Month: December 2015

Obscured in the King James version of the Bible chapter often read at weddings and known for its descriptions of love is this line: “Now we see through a glass darkly, then face to face.” This sentence is the greatest promise I can imagine. One day, I will see clearly.

The promise follows another lesser-known verse about speaking, understanding and thinking like a child until one grows up and gives up childish ways. Much has been written alleging that, as one ages, one returns to childish ways. The allegation is specious.

In Dr. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, the author dissects the ways in which older Americans have been treated as they gradually develop the inevitable infirmities of old age. His Chapter Two, “Things Fall Apart,” is a decade-by-decade account of how major organs and systems of the body break down over time. There are steps people can take to slow that deterioration but basically, our bodies fall apart with time.

One’s first reaction might be “I should have drowned myself at age 40,” so disheartening is the news. Yet we all already understand the deal; we are not immortal, and our bodies are merely reflecting basic laws of physiology and physics. So, we press on, bravely accepting a few more aches and pains each year or a little less ability to hear.

Despite this physical falling apart, we are, remarkably, happier as a group than those who are younger, according to many studies. Gawande notes that, as we age, we shift toward “appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting.” What’s childish about this? If we find this more fulfilling, Gawande asks, why do we wait so long?

Gawande cites the research of Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen to answer that question. In her work, Dr. Carstensen has established, through a series of experiments, that perspective matters. “When life’s fragility is primed, people’s goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It is perspective, not age, that matters most.” Of course, People of a Certain Age, since we are among the older group in our society, our “fragility” is necessarily more “primed” than is someone’s who is thirty.

To offer the perspective of a person in his late 60s is what led to my writing these occasional pieces a year ago. Happily, my thoughts have prompted many readers to write about their own perspectives, telling their own stories. We are reflecting the perspective of age.

My perspective about mortality was affected by my reading Dr. Gawande’s book, given to me by a man whose vocation is running a first-rate retirement community in Honolulu. The first sentence of the book—“I learned a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them”—grabbed me.

There were no lessons for Gawande about mortality but then who among us, we People of a Certain Age, has thought much mortality, unless we have faced a serious health issue or the loss of a loved one? Gawande’s criticism is that we have applied medical answers to issues arising from aging without thinking much about what might constitute a “good life,” even as we grow old.

He uses Ivan Ilich, from Russian literature, to illustrate how those around a dying person can mis-apprehend what is important to that person. He champions hospice for its focus on the person rather than the disease, a focus that often adds some higher quality days of living for the patient.

“Depends on your perspective;” I’ve said that often, sometimes to explain to my students why Presidents often think differently once in office, or coached my professional colleagues as they handled difficult situations with parents and students.

There is, of course, that glass of water that stands as a symbol of perspective. My favorite response to the image is that the glass is full; half water, half air.

For a class I co-taught at the University of Hawaii, I shared the following as an introduction to consideration of one’s “positionality” in doing practitioner action research.

“A triangular prism hangs from a thin filigree thread in my study window. I look through it into the yard outside whenever I notice the refracted colors moving slowly around the room as the day progresses. Peering through the prism, I watch just-budding forsythia blur into golden clumps of color, separated now from the distinct arching of branches and formed into a new version of spring. Later, as the sun sets, the forsythia reappear as golden, violet, blue, and orange dots across the table where I am writing. Both points of seeing present shifting versions of the environment surrounding me: these versions depend not only on the slight motion of the hanging crystal itself but also in the angles from which I look through and around the prism.” (J. Miller, in Teachers as Curriculum Creators)

Through a prism or a glass darkly, or the Revised Standard version’s “in a mirror dimly. One day we will be face to face. Until then, I will treasure the perspective unfolding in my life and wish you the same satisfaction. There is nothing childish about that.

Happy New Year!

Daniel E. White

December 29, 2015

Every time our Jewish mother, Mildred Joseph, took us to Avery Fisher or Carnegie Hall, she would say “I’m so glad that baby Jesus was born because there has been so much good music written because of him.”

I thought of Mildred on Sunday when the soloist sang, “How can I keep from singing?” How, indeed!

This is the time of year when the air is filled with music, holiday music, mostly Christmas oriented, that includes cheery secular songs, moving and beautiful carols, and instrumental compositions with upbeat tempos, like those of Mannheim Steamroller.

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and cannot remain silent,” wrote Victor Hugo, well before his words spawned the soaring lyrics and music of Broadway’s Les Miserables. I’m sure Mr. Hugo’s music did not have to include lyrics. Chords and melodies move people, too.

I am a fan of music without words, like the compositions that we heard with Mildred. I have been moved to tears by melodic representations of, say, the afternoon of a faun or being beneath the Southern Cross. “Greensleeves” does not require words to inspire me. Sometimes words even get in the way of magnificent compositions.

I am a fan of music with words, too. Lots of people must be. Radio stations depend on it. When do we most commonly sing? At important events: weddings, church services, holiday gatherings, funerals, ball games. And in private, like in the shower. I think we sometimes forget to sing when singing would be healthy.

Judy and I enjoy Broadway musicals. Wherever we have lived, we have been season subscribers, or at least regular attendees, for local theaters presenting the ones from the canon—Oklahoma, Show Boat, Les Miz, Carousel. We like Sondheim, too, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. When we are in a big city, like New York or London, a hunt for tickets is one of our first priorities. In New York, we froze walking from the hotel to Jersey Boys. For my birthday, Mamma Mia in London was a special treat. “Thank you for the Music” by ABBA captures my sentiments exactly. I want that song and one from A Chorus Line (What I did for Love) at my funeral.

We see movie musicals, too. In a recent interview, a Hollywood director who specializes in them separated the genre into those movies in which the song is the natural outgrowth of the dialogue leading up to it and those where the song sticks out like a sore thumb.

That might be art imitating life. There might be inappropriate times for singing. Maybe it depends on the song.

Years ago, I was part of a church committee charged with hiring a new choir director. One candidate asked me how many poems I could recite in full. Then he asked me how many songs I could sing, remembering all of the lyrics. The latter number swamped the former. He made his point.

I heard another interview about a fellow whose dad dragged him to Pete Seeger concerts when the fellow was a teenager. Being a teen, he preferred rock or hip hop or anything other than folk music. He took notice, though, of how the Seeger concerts created communities of people who loved the music and sang the lyrics and shared the values of social conscience and social justice. He said he felt there were real bonds between these people. I’m told rock concerts do the same thing.

People of a Certain Age, if you were in an elementary classroom like mine, you sang frequently. That’s how I learned “O Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” which I have never sung since fourth grade. But, we sang, often. When did we stop?

Music unites. What nation does not have an anthem? What college lacks a piece it calls its Alma Mater?

How can I keep from singing? My Dad could not. The songs he sang on a regular basis during his life are the in-the-moment visits by him for me whenever I hear them.

One in particular. At our house for Christmas dinner one year, we played Barbara Streisand’s Christmas album. “I Wonder as I Wander “played. Dad dissolved. I had never seen him so…what? Moved, certainly. Sad? Depressed? Filled with memory? With joy?

I can’t know the music’s power on Dad. But it had power.

How can I keep from singing?

Actually, I can think of one inappropriate time for singing. It is tied to a place. Dad sat on our deck in Sacramento at 4:00 a.m. and sang to the trees. He woke our neighbors. They were very nice, saying that he sang beautifully, but hoping that he might start a little later in the morning.

Next morning, he sang again, more softly. No one awoke. He could not keep from singing.

Neither can I, in my head. Not sure that I would want to. Mildred would approve.

Daniel E. White

December 17, 2015

I should not be surprised when I find out that an experience we’ve had that we thought was unique turns out not to be. But I often am.

NPR carried the story of a First Mate on a container ship making a China-California-Japan circuit on a regular basis. The officer is ethnic Indian, a Sikh from Punjab. The story focused on how he spends his day off in port at Oakland, California. He heads out early with a shopping list; Best Buy for electronics, Target or Walmart for consumer supplies like Gerber’s Baby Food and various lotions, and Victoria’s Secret for… well, you get the picture (a trip there is indicative of a husband on his way home). The reporter was tickled by the idea of this man of the sea spending his time on shore shopping for his extended family.

Turns out, a local church serving seafarer’s in Oakland provides volunteers for such commercial excursions. Turns out, he is not a unique Sikh!

In 1969, while we were in graduate school in Seattle, Judy and I enjoyed lunch on board a freighter docked at the Port of Tacoma, guests of an Indian First Mate and the Captain. Why we were lunching on an Indian freighter is another story in itself. The next day, when the ship had moved to the Port of Seattle, Judy agreed to drive the First Mate to do some shopping. Two of his shipmates asked to come along and the foursome went off to White Front, the Costco of its day.

They filled our VW Bug with loads of consumer goods ranging from Ivory Soap to disposable diapers bound for friends and relatives back home in India. Each man had a list from his wife. In a moment of improbability, they stopped by on the way back to the ship to pick me up from my softball game.

Question: How many rolls of toilet paper and packages of disposable diapers did it take to fill up a Bug laden with five adults? Answer: in such circumstances, there is no such thing as a filled up VW Bug.

Based on the NPR story and our experience, and the fact that the Oakland church has a plan to support such forays into the biosphere of America’s stores, I must conclude that there are lots of first mates and crewmen from scores of ships making port in the U.S. who spend their off-days on land with shopping lists from their wives.

My sample of two also indicates that the shoppers invariably are shopping for others, seldom themselves.

Judy (especially, since she drove and was the on-board domestic expert for the shipmates) and I have gotten lots of mileage from telling the story of our Seattle shopping spree with three new friends from India. We still can, of course. But it will feel like whenever you describe a pristine trail you think you have discovered to a couple that, as it turns out, have tramped that trail for years. “Oh, you mean that trail!”

People of a Certain Age, we have spent much of our lives establishing our uniqueness, our individuality. Have you, like me, concluded that, in so many ways, the more we have tried to be unique, the more we seem to have in common with at least some others?

A part of the business of growing up was focused on encouragements like “Stand up for yourself,” “Be who you are,” and “Like snowflakes, we are all unique.” That exceptionalism is often tempered by cultures and/or families that highlight community obligations and responsibilities, encouragement not to stand out in a crowd. Perhaps it is natural for people raised to be individuals to think that significant experiences in their lives are unique.

Logically, with seven billion people on Earth, there are bound to be some repeats. Whenever something different happens in our lives, we sometimes become aware of something similar happening to someone else.

At times, there is virtue in not being unique, like when you realize that others have lost loved ones and survived after the loss. Feeling connected to the on-going flow of humanity, at one (or nearly so) with others of like mind and experience, conveys the warmth of belongingness, a satisfaction born of being “a part of” rather than “the only.”

I think a part of the satisfaction of Thanksgiving and the allure of Christmas (the secular version) lies in the connectedness these holidays encourage us to celebrate in the company of others.

Of course, it does not matter, in the larger scheme of things, whether or not our day with the merchant marines was unique. The fun comes from hearing a story nearly fifty years later that reminds you of a good time in your own life.

I wonder if those guys on the freighter, who would be our age at least and likely not at sea any more for a living, remember a particular shopping trip in a VW Bug is Seattle?

Daniel E. White

December 2, 2015