Old Tribesmen

I often wince and look away from a very old face on the street or on a page, look away, get away. Is it fear that makes me avert my eyes? I don’t know.

But when I choose to look back, it’s amazing what I find. All that fear and loathing of old age I’ve carried with me since youth and strikes like lightning at the thought of being so old myself can also be quieted long enough to allow me to take in the eyes and soul that lives in the crags and runnels of aged faces.

A face frightful at first glance slowly loses its terror when I can quiet my fears long enough to simply gaze into the grizzled, worn face, the fire that still burns in his eyes, see the beauty in the patterns of wear, the understated strength, the still endurance of a life long lived. And forgetting the cultural differences among old faces I’ve lost myself in is a study for anthropologists, there is also for me so evidently the kindred human spirit that inhabits us all, wherever we come from.

The Cowboy, photo Phil Morgan
Elder; photo Dorthe Juri Lange
Cowboy; photographer unknown
Elder; photographer unknown
Willie Nelson; photo Pari Dukovic

Rediscovering Songs of our Youth: “Spring is Here”

Mike Schiffer, a fabulous jazz pianist and teacher now in his late 80s, remembers one of his first love affairs with a song, “Spring is Here.”

Spring Is Here was first introduced by Dennis King and Vivienne Segal in the 1938 Broadway Musical, I Married An Angel, and sung by Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the 1942 film version by the same name. Earliest recorded hits by the Leo Reisman Orchestra featuring vocalist Felix Knight and by the popular baritone Buddy Clark (nee Samuel Goldberg) were raves in 1938.

What’s not widely known is that Spring Is Here was one of the first of its kind in a Broadway show. It’s a rather sad song, highly nuanced, a type of song that hadn’t been tried on the stage where the songs were designed for belters like Ethel Merman who could be heard clearly in the last rows.

I personally wasn’t aware of the song until the jazz community discovered it in the fifties. There were versions by Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. And singers such as Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Julie London and Frank Sinatra included it in their albums. There’s no doubt it’s still one of the best known standards.

Here are the lyrics to “Spring is Here,” and links to a few stellar recordings I think you’ll like. 

Spring Is Here
Once there was a thing called spring,
when the world was writing verses
like yours and mine.
All the lads and girls would sing
when we sat at little tables
and drank May wine.
Now April, May and June
are sadly out of tune,
Life has stuck the pin in the balloon.
Spring is here!
Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?
Spring is here!
Why isn’t the waltz entrancing?
No desire, no ambition leads me.
Maybe it’s because nobody needs me.
Spring is here!
Why doesn’t the breeze delight me?
Stars appear.
Why doesn’t the night invite me?
Maybe it’s because nobody loves me.
Spring is here I hear.


MIKE SCHIFFER | Cincinnati-born Mike Schiffer has spent his life playing piano. After14 years of classical lessons, he was eager to get into jazz, and two weeks after arriving at Kenyon College he had a regular gig with a busy off-campus band. Four years of weekends with that quartet taught him how to play the music with musicians who knew all the songs of the day.

Always fascinated with New York, at twenty-five he moved to the big city. It was the mid-fifties, and there was a jazz scene in the Village that took him in. Before long he was playing full time in the bars and restaurants that had a piano.

In the late sixties, Schiffer had enough city life and landed in the Berkshires where he’s continued playing and teaching piano for the past fifty years. He’s especially enjoyed accompanying over sixty different silent films, something he began doing in college. Another of his interests are the visual arts, especially photography.

mikeschiffer.com • music
myronschiffer.com • photography

What if the answer to “when” is never?


This thoughtful essay by Howard Englander of “Cheating Death” renown reminds me of a discussion the Five Wise Guys had during our first season. When someone began talking about his “Bucket List”, Matt Tannenbaum famed bookseller, said: “We all know about the Bucket List, but there’s also a “Fuck-it List,” the things we on longer need or want to do. What’s on your to-do or not-to-do agendas? — Sam

What if the Answer to “When” Is Never?
By Howard Englander

I’m not sure about the term, “Bucket List.” It puts the emphasis on traveling to exotic locations before you kick the bucket…doing the things you have talked about endlessly but never got out of your rut to actually do.

For sure there are places I want to visit before I put away the Rick Steves’ Best of Europe in 21 Days guidebook, but my “Must Do” list has more to do with the ferry trip across the River Styx when my name is on the ferry’s manifest.

I want to arrive at the final destination without being remorseful and regretful about what I did or didn’t do in my lifetime. ‘Getting complete’ with troubling issues from the past is the process that is helping me. Each unsettling bygone event I resolve gets me closer to the peaceful place where there is nothing left to lament! Having shed the grip of the past, it won’t be as difficult to bid adieu when Act III arrives and it’s time to shuffle off this mortal coil grateful that I outlived Hamlet by a good fifty years.

Of course, I feel sad knowing I won’t be around for the joyous events I’ll never share with my six-year-old granddaughter. But for the most part, the grief that lingers from the consequence of an irresolute past has been confronted and resolved. I’ve come to regard the wounds as hard lessons learned, recalling the painful events without being triggered to relive them again and again. I don’t want to spend my final days wallowing in regret!

I still have some outstanding cold and sullen relationships that need to dissolve in tears and hugs or be accepted as permanent thorns in an otherwise rosy life. Grudgingly I’m consenting to detente as the best of the lousy options available. After decades of unfulfilled expectations and thwarted intentions, I’ll have to live – and die – with the issues unresolved.

A degree of solace comes from knowing it’s not all about me. There are two sides to relationships and if the peace branch is spurned, there’s consolation in knowing I offered it. I like this quote from Anne Lamott about experiencing loss that you never completely get over but finally get through: “It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

The way we live writes the history we leave behind for posterity to judge. I’ve been lucky to have an opportunity for a mid-life rewrite, shifting the location of my story from the self to the Self. I’ve moved toward selfless service, assuming responsibility and being trusting and trustworthy (trying hard to do so if not always succeeding).It’s the path I want to be on but it veers away from some of the most important people in my life who are still stuck in vanity and victimhood, the traits I want to discard.

I want our paths to reunite. I keep searching the GPS for a propitious route to make it happen. But it’s not on the screen as yet. And maybe it will never be. And I have to accept that.

Loss and Gain?

There’s a terrible moment in the life of some older folks when wiser minds forbid them from driving anymore. Maybe it’s not so bad for some. But I imagine that for me it’s going to be really hard.

Here, in the remarkable final scene of Nebraska, an aged and somewhat confused Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), is given a taste of independence by his devoted son David.
Please tell us what you think of the scene and the implications for old folks. Perhaps even some advice for taking such eventualities in stride.

I’m Not Rappaport

Here’s an excerpt from I’m Not Rappaport by Herb Gardner who was also the author of A Thousand Clowns. The speech is something of a rant by the character of Nat, an old man who is attempting to intimidate the tenant committee chairman Danforth to drop his plans to fire the aged and near-blind building superintendent, his friend Midge Carter.  He makes an eloquent stand for the value of old people. It’s a fantastic piece of writing. Nat begins as Danforth has tried to excuse himself from this inhumane treatment of Midge, claiming it is a Committee decision, not his own. Nat claims to represent HURTSFOE, the Human Rights Task Force of Midge’s union that, of course, doesn’t exist.


(To Danforth) I’m sorry, the  spotlight falls on you because it must.  Because you are so extraordinarily ordinary, because there are so many of you lately. You collect old furniture, old cars, old pictures, everything old but old people. Bad souvenirs, they talk too much. Even quiet, they tell you too much; they look like the future and you don’t want to know. Who are these people, these oldies, this strange race? They’re not my type, put them with their own kind, a building, a town, put them someplace. (Leans toward him) You idiots, don’t you know? One day you too will join this weird tribe. Yes, Mr. Chairman, you too will get old; I hate to break the news. And if you’re frightened now, you’ll be terrified then.

The problem’s not that life is short but that it’s very long; so you better have a policy. Here we are. Look at us. We’re the coming attractions. And as long as you’re afraid of it, you’ll be afraid of us , you will want to hide us or make us hide from you. You’re dangerous. (Grips his arm urgently) You foolish bastards, don’t you understand? The old people, they’re the survivors, they know something, they haven’t just stayed late to ruin your party. The very old, they are miracles like the new-born; close to the end is precious like close to the beginning. What you’d like is for Carter to be nice and cute and quiet and go away. But he won’t. I won’t let him. Tell him he’s slow or stupid –O.K. – but you tell him he is unnecessary, and that is a sin, that is a sin against life, that is abortion at the other end. (Silence. Nat studies him for a moment) HURTSFOE waits. The arena is booked, the lions are hungry …

– Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little in the 1985 production of I’m Not Rappaport. (Playbill)

You might also enjoy this short clip from the 1996 film version with Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis.

The gusts of sadness that come out of nowhere


It hits me at the most unexpected of times… at the public pool proudly watching my granddaughter mustering up the courage to jump off the high dive… at a sidewalk café when the glow of a fading twilight peeks past a cloud and backlights my wife’s face in a halo of gold… at the wedding of a friend’s daughter as she looks lovingly into the eyes of her betrothed and recites the vows she has written.

I am flushed with sheer joy, when suddenly, without warning, tears steeped in utter sadness wet my cheeks.

I know what is behind this yin and yang. As I open my heart to embracing the rapture of life I can’t close my eyes to its unalterable transience. Accepting this reality is the gift and the millstone of growing older.

When my granddaughter jumps into my arms yelling “Papa, Papa,” my breath is washed with pure oxygen, enhancing my capacity to love tenfold. But there is no escaping what is inexorable: Life and Death oppose each other and contain each other, each complementing the other.

I make a choice. I can be in the present moment, fully appreciative of an instant of time that has touched me deeply; or absorbed in the thrall of melancholy grieving for a future moment that I will never know.

I decide to be cheerful or to be sad. You would think the choice is a no-brainer. Oddly enough, it is not so cut and dried. Although more often than not I opt for the exhilaration of the heartfelt moment, there is something seductive about sinking into the gentle sadness of the ‘pathos of things.’

Because I know the moment is fleeting, my appreciation of its significance is enhanced. But at the same time, I feel sadness at how quickly the actual experience becomes an anecdote of memory. The sadness deepens knowing that the transient moment is a reminder that life itself is impermanent.

The Japanese call this Mono no aware: an awareness that the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing.

I’ve come to accept the gusts of sadness that come out of nowhere. When tears accompany the feelings I try to find the source of the grief they speak to, uncovering the unresolved issues of the past. It’s helpful for me to do that because I know that putting to rest whatever remains unsettled from my past will ease my trepidation about what is to come.

Democracy: Leonard Cohen

We mourn the loss of our great poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, of whose life we will post an appreciation in coming days. For now, given the darkness that has descended on our body politic, it feels most appropriate to remember his words on the source and force and spirit of democracy.

Here is the link to Cohen’s performance of  “Democracy” along with the lyrics. Rest in peace, brother. And thank you forever for this reminder.



Democracy
It’s coming through a hole in the air
From those nights in Tiananmen Square
It’s coming from the feel
That this ain’t exactly real
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
Democracy is coming to the USA

It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay,
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the USA

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the USA

Sail on, sail on
Oh mighty ship of State
To the shores of need
Past the reefs of greed
Through the Squalls of hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on
It’s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst
It’s here the family’s broken
And it’s here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the USA

It’s coming from the women and the men
Oh baby, we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep,
And the mountain’s going to shout Amen
It’s coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the USA

Sail on, sail on
O mighty ship of State
To the shores of need
Past the reefs of greed
Through the squalls of hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
As time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
To the USA

Summer Evening

I go to this lovely song so I can hold my ground against the sudden bullying of my mortality. I need only hear the first twang of the guitar and the singer’s face-front telling, that I am heartened: the choice of hope over despair. I walked on the beach at Truro, Massachusetts the other day, and sang myself into sweet peace.

I’ve included a link to what I think is the most beautiful version of it, performed by Gillian Welsh.


Summer Evening by Gillian Welch

Say this deal’s about over, and I guess that’s true,
Town used to have twelve stores, now we got two.
Big boys movin’ in, small farmers movin’ on.
The way may be goin’, but the life ain’t gone.
 
On a summer evenin’ when the corn’s head-high,
And there’s more lightnin’ bugs than stars in the sky.
Ah, you get the feelin’ things may be alright,
On a summer evenin’ before the dark of night.
 
Walked down by the river where my good fields are,
It’s a dusty old road, but there ain’t many cars.
Think about my wife, my daughter and my son,
If the good Lord’s still lookin’, the Lord’s will be done.
 
But on a summer evenin’ when the corn’s head-high,
And there’s more lightnin’ bugs than stars in the sky.
Ah, you get the feelin’ things may be alright,
On a summer evenin’ before the dark of night.

Life in the Fourth Quarter


We spend the first half of our lives wishing we looked like someone else and the second half wishing we looked like our former selves.

Ian Brown has turned 60, and he’s not happy about it. Consulting newsstands and bookstores, he finds a dearth of honest, original writing about aging, “a subject we don’t care to think about when we’re younger and can’t bear to face when we’re older.” And so he decides to make a diary of his 61st year, “to stare in the face of that denial, and keep track, at even the most mundane daily level, of the train coming straight at us.”

His journal is largely a protest against decline. His hearing is fading, along with his memory. His knees ache. His arches have fallen. His face sags, and a patch of hair over his forehead resembles “a random stand of corn that somehow got planted away from the main field.” He has rosacea, age spots and a hemorrhoid. Though he and his friends still hike and ski, it’s a case of “ever-older men doing daring things, to prove we’re still daring, and therefore not older.”

Since he turned 60, he thinks, people look at him differently. If a pretty young woman gives him a smile, she isn’t flirting; she’s taking pity. His neighbors expect him to be wise, cuddly and scrubbed of emotions such as anger or lust. “Sixty may or may not be the age you can start to feel old,” he finds. “But it is certainly the age others begin to think of you as old.”
With every day dragging him closer to The End, he must be ruthless about which book to read, which movie to see, which conversation to have, which story to write. Before he buys anything he calculates whether he will get enough use out of it before he dies. When he has to wait to be served in a bar, he wants to scream, “Don’t you realize I’m dying?”

The problem isn’t death, exactly, since he believes that it will be an anti-climactic nothing, a blackout followed by oblivion. It’s the idea of missing out on life that he can’t bear. That and the “slippery indignity of the stinking slide” into decrepitude. But more than the tick-tock of the existential clock, more than grief for his waning physical and mental powers, more than aggravation at society’s diminished estimation, he is consumed by regret, which he considers the greatest enemy. He is reminded of Samuel Johnson’s line that “sorrow is the rust of the soul.” “And,” Mr. Brown adds, “regret is the oxygen that makes it.”

Mostly Ian Brown regrets not taking more risks. Though he seems a good husband and the devoted father of two adult children, he feels that he could have been less guarded, more loving. Though he is a successful journalist, an award-winning author, and a television and radio host, he is afraid that he hasn’t lived up to his promise. He could have written more books. He could have made more money. He could have worried less about the threat of failure, which kept him from trying harder. Above all, he regrets that he has never had the courage to write what he’s always wanted to write, by which I believe he means a novel.

But if nothing else, his arrival at what he calls the “Decade of Living Precariously” has made him aware of his fears. He expects to live for an additional 25 or 30 years. Maybe there’s still time to write that novel. Maybe he can still “become the thing I want to be, whatever that is, time for another career, another self, another life, time to get it out of me, onto the page, into the air, into the heart.” Unless it is already too late — which, he concedes, “is the other main fear.”

Judging from Willard Spiegelman’s “Senior Moments,” the eighth decade of life is more tranquil than the seventh. Though he is 10 years older than Mr. Brown and, actuarially speaking, that much closer to the grave, Mr. Spiegelman is considerably sunnier about both his mortality and the decline en route. In a way, his book’s title is a misnomer, since the essays collected here are not so much about aging — Mr. Brown’s unblinking focus — as about having aged, about looking back over a long and satisfying life and looking ahead to “more years of pleasure, if luck and health hold out.”

Arranged in loose chronological order, the essays form a kind of memoir. The first reflects on the author’s childhood in a large, voluble Philadelphia family, where he learned early that language “was the best way to make one’s mark.” In time, he would embrace language as his life’s work, as an author and professor of poetry. Whereas Mr. Brown writes in the clipped, propulsive style of a journalist, Mr. Spiegelman adopts the discursive, finely crafted voice of a literature professor, revealing a penchant for aphorism and allusion.

“Here is a formula for staying young well beyond the days of youth,” he offers: “Grow old in a place where you do not think you belong.” He means both his longtime home of Dallas and his new home of Manhattan, where he relocated after retiring. In each city, he can’t escape feeling the transplant he is, but the sense of dislocation makes him feel more vital. The late-in-life move to New York is “an act of bravery,” he admits, but “the anonymity of metropolitan life gets you ready for the anonymity of the grave. I find this assessment comforting rather than macabre.”

Another essay considers how his attitudes have changed toward reading, “the first and the ultimate pleasure.” He finds his attention wandering more now, and he has trouble retaining plot points and dialogue, not to mention complex themes and variations. Like Mr. Brown, he has shed the promiscuity of youth and is now more selective about what he spends his time on. And at his age, he finds, “the sentence matters, perhaps most of all. Lucidity now trumps opacity and difficulty.”

A class reunion — “ Proust goes to the country club” — inspires a rumination on the meaning of nostalgia, or “melancholy without pain, a penumbra of chronic, thoughtless homesickness, a bland watercolor wash of feelings, or a bittersweet longing for auld lang syne that might not have been so good in actuality.” A friend reminds him that we spend the first half of our lives wishing we looked like someone else and the second half wishing we looked like our former selves. As for the reunion, it is brief and cheerful but nothing extraordinary — like life, he realizes, writ small.

Though Mr. Spiegelman may be closer to the end than Mr. Brown, he doesn’t betray dread or regret but a gentle, teasing acceptance. “We come into the world alone, with a cry,” he reminds us. “We exit alone, to confront the final eternal silence. The fun, all the pleasure and adventure, lies in between.” In Mr. Spiegelman I suspect that Mr. Brown would see the embodiment of the scrubbed-up, well-behaved senior that he himself is determined not to become. If he were to begin another diary on his 70th birthday, would we find the sharp corners rounded off, as in Mr. Spiegelman’s essays? It’s an intriguing theory, but I doubt it. In all likelihood, the books’ striking dissimilarities — in content and form but especially in attitude and voice — derive from the authors’ varying views on life more than from their relative ages or their divergent attitudes about the end of life. Whether we are 60 or 70, or 80 or 90, how fiercely we rage against the coming of that good night depends above all on how we have embraced the sum of our days.


This article by Gerard Helferich originally appeared on September 2, 2016 in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Helferich, 62, is the author of “Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912.”