Old Folks and the Wisdom of Appreciating Little Things

Younger people sometimes make fun of their elders for the simple pleasure we find in routine – waiting for the mail, afternoon tea, watching our favorite television show, knitting a sock, dead-heading the roses.  Somehow, they think small pleasures are signs of a diminished life.  However, there is every reason to believe that these are the constituents of the good life.  Maybe this is something we learn in our old age.

You may remember that at the end of Voltaire’s Candide, that satire of the optimistic philosophy that all things are for the best, Candide counsels us that we must all simply “cultivate our own garden.”  I have always thought that it was a way of reminding us that the worth of our lives, the joy of our lives, comes from paying attention to the small things that we do every day, the things that truly make up our lives.   As I have aged and the distractions of the outside world are more easily kept at bay, I have realized what good advice this is.

My husband and I have been reading Thomas Hardy lately, and at the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge, I was quite taken by a passage which talks about the “ever-after” of Elizabeth Jane, a central character who has suffered much from the ups and downs of life:

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers.  But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.  And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

While you might not agree with Hardy that life is a “general drama of pain,” we must all agree that it is no Eden either. Hardy’s “solution” was akin to Voltaire’s:

As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt of it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody  not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider  interests cursorily embraced.

This talk of the cultivation and appreciation of “minute forms of satisfaction” is brilliant, I think, – and true.  I think of the little pleasures in our life – watching “Grantchester,” espresso on Saturday night, a good pasta dinner – what would life be without them?  Hardy is skeptical enough to put a caveat in (“to everybody not in positive pain”), but generally he gives us hope.

I wrote some years ago about the wonderful book by Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own.  It was based on a journal this amazing woman kept in an effort to try to ascertain what, really, made her happy:

I could not by direct effort feel love towards someone, or by direct effort make myself happy.  What then was entirely under the control of my will?  It seemed to me that the only thing that was even potentially so controlled was my attention.  I could not control what I saw when I looked in a certain direction, but I could, generally at least, control which direction I should look in.

And mostly, her attention and her joy were on the small moments of life.

When long-married couples are separated by death or disability, they often talk about missing the little things – the glass of wine after dinner, the game of Scrabble on Sunday afternoons, or the standing joke about who was going to wash the dishes.

Small pleasures should not crowd out the more important things in life (and this can begin to happen if we are not careful), but they should be valued for the fact that they often contribute to those more important things – chances to share love, restore our balance, touch base with who we are.

So, when young folks roll their eyes over our rituals and small attentions, just realize that they have a lot to learn.  And never neglect or take for granted the simple pleasures of life that last into old age.

Fantasies to Reject in Old Age (or Sooner)

Youth is a time for fantasy, but it occurs to me that we may never outgrow some illusions.  The nature of our fantasies changes as we age (Santa Claus and Prince Charming may have been discarded), but our need for such magical thinking apparently does not.  I have been reading Swamplands of the Soul, by the Jungian James Hollis, which is a far more uplifting book than you might expect from the title.  Hollis and others whom I will discuss think that elderly fantasies are not entirely harmless.  And if you think you don’t have any such illusions, please read on.

Hollis is particularly interesting on the subject of aging and fantasy. He says that there are at least a couple of fantasies that we all need to reject as we grow old:

The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “Magical Other” who will rescue us from existential isolation.

My body has been working hard to convince me that it won’t last forever; so, I think I have probably come close to accepting my mortality (ask me on my deathbed).   But the “rescue” fantasy is harder – and it includes, according to Hollis, “Taking responsibility for choices, to cease blaming others or expecting rescue from them, …and to accept the pain of loneliness.”   I do have trouble with the blame thing – partly because my family of origin loved the blame game and partly because it is indeed an easy way of avoiding responsibility.  I have spent countless hours with therapists, siblings, and friends detailing the sins of the childhood that made me what I am.  But that’s over.  The older I get, the surer I am that those recalled injustices just don’t matter anymore.

As for the “Magical Other,” I think I have finally learned that no one can rescue me from myself.  I also realized over time that it was not simply a knight in shining armor I was looking for to redeem me. I often fell prey to the false belief that more money, another house, a new situation, a grand trip could do the job – never seeing that any remediation for “existential isolation” comes from acceptance within.

Much “magical thinking” is the product of conceiving our life as a story.  As James Carse says in his wonderful Infinite Games, “Because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also [think] we know what the narrative is…. [But] true story tellers do not know their own story.”

And of course, if we have a story, we want a happy ending.  This is another fantasy to reject in old age (related to Hollis’s second one).  My husband and I have recently lost the last of our parents, and it is clear that life’s end may be many things, but it is seldom happy and often it is quite the opposite.  The old have happy moments, happy memories – but to tell ourselves that everything will come out right in the end (think Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is indulging in a fantasy.   Many of us delay making necessary changes to our lives because we picture a quiet deathbed scene in our own bed, with loving (and not burnt out from taking care of us) friends and relatives holding our hands and playing our favorite music.  May it be so for you, but I hope I know enough not to count on it.  But accepting this does not mean despair.  Joko Beck posited that it could mean something else entirely:

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way the want it to.  Then they can see the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below – you may know the story] – because that is all there is, this very moment. (Everyday Zen)

It is easy for me to say that I accept Hollis’s imperatives to accept mortality and to reject optimistic fantasies and magical thinking.  It is not easy to do, and recidivism occurs frequently.  Young children often cannot tell fantasy from reality; dreams seem real, Santa’s reindeer can fly, and there really are monsters under the bed.  We are older, but are we wiser?  We justify telling lies to children to protect them, to make the world seem less threatening.  An argument might be made that elders need the same protections.  I will, however, keep trying to “put away childish things.”

Jorge Borges wrote a story, “August 25, 1983,” in which he imagines his own death.  Using his format, I did something similar and found it an interesting exercise.  I highly recommend both the story and the exercise.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Look at it as practice in dealing with reality.

I would also recommend a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired my story, “Encore.”

Old Marriages/Grow Old Along with Me

I have written about long marriages, old marriages, before (see my blog on romance in old age, “Old Folks and True Love“), but I recently ran across this quote worth sharing from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.  They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.  For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Is love more solid the closer it comes to death?  Shakespeare addresses age in Sonnet 73, beginning with a trope comparing age with the coming of autumn and winter:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The bard finishes with a couplet addressed to his lover:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare is assumed to be writing about a relationship between a young person and an old one; I would say that his sentiments are even more true when both participants are old.

And it is not just each other that we old folks love; the marriage itself becomes a valued object.  The marriage contains history (good and bad), a moral code (carefully crafted over the years), and a full set of rituals and traditions.  It even has a liturgy.  My husband, for example, ends every meal by sighing and saying it was “the best meal he ever ate,” (even when he was the cook).  I can be relied on for the morning weather report promptly upon sitting down for breakfast.  And so it goes – you long-married folks doubtless perform your own liturgies on a regular basis.

When we were wed over three decades ago, dear friends gave us a sun dial which has traveled with my husband and me to four different states.  “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” is inscribed on the top of it.  It is a line from Browning.  We thought we were already “old” when we got married in our forties, and here we are in our seventies.  For us, Browning’s prophecy proved true – the latter years have only gotten better.  Part of it is that the family/stepfamily responsibilities have diminished, but mostly it is that we started with some trust, and worked hard to remain trustworthy to each other in every way.

John Lennon loved the quote from Robert Browning.  In the last year of his life, he used it as a basis for a song.  At the same time Yoko Ono wrote a companion piece based on Elizabeth Browning’s “How Do I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways.”  Before either song could be released, John was gone. John and Yoko were not allowed the chance to see how and if their love matured.  John thought about it in his song, however:

Grow old along with me

Two branches of one tree

Face the setting Sun

When the day is done.

Divorce was common in our generation; there are few of my childhood friends who are still with their first spouse.  And baby boomers are still getting divorced at a high rate. While divorce rates have declined ever so slightly over the past two decades, one cohort has been bucking the trend: baby boomers. “Research shows that boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are divorcing more than any other generation.”  This is from a generation whose parents – no matter how much they bickered and sulked – rarely got divorced.  In some ways, I envy those of my cohort who were able to stay with their “original spouses.”  But by the time I made the choice for the long haul the second time, I apparently knew what I was doing.  May it be so for you.

I have written many short stories about old marriages.  You might look at “The More Loving One” or “Slip Slidin’ Away” for a couple of examples.

In Praise of Failure

I am thinking about failure these days.  This is partly because I have had a few lately, but mostly because I just finished Costica Bradatan’s very interesting new book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.  Bradatan sees failure as necessary because it grounds us in reality and brings us humility.  He cites Iris Murdoch’s definition of humility as “selfless respect for reality.”  (Murdoch thinks that humility is “the most difficult and central of all virtues.”)

Bradatan says failure begets humility in three phases:

  1. Humility involves acceptance of our cosmic insignificance.
  2. It puts us on firm ground, since we have been “brought down to earth.”
  3. Having lowered our anchor into the world, and regained our existential balance, we can move on to other, bigger things.

Bradatan also notes that “Humility is the opposite of humiliation – that’s the chief lesson…There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening.”

I certainly am interested in “regaining my existential balance,” so this got my attention.  I was also interested in the way that we often reference old age as some kind of failure.  We talk about old folks failing to thrive, having failing eyesight, experiencing organ failure.  Much about old age unfolds with small failures, a dripping faucet of losses.  I used to be able to reach that shelf, didn’t I?  Remember that word?  Walk up that hill without pausing for breath?  Bradatan does not reference old age often in his work, but he is reassuring that failure grounds us and serves us in ways that success never can.

Failure is defined in the dictionary as “unsuccessful at reaching one’s goal.” Is staying young, staying alive, a goal?  It certainly is not within our complete control. We are mortal, and we will age, whether we like it or not.   We may have some control over the rate of decline, but not over the inevitability of it – Silicon Valley notwithstanding.

And how do we handle this sense of failing?  We are bombarded with contradictory messages.  Some say we should try harder, accept new challenges, revolutionize our diets.  Others posit that we should practice a reasonable level of acceptance. David Chernikoff in his Life, Part 2, shares this wonderful quote, a prose-poem really, from Solzhenitsyn:

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own. . .. There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past—just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane. . .. Growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.

Uphill, downhill.  Success, failure. Do these words have any meaning in relation to human existence?  Life is a parabola according to Dante; we go up, we go down.  Almost a millennium after Dante, Joni Mitchell said life is a “game,” not a tragedy, and as the “painted ponies go up and down”:

We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

I think there can be joy in the motion, whichever side of the circle or parabola you are on. Yes, we must “accept” the end of a season, of our youth.  We either have to change our view of failure in relation to age, or start to use another word.  “Growing old serenely,” says Solzhenitsyn, “is not a downhill path but an ascent.”

And, if we are willing, we may find happiness in the falling, the failing, the downhill path. I have listened to many dharma talks about withholding judgment on all changes, including age. Rather than judge, we are to watch, realize.  Serenely.  A good word.  Like equanimity.

One last note: my last two blogs have started with the term “in praise of” – ordinary times, failure.  One cannot neglect mentioning Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly – the most memorable of such encomiums. In it, Erasmus’s discussion of old age almost always puts it into the context of the life cycle.  Lack of decorum in relation to one’s place in the life cycle is a constant source of humor for Folly.  Folly holds up the futile attempts of the elderly to be what they are not: “They cling to life so fiercely, and try so hard to ‘seem young,’ that one old codger will dye his last gray hairs, while another will stick a wig on his pate, and still another will fill his gums with false teeth, borrowed perhaps from a pig’s jaw.”  Erasmus, too, is cautioning a level of acceptance and equanimity.

For more on Dante’s view of life as a parabola, you might look at my blogs, “Dante’s Parabola” or “A Diminished Thing.”

In Praise of Ordinary Times

My husband and I just got back from a week away from home and are slowly getting back to… normal.  As far as I am concerned, ordinary time is a precious commodity.  While the definitions of ordinary or normal sound pretty boring – “usual, typical, expected” –  I think normal life is undervalued, and I would prefer to define it in terms like “comfortable, relaxed, and reassuring.”  We have our rituals (Thursday is shopping and laundry, Tuesday and Saturday are hike days, Saturday is movie night), but the quiet anticipation of known events nurtures me far more than waiting in crowded airports or sleeping in strange beds.

I know that I am in the minority on this.  Advice columns tell us older folks to keep trying new things, exploring unfamiliar places, stretching our wings.  We have friends who spend half their lives on cruise ships, and others who spend as much time visiting one relative or another.  I would remind everyone that if you peeled back the travel industry’s propaganda, you could find documented risks to the elderly from air travel (blood clots, etc.), cruise ships (petri dishes of germs) and relocations of any kind.   How much more likely are we to fall trying to find a strange bathroom in the middle of the night?

There is a wonderful line in the movie, Mrs. Miniver.  Suffering the deprivations, apprehensions, and demands of life in wartime Britain, Mrs. Miniver (played flawlessly by Greer Garson) thinks back to what normal life was like, and promises herself to cherish it when and if it returns.  The movie was based on a series of newspaper columns by Jan Struther, and in one of them, the writer reflects on her feelings about returning home after a holiday:

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays, but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over.  Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she would find herself unable to get back.

It is true that many old folks have a tendency toward the static, toward ritual, toward constancy.  Our culture works against this and has somewhat tainted what should be one of the major joys of old age.  By now, my readers know that one of my favorite novels is Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  Lady Slane, elderly and retired far from children, grandchildren, and obligations, finds life’s “last, supreme luxury” to be the time to sit and reflect, to live a life of one’s own making, to enjoy one’s own quiet habits.

Some Christian churches have periods of what are called “Ordinary Time.”  Generally, they are times that are not special because they are neither just before Christmas and Easter (Advent, Lent) nor just after (Epiphany, Eastertide).  Holy Week is coming up soon, with many churches having a dozen or more services; I’m sure the rectors sometimes long for ordinary time.

Ordinary Time brings me to T.S. Eliot and his poem “Ash Wednesday.”  Eliot seems to rebuff those exhortations that we “stretch” ourselves as we grow older.  Eliot spurns such advice, quoting Shakespeare in the process:

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

I sometimes mourn lost stamina, but I never mourn lost ambition or the impetus of “striving.”  I resist replacing forced imperatives of youth (those of employment and raising children) with self-imposed ones of old age (doing “what is expected of me” or “what is good for me”).  I want to define my own normality.  I want to stay at home and reflect like Lady Slane.  I am accused (often and even by loved ones) of being boring.  However, this agèd eagle is not bored.  And I am not afraid of ordinary times.  I am just happy to be at home among my books and chairs and pots and pans.  And my quiet thoughts.

For the value of ritual, you might try my story about Walden Pond, “Again and Again and Again.”  And, please be assured, if cruises and world tours make you happy, keep at it.  Just don’t expect me to envy you.

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”

The Borrowers, Old Age, and Memory

When I was a reading-obsessed child, there was a series of books called The Borrowers by Mary Norton – the first one was published in 1952 and won the Carnegie Medal.  The “Borrowers” are a family of tiny people who live by “borrowing” things from the people in the house – sometimes they return them, sometimes they don’t.  When things go missing in the house, they are blamed.  Norton uses maximum creativity in imagining what “borrowed” items might be used for by 6” people.  A thimble might become their stewpot, for example.

I do not know how we would characterize the Borrower books today; they are chapter books and Amazon describes them for children from 6-10; however, most children within that age range would have to have the books read to them (the writing includes words like philosophical and rheumatic).  The language level is surely at a par with what we term “young adult” novels now, but the subject matter is far tamer and probably far wiser.

The Borrower stories are told to the child Kate by the elderly Mrs. May, who was “some kind of relation” who lived with her younger family members in London.  There is this wonderful description of her in the first chapter:

Mrs. May was old, her joints were stiff, and she was – not strict exactly, but she had that inner certainty which does instead. Kate was never “wild” with Mrs. May, nor untidy, nor self-willed; and Mrs. May taught her many things besides crochet: how to wind wool into an egg-shaped ball; how to run-and-fell and plan a darn; how to tidy a drawer and to lay, like a blessing, above the contents, a sheet of rustling tissue against the dust.

How great is that passage?  Old Mrs. May had “inner certainty,” and she taught the little girl things, useful things.   Just being with Mrs. May made Kate into a better child – never “untidy” or “self-willed.”  If you read the Borrower books as a child, get one and read a couple of chapters.  Do this even if you didn’t read these books in your early years.  You will be charmed.  You will want to be like Mrs. May.

But back to “borrowing.”  We must have a family of Borrowers in our house, because I keep missing things – as well as names and words.  Is this the Borrowers too?  Things I have lost (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master”) do tend to show up sooner or later – usually just two days after they have been replaced.  They show up under a cushion on the couch, in the glove compartment, or set on a shelf in the linen closet.  The names of people and things that I have forgotten return too.  Where they have gone to is less obvious.  They are not gone forever, but seem to have sunken to the bottom of my consciousness, only to return when I no longer need them.  Oh, I will say to myself just as I am about to fall asleep, the name of that nice women in the grocery store was Jill.  Too late.  But where had Jill’s name hidden all afternoon?  Are there also borrowers of the mind?

Of course, there is inter-personal borrowing also.  I get aggravated at people in my life who borrow things and don’t return them.  And it is very uncomfortable to ask.  I loan out contemporary novels gladly, hoping they will never resurface in our house, which is always in need of more shelf space.  But important books are another thing.  I don’t begrudge the books themselves – most can be replaced for a pittance – but my marginal notes are precious (if only to me).  I must admit, though, that when I was going through books in anticipation of moving, I found more than one with the name of an old friend on the flyleaf.  Mea culpa.

My husband has his own answer to this dilemma.  He rarely, if ever, loans books, and never takes anything (even a plastic food container) to someone else’s house that he wants returned.  He has a skeptical view of human nature – or at least of human memory.

Of course, we also borrow memories from each other, which are also often appropriated and never returned.  We sometimes correct each other’s memories and often nudge each other into remembering past times that we had almost forgotten.  Sharing reminiscences can impress upon us how unreliable memory can be.  No family gathering is complete without an argument about exactly how something in the past happened.

In old age, we often say that we are living on “borrowed time.” But we have no intention of returning it.  And we may “borrow” from the past as well as the future.  I loved looking back at Mrs. May and her Borrower stories. Mrs. May knows what it means to lose something and what role the human imagination has in coping with it, making a story of it.  I wish I had Mrs. May’s “inner certainty.”

For an example of the borrowing and sharing of memories, you might look at my story “Boxing Day – A Vignette.”  Or, better yet, get a copy of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers out of the library.

Addendum to “Old Parents and Prodigal Children”

After I wrote “Old Parents and Prodigal Children,” I recalled two other great portrayals of prodigal sons and older fathers in recent literature.  The first is the wonderful Atticus, by Ron Hansen.  Atticus, in his sixties, has an older son who is a successful politician.  And then he has Scott – who was recklessly driving the car that took his own mother’s life, who cannot seem to stay stable in body, mind, or place.  Whom Atticus loves deeply.  And who keeps coming home. Hansen parallels the Bible parable with a twentieth century family drama, even making real the phrase from Luke: “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”  Scott is indeed thought to be dead, he himself conspires in this cruel deception, and yet Atticus, when he finds out that his son still lives, rejoices and welcomes him back, he “rushes out to greet him.”  Again.  And the reader is fairly sure that this will not be the last time.

The other story of a prodigal son spans all of Marilynne Robinson’s books about Gilead, Iowa (Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack).  Jack is the always disappointing son of the town’s Presbyterian minister, named for and godson of Gilead’s Congregationalist minister, and an enigma and a challenge to all who know him.  As he is dying, Jack’s father tells his son, “So many times, over the years, I’ve tried not to love you so much.  I never got anywhere with it, but I tried…”  And therein lies the problem.  Real love is not easily undone.  There is a nobility in the parents of prodigals, but I just wish it was not so hard on them.

In an interview with the New Yorker in 2020, Marilynne Robinson explains how she sees the parable of the Prodigal Son.  “I believe the parable is about grace, not forgiveness… the father loves the son and embraces him right away, not after any kind of exchange or apology.  I don’t think that is forgiveness – that is grace.” 

And what is grace?  I have seen it defined as the opposite of karma – rather than getting what you deserve, you get an undeserved gift.  But it would seem that, at some point in life, grace might fall on the shoulders of the parent, as well as the child.  But, again, grace is not something we can earn, even though it is something we can bestow.

 

Old Parents and Prodigal Children

Perhaps the story of the Prodigal Son means something different when we are old.   Will we take our children back when they fail or falter?  How many times?  With or without their children in tow?  In the story of the prodigal son, we are left to think that everything ends up ok – except perhaps, for the resentment of the older and more responsible brother.  The story (from Luke 15) ends with the father telling his “good” son why he has killed the fatted calf for his wayward sibling:

 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.

But in real life, this is seldom the end of it.  Does the prodigal son stay on the straight and narrow or does he wake his father coming in drunk every night?  Has he sired children that are looking for support?  If he runs away a second time, will he be taken in again? In “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said that: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.”

How many times?  How many fatted calves? How much money?  How much heartache?  Surely, parenthood is a lifetime job, but we protected them when they were vulnerable – who is protecting the old couple who have frayed their nerves and spent their nest egg for the prodigal son or daughter who just keeps returning?  It is surely a question for our time.

Recently, I mentioned the story of the prodigal son to a parent who has had to exercise some tough love with an adult child, but seems to feel painfully guilty about it.  She pointed out to me that the father in the story represents God, not a typical parent.  Ah, I sighed, you are surely right.  But don’t we all see that gracious parent in Luke as the model of the endlessly forgiving parent?  Killing those fatted calves whenever there is a glimmer of light?

Because, here is the thing.  It is terribly difficult to renounce parenthood.  Harder than divorce, harder even than becoming estranged from your parents.  Your children can cut you out, but it is extremely difficult to cut them out – even when you have run out of energy and fatted calves.

There was a grand essay by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers entitled, “The Mother of All Questions.”  The question she poses is whether to have children.  (She has none.) And, of course, this is a weighty question, particularly in these days of economic distress and climate crisis.  But, when most of us made the decision to procreate (or neglected to make it and just let nature take its course), we were not possessed of our full maturity or even our right minds.

So here is the harder question: “Is it ever too late not to have children?”  To cut yourself off from your children?  Or, less extreme, is it ever too late to not make parenthood a primary identity?  Not to feel like we have to have the patience of the prodigal’s father, of Job, of God, in the face of the relentless demands of adult children?  It is not a question I have had to answer in any but the most minor ways, but I have watched the anguish that prodigal sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, can cause.

Here is another strange thing.  There are few novels, plays, or poems about good parents with bad children.  There is Balzac’s Pere Goriot, William March’s The Bad Seed, and a few other horror stories – however, novels and poems about bad parents abound. (Think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful “This Be the Verse.”)  Culture is on the side of the children.  While our offspring are children, that is the way it should be.  But what about when they are fifty and we are seventy?  There is no right answer to this question, but I find myself with great empathy for those who are asking it.

For a view of differing attitudes toward parents, you could try my story “Tale of Two Grannies” or look at “Snickerdoodles.”  Neither of these tales, however, depicts the extreme situations I am discussing.  It is probably no accident that most of the stories of “bad children” are tales of horror.  Again, I empathize and only hope it is never a situation I experience.

New Year’s Re-Solutions

Those of you who have been following me for the past six years, know that I have written many times about old age and the New Year – I recommend particularly “Baby New Year and Old Father Time” and “New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age.”  This blog – When I Come to Be Old –  is titled after a list of resolutions that Jonathan Swift wrote in 1699 when he was a young man; one of them, of course, is “Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people.”  So I will refrain from repeating my previous comments about the year becoming new as we continue to get old.

However, I did have some thoughts about New Year’s resolutions.  Every January, I fill a page of my journal with new resolutions.  I falter on some, but I keep many.  I haven’t missed a day of French on Duolingo since last January; I have read the books I promised myself to get to.  But even re-solutions kept are not solutions.  It is right in the word.  Resolutions are things we have to do over and over again, trying to find a way to make life better (or longer or more fun).  Maybe the most effective resolution is to come to a sense of peace with our life as it is.

I did write a new story for the new year, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse,” which is – in a way – about new beginnings.  Happy New Year to all.  I wish us all peace and solutions.