An afternoon with an elderly respondent:

...And so no longer exposed to the obscenity of death, we axe now treated (by the new thanatology experts) to its utter banality...

...E ARLY ON IN this reflection I quoted Hannah Arendt's injunction that we "think what we do...

...Such an attitude would resist the temptation to reduce the strange to the familiar, the dreadful to the manageable, the careful to the ordinary...

...I do...

...In disbelief, Cora focused on the woman's argyle-knit socks rising out of peasant's clogs, the kind Cora' s own grandmother might have worn in Trondheim...

...DON'T c'ALL My...

...What for, Cora...

...Fletcher's impulses as a homeowner seemed essentially destructive...

...As the interviewer's set speech came to a close, Cora shifted her weight, and a puff of dust rose from a break in the upholstery...

...Even if the old timers are dead or moved away, whoever's here now, they got their rights like the rest of us...

...Some researcher at the University must have got Cora's name from the Nutrition Site where she eats lunch twice a week, complaining about the soy beans in the meat loaf and those old people "full of aches and pains and dying to tell you about them...

...First, though, I do want to assure you of the value of your opinions...

...Commonweal: 114...

...Using the binoculars Fletcher forgot to take with him that day, she checks license plates and reports them to federal agencies, convinced that the mild-mannered Mr...

...You mean that odd-looking person who asked me all those questions...

...When my folks died I stayed here, and I married Fletcher Weatherby, a building contractor...

...She can also see into the basement of the Manousos family on the other side of her alley...

...a tweed jacket frayed at cuffs and buttonholes...

...Long gone are the trellises old Larsen was so proud of, one slat after another rotted away...

...She also reported a heated exchange with Mr...

...Cora's impressions of that institution were picked up in the thirties, when a local drugstore owner declared in newspaper headlines that his daughter was being fed Communist propaganda in her freshman survey course...

...In response to the question, "To whom would you turn for financial advice or assistance," Cora invented "my son-in-law Milo, real good at handling money...

...When one considers how ill-tempered, acrimonious, and feisty the rest of us are, it is good to hear that the elderly, in their wisdom~ have attained a I I I KATHARINE B YRNE, formerly associated with the Psychometric Laboratory at the University of Chicago, was also Director of Continuing Education at Mundelein College...

...I've called Sanitation and Forestry and the Corporation Counsel's office...

...William Howard T a f t . . . Madame Chiang Kai-shek . . . The Dutchess of W i n d s o r . . . " You'd think you were at a diplomatic reception...

...I should get in touch with the Zoning Board," she tells me...

...One poem in particular, the "Ode to a Nightingale," is wrenched from his experience of ministering to his dying brother...

...In such a crucible, what Keats called the "vale of soul making," and only in such a crucible might we then become emboldened to speak...

...As soon as she plugged in the coffee pot, Cora tore into "Milo' s latest idiot scheme...

...I remember no such thing," is her answer...

...They're building bedrooms down there for all these people they say are their cousins from Sparta...

...When my family moved here everybody was Swedish or German, or a few Norwegians like us...

...Bastidas is an engineer who was born in Ecuador...

...Yet in a world where nothing is obscene, nothing can be saved...

...Again, in May's words, it would simply "let death be death...

...Indeed, years ago she didn't think much of Himmelfarb's enterprise either: all those earnest little boys carrying instrument cases and wearing embroidered yarmulkes...

...He told anyone who would listen that the roses his wife's father had cherished were of inferior stock, woody, and worn-out...

...Accustomed to clear distinctions and ready-made labels she was receiving confused signals as the operator pushed keys that set off clicks and whirrings from the cassette recorder...

...Cora proceeded smoothly...

...How often I have heard her say, "Sure I'm an old lady, but don't call me no senior citizen...

...When I could resist my prying impulse no longer, I asked, "Cora, what did you think about the research project...

...He used to find room for all those Norwegian boys looking for jobs as carpenters' helpers...

...Cora keeps it on the mantel, propped against an empty bud vase, next to Gloria's graduation picture...

...Besides, what you are seeing through those binoculars are the practice rooms Mr...

...The terror and the shame have been therapeutically excised from death, as evidenced in the droning boredom of films like Joan Robinson: One Woman's Story or the silly saccharine placebos of the spiritualist in Poltergeist or finally, the trendy proclamation by Kiibler-Ross that we should no longer speak of death, only another "transition...

...She had emptied the usually overflowing orange plastic ash tray from The Dells, but the table's surface was still covered with a gray mottling of old Marlboros and spilt coffee...

...Now Cora launched into her own recital...

...There's no harm in it, I guess...

...If these words mean what I think they mean, they are reassuring...

...She and Milo say all the time, 'Mama, come live with us,' but I say to them, 'You got your life, I got mine.' Even if I can't keep up like I used to...

...FOUND THIS ponderous quotation in a report of a seminar on aging, a subject which, if not yet close to my heart, is already knocking at my arteries...

...not too handy, was the local opinion...

...In a voice louder than necessary, and slowly, as though addressing a child with a learning disability, the interviewer began to speak...

...Just listen to this...

...Sometimes Cora calls him, "that wetback...

...As Homer long ago reminded us -- "any sorrow can be borne if it is told in a story...

...But can you trust those kind of people...

...This union yielded one fat child, Gloria, now grown up and moved out...

...Such therapeutic surgery is nothing more than an intellectual lobotomy that cuts us off from the terrifying experience of what lies beyond our control...

...Just when you think the Russians may be moving ever so gradually toward a more civilized state (their young people wearing jeans and listening to rock 'n' roll, their government officials and factory managers taking kickbacks, their political dissidents being sent to psychiatric hospitals instead of the Gulag) they proceed, like not-quite-Hellenized Macedonians, to shoot down the Korean Air Lines plane, killing 269 persons...

...Live and let live, I say...

...I didn't mind talking to her...

...Here is the real world of dying, the "fever and the f r e t . . , where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies...

...T HE RUSSIANS are to European civilization what the Macedonians were to ancient Greek civilization...

...As Cora hit this high-minded note, I knew that she needed no help from me...

...Weatherby, I hope you will just talk freely about yourself and how you feel about your life in this house...

...And she read me a letter asking her "cooperation in a study of the attitudes of mature members of our community...

...For seven years now I been a widow...

...The last thing I heard was a good word for Milo...

...and also about your neighbors and your family...

...In many respects the Macedonians looked and acted like members of the Greek world...

...Instead, we need to stand humble before this humbling event, suffer its indignity, and perhaps reverence what may lay beyond it...

...Late-in-life, she married Fletcher Weatherby, a kind of handyman in the neighborhood...

...Now he wants to buy into a pistachio nut farm and needs $2,000, from me, who else, and he sure won't get it...

...i i i i i ii i i I I i l l I OUR OLD-FASHIONED REACTION TO FLIGHT 007 America's nostalgic liberalism DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...

...He even speaks of the temptation to be "half in love with easeful Death" but resolutely bids it "adieu" realizing "the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do...

...The Hialeah postcard was not there...

...Kids come through the yard and tear everyl I l i i thing out, all the roses...

...I been living here in this house all my life...

...something was always just a bit awry...

...They'd borrow this or that element of Greek culture (e.g., they'd hire Plato's star pupil to tutor young Alexander), but just when you thought they might be getting the hang of it they'd go ahead and do something indicating they had missed the whole point...

...The next time 1 stopped in, I did notice that the Hialeah clubhouse was once more leaning against the bud vase...

...In reflecting on this event, it is difficult to decide which is more astonishing, the callousness of the Soviets or their stupidity...

...While impressed by the word "gerontological," which she sounded-out carefully, she was also suspicious of Commonweal: 112 anyone connected with the University...

...Like my husband's rose garden, y'know...

...Such an attitude which let death be death would ultimately redound to those who remain and then, perhaps, life might truly be life...

...and yet they weren't quite Greek...

...Don't you remember...

...Yet I hesitate to convey this information to you without also telling you something about the only elderly respondent I have ever actually known, my neighbor Cord Weatherby...

...Cora eyed the researcher and the tools of her trade warily...

...We realize that senior citizens like y o u r s e l f . . . "' Cora's back stiffened...

...and that he intended to replace them with spectacular new hybrids...

...One day last fall I heard Cora's insistent telephone voice giving me a directive...

...But even then our speech would be the language of indirection, a poem (of the nightingale) a song (about the blues) or a story (from the Bible...

...Cora indicated a young woman who stood there fiddling with recording equipment, her clipboard and briefcase on the dining room table...

...After the death of her parents, Cora lived on in the square red-brick two-story house...

...I should like to close in a similar chord by invoking the memory of the poet John Keats whose verse represents an authentic encounter with death as death...

...A T THE APPOINTED hour, I picked my way through the weeds in Cora's yard, stumbling into holes where her father's roses used to grow, the ground taken over now by plantain and Russian Thistle...

...Chung, who drives a cab by day, studies accounting at night, and lives across the street from her, also trafficks in drugs...

...the kind of embroidered cotton blouse you might find in a thrift shop...

...Naturally, things aren't the same no more...

...With her radio tuned to voices that tie moral turpitude to political degeneracy -- and in the last national election found both qualities in the party that lost -she deals with local matters of concern to her...

...punishing Thebes for resisting him, spared the house in which Pindar had lived while tearing every other building in the city to the ground...

...He did send a postcard picture of palms and azaleas around the clubhouse at Hialeah...

...a long skirt of faded denim...

...state of equilibrium, accommodation, and generosity that their children and their children's children fail to achieve...

...Tkere is nothing to be done toward the sacred," writes William May, "except to let it be what it is, permit it to run its course, and let one's own life be caught up in its force...

...Like Arendt, Keats knew full well our task --- only in a world of suffering and death it is a melancholy one -- here "where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs...

...The contents of one bank account went with him...

...Coming from that place," she reminded me, "you never know what might turn up...

...24 February 1984:113 "Mrs...

...Hearing old Fletcher thus promoted and disposed of, I glanced at the mantel...

...But I get some real good food and I meet some nice people at the nutrition place...

...Why can't you live and let live...

...Kathern, you got to come over tomorrow at two o'clock...

...You just have to be careful what you say to them...

...Cora doesn't have much time for housekeeping, but she had for this occasion cleared away some of the coffee cups, old copies of The Enquirer, and pill bottles, to make room for her questioner's equipment...

...Bastidas, a branch of whose maple hangs over her driveway...

...Contemporary culture seems heU-bent on liberating us from any sense of violation and thereby eliminating altogether the category of the obscene...

...There was the memorable occasion, for instance, when Alexander, 1 _9 i i i I I I I DAVID R. CARLIN, JR., a frequent contributor, is a Rhode Island state senator...

...it is equally difficult to decide whether these deficiencies manifested themselves more plain!y in the perverse downing of the plane or in the equally perverse refusal to repent afterwards...

...Did Cora, perhaps, see too many Charlie Chan movies during her formative years...

...One summer day about seven years ago, Fletcher drove out to the Arlington Park Race Track, and he hasn't returned...

...Sure he says he'll cut it off as soon as he can borrow a chain saw...

...Well, he never got around to it...

...Cora does keep busy...

...NO SENIOR CITIZEN" An afternoon with an elderly respondent HARINE BYRNE "Most elderly respondents report that the sequential experiences of their day-to-day existence are basically satisfying, especially as these relate to the achievement of an equitable resolution to earlier familial and cultural conflicts...

...Himmelfarb made years ago for his violin students...

...As she opened her door Cora looked grave but also pleased with herself, dressed in frilly lavender that fit better when she weighed less, wearing the headcovering reserved for festive occasions: a "curly chestnut wig with golden glints," it was called in the advertisement, and she had bought it for lier own seventy-fifth birthday...

...Gloria's married to Milo, a man whose first wife, in Cora's words, "took off with a door-to-door photographer," leaving behind two unphotogenic children...

...I invented-a spaghetti sauce that needed stirring and turned to leave...

...And what was she to make of the investigator herself, who was wearing, along with a fixed expression of professional good will, hair that hung straight, almost to her waist...

...Cora,' I remind her with self-conscious virtue, "Your own father was an immigrant...

...Her father was one of the shrewd developers who sold off their farm acres in thirty- and fifty-foot lots when Swedish and German aspirants to the good life moved here after World War I. I can remember him tending his roses, lovingly encouraging them to climb the trellises he made in his basement workshop, introducing them to anyone who paused at his back gate: "This is Mrs...

...both were foreign to her...

...Their father she describes as "a little man full of big ideas for using my money which he will get over my dead body, and if I can help it, not even then...

...What redeems such agony is not the faddish gimmicks of the thanatology movement but men and women of virtue who with humility and courage suffer the shame of death rather than manage it away...

...Cora's the last of the old settlers in our neighborhood...

...I got this one child, my daughter Gloria, married to a fine man and they got two lovely children...

...When Gloria visits her mother, she brings these children with her, and they rage up and down the stairs and beat on the tin sides of the clothes chute...

...They call me 'grandma,' " Cora says of them, "but not with no encouragement from me...