The usefulness of very old animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, aging, gerontology, longevity

This old fellow, assuming he isn't one of the patriarchs in Genesis, is probably half as old as the tortoise. Among terrestrial mammals, humans have the longest lives. Among all land animals, giant tortoises are probably the longest-lived. It is likely that "Darwin's tortoise" wasn't really brought back from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, to live to age 175 in a zoo. But it is known that these big tortoises can live at least 150 years, and possibly as long as 200.

No human (at least since the time of Moses) is known to have lived longer than 122 years, the known age of Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997. The second-longest, in the past few centuries anyway, seems to be a living woman currently aged 119. No (recent) man is known to have exceeded 113.

A side note on the great ages reported for Biblical patriarchs. The progression of ages tells a story, which may be more important than whether anyone actually lived 900+ years. What is commonly called "The Fall", the sin of Adam and Eve, is the first of four Falls. Here I'll focus on the longevity of the generations, the story within the story:

1. The first couple disobeyed God and were exiled from the orchards of Eden. Lifetimes went from "undetermined" (potentially endless) to mostly 900-969 years.
2. Cain killed his brother and fled from the presence of God. No lifetime of any of his descendants is recorded.
3. The earth became "filled with violence", motivating God to bring on the Flood, saving only one family. Noah was the last person to live more than 900 years (950). His son Shem lived 600 years, then 3 generations lived 433-464 years.
4. The tower of Babel ("to make ourselves a name") motivated God to confuse the languages. The next five generations lived 148-239 years, ending with Terah (the father of Abram), who lived to age 205.

Each Fall was followed by a reduction in life span by about half. Then Abram/Abraham lived 175 years, Isaac lived 180 years, and Jacob/Israel lived 147 years (his brother Ishmael lived 137 years). Thereafter, a few others including Moses lived to ages of 110 to 120, no more than that. In Psalm 90, composed shortly after God called Moses to return to Egypt, Moses, age 80, declared that the usual life span was 70, or as much as 80 years, "according to strength".

The progressive shortening of life span in Genesis drives home that disobedience to God leads to a shorter life.

Now to the book: Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives, by Steven N. Austad. Dr. Austad is the first professor at his university (Alabama) to hold the Chair in Healthy Aging. His central theme is that nearly all our laboratory studies are of dismally short-lived animals: fruit flies (weeks to months) and mice (less than a year in the wild, less than 3 years in the lab) predominate; but we should be studying animals of exceptional longevity. At least some of them may have something to teach us about living long lives with good health.

Animals with short lives do have a little bit to teach. A mouse in the wild is most likely to wind up being eaten by an owl or a fox. It's well known that larger animals live longer, if only because there are fewer predators that can overcome them. But in a protected laboratory environment, a 3-year-old mouse is positively geriatric: thinning, graying hair; cataracts; feeble gait. Whatever aging is, mice do it fast, like everything else.

The book is full of stories of the unexpectedly long lives of certain animals. It opens with a bird called a fulmar. No firm conclusion is drawn about the longevity of fulmars, but we are introduced to one that might have been nearly as old as the ornithologist pictured with it in two photos taken 35 years apart. The bird outlived the scientist by a year or two, and may have lived 60 years or more. Fulmars are the size of seagulls. We have better information about other birds. A particular cockatoo lived to age 83.

Life in the slow lane can be longer. Tortoises are one example. I have a friend whose pet tortoise, about the size of a softball, was thirty years old the last time I saw him. Giant tortoises live longer, at least the aforementioned 150-175 years. Their heart rate is six beats per minute. Being exothermic (not self-heating like birds and mammals), they have low energy needs. It is said that we each get a potential 2-3 billion heartbeats; for humans that's from 60-90 years. For a giant tortoise, with a heart that beats at 1/10th the rate, maybe they can actually live 600-900 years!

I was intrigued by the animals that don't seem to get feebler with age. Old fulmars and old cockatoos don't have menopause in females (or E.D. in males). Neither do old tortoises. Other long-live mammals and birds do seem to end their lives with a number of years of infertility. I hope there is something useful to learn about genetic (or something else) differences between animals that age and animals that seem not to. It won't come easily or cheaply. Scientists study mice because they don't live long. It's at least 100 times as costly to study lifelong matters with naked mole rats that seem to live 50-100 times as long as field mice. Such studies would be multi-generation endeavors…multi-HUMAN-generation!

Then there's cancer. We don't yet even know the cancer rate for elephants or whales. A bowhead whale, weighs more than 1,000 times as much as a human, and one might naively think they ought to get cancer 1,000 times as frequently. Nope. They live more than 200 years, but we know little more than that. There are a few genetic clues about the cancer-avoiding (not quite cancer-proofing) of huge animals, such has their possession of multiple copies of certain cancer-suppression genes, where humans have one copy only. But our ignorance is typically as colossal as their size.

Even more mysterious are small animals with extraordinary longevity, such as a one-ounce bat that lives 40+ years, or centuries-old mollusks no larger than a teacup. One concept dwelt on throughout the book is Longevity Quotient, LQ. If most one-ounce mammals live at most 3-4 years, and a one-ounce bat species can live 30-40 years, that is an LQ of 10. Humans have an LQ of about 4, although Jeanne Calment's 122-year life indicates an LQ of 5.5.

It is still not known whether there are two intermixed human populations, one with a typical longevity of about 85 years, and another that can make it routinely to 100. I have numerous ancestors who lived into their 90's, and an aunt who died last year at age 101. A friend of mine, who is 65 years old, is already older than everyone in his family tree that he knows about; his parents both lived about 60 years. Maybe there's a third population of shorter-lived humans.

Whatever our ultimate life span may be, recent trends in longevity seem to be based more on health span. Just keeping us from "untimely death" has been a triumph of public health measures including clean water systems, at least in some countries, and vaccination for many former scourges of humanity such as smallpox, measles, and polio. Most of the long-lived ancestors of mine that I mentioned above lived in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries, when such public health measures weren't even dreamed of.

The author makes an important point about "life expectancy", which is different from longevity. Life expectancy is the average age that will be reached by a cohort of the population born at the same time. If infant and child mortality is high, even if some will reach ages greater than 100, the AVERAGE will be low. Population pyramids show this, in part:

A rectangular population pyramid like the one on the left shows that the death rate is low at all ages, until one reaches age 70, and then increases. A triangular distribution, or a "scooped triangle" such as the one on the right, shows a high death rate at all ages. The life expectancy for the US is about 78.5 (average of both sexes). One might initially guess that the life expectancy for DRC is below 30, but we must remember that each horizontal tier is a different cohort. This pyramid shows high death rate, but also high birth rate. The WHO figure for life expectancy of the DRC is 62. That is for the cohort in the bottom tier only, and it takes a lot of actuarial calculation to determine it. Regardless, the more triangular a population pyramid is, the lower the life expectancy. Both charts show a very few people living to 95 and beyond; fewer in DRC than in USA, of course. But there are some. The ultimate longevity in both countries is similar.

This just scratches the surface of a book full of information, well presented. Just finding out how long some animals can live is very time-consuming (decades to centuries!) and can be very costly. The author hopes we will soon begin to learn why some animals live so long. Will learning that help humans become bicentenarians (200+ age)? Perhaps. That makes it worth doing.

One small error I wish to correct. On page 186 it is stated that carbon-14 decays to carbon-12. No, it decays to nitrogen-14, by emitting a beta particle—a high-energy electron—which changes a neutron into a proton. The rest of the analysis in that chapter is correct.

An open-style memoir

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, aging, death and dying

Abigail Thomas is just a year or two beyond the age of the oldest Baby Boomers, so her third memoir, written during her years approaching age 70, and upon reaching 71, make her a pioneer for those just a bit younger. What Comes Next and How to Like It explores her life as she copes with the deaths of a few loved ones, including her late husband, Rich, whose declining years she chronicled in her prior memoir, A Three Dog Life; and with the beginnings of her own decline.

I prefer not to go into what she writes about . Many prior reviewers have covered that territory very well. I was struck by the form, format and style of this book. Ms Thomas writes with painful honesty and frequently with great grace. I do need to mention a singular image. A "chapter" of six lines, in which she describes her decision to volunteer at a hospice, is summed up thus, "I want to make Death a member of the family. I don't want it to arrive as a stranger."

Many memoirs are narrative biographies that could have been written in the third person with little loss of meaning or content. Not this one. It reads like a series of blog posts or diary entries, with lengths that vary from a sentence or two to three or four pages. Though each piece is titled, it is hard to call them chapters. They are more like excerpts from longer chapters, as though she could have written much more but preferred to leave something for a reader's imagination to work on.

This kind of writing strongly appeals to me, as a useful example. My own attempts to write stories or other long forms have been frustrating. I am an essayist and storyteller, but the pieces need to be rather brief. I can usually say all I wish to say in 1,500 words or less. What the publishing trade calls a "short story" tends to require a narrative arc that sustains itself through at least 3,000 words. Chapters in typical nonfiction books are of a similar length.

I just had to do a brief experiment, taking three books at random from my shelf:

• The Peter Principle by Peter and Hull. Chapters range from 5 to 22 pages, averaging 10.7. Accounting for illustrations, the chapters are on the shorter side, ranging from about 1,300 to 6,500 words, averaging 3,400 or so.
• Smart Kids With School Problems by Priscilla L. Vail. Chapters range from 16 to 28 pages, averaging 23. Lengths in words: just over 6,000 to 10,500, averaging 8,700.
• O. Henry's Short Stories, a Magnum paperback. Stories range from 7 to 39 pages, averaging 15.5. Lengths in words: nearly 3,000 to 16,200, averaging 6,500.

Emulating any of these writers would put me way out of my league! I am comforted by an author whose attention span is closer to mine. Such a string of vignettes gradually paints a vivid picture.

Keeping what we have against all odds

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, scams, aging, self protection

The older we get, the more paranoia is justified. Someone really is out to get us! Here are the top 5 risk factors for getting scammed:

1. You are older than 55, and the risk goes up every year.
2. You think you are too smart to be scammed.
3. You are uncertain your retirement savings will last.
4. You are suspicious of "traditional" investments ("the Market").
5. You frequently attend "free dinner" seminars about retirement-related subjects.

A couple of years ago AARP sponsored a new book, Outsmarting the Scam Artists: How to Protect Yourself From the Most Clever Cons by Doug Shadel. Now it is out in a large-print paperback, making it affordable and easier to read. In it we find the way a scammer tries to get us "under the ether", numbed by emotional factors and our own greed (and don't think you don't have any greed!). We also learn the process they have worked out to fleece us to the maximum extent.

A scam typically has four stages, though the last stage is not always used:

• The Front is the initial contact. This turns a cold call into a prospect who is "qualified", that is, has told the front man of having sufficient funds. The front man is also tasked with weaseling out of us a lot of personal information, to be used in the next step.
• The Drive persuades a prospect to "invest" or pay for some "benefit". This can be a hard sell or a soft sell, but it'll soon be hard on your bank account! It usually includes lots of grooming and flattery.
• The Close is the actual transfer of funds.
• The Load is a follow-up that may lead to even more, often much more, money being transferred. Typically, someone who has just invested will feel great for a few days, and so can be called again with a "new, last minute opportunity" to invest even more. This turns a fleecing into a scalping.

Some telephone boiler rooms (telephones are the weapon of choice these days. Guns and lock picks are so passé) employ enough callers to have specialists in each stage. Other callers can do it all. The process is described in detail in the first 3 chapters, and in the following 7 chapters, describing 7 major cons, each step is explained in context.

The final 3 chapters are titled, "How to Fight Fraud". The trouble is, it is like fighting the reigning heavyweight champ. You, no matter who YOU are, are out of your league. The best we can do is to cut of the Front at the earliest opportunity. Appendix A helps you assess your vulnerability to fraud. Many of the questions relate to practices that make you more likely to get a call, or more likely to answer a questionable ad (and then if you argue with the guy on the phone, he can say, "But you called me!"). If you are never in phone contact, there is no Front!

As to those 5 items above:

1. Why are older folks targets? We usually have more money, and as we get very old, we are more likely to be lonely or fearful, and the old thinker slows down, a lot.
2. People who don't know much about money, and are honest with themselves about that, make poor targets. Its the more educated, more sophisticated among us, particularly someone more open to "alternative investments", who are the ripest targets.
3. If we're scared we'll run out of money, we know we have less time for money to grow because we are using it right now! So we are more open to get-rich-quick schemes. You are more likely to hit the lottery than to get rich on any scheme that starts with a phone call out of the blue.
4. Are you fearful of "the Market"? Do you think gold, or an oil well, or investing in movie production, or windmills, or (the list is Loooooong!), can make you a mint? Boy, are you ripe for the fleecing!
5. Because of item #4, do you go to every investment "dinner" you can get to? Your uncertainty and greed are showing. The name lists from such seminars are one of the main sources of target lists bought by boiler rooms trolling for prospects. The more "free" dinners you eat, the more calls you are going to get. Some guy with just the right formula to catch your interest just might take you right to the poor house.

So what can we do? Get on every "do not call" list you can. Several are listed in Appendix B. If your phone doesn't have Caller ID, get one that has it, and has an answering machine. If you don't recognize a phone number, don't answer. The answering machine will either induce the caller to hang up, or it'll give you breathing room to ask yourself, "Do I really want to talk about that, with a total stranger?" And those enticing but all-too-vague ads in the paper or in e-mail? Ignore, ignore, ignore. The less junk mail and spam you read, the better.

Well, if even one person hangs onto life savings, who might have been scammed, this book (and perhaps this post) will have done a good job.

Going the way of all flesh

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, aging

I phoned my father on his sixtieth birthday and asked, "What is it like?" He said, "I feel a lot like I did when I was twenty, but everything takes longer." Five years ago, I passed that milestone myself, and I have to agree. Not much has changed, yet everything has changed. And, nearly everything does indeed take longer. I expect to have some time yet for things to take even longer. Dad is still ticking along at age 90.

Though Mom passed away at 81, she had the potential for a longer life, had she not fallen afoul of a deadly cancer. As it happened, she also fell afoul of creeping dementia, starting before age 60, so when it came, her death from cancer was counted a blessing. Which side of the family will I be more like? I've already had cancer, and I show no signs of dementia (you reading this can judge for yourselves – be kind!), so perhaps I have 20-30 years to go. I hope they are fruitful years.

I live by my wits, and in particular I need a robust memory to thrive in the knowledge management business. If I start "losing it", I won't last long. But I have had colleagues who retired at 58 and 60, while others retired at 75 or even older, and I have a valued colleague who is 78 (I think; he is a bit cagey about it). This last fellow retired, then came back as a consultant. I figure, as long as the work is fun and interesting, having that paycheck is also lots of fun, so why not keep going? My father retired at 75.

Professor William Ian Miller may be one of those who is ready for retirement closer to his sixties than his seventies or later. The title of his book says it all: Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain, Which He Flatters Himself Formerly Did Him Noble Service – A Plaint, Tragi-comical, Historical, Vengeful, Sometimes Satirical and Thankful in Six Parts, if His Memory Does Yet Serve. Ka-boing! He gets the award for longest title!! Dr. Miller is 65, probably no more than a month or two older than I am, and his writing indicates he is still in possession of most of his wits. However, upon introspection, he feels he has lost a lot. One of the six parts of the book is titled "Complaining", but he doesn't confine his own complaining to that section. By the finish, I had to say, with Shakespeare, "Methinks thou protesteth too much", to slightly misquote Gertrude in Hamlet, Act III.

However, the book is not entirely a complaint. I would not have read through 265 pages of pure kvetching. It is, rather, a very entertaining survey of old age, its ills, and the ways a range of societies (mostly Norse) have treated the old through history. The good professor studies a cluster of ancient literature genres centered on the Icelandic Eddas and Norse epic poetry in general. Many of his illustrations derive from these. Thus, he dwells for quite a spell upon the characters in Egil's Saga: Egil, his son Skallagrim and grandson Kveld-Ulf. Each grew old in turn during the time covered by the saga, and they had quite similar personalities. In particular, in their old age, they each responded to grief by taking to bed and staying there for long periods. This is a common ploy of those who think they are old enough to get away with it. However, in one instance, the old codger's son shames him into arising and taking the field in vengeance, where he dies, though only after killing a dozen or so enemies. Perhaps old Icelanders are made of sterner stuff.

Isn't that how we all hope we can go out, in a blaze of glory? Well, maybe some of us. I confess to being more cowardly than that, and hoping my heart just quietly stops beating some night while I lie sleeping. In particular, with my family history, I have zero risk of death by heart attack or stroke, and a recent Heart Cam scan (my doctor insisted) shows my heart is as clean as a healthy teenager's. So I expect, sooner or later, another bout with cancer, and that's typically a rather painful way to go. Maybe if I am lucky, something critical will just wear out first. I'd rather wink out than blaze out.

Before getting to complaining, the author discusses the horror of finding yourself old, to the point of not easily recognizing your face in a mirror. I still have my high school picture. I showed it to some college students recently, because one asked about it. A girl blurted out, "Oh, you used to be so handsome!" Clearly, things have changed. I really don't look like I did then, though I really can recognize myself in recent pictures or mirror views. Looking at my father, I can see about how I'll look in 25 years, God willing. And by the way, Dr. Miller writes about recently visiting his mother, aged 89, so he probably has 20-25 years to go himself. Get used to it, Bill!

The shortest section of the book is about "Wisdom", and the various rather unfounded myths about getting older and wiser. Older and more stubborn is more like it. I rather like what Elihu said to Job and his "friends" (as if you could have such good enemies): "I said, 'Let age speak, and let the multitude of years make wisdom known.' But there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding. It is not the great who are wise, nor the old who understand justice." (Job 32:7-9) A succinct proverb says it all, "There is no fool like an old fool".

So the fourth section is about how we might wrap things up, and is titled "Retirement, Revenge, and Taking it With You". The retirement picture, at least in the West, is where the rubber really meets the road. Having lots of kids was the traditional retirement plan; you just hoped at least one would have sufficient gratitude to take care of you when you got feeble. The condition of one Neandertal skeleton, of a man who was aged at the time of death, but was apparently being fed and cared for by someone, shows that the plan can work, though cases abound of the young giving the very old a bit of help to embark on "the next journey". Now we have pensions and IRA's and so forth.

We need them! In 1900, 4% of Americans were 65 or older, and the average retiree lived on about five more years. By 1936, when Social Security was enacted, those 65+ amounted to 5%. By 2000, it became 12.5%, and is expected to hit about 16% in eight more years (2020, when I'll be 73). Living on a fixed income these days is just a death sentence by inflation. Costs go up, and old folks begin to starve. Some people put their aged relatives in a nursing home. Nursing home neglect is becoming an epidemic, and is part of a larger picture of "the home" just being another means of "helping" someone reach the final exit sooner. Particularly if the aged person in question has a substantial IRA or other wealth. Is it any wonder some oldsters get vengeful, and even plan how to "take it with them", if only by spending down their assets. Can you say "Senior Citizen Cruise"? In Egil's Saga, old Egil gets out of bed long enough to take a couple of chests of silver to a bog, where he throws them in, with the help of two slaves. He is still strong enough to kill the slaves so they can't be asked which bog.

The section titled "Sentiments" made more sense to me. My wife finds it a bit amusing how easily I shed a tear. It gets easier as the years go by. It is getting risky to invite me to a wedding or funeral. I'll be the one trying to weep silently, and failing. Was Dylan Thomas's father a sentimental type, that the son wrote "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"? What is the use of all that rage? The stress will just kick off your ticker that much sooner. The sixth section explores this a little more. But I have to remark on another item that I found quite bracing.

Throughout the book, the author disparages "Positive Psychology" and its Pollyanna-ish tendencies. I agree with him. Life can be tough, and it does no good to over-optimize, or to over-pessimize about it. If some think the very old are happier than others, there are several explanations. One is that happier folks might live longer. Another is that "ignorance is bliss" and that an increasing number of the very old are too demented to know if they are sad or not. I suspect some of it is just the error of averaging apples with oranges with bananas with orangutans. Anyway, I wonder how many old folks simply lied about how happy they were. I just got interrupted by a phone call, one of those automated political surveys. I hung up on it. If I had taken it, I would probably have lied, because I usually do, on purpose. Think about that, pundits out there with your surveys and smoke-and-mirrors predictions!

I was able once to recalculate the statistics from an article that reported on a study of IQ and aging. The authors claimed that IQ dropped with age after 40 or so. But if you recast the numbers so that you count back from the age at death, IQ actually rose until a final decline that typically began about five years before death. So if your "natural death" is going to come at age 80, you can expect to get smarter until age 75. Maybe there is something to this wisdom of age bit!

How does that square with the fact that brain scans show brains shrinking with age? Size isn't everything. Einstein's brain has been preserved, and its volume is 1,230 cc. The average 76-year-old man's brain is about 1,250 cc. The "normal" range for middle aged men is 1,050-1,450 cc. Einstein worked on the "grand unified theory" right up to the end.

So, like many, I may occasionally find a word that I ought to know, on the tip of my tongue, but glued there so I can't get it out; I may mislay my keys (though I have strict habits to forestall this); I never could put a name to a face until I'd been with someone three or four times, so that's not a consideration; I have different eating habits than I used to; the way my wife and I relate to one another has changed; the way my brothers and father and I relate to one another has also changed; and I think I am less likely to try to intimidate my younger colleagues with superior knowledge – I'd rather collaborate on a more equal basis than I used to.

I don't know if Dr. Miller is really "losing it", any more than I am. If we are, I think there is still a very great much left to lose. There are also a few things to gain. For example, I can play a greater variety of parts now: curmudgeon when it suits me, or kindly grandfatherly ball of fluff when that is better. And so forth. Back to lying on surveys: the old become better actors. Another reason to watch out!

Care or cure?

kw: musings, aging, dementia

Yesterday's post about Making the Rounds With Oscar renewed my consideration of aging and dementia. I found a document online that gave me some numbers ("Prevalence of Dementia in the United States: The Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study" by B. L. Plassman et al, found here).

Of course, the most important variable is age. In the sample, made in 2002, the breakdown of people 71 and older is thus, by decade:

• 71-79 5.0%
• 80-89 24.2%
• 90+ 37.4%

Considering that those over 85 are the fastest-growing segment of the population, those are grim numbers. Absent effective treatments for, primarily, Alzheimer's Syndrome, end-of-life care for demented elderly will take up great amounts of caregivers' time, and prove very costly.

As an example, my Father found the most economical option he could for caring for my Mother, supplementary care in addition to his own efforts. This was enough for a time, and the cost was a few thousand dollars monthly. But once her care required round-the-clock attention by professionals, the cost rose to $9,000 monthly, and he was still wearing himself out doing just a portion of the care, and with some help from one of my brothers who lived two hours away.

In a few years, the numbers of Americans requiring such care will be about ten million. $90 billion per month comes to $1 trillion per year. Public spending for dementia care in 2009 was about $170 billion. Contrast either figure with the national budget for dementia research, just over a billion dollars (I found it hard to determine any figures at all, let alone accurate ones).

We need to do better than that. An effective preventive or treatment will always be less costly than meliorative care. It will be even more economical of the time and emotional well-being of family members.

Maybe aging can be stopped, if that is what you want

kw: observations, medicine, aging

This little girl is sixteen years old. I saw a TV special about her last evening. Brooke Greenberg is a wholly unique person, so far as is known. She hasn't aged significantly since shortly after birth. She weighs about 15 pounds (7kg) and has the physical and mental development of a 6- to 9-month old. An ordinary sixteen-year-old has learned to drive; Brooke cannot walk or speak.

There is a ton of material available about her, which I don't need to repeat here. On the TV show her father expressed the hope that something about her might unlock the secret of aging, and perhaps lead to a "fountain of youth." I find this most intriguing. If this is the fountain of youth, I am not sure it is worth having: to be unable to grow means to be unable to learn. I am sure if Brooke were capable of understanding things, she would prefer to be a more ordinary 16-year-old. Her family evidently agrees; a doctor they contacted tried dosing her with human growth hormone. The astonishing thing is that it had no effect at all.

That, by the way, may be the clue staring us in the face. If she lacks receptors for that hormone, then her body and brain just aren't getting the signal to develop further. A single defective gene or a small cluster of defective genes, needed to form the HGH receptor, could do the trick.

There is some evidence that HGH is part of the signaling network that forms memories. Cut the hormone off, and you may not age, but you won't remember anything new either. If that is the case, the price of "eternal youth" is too high.

A crisis by any other name...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, aging, aging gracefully

When I saw The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50, I snatched it up with high hopes. Having already learned by experience that people tend to experience some kind of self-reinvention about every ten years beginning at age 35, I hoped to learn more of the particular drives, risks, and opportunities that occur at ages around 55 and 65. I hoped to learn why so many are saying "Sixty is the new thirty" and why my experience doesn't square with that Pollyanna-ish assessment. I hoped to find what it is that is unique about "late middle age", for those of us who aren't quite ready to admit to "eldership" yet. Those hopes were only partly realized.

The author, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, already at the height of a distinguished career, in her own "third chapter" of life, having eight well-accepted books already published, interviewed forty people of ages between 50 and 75. Considering the number of quotes and references, she must have bounced a lot of this off of her friend, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson.

She states, both early on and in the conclusion, that her forty subjects are all privileged people, and that their experiences may not apply to those who still have to worry where grocery or rent money may come from. Being a person who would most definitely retire if he could afford to, I found that unsettling. Having only recently been able to re-invent my job to better suit my changing (growing?) personality, I'd still prefer a more definite break, a more sweeping revamping of my surroundings.

To avoid the extra-long moniker of "Ms Lawrence-Lightfoot", I'll take the cheeky presumption of using the author's first name. Sara is very thorough in her approach, as any good sociologist ought to be. It is more thorough than I could easily bear. I'd hoped for a forty-fold "Dutch uncle" talk, the words of wisdom distilled from forty lives. What I got was tiny excerpts of what they had to say, longer narratives of their mannerisms and chosen surroundings, and much, much longer disquisitions by Sara. I felt that each snippet was analyzed to death.

Granted, many of the participants found it hard to put into words, the new styles of learning that they had each developed, independently and personally. Each had been driven, often by ennui, to learn new things, accept new challenges, and enter new arenas. Perhaps their "words of wisdom" would have meant little to anyone other than themselves. I still wanted to hear them try, and I didn't.

I suppose there are many readers who will find this book more congenial than I did. It has an undertone, a combination of new-age pseudo-spirituality (or even anti-spirituality) and a fondness for progressive political activism, that I find quite abhorrent. This is coupled with a certain attitude of "Isn't this just to cool!", to which I often replied inwardly, "No, not really."

It would be an oversimplification to aver that Sara's forty subjects are reacting to imminent mortality by attempting to leave some permanent stamp on the world. Though it is certainly true in a few cases, in most there is much more of one or both of these: "I want to experience what I've ignored for the past 30-40 years," and "I may be just one person who can't make that big a difference, but I'll never forgive myself if I don't try." Therefore, the two biggest themes to emerge from their experiences are Art and Political Activism.

I have a couple of, not counter-examples, but sideshows to all this:

• My good friend R—, retired from blue-collar work at age 62 and now 67, is seeking to "find his place" in the Christian community as more than a "consumer". He is at his best in one-on-one situations, and he is living the frustrations of someone with a well-developed White Knight Syndrome who is learning when his help is needed and appreciated and when it is not. He is growing and learning, mostly the hard way, but that's the best way.
• My father, at age 87 firmly into the Fourth Chapter, was a business executive whose employer was bought out and shut down, so he was out of work at age 52. He spent the first half of his Third Chapter in business for himself, and succeeded quite well. He had two passionate hobbies in this forties to his early seventies: painting and the collecting and repair of antique clocks. When my mother needed full-time care, he learned nursing and took care of her until it became too demanding and he had to hire additional help. After she died, he soon found a congenial travel companion, and they married some time ago. I have some of his paintings and clocks; he has given away or sold most of the ones my brothers and I didn't take. He doesn't paint any more, though he is willing to fix a broken clock for a friend. He likes seeing new things, expecially by traveling.
• When we moved away from Oklahoma a decade ago, we lost contact with T—, who married for the first time at age sixty, and had six children by the age of 68. Though at age seventy he looked older than my father does today, he was holding two jobs and always looking for an "angle" for making money: an oilfield venture, or a business to operate. I am told he is still going strong in his early eighties.

All three of these men still have their worries about money. My father is the most well-off of the three, but still rations his travel time, to avoid the "terminal pauperism" of outliving his retirement funds and leaving his wife destitute after his passing. These men only partly fit into Sara's framework. Though she takes a more free approach than other sociologists, seeing more layered experiences and more overlap of "stages", there is still a framework there that fits some people and not others.

What she has produced is an approach to understanding the "later-than-midlife" crises that arrive at ages after fifty. I do know people who match her thesis very well. Many of them partake of various "Institutes of Lifelong Learning" at colleges in the area (particularly the ones that are tuition-free!). Others are busier with their "retirement" than they were when at work, learning by sweating, so to speak.

Being nearly twelve years into my Third Chapter, where do I fit in, if at all? I'd like to retire, and I was close to doing so when the current economic troubles began. My ideal retirement situation? First, half-time work either as a science instructor at a junior college, or gathering more music students, particularly if I can attract intermediate students who want to learn the folk genres in which I specialize. That could pay enough of the bills that I wouldn't need to "hit" my IRA and 401K. The other half of the time, I dream of seeing all of America's national parks (that includes Canada, at least). I'd probably find it rather fun to participate in a Lifelong Learning program, maybe as both a learner and a teacher, which many do. I've carried on private studies in subjects of my own quirky interest since my forties. Taking actual courses in some of them is an attractive option.

What are we to do with the third chapter of our lives? Far from dropping old passions and moldering in a rocking chair, we are most likely to trade new passions for old, to learn because it is fun to learn, and to restore those corners of ourselves that we've neglected because we were "making a living". If some want to get back out there and "change the world" some more, that is worth a try. For me, if I change myself, the change in me will change others. That's good enough.

Aging gracelessly

kw: book reviews, autobiographies, aging

Google "nora ephron" and you'll get nearly 700,000 hits, and more than 10,000 image hits. Nora Ephron has lived her life in public, so there's nothing I need to say. I picked up the book because I recognized her name from hearing a few of her audio essays on NPR.

I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman ought perhaps to have a minor subtitle change: ...Being an Aging Woman. Perhaps. Or ...Being a Woman of a Certain Age. This collection of essays that reveal her inner life, the one not lived in public—or the one that she's doing her best to hide from public view—are by turns witty and devastatingly frank.

Move Erma Bombeck from Dayton, Ohio to Manhattan (and resurrect her; she passed away in 1996...and she still has 1.3 million Google hits), add a few hard edges and about 220 volts of vanity, and you have Ms Ephron.

The author writes primarily of the toll gravity and time exact, particularly about her efforts to minimize them, even as she brutally exposes what she sees in the mirror...when she can bring herself to look. As she writes, "Denial can be a way of life."

But she also writes about habits, habits of thought and habits of action. She writes about divorce as though one were expected to pull one off every ten years or so. She writes about disorganization and the kind of purse required to at least contain (some of) it. Eventually, it is all seen as a diatribe over failed dreams.

I've had dreams die. Several times. I recommend Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst. It is more for women than for men, yet it helped me a lot (the men in my family tend to think like women anyway...at least compared to the average "man"). Why would I say this? I came away from reading Neck, at one sitting, with this impression: It is the modern equivalent of Ecclesiastes—"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity."

A Fresh Breeze and Spring in Your Step

kw: book reviews, poetry, aging, humor

Perhaps best known for the children's book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Judith Viorst is at her most delightful best as a poet. A few years back, her Suddenly Sixty (and Other Shocks of Later Life) provided fuel to the cry, "Sixty is the new Thirty."

Her latest, I'm Too young to be Seventy (and Other Delusions), continues the tradition. I think as a children's author, she has remained better connected with the RIGHT NOW mind of a child, and clearly sees how the luckiest of us recover such a mindset once we're old enough to be free again.

Her poems are short, which suits me. They smack of Ogden Nash: the lines usually vary in length, but tend to rhyme sooner or later. A favorite of mine, "The Secret of Staying Married" exemplifies:

Still married after all these years?
No Mystery
We are each other's habit,
And each other's history.

Whether wise or wicked, languid or lascivious, these lovely little poems hit the reluctantly gray right where they live.