

For five years after his wife’s death, Hall was not able to write in his usual range of forms. Even children’s literature in which he had excelled –  –  “The Ox-Cart Man” being his most celebrated book –  –  no longer stirred his creative powers. Nor could he find any pleasure in the essays at which he also excels.

As his grief diminished in intensity, he rediscovered the satisfactions of daily work. Some of that work includes tending to the farmhouse and the yard in Wilmot, New Hampshire where he has lived since 1975. To him, gardens are important; so is walking the dog and daily dealings with his fellow townspeople.

This balance of activities seems ideal to me, a contented urban dweller far removed from frequent contact with the good earth. At least in theory, I recognize the therapeutic benefits of chores outside the house that keep a person in contact with bedrock reality.

I strongly identify with Donald Hall’s vibrant sense of family members, some of them long gone. The farmhouse in which he lives was bought by his great-grandparents in 1865. There his mother and grandmother were born, and there were other family members living in the area. The church that Hall attends, some two miles away, was the site of his grandmother’s organ playing. She played for an astounding 78 years, starting at age 14.

Many of Hall’s activities evoke the presence of these ancestors: fixing things in the house, doing chores in the yard. They summon up the memory of family members who came before him, and continuity with them remains important to him. He knows a lot about his forbears and relishes much that he has learned of their accomplishments.

The stories told of his family members form a precious legacy for Donald Hall. Of them, he says: “I repeat stories I grew upon, stories that created me.” This is a man rooted in family history, much to the benefit of his own psyche.

But back to his main work, writing, I take inspiration from what he says about it. For him, “work is my obsession but it is also my devotion.” He gets out of bed at 4:30 or 5:15 in the morning, reads the newspaper during breakfast, all the while feeling excitement building in anticipation of turning to his writing projects.

But he is not an intellectual detached from the world. Every evening in season he watches the Red Sox on television. In the winter, he watches the Celtics’ play basketball. While following sports on screen, he writes letters to his friends, pays bills, shuffles through magazines, and prepares his tax returns.

Of all the insights Hall shares in his book, I like best those shared with him by the sculptor Henry Moore, expressed at age 80. “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is –  – it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

To me, this statement suffers from exaggeration but, still, it expresses a vital ideal, namely being passionate about something. Yes, it is easier for artists than for the rest of us to commit themselves entirely to one quest. But, those elders among us who have found such a similar ideal in whatever they do are indeed fortunate.

Hall also caught my attention when he wrote about a byproduct of work: “Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know you are working.” And he adds: “You are only content when you have no notion of contentment.”

In my working life, there is nothing that pleases me more than getting lost in a project. Forgetting about myself, becoming wrapped up in what I am doing, losing all sense of time – these are my most precious experiences in work. Unfortunately, they are altogether too rare.

Would that more of us in later life – – yes in retirement – – could find activities that can bear this kind of meaning. Many of us, to be sure, have learned to reshape retirement to make of it a time of flourishing, in both our inner and outer lives. Work may mean something quite different now from what it meant when we were paid for the job we did: it may even have more significance for our lives at this point.

Richard Griffin