Yesterday, eminent composer Elliott Carter celebrated his birthday with a concert at Carnegie Hall.  It was also the premier of a 17-minute composition — and “not some chestnut written when he was a student in Paris in the 1930s,” as the front-page New York Times tribute pointed out. Carter wrote the piece last year, at 99, along with five others.

So says Professor Leon Simons of the University of New South Wales, whose study
tracking 3000 people for two decades was just published in the Medical Journal of Australia.  What he actually said was, “A drink a day can keep dementia away.”  He found that one alcoholic drink per day cut the risk of dementia by 34 per cent. And you should garden while you drink. 

When I first heard the term “longevity risk”, I figured it was medical: a hazard associated with some new fountain-of-youth drug or diet. Silly me! It used to refer to the risk borne by pension funds or life insurance companies that guaranteed lifetime benefits. Then employer pension plans migrated to more volatile 401(k) plans. Then the market crashed and 401(k)s turned into 201(k)s.  “Longevity risk” is now the chilly term for the prospect that more and more Americans will outlive their retirement savings, spending their final years despairing and destitute.

Knees hurt.  Memory hiccups.  Eyesight and hearing degenerate. I’ve interviewed people who can’t walk unassisted, who’re hooked up to oxygen tanks, who are being treated for cancer. But while those who work into their eighties and nineties face many different physical challenges, they share one attribute:  excellent cognitive function. And as Judy Steed writes in the Toronto Star,  “the harsh truth is that you can't enjoy old age if you haven't got the healthy brain to go with it.”

Unless he’s traveling, Harold Burson can be found in his corner office at Burson-Marsteller, Inc., the giant public-relations firm he founded in 1946. His parents emigrated from England in 1920 and opened a hardware store in Memphis, Tennessee, but were wiped out by the Depression. Burson’s mother supported the family by selling clothing door-to-door, and he declares that, “if she’d ever had $25,000 in capital, she’d have been Sam Walton.”

I’ve been sifting through past interviews, and this morning brought me to 92-year-old pianist Irving Fields (introduced here).  Fields had had a hip replacement a few weeks earlier, but you’d never have guessed it. He hoped to be back on the golf course soon, and was having no trouble handling his nightly gig at Nino’s Tuscany on West 58th Street. “I go out the back of my building, walk 30 steps to the left, go up four steps – which I can do now, without a cane – and I’m at the most wonderful job I’ve ever had,” Fields reported happily. Not that unusual, I reasoned.  These days really old people skip rope the morning after hip replacements. But open-heart surgery?

I’ve been wondering all along which personality traits contribute to a productive old age.  Two researchers at the University of California, Riverside have nailed one for me: conscientious people live longer.  Their study showed that conscientious people are less likely to take risks, to smoke or drink to excess, to gravitate towards more stable jobs and relationships — and to live an average of two to four years longer.  

A little while ago, Eldr, a national magazine aimed at people over 60, invited me to post some of my stories on their website. I’m delighted to announce that the blog, Portraits of Older Workers, went live on October 30th.  You can link to it directly, or off the blogroll on Eldr.com’s front page, where I’ve got lots of interesting company.

Last night I went to hear Dr. Rudi Westendorp, the head of gerontology at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, speak at Mount Sinai about good health after 85.  A slight and smiling man in a red bowtie, Westendorp was introduced by International Longevity Center director Robert Butler and opened with a zinger: “There is no biological limit to human age. Mortality is plastic, as the biologists say.”

NPR’s Frank Deford is always fun to listen to, but my ears really pricked during today's Morning Edition when he declared, “Yes, old is in. In college football, 80 is the new 60.”  He’s not referring to the 30+ year-old players hobbling off the field but to their coaches, who are retiring far later than their predecessors ever considered.