Month: January 2018

The interviewer asked a question we all wanted to know, had some idea about, but welcomed hearing it from the man himself.

“Maestro, how is it that you can come into town on Thursday to rehearse, hold two complete run-throughs of the program, and during each, tell each section of the orchestra how you want a particular passage played, and conduct outstanding performances on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon that sound like you’ve all been playing together for years?”

Okay, he didn’t use all those precise words. His question was simpler. How can you provide each separate group of instruments meaningful direction during rehearsal?

The part of the answer about which we had some idea: “I do my homework.” He elaborated. I’ve had many mentors in my career, chief among them Leonard Bernstein. He said emphatically, “you’ve got to know the score.”

Martin Luther King, Junior knew the score. His team was behind and prospects were bleak. Overt, blatant discrimination against his people was stark in the South but just as real in other states. There were laws, for example, permitting “sundown towns.” Don’t know the term? Towns around the country prohibited African-Americans from being in town after dark.

He knew that neighborhoods in cities across the country actively discouraged African-Americans from buying homes in their midst; these folk feared that housing prices would fall if the neighborhood was integrated. He knew that there were quotas at universities in every part of the country dictating how many people who had skin color like his would be enrolled. He knew about high schools like mine where the enrollment was 1/3 white, 1/3 African-American, and 1/3 Hispanic though the Advanced and Honors courses included very few students who were not white.

He knew the potential price of his raising a fuss might be a bullet in his head. He knew the score.

This Christmas season felt different. I don’t know why. We decorated our house in a manner similar to the way we have decorated for a few years now. We played Christmas CDs about as much this year as in the past. We attended concerts featuring Christmas music, just like we have done in past years. We spent time with good friends and family.

The weather provided more chill in the air than in past years although our mainland friends would not consider a low temperature of 62 particularly chilly. We have acclimated, though, so we do have flannel sheets on the bed and wear long sleeves around the house, sometimes even in daytime. There was more wind than we remember. So, maybe the comparative melancholia of the weather was a factor.

Since last Christmas, we have lost a few more friends to the afterlife. Neither of those deaths was expected this time last year. One involved a teacher not yet 60 who seemed to have found a new contentment with her life, and we, her friends, all were happy for her for that. Another involved a man with whom we had swapped homes and intertwined lives, a one-of-a-kind fellow whose company we always enjoyed. It never feels good to have yet another blessing in one’s life end.

Maybe turning 70 this year has had more of an impact on me than I have thought. More and more of the obituaries that I seem to read daily, are for folks younger than me. More of my friends are experiencing more of the nettlesome declines in health or mobility. Saying “I can do most everything I used to be able to do, only more slowly,” as breezily as possible, might be masking a complaint rather than showing insouciance.

I know the score. Mom used to observe that one of the negatives in living to her age was that she was saying goodbye to the people who could remember the old days with her. And she set out to find some younger friends in her church, people older than me but younger than her.

The mortality rate over time for humans is 100%. Should I live to 95, as did Mom, I will be in the same boat, losing people who can talk with me about the way things used to be.

But, we have lost friends in other years as well. Why should this year feel any differently at Christmas? I won’t ever really know, and maybe I don’t need to.

People of a Certain Age, don’t we all try to know the score, in both senses? Don’t we hope that we are all the conductors of our own lives, the composers who fashion lives of fulfillment from whatever life presents to us? One of the contentments of advancing age comes from looking back over our time on the planet and seeing times we played well. “The older I get, the better I was” pokes fun at how our memories can edit out the bad. But most of us have enjoyed good runs that make for good memories.

We know this score because we have helped to create it.

The other score we just know. It is a reason to live well each day.

Daniel E. White

January 2018

 

“To those who have not the means within themselves of a virtuous and happy life every age is burdensome…to those who seek all good from themselves nothing can seem evil that the laws of nature inevitably impose. To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained; such is the inconsistency and perversity of Folly!”

People of a Certain Age, the lines above, and much of what follows, were written by Cicero in 44 B.C., published as De Senectude, or On Old Age, and translated by W.A. Falconer. The words offer great advice, much wisdom and caring, and some wry thoughts about sex and other pleasure of the body. The brackets are mine, and because the Roman sages tended not to write much about women in 44 B.C., everywhere it reads “men” or “him,” please mentally add the feminine.

The words also illustrate the remarkable continuity of human nature. This translation came to me from a younger friend who can read them in Latin if he chooses. I offer them, lines really about aging, on the third anniversary of my bi-weekly scribblings.

“…amid utter want old age cannot be a light thing, not even to a wise man; or to a fool, even amid utmost wealth, can it be otherwise than burdensome…the most suitable defenses of old age are the principles and practice of the virtues which, if cultivated in every period of life, bring forth wonderful fruit at the close of a long and busy career, not only because they never fail you even at the very end of life…but also because it is most delightful to have the consciousness of a life well spent and the memory of many deeds worthily performed.”

“Four reasons why old age appears to be unhappy: first, that it withdraws us from active pursuits; second, that it makes the body weaker; third, that it deprives us of almost all physical pleasures; and fourth, that it is not far removed from death.”

“[Regarding] withdraws us from active pursuits…Are there, then, no intellectual employments in which aged men [and women] may engage, even though their bodies are infirm? [This is] like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of the ship because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller…”

“It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but is even richer.”

“ I do not now feel the need of the strength of youth…any more than when a young man I felt the need of the bull or of the elephant. Such strengths as a man has he should use, and whatever he does should be done in proportion to his strength…let every man make a proper use of his strength and strive to his utmost, then assuredly he will have no regret for his (her) want of strength.”

“He who strives…to mingle youthfulness with age may grow old in body but old in spirit he will never be.”

“…the third ground for abusing old age…is that it is devoid of sensual pleasures. O glorious boon of age, if it does indeed free us from youth’s most vicious fault…if reason and wisdom did not enable us to reject pleasure, we should be very grateful to old age for taking away the desire to do what we ought not to do. For carnal pleasure hinders deliberation, is at war with reason, blindfolds the eyes of the mind, so to speak, and has no fellowship with virtue.”

“…old age, though it lacks immoderate banquet, may delight in temperate repasts.”

“Nothing can be more abounding in usefulness nor attractive in appearance than a well-tilled farm, and to its enjoyment old age not merely offers no obstacles but even entices and allures…Let others, then, have their weapons, their horses and their spears, their fencing-foils…old age can be happy without [them.]”

“…the fourth reason—one that seems especially calculated to render any time of life anxious and full of care—the nearness of death; for death, in truth, cannot be far away…clearly death is negligible, if it utterly annihilates the soul, or even desirable, if it conducts the soul to some place where it is to be forever…What shall I fear, if after death, I am destined to be either not unhappy or happy.”

“Old age is the final scene, as it were, in life’s drama, for which we ought to escape when it grows wearisome and certainly, when we have had our fill.”

“Such, my friends, are my views of old age. May you…attain it and thus be able to prove by experience the truth of what you have heard from me.”

May we all age well in the spirit of Cicero!

Daniel E. White

January 8, 2018