Aging and the Glass of Life

A friend of mine recently complained that his father was getting crankier by the day. I asked him if he’d always been that way. He thought about it and said that come to think of it, his father had always been on the crotchety side.

Our conversation reminded me about something that had happened years earlier. It was the night before Thanksgiving and New York’s Penn Station was jam-packed with holiday travelers and commuters hurrying in every direction. The overhead sign board flashed departure times and gates with an air of urgency as we made our way through the throngs of people toward the Amtrack ticket counter.

Our hearts sank at the sight of the ticket line which looked as if it stretched from one end of the station to the other. We were trying to make the last Downeaster to Boston where we were spending the holiday with friends.

An elderly woman in line overheard us worrying that we might miss our train. She turned and said, “You kids go ahead of me. I have plenty of time to make my train and I don’t want you to miss yours.” We thanked the woman for her kindness and moved ahead of her. Then she reached out and tapped the back of the older man in front of us.

“Excuse me sir,” she said. “These kids may miss their train. If you’re not in a hurry, would you mind letting them go ahead of you?” When the man didn’t respond or give any sign that he’d heard her, she reached out and tapped him again. “Sir…” This time the man’s back and shoulders stiffened and we knew he’d heard. I whispered in the woman’s ear, “that’s okay. Thanks anyway.”

“Son,” she said, “I don’t want you to think that all elderly people are cranky. You’re going to find that most people who are cranks when they’re old were usually that way when they were young.” Over the years I’ve learned how right she’d been. “There's nothing worse than being an aging young person,” is how Richard Pryor put it.

Several years later when I was working in Community School District 18 in Brooklyn, my office was across the way from a man who tested youngsters for the Gifted Program. Jack was in his 70s at the time and I have never known anyone before or since who was younger at heart, even though he’d known his share of adversity.

One afternoon we were having a conversation when out of the blue he asked me if I could have anything in the world I wanted, what would it be? My father had passed away seven years earlier and I still missed him. Without even thinking, I said “if I could have anything, it would be to have my dad back for just a minute so I could hug him one more time.”

Jack didn’t hesitate. He wrapped his arms around me and hugged me right there in the middle of the office. In that moment, as Jack and I embraced, I felt my father’s presence more acutely and in a way that I hadn’t experienced since his passing.

Jack and my anonymous friend in Penn Station each understood something fundamental about the human spirit and how the aging process doesn’t have to change who we really are. “If wrinkles must be written upon our brows,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith, “let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”

I’m thankful for many things today, including those delightful and unexpected encounters in life that remind us of the things that matter the most, that while we are destined to age it is not written that we must grow old, and that it is far better to view the glass of life as half full.