Happy Happy Old Folks

When I read the Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks I am always reminded of some of my students' essays, back in the days when I was a professor and graded papers.  There were always those special few who had some extravagant idea which in their good will and enthusiasm came written up in their weekly or monthly writing assignment.  Recently Brooks devoted a column to the proposition that the elderly in the USA are happier than they have been at any other time of their lives.  He statistics to prove it.  I was mildly outraged when I read the piece, just for the presumption of a younger male to speak for a group of people with whom he could not personally identify.  In a way, he's just like a white man telling us how blacks feel.  My outrage was nothing compared to the strong temper displayed by the writers of letters to the editor which the Times published.  Well, I am eighty four, and I pass time in the company of a great number of the elderly.  Yes, they certainly are lucky to have Medicare and Social Security, and a lot of them have pensions, too.  But, of course, as statistics show, there are a lot of poor seniors in this country as well.  But let's get beyond the material.  The statistics David Brooks displays in his column are true in an interesting sense.  My experience of the elderly as a whole is that they are polite and friendly and would try to say positive things to an interviewer or on a questionnaire.  But this does not tell the truth as it really is.  Elderly are quiet, partly because they are resigned, partly because if they have any sense they know it is useless to complain about the inevitable.  They mostly have cut way back on their drinking, and the fun times that went with it, few of them are getting laid, and certainly at best only once in a great while.  The wonderful friends they used to pal around with are most of them dead or demented.  Their spouse has died or is lying in a bed and everyone is praying for the end.  The walk down the street is a perilous balancing act that could end up in a serious fracture, double pneumonia, and, well, there's the thing, if you are lucky and they don't get too much medication in you, the pneumonia will kill you like it used to do all the time.  "The old man's friend" wasn't just a cute saying when they were talking about pneumonia.  It's not a total disaster, this being old. It's a chronic thing that one doesn't really want to talk much about, it's just not really much fun.