At those senior lunches, church suppers, midmorning diner confabs, I hear retirees chatting about the trajectory of their lives, deepening the smile lines they already have. Hindsight logic seems half the fun. Who would have guessed you’d end up selling clothes, or as a custom carpenter or court clerk? There’s no exaggerating the role patience may play in living well, or wearing a coat of the proverbial many colors—bold caution and humorous solemnity. You’ve talked to children and to the military, yet sometimes held your tongue, except about McCarthyism and Guantanamo. Balderdash still wins votes for popinjays, but the lag period when an environmental rescue effort, for example, can be mounted has shrunk alarmingly, voiding the chances for a new president to put the glaciers and rain forests back together or reduce sea flooding, restore the vanished galaxies of species. We prefer a president who mirrors us—a lowbrow braggart when we’re in that mood, or a gallant and humane man for World War II and the Marshall Plan. Our frame of mind does need repair, but that’s been true for a thousand years.
Pudgy, we sit in the senior center occasionally recounting the deaths
of our spouses, round robin, for solace. How one was trying to lift his legs off the bed when the embolism took him—or a woman’s heart failure, starting on the toilet, that crumpled her at the sink—and my mother, a long-term stroke victim trying to speak, whose eyes seemed to beg for death, after she could no longer swallow without choking. But was she possibly asking something else?—she wasn’t able to write. Agewise, we may all be in the same boat, and yet a healthy sprinkling of us have wrinkle lines denoting repose: not chewing over grievances or kicking ass, even our own. Instead, we enjoyed a good run and now could be an advertisement for life’s beneficence, if the word doesn’t mean you can’t also die of thirst in the desert. You might, but we exerted ourselves not to.
Doing what comes naturally should prevent your children from feeling estranged even if at some point you did get divorced; and keep you from beaching broke on the shoals of old age, unless you never shed a dice-or-drink addiction; and dissolve some of your midlife mortgage anxiety. Paying out mostly balances out, and the kids who ought to land in college eventually make it there. I believed in theory that character is fate but have been surprised a bit, firsthand. Not to find that hustlers beat nice guys, but that it doesn’t matter; they come a cropper, as you can read like newsprint in their faces; the length of life unstrings them. I can go to an Ivy League alumni reunion and meet posh fund managers who either wish they had pursued a degree in ornithology instead of finance or are fretting about a tax shelter gone gravely awry, not to mention a painful mismarriage. An auditor disqualified the shelter and a judge is divvying up their assets as if to provide for their stepchildren as well as the wife: is that fair? Although grads at the Ivy gathering got a head start over nine-tenths of the folks at the senior-center lunch, long before their seventh decade the effects of early privilege had petered out, at least according to the emanations of contentment versus discontent at each location. George Orwell’s last notebook jotting observed that “at 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” (Sadly, he didn’t make it to that age.) And I tend to agree, especially if you advance the criterion to the white-hair phase, when a thousand accumulating decisions at first defined and then achieved our goals. If subliminally we wanted to be couch potatoes, we are—or exercised a real green thumb, cooked delicious pasta, and mastered the organ in the corner church. Perhaps there was a mountain in the Adirondacks whose profile stirred us to drive the Alaska Highway, and later we threw lire into the Trevi Fountain, raised Belgian shepherds, adopted a three-month-old child to enlarge our family, worked in wholesale. Whatever the destination, it turned out not to be Phil Rizzuto’s or Phil Donahue’s or whoever we idealized originally. Life’s gauge was broader than we anticipated. Not in the sense that we batted in Yankee Stadium or chatted up celebs like Montgomery Clift; but our aims multiplied and vicarious satisfactions punctuated our days. A snatch of Scott Joplin on the radio (we don’t need to have composed to exult); a daughter on a winning basketball team; a seagull, surplice-white but primeval in posture, that lands on the lawn to grab food left for the dog. 感谢您阅读《老年人口比例增加对社会的影响 》一文，出国留学网(liuxue86.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
