Grandpa William Olmstead reading his newspaper. |
I didn’t understand oldness when I was a kid. Nobody around
me acted old. My grandpa was up at 3 o’clock every morning to get the first
streetcar of the day on the tracks. He was in his youthful 70's and so was my
grandma, the one who got up before dawn one Christmas morning so she could do
the laundry, hang it up to dry, iron it and put it away. Christmas that year
fell on a Monday. Monday was Wash Day and in 1933 Monday was Christmas, both
sacred in ways known to my grandma and her neighbors.
It was the Great Depression that had me living with
my grandparents in Celoron, N.Y., in 1933, but mental depression may have been
a threat to those septuagenarians, all of a sudden having to get an
eight-year-old kid off to school every day.
Social Security was still a dream in the mind of an
Episcopalian layman, one of 11 who served as president of the United States,
and the years of the Great Depression were not notable for pensions generally.
Life expectancy for Americans in 1933 was 63.3 years. There weren’t so many
elderly, and they were largely invisible. There weren’t many ramps and power
wheelchairs to get the disabled out of the house, no wide aisles for shopping
or public rest rooms for people with special needs. By 2014 life expectancy had
climbed to 78.94, and ways to keep smiling despite disease and disability had
climbed with it.
Family and friends, and some strangers, too, have
shown me how to enjoy the aging process in ways I could not have imagined. I
didn’t try very hard to imagine it when I was young. I was astonished, several
decades ago, to be named to the White House Conference on Aging. I didn’t know
anything about aging, and I wasn’t ready to learn. If I had looked over my
shoulder I would have seen the caisson loaded with dizzy brain cells and
wrinkling surfaces . It was getting closer.
Once a journalist, always a journalist, is one of my
earliest professional superstitions. It was already taking form in that Celoron
house in 1933 when my pal Harold Lind and I produced a neighborhood newspaper,
with circulation limited only by the amount of carbon paper at our
disposal. Harold, the smartest boy in
school, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge in the war we thought would
assure world tranquility.
Those journalism genes have kept my itchy typing
fingers turning out occasional reports on the rare, incurable disease called
Multiple System Atrophy, once known as Olivopontocerebellar Atrophy. I provide
an insider’s view, having been diagnosed several years ago. It is a difficult
disease to diagnose, and I probably had it for a while before it was
named. Well, some of my co-workers may
have had a short name for it, but they usually were patiently confused.
There aren’t many new symptoms, but the old
squishy-head symptoms are more aggressive. They add a feeling of adventure to
rising out of a chair, or getting out of bed, or taking a shower. There’s a
pill for gout, other pills for other things, the names of which I have
forgotten because there is no pill for remembering them. The brakes are on,
hidden in the throat, fingers, brain, feet. MSA folks tend to get slower. Now
that I’m 91 years old I celebrate the happy fact that I’m slow to stop. It is a
good omen, and I wish I could remember to buy a lottery ticket.
Thanks for reading this far. I still read a lot,
enjoying the latest John Sandford novel, “Extreme Prey.” This gave me a
momentary thought about writing a book to be called “Extreme Pray.” Maybe that
notion came from some other current reading of Franciscan Father Richard Rohr
and Jesuit Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin during an intermission between
mystery/adventure novels on my Kindle Fire. I continue to enjoy the poets,
including the vast poetry of the Gospels. May the good news be with you.
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