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Baseball season once more. Life begins anew.

I heard a story on HPR about a father and son at Wrigley Field. The home of the Chicago Cubs is hallowed ground to baseball fans, the more so, perhaps, because the Cubs haven’t won a World Series in over a century.

The father was showing his son how to keep score on the scorecard in the center of the program. The reporter speculated that the father’s father had done the same years before. That image transported me to Sicks’ Seattle Stadium, where “Aunt” Jane Harris’ alligator purse was a lucky charm for the Rainiers, and my father taught me the symbols of scorekeeping at games in the 1950s. I have never forgotten how.

A baseball stadium evokes good times past, games and players of old, the warm and comforting sense of familiarity. For me, and for other lovers of the game, a baseball stadium is a special place.

A certain kind of church, one with a large pipe organ and stained glass windows (think the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.) is often another such place. So are, invariably, college campuses, whether in the U.S., England or Japan.

At age 18, I sailed on the Semester at Sea, circumnavigating the world. Many days I stood on deck gazing at the horizon, overwhelmed by a sense of smallness and a sense of peace, at oneness with the universe. I was on a ship—the place obviously moved—but that didn’t matter.

I asked Judy about any place that stimulated her senses in some special way. She went to the day and hour that the heat of summer breaks, the first hint of fall chill whispering its way into being. Her sense of special place was many places. The feeling of peace was the same.

Going into a stadium, a church with a great organ and stained glass windows, a college campus, a beach facing the horizon? Count me in on those trips.

My mother and I enjoy a ritual. Whenever I visit her in La Mesa, we find an afternoon for me to drive us to a particular parking lot at Sunset Cliffs, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We park, roll down the windows to catch the breeze and the sounds, and we watch. There’s a lot to watch so we stay quite a while. Then we drive to the other side of Point Loma, get a sandwich and go to the end of Shelter Island to eat our sandwiches and watch ships coming into the harbor, pelicans patrolling, dogs walking their owners, whatever passes.

Our watching time nurtures remembering time, too. Mom has lived most of her 94 years near salt water. She especially remembers time past at the seashore.

We both hold those times at those places as special, too.

A Somerset Maugham short story tells of an Englishman who worked his professional life in Hong Kong. He loved the liveliness of the city, felt comfortable in its foreign-ness which was tempered by its British-ness. On one level, he would have been content to live out his years there.

But, there was a nagging feeling that he needed to return to England to retire. More and more, he reconciled himself to going home, and soon enough, going home was the most attractive alternative.

So, he went. Over time, his life in England lost the allure he had imagined it to have whilst he was in Hong Kong. The dreariness of the weather depressed him. He reminisced about the liveliness and foreignness of Hong King. Inducements for him to stay in England disappeared, despite his high expectations about going home to England.

He resolved to return to Hong Kong. On his way, he stopped in Vietnam. First this attraction and then that one kept him from completing his return to Hong Kong. If anyone asked when he would be leaving for Hong Kong, he would reply “soon.”

He died in Vietnam because he feared being disappointed by Hong Kong in the way England had disappointed him. Rather like, you can’t fail if you don’t try.

Special places that satisfy the senses are wonderful. And, there is always the risk that, one day, you will return to that place and not feel what you have always felt before.

A friend once quipped “expectations are resentments under construction.” Perhaps we would do well to savor the moments when our places satisfy our senses, be pleasantly surprised each time that they do, knowing that, one day, the magic might not appear.

Even at Wrigley Field.

April 30, 2015

The frenetic energy of the players in Rent pauses as some of the singers ponder dignity and whether anyone will care when they are dead and gone.

In similar fashion, the artist J.M.W. Turner, in the movie, Mr. Turner, laments that his ultimately fatal heart ailment will condemn him to obscurity.

I’m not sure when I began scanning the obituaries on a more regular basis. The old joke suggests that I do so to be sure I’m not listed. Sometimes I read the longer ones entirely, those that chronicle lives that included particular achievement or accomplishment.

The death of Charles Schulz years ago made me feel a part of me had died. I did not know him, but I read Peanuts every day. From the time of Schulz’s death on, I could only read repeats, unless someone took up the pen and ink and carried on. The creator was gone. So was part of my daily life. I felt like some micron of me was dead.

Silly, of course. Countless others who have contributed in some way to my life have died since. I don’t mourn every passing as I did Schulz’s. But some. I am made up of lots of microns. I can survive many more deaths like this.

I have survived more immediate deaths: my grandparents, my father, my uncles, colleagues, children of colleagues, dear friends. Recently, the love of my sister’s life died, before age 70, younger than the statistical norm for male deaths in the U.S. Ill, and in a rehab center, he died wearing a snazzy shirt, sooner than expected though he, and we, knew that his illness would claim him sooner rather than later.

Was the snazzy shirt—a colorful Hawaiian shirt—his claim to dignity? Like the heroine in Cabaret would choose “when I go, I’m going like Chelsea,” did he choose to dress up for his going? Did he know the when of his dying and determine to cross over looking smart and feeling proud?

People care that he has died. He’s avoided that apprehension of the Rent players. There’s talk of some lasting memorial of his life, a form of immortality. As long as we who knew him live, he enjoys one form of immortality. We’re talking about something that would outlast us. I have wished before that every soul leaving this earth would be remembered by more than a footprint on the shifting sands of time.

I can’t do anything about the who-will-care part for those I don’t know. I think anyone who dies without someone caring is the utmost tragedy of death.

I have also wondered about dignity and death. A movement for assisted suicide is called Death with Dignity, asserting for the dying the right to determine how and when to end their lives. The usual image of the nearly-departed is one of pain muted by palliatives, being bed-ridden serviced by tubes, monitored by technology.

It must be a chore for a person to find and assert dignity in that tableau. I hope people do.

Dying a hero’s death on the battlefield has always commanded high status among the ways one can die. Nathan Hale bravely proclaimed “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” just before being hanged by the British. Millions of us have benefitted in the course of U.S. history from the willingness of men and women to “give their last full measure, “ as Lincoln proclaimed.

We owe such as these. We honor them. We memorialize them. In our honoring, we dignify. We can hope that, if they were conscious in their last moments, they thought about something more than their torn bodies and oozing lifeblood.

The “Renters” faced AIDS. Their literary ancestors in La Boheme confronted tuberculosis. The physical nature of those deaths is not pretty, either. Their anxiety about dignity might be shared by many of us who, were we able to choose, would opt for the way the Gambler in Kenny Rogers’ song, cashed in his chips; asleep. You can’t fall dead if you are already prone. No fear. No pain. You simply don’t wake up. Did the Gambler die with dignity?

Truth is, dignity is a state of mind. No one can rob anyone else of his or her dignity. I do not know when, how, or where I will die. I hope I do so proclaiming “I’ve had a good run.”

Maybe I will have the chance to put on a snazzy shirt—a Hawaiian one.

Daniel E. White

April 15, 2015

A while back, an Adult Development PhD encouraged the audience to think of their memories like the fortune-telling 8-ball we played with as kids.

“The answers are all in there,” she said. “It just takes longer for them to reach the window.”

Most of her audience were in their late 40s. Our speed-to-the-window would have been measured in nano-seconds (which we did not know about at the time). Her message was less relevant to me then.

Nowadays, that ball is a reassuring image. My window could be cleaned, though, to clear the fuzz.

I recalled the 8-ball recently when reading a story about German researchers who concluded that one reason many older people can be slower to recall facts or learn new information is that their brains are so stuffed with accumulated knowledge, not because of supposed inevitable cognitive decline.

“The brains of older people do not get weak,” Michael Ramsicar of Tubingen University said to the UK’s The Independent. “On the contrary, they simply know more.”

Ramsicar went on to observe that computers with less information stored in memory often retrieve requested data more quickly while machines packed with information are slower.

I worried at this point in the report. Computer chip-makers compete over speed of retrieval. Fine, two computers of the same make and model may have different retrieval speeds according to the volume stored. But, inevitably, there will be newer, faster models.

I calmed myself with the thought that capacity in the older computers—and me—does not disappear. The speed is just slower. Or so the researchers assert.

One study cited by the Germans noted research tests that involved trying to remember pairs of unrelated words. They concluded that older people often achieve a higher performance because they have a “better understanding of language” and are, as a result, “naturally resistant to nonsensical pairings.”

I hope the researchers are in their 30s or 40s so that they cannot be accused of age bias.

People of a certain age, do you realize what this means? We know stuff, lots of it. We naturally resist nonsensical pairings, because we understand language better. Our tip-of-the-tongue moments are mere manifestations of brains bursting with information.

Take that, you young whippersnappers who think you know everything. Your incessant “text-speak” will lead to difficulty down the road resisting nonsensical pairings! Or not. You might just become older, like us, with all of the attendant advantages of age.

Senior moments as battle ribbons. The world turned upside down, just like you had to do with the 8-ball to get an answer. If we only knew that it was true.

We seniors fret about memory. We joke about premature senility, nervous because we have friends and acquaintances who are senile for real. Maybe we subconsciously worry about our prospects in terms of the dreaded Big A—Alzheimer’s.

We scrub the bad stuff from memory as much as possible and use shared memories in conversations with old friends to recapture treasured feelings. At the same time, we try to avoid living so much in the past that we lose the present. Or bore the young people.

Not being able to find the car keys is a momentary nuisance. Inability to experience again the joy of a given moment in the past is a treasure none of us wants to lose.

Cognitive scientists understand so much more about the human brain than before. What they are learning has stimulated the development of products and activities designed to maintain and increase memory. That’s good. I have friends who have bought the most widely advertised commercial plan available, and swear by its effectiveness.

One author cited research that touted regularly learning new things as the best way to insure active memory remaining alive and accessible. In a nutshell, this neurological exercise program stimulates the development of neurons and revitalized synapses and brain connections. Use it or lose it. One of the suggested activities was to learn a new language, “like Italian.” If that prompts a return to Florence, sign me up.

The Germans might be right. If so, imagine if someone could invent a memory-scrubber that ditched what you didn’t need or want, maintaining brain capacity levels. Better yet, a memory stick, to store the possibly useful but not necessarily first-rate recollections.

If they are incorrect, maybe brain scientists will find how to save the memories we subliminally fear losing.

In the meantime, I’ll keep the 8-ball oiled and clean the window. Capiche?

“So we’ve stayed put since we saw you last. You haven’t. Bring us up to date.”

Our good friends from the 1970s wanted a synopsis of the 36 years since we last spent time together. We had worked at the same university, played golf, shared meals, started a penny-ante poker group (that is still playing), the kinds of activities friends do together. They had two kids. We had none so we had taken a special interest when theirs were a baby and toddler. Until this night, we had been just Christmas card friends for more than three decades.

The intervening years notwithstanding, they were still the same characters with the same sense of humor and the same capacity to tell stories over each other. Their voices were the voices we remembered. We felt comfortable in the familiarity of their home even though they had lived in a different house back then.

Bring us up to date. How does one convey the stories of 36 years in the minutes between pupus and dinner? They listed where we had lived over the years and approximated the length of our stay in each place. We were to fill in the essentials without losing the evening to mind-numbing narration of the virtual film called “Our Lives Since 1978.”

From our holiday exchanges, they knew what jobs we had worked. They asked how we liked each community in which we had lived. Embedded in our answers, no doubt, were cues about how we had felt about people, jobs and places, each cue a potential prompt for a divergent question and conversation. But dinner awaited.

Places and jobs. These were the skeleton of our effort to bring them up to date. Not surprising. How often do we define ourselves to others by what we do and where we live?

We ended our narration at the point of starting a school. They, being educators as well, wondered what that was like. To them it seemed daunting. To us it was what we did. She rang the dinner bell.

He said they had stayed put in retirement because they had already been in that city for more than thirty years, the time he had spent in the same job. I said having roots was desirable, that living many places risked no place being home.

He observed that home for us had been wherever Judy and I lived together. I agreed.

We talked about the old days, who was still at the university, who had died. We swapped stories about travel adventures. They go some place special every year. Have done since he retired in 2001. We discovered we had been in many of the same places. We compared experiences.

We heard about their kids and grandkids. The toddler we remembered is now 42, the infant is a state official, and they have kids of their own. Sleepovers at the grandparents are a regular treat. We told them about my mother’s romance at age 81, how she married a man she had not seen in seventy years. We learned things about her family not shared over dinners of yesteryear.

Occasionally, we divided into male-female conversations. He and I lamented the state of athletics at the old school–they should have stayed Division II–and  complained about the high salaries of Division I football coaches. The ladies toured the house and spoke about—well, I don’t know because he and I were still lambasting the NCAA, referees who don’t call “steps” anymore, and wondering whatever happened to the well-behaved role model athlete. Old guy stuff.

I gave them a copy of my book. She gave us a bottle of the limoncello she makes at home. Delicious. I hope they find my book as good.

We talked at the dinner table until 11:30, over four hours. You can say more things in four hours than you can between pupus and dinner.

Had we managed to bring each other up to date?

Daniel E. White

March 15, 2015

Every birthday, Mom chuckles, “Now I have to learn to be…” and then she adds her new age. 94 this last one.

Whenever I complain about a pain or being tired, she counters with, “well, you’re learning how to be…” and she says my age.

Aspiring to the next age cohort seemed common in my younger days. As a child, I
coveted teenage, when I would be allowed to stay up for The Red Skelton Show or Bold Journey. Being recognized at age nine to be older, and obviously wiser, than 7 or 8 year olds was important.

At teenage, I counted the days until I could drive. Undeterred by having to pay my own insurance, I applied all of the money I had to buying a used 1958 Chevrolet Impala with more horsepower than I understood. The car represented my ticket to adult-­‐like freedoms. And didn’t we all want to be 21?

In adulthood, better jobs, starting a family, buying a house, earning (maybe even
saving) money, achieving status; these became mileposts on our journey toward
responsibility, influence, authority. Maybe even some measure of power.

Always becoming. A virtue—growth—became a burden; if you’re not growing,
you’re dying. Where was the time for just being?

As retirement nears, further anxious anticipation arises. “I can’t wait until I can
retire” or, a modern lamentation, “I don’t think I will ever be able to retire.”

At lunch, a friend observed that a pastor-­‐acquaintance of his was staying in his post past the point of effectiveness. He was becoming a problem to his parish, beloved but an embarrassment. My friend called it “the Willie Mays syndrome.”

David Heenan has written a book on the topic, Leaving on Top. That calls for
knowing where the top is and how near to starting back down you are. Like Kenny Rogers says, “you gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”

Not easy.

Learning how to be one’s age is not to be confused with resignation or giving in.
Rather, viewed as a positive, that learning helps one to accept and enjoy the experiences available to all of us every day as part of an unfolding story in which we are the heroes. Tough spots can become plot points.

Hrumph, you say. What’s to enjoy about not being as strong as twenty years ago or the stiffness even a twenty-­‐minute drive into town introduces to your legs or the increasing frequency with which you read the obituaries and know someone
there?

Point taken. As the lady said, getting old is not for sissies.

People my age and older might still twitch for accomplishing or becoming in the
same way they always have, even still doing what they have always done, and
effectively. No Willie Mays effect evident.

There is no rule here.

I said that to my friend at lunch, and he smiled, understanding. He’s still twitchy.
That’s who he is.

Kareem Abdul-­‐Jabbar, writing in The Rotarian, called retirement “transition.” Elegant idea, transitioning from gainful employment to taking a class in Marine
Science for fun, teaching Tai Chi as a volunteer, collecting food for the Food Bank,
playing more golf, learning Italian for your upcoming journey, and so on. The
“transitioned” people I know all seem busy as ever, now doing what they choose, not what they must.

Another friend heard my recent schedule of activities and referred to me as “hard-­‐ working.”

“Busy, perhaps,” I said. “But the hard work is past, left to others still striving for the next job.”

William Chace teaches literature to adults now that he has retired from being a
college President. One physician/student of his explained that he was seeking the
wisdom he had little time to seek before. Chace described him as “recovering lost
time.”

What a pleasant prospect, to recover lost time!

I have not met retired people itching to be the next age up. They might still be “becoming,” but there is much less urgency and far more understanding that “being” is a good place to be, too, at least some of the time. You notice the little things more the less you fret about becoming.

Becoming is a lifetime habit, though, certainly learned, perhaps even inbred. For
hard working people, just “being” can be a challenge.

I can’t claim the same mindset as Mom yet. I think I have evaded my Willie Mays
moment but is 68 really that different from 69 or 70?

Maybe there is a “learning how” to “learning how.” Probably a mindset.

Dan White

February 19, 2015

I looked at Ike differently today. He might be my version of the Big Chair.

Jo Smith, my inspiration for “About Aging,” wrote a column about her long-­‐time
friend, the Big Chair. She bought the chair for her mother when Jo was nursing her through ill-­‐health. When her mother died, the Big Chair “wrapped its arms” around Jo and her newborn son.

The Big Chair symbolized “her whole life,” spanning periodic transcontinental moves, bouts of sick children, three re-­‐upholsterings, and settling into the one  room that defined Jo’s living space in her final days.

The Big Chair suited TV watching, knitting and naps. It shared scores of books with Jo. It “never advises, never criticizes…it accepts,” Jo wrote.

Chances are, we all have a Big Chair. In a life that speeds change and impermanence at us at ever-­greater velocity, there is some tangible thing to
touch or see that provides some psychic safety, a rock of dependability, connecting us to ourselves through time and space.

It helps to be older, I think, to understand Big Chairs. I remember my grandmother, after Poppa died, spending time in the passenger seat of the Cadillac DeVille purchased in the 1960s by him. The Caddy sat in my parents’ garage next to the small apartment to which she had moved after his death.

So far as I know, Nana shed no tears sitting there. Her visits were as routine and
matter-­‐of-­‐fact as her taking vitamin supplements at every meal. Sometimes, Dad offered to take her for a short ride. She would agree but told him it wasn’t really necessary. It’s good for the car, he would say.

My folks sold the Caddy when she died. It was a valuable used car. I know now
it was something more.

I am among the fortunate to enjoy a long marriage to my best friend. I don’t equate a best friend with a Big Chair. She is so much more. Friendships evolve,
grow, mature, engage one’s whole being.

I am certain many people would think about their religious faith as a Big Chair. I can relate to that. But faith isn’t really a Big Chair, either. It is harder to touch, and it often is tested.

I have quoted Robert Frost’s encouragement to “take something like a star to stay
our minds on and be staid.” I believe in the importance of that, too, a fixture, there without fail when the clouds clear and the sun is gone. Valuable, but still not quite the Big Chair.

My mother has TW. She made him. He is a teddy bear that has sat on the Hokulea, sailed through the Panama Canal, and settled for years on my mother’s walker, day and night, usually in his Aloha outfit. It is hard to think of Mom without seeing TW there, too. I wonder if she thinks of him as a Big Chair?

When I was 10, our family adopted an orange male tabby cat, with stripes in a
darker orange and green eyes. We named him Tiger. It fell to me to feed Tiger and carry him every night to a door to underneath the house where he could sleep and eat in fresh air without worrying about competing cats or the odd
raccoon popping out of the canyon across the street.

When I was 13, we took Tiger on a driving vacation to Yellowstone and the Grand
Canyon. The day we got home, Tiger did not come in at his regular time. For 16 days, I searched and whistled for Tiger.

Late one night, Dad awoke me to put Tiger on my bed. Tiger fell asleep, purring.
So did I.

Ten years later, it was the Red Baron (RB for short). Sadly short-­‐lived, he was
succeeded by a champion jumper, Rigby. When Rigby had a heart attack, Mo
replaced him. All of them orange, male and neutered.

These days, Ike is never far away from my writing desk. That requires periodic
dusting of the desk because his orange fur does not always stay attached to his
chubby body. He supervises when we work in the yard. His face fills the translucent kitty door when we drive into the garage at night, welcoming us. We have spent time together in contemplation.

I spoil him. Cats bond with food sources, if at all. Maybe that is all I am to him. I
know other people have fingernails more satisfying for scratching his back than
mine. That does not stop either of us.

Maybe Ike himself is not as permanent as the Big Chair. Unlike Jo’s, he might “criticize,” however cats do so. Still, for 57 years, there has been something about
the purr and the fur.

“Well, hel-­‐lo-­‐o-­‐o,” crooned the voice on the line from the past.

Roger sounded like he had when we used to talk on the phone in the 1960s. His voice, and I suppose mine for him, transported us to his green and white ’56 Chevy that stopped at Oscar’s for a burger and fries
when we had the money. We would insure the needed funds by putting just enough gas in the tank to get us through the weekend.

The radio gave us the Beatles when they were fresh, even revolutionary, with their mop-­‐top hair and suits with odd collars, singing, as teen singers always do, about love, imagined, real or lost. Their music annoyed our parents, raised on Big Bands, Sinatra and Dinah Shore, sustaining a human tradition of irritating one’s elders.

“She Loves You” still puts me instantly in the Chevy, cruising, singing along,
windows open, life so free.

“So how’s Wisconsin,” I asked in reply, confirming that I recognized the voice. And we were launched into catching up seasoned with memories.

Roger described his by-­‐pass, the value of stents, and his knee replacement. I countered with reports about radio-­‐active seeds in my prostate and torn retinas in each eye. We compared the frequency of periodic skin cancers, relics of days when the Chevy got us to La Jolla Shores for body-­‐surfing. No thought about sunscreen then; SPF was a random group of letters, not an advertising feature.

His new knee had roots in the ‘60s, too, a game of touch football on a Sunday when he should have been in church.

“God’s response to my playing hookey,” he laughed.

“Didn’t that cause you to flunk your physical for the Air Force?” I asked.

“No. That was my wrist.” Another game.

But not on a Sunday.

Roger was raised by a single mom, I was the son of a minister who never earned much a year. Our fun had to be free or at least low cost. The beach, listening to music on the radio, cruising, making fries last; they were the vehicles for bonding back then.

One year, I added a girl friend to the mix. Roger took the addition gracefully, and we became a threesome, all in the front seat. Remember seats like that?

Then came his girl friend. We found ways to earn money so that we could add movies to the mix of entertainment, preferably double features, a long-­‐forgotten
value. We accepted contributions from the girls for gas and weren’t above having them pay their own way into the show. We weren’t earning that much.

We married those girls. Still married.

Roger and I  liked the Beatles more than the girls did. Odd. When you hear tapes of their concerts, it’s the screams of girls that form the base over which “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” rises like a jet from a dusty landing strip.

Neither of us got Beatles haircuts—his mom and my dad would never have allowed that—and we had neither the money nor the fashion motivation to get suits with funny collars.

Maybe it was the Beatles’ shaking up of the status quo, the annoyance  of the older folks, albeit in the tamest of ways, that stirred Roger and me. Wannabe rebels without the courage, perhaps?

Roger’s life has surprised him. “Never thought I’d have done most of what has happened,” he said.

I agreed. “The unaimed arrow never misses, said Kimo on a T-­‐ shirt,” I said.

He laughed again. I remember that. We laughed a lot.

We talked for two hours. Like clockwork, the cell phone connection  between upper Wisconsin and Kapolei cut out after 50 minutes—twice. After the second time, we still took 20 minutes to close. Several times, there was one more thing to
recall.

He told me about driving the old neighborhoods on his last visit to San Diego. I told him I still do once in a while. We pondered what has happened to a few of the people who seemed so important to us in those days.

He asked to be remembered to my mom.

It would be fun to talk more often, we agreed.

I won’t have trouble recognizing the voice when that happens.

As Boomers unpack their parents’ houses, a question persists: what to do with the National Geographics?

Many of us have borne the responsibility for taking apart the home of a parent, perhaps more than once. The disposition of a collection of keepsakes and trinkets, photographs and furniture, closets filled with clothes from bygone fashions forms the task. Often, the experience is shared, with siblings, a remaining parent, spouses, or special friends. It is bittersweet, though often more bitter than sweet.

Perhaps on the dis-assembly team, there is a pack rat wanting to take anything remotely nostalgic, useful or not. With luck, there is a family historian who can recognize what should remain in the family because it has done for generations, or the photo that will help keep memory alive for descendents. For the sake of balance, having a person involved who can recognize what has value outside the family and no intoxicating memories attached and devise dispositions that will become cash to the benefit of a surviving spouse or the heirs.

A Dumpster Dave or Darla helps, too, providing a base line judgment of what has further utility and what is beyond its useful life or structural integrity.

Whatever the cast of participants, the task is the same; empty a house that has been a home.

Remember when National Geographic was just a magazine, trademark yellow on the edges and spine, decorated with stunning photography on the cover and inside? No TV Channel or “films by,” blog or Twitterfeed. Just a monthly delivery of knowledge and pictures. One could learn geography, anthropology, entomology, astronomy and so on. Medical frontiers might appear if they could be brilliantly illustrated.

A recent issue featured our Prairie Home Companion writing about the geography of his childhood in the twin cities area of Minnesota. We were there with him, just as much as we had been with the writer and photographer in New Guinea or Uganda. The same issue featured brain research, complete with photos of the routes of our neurological highway system, color-coded like any good map.

My wife and I have a National Geographic connection. Her brother’s cover photograph of a Jewel Scarab Beetle in 2001 announced the article inside about collecting and classifying some of Mother Nature’s most dramatic and beautiful creations. For professional photographers, a Geographic cover is the big leagues. This time, an amateur captured an object that reached out to those who saw it and lured them into the magazine’s net.

Growing up, my family subscribed to newspapers, news magazines, Sports Illustrated, and a couple of health publications. And the National Geographic. None of the papers or weeklies stayed in the house beyond the time it took for them to be read, usually by the next edition. A useful article in one of the health magazines might linger longer. The Geographics were piled in the study, in the storage area, in the garage. Tossing a Geographic was unthinkable, like burning a work of art or shredding a completed dissertation.

Which piece of furniture might begin its time as a family heirloom now? How many photographs of her at age six are needed to sustain memory? Which trinket is really an artifact, conveying the nature and personality of the one whose physical possessions are being parsed? How to decide?

Valuable things are easier, if there is a will involved, designating who gets what. Valuable things are harder, in the absence of any designation, and there are heirs particularly attuned to who gets what worth how much. Sometimes unpacking a house leads to unpacking a family.

My wife and I have moved household goods seventeen times in our 47 years of marriage. Seventeen opportunities to cull the collection, and still there is a large household of furniture, keepsakes and knick-knacks. In an ideal world, we will move to smaller digs as we age, maybe to a retirement community where limited space will force difficult choices, like the choices made by so many others before us.

We don’t have kids, so it is unclear to whom would fall the chore of unpacking our house if we were to perish together in a plane crash. In that ideal world, there wouldn’t be much.

We never subscribed to the National Geographic. At least they won’t have to worry over those.

About Aging

Depend on it! Barring tragedy or fatal illness, you will age into old age. What’s it like to get old?

Years ago, retired journalist Josephine Smith (Jo) wrote a column in the weekly Claremont Courier entitled “About Aging.” Jo would take any subject that struck her fancy and write about it from the perspective of one already past the Age of Retirement and moving toward Really Old.

Though in my 40s then, I found her musings entertaining and instructive. They revealed a point of view, one marked by time on the planet, one new to me. I think her column contributed to my comparatively calm embrace of the inevitable. I write in her honor.

Though our society benefits from the activities of many who count their ages in decades (Hawaii’s ex-Governor, for example, is in his eighth), we tend not to solicit the views of elders. Not a few older folks complain about retirement feeling like it is the onset of irrelevance in the minds of those younger. And the juniors often contribute to that feeling by dismissing as old-fashioned and outdated the views of their elders.

“About Aging” version 2015 seeks to be a voice from an age cohort that still often writes letters with pens and paper. They might or might not work in GoogleDocs or Drop Box. My voice is solitary but, I hope, perhaps, inclusive. I invite feedback by whatever means, including the social media, especially by letter or e-mail.

The voice will steer clear of partisan politics—there are enough voices in that realm already—and be, on occasion, curmudgeonly. The right to curmudgeon-ness is earned by the passage of time. But too much of it is tiresome; expect only small doses.

The voice will be affected by some of the gifts of advancing age: perspective, less concern about impressing others, perhaps even wisdom. Folks who share an age range seem also to share understanding that transcends gender or ethnicity, like knowing the “in” joke. Young folks might like to know that aging does not have to be a solitary activity.

My hope is that people my age (born 1947) and older will read “About Aging” and identify or relate and appreciate. I hope that younger readers will see the joy and possibilities still available for the taking even after one becomes Medicare-eligible.

A chance encounter with a nurse in her 30s underscored the potential value of “About Aging.” We were chatting about my mother, still in possession of a sound mind and contagious laugh at age 94.

“I don’t think I want to live past 85,” said the nurse. “Too many chances to be broken and not be able to get around.”

I was sitting in her exam room in the course of treatment for prostate cancer but I took no offense at her reference to being broken. Instead, I pointed out how much more likely her generation would be to live active lives into their 90s, given advances in medicine, nutrition, and understanding of the physiology of aging, etc.

“You should shoot for 95,” I said. I don’t think she was convinced.

Maybe reading “About Aging” would help her see her post-65 year old future in better terms. Maybe she would not read it at all, thinking it to be only about old people. Trying to have her see the wonders of life possible at every stage is a worthwhile effort.

Some people ease into years that really are golden. Others are dragged kicking and screaming into their 60s, 70s and beyond. That is not unique to the elderly, being dragged kicking and screaming through the ages and stages of life. My contemporaries regretted reaching 30 once upon a time. Few of us would choose to go back now.

Jo Smith lived into her 90s, writing her column until shortly before she died. Her friends turned some of her columns into a book. She was our village “auntie.” I can aspire to be a village “uncle” one day.

In the meantime, as we all age, we can use “About Aging” to talk story about what it’s like to grow old by looking at our world through the eyes of ones who have been around for a while.

Dan White

January 2015