This afternoon I heard an interview with Walter Mosley on NPR. Among other things, he talked about how his latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, was informed by caring for his mother as she progressed through dementia. The novel tells the story of a 91-year-old black man who’s beginning to deal with dementia himself, and of a young girl who comes into his life and tries to help.
That’s the witty title of an opinion piece by journalist Patricia Cohen, who’s just published a book called In Our Prime: The Invention of Midlife. I’ve been struck by how much her undertaking resembles the one I’ve set myself. The review in the New York Times opens with “An upbeat look at middle age? Patricia Cohen had her work cut out for her.” Sounds familiar.
Two friends sent me links to a piece by James Ridgeway’s piece in the Guardian about the future of growing old in America.(Bottom line: not looking good. Better to be British, though not for long or by much.) What caught my eye wasn’t the greedy-geezer-rebutting statistics that millions of older Americans can expect to keep working or to be poor – or both. It was the first line: “In her remarkable book The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir observed that fear of aging and death drives younger people to view their elders as a separate species, rather than as their own future selves.”
When I first learned that the oldest Americans are the happiest, I was skeptical. I was still in the grips of the cultural bias that drowns out positive messages about late life. Also, happiness is notoriously difficult to measure. (Ask me right after I’ve eaten a chocolate chip cookie.) So I was intrigued when a counterintuitive factor behind contentment — at any age — surfaced in a recent study in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
It’s common knowledge that older workers are staying on the job longer, reversing historic retirement trends. Meager savings and trashed portfolios mean that many can’t afford to quit. Social Security no longer penalizes those who continue to earn. And the great majority of older workers is employed in the education and health sectors, which aren’t physically demanding. This is bad news for those hungrily eying their La-Z-Boy recliners, but “there is a lot to like in this surge of experienced workers,” writes Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser in an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times. More salaries generate more tax revenue; seasoned talent is valuable; and it’s not a zero-sum game in terms of the job market.
It’s always good to encounter work that pushes back against the prevailing “it’s-all-downhill-from-here” narrative, and Wendy Lustbader’s Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older does just that.
Like everyone else, Hollywood agents use the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to get the scoop on different actors’ careers, including their ages. Now an “anonymous 40-something actor” is suing IMDb for revealing that number, and three major actors’ unions are supporting her.
I loved Up the Down Staircase, the story of an idealistic teacher learning the ropes in a tough urban high school, which came out in 1965 when I was just learning how to be a vile teenager. It turns out that Kaufman's still in the classroom, having been hired last year by Hunter College, her alma mater, to teach a course on Jewish humor.
Last month I went up to Boston to give a talk at the invitation of my friend Sarah Wright, founder and director of Social Work in Progress. The organization provides staffing for healthcare and eldercare organizations; the audience was a mix of administrators, directors of nursing and social workers; and I was honored to kick off its community education and professional development program series in Sarah’s beautiful new office in historic downtown Dedham.
September 21, Dedham, Mass.
Sarah and meBelow, the transcript of my talk, to which people responded warmly. From my end, the best part was hearing from one person after another how gratifying they found working with older people. photo credit: Gretje Ferguson Photography
I'm an author whose books include Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well (HarperCollins,1997). I'm on the board of the Council on Contemporary Families, and a staff writer at the American Museum of Natural History. While researching this project I've received fellowships from the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, the New York Times, and the Yale Law School's Information Society Project.
-- Ashton Applewhite
