Most elderly respondents report that the experiences of their day-to-day existence are basically satisfying, since they have achieved in their old age an equitable resolution to earlier familial and cultural conflicts.”
This ponderous quotation comes from a report of a seminar on aging, a subject not only close to my heart but knocking at my arteries. When one considers how ill-tempered, acrimonious and feisty most people are, it is reassuring to learn that the elderly have attained a state of accommodation and generosity that their children and their children’s children do not exhibit.
I hesitate to convey this information to you, however, without also telling you something about my neighbor Irma Weatherby, the only elderly respondent I have ever actually known.
The story begins with Irma’s raspy phone voice giving me a directive: “KA-thern, you gotta come over Sunday afternoon at 2 o’clock.”
“What for, Irma?”
“Just listen to this.” She read a letter asking her “cooperation in a study of the attitudes of mature members of the community.”
A graduate student must have gotten Irma’s name from the church basement, where she eats lunch twice a week, complaining about the soy beans in the meatloaf and “all those old people full of aches and pains and dying to tell about them.”
While impressed by the world “gerontological,” which she sounded out carefully, Irma was suspicious of academia, especially “that place,” her designation for a local university.
“From that place,” she noted, “you never know what might turn up.”
Irma is the daughter of old settlers who sold off their farms to developers early in this century. When her father stopped selling farm-stand tomatoes, he cultivated roses, encouraging them to climb trellises he made in his basement workshop, and introducing them to passersby: “This is Mrs. William Howard Taft . . . Madame Chiang Kai-shek . . . The Duchess of Windsor.” You’d have thought you were at a diplomatic reception.
After the death of her parents, Irma lived on in the old house and married Fletcher Weatherby, a kind of handyman. Not very handy was the local opinion. Fletcher’s impulses were largely destructive. One example will suffice: He tore out all the roses, vowing to replace them with spectacular hybrids, but he never got around to it.
One warm day Fletcher drove out to a suburban racetrack, carrying the contents of their bank account, and has not returned. Their union had yielded one child, Gloria, now married to Milo, a man whose encumbering baggage included three children from an earlier marriage. Sometimes these children rage up and down the stairs and bang on the tin sides of her clothes chute. Irma calls them “rowdy.”
“They call me ‘Grandma,’ ” she says, “but not with no encouragement from me.”
Their father, Milo, she describes as “a little man full of big ideas about how to spend my money, which he will get over my dead body-and not even then if I can help it.”
Irma keeps busy. Her radio is tuned to voices that warn of rampant degeneracy related to lax immigration laws. Using the binoculars Fletcher forgot to take with him that day, she checks license plates and reports them to the FBI, confident that the mild-mannered Mr. Chung, who drives a cab by day and studies accounting at night, also traffics in drugs. She can see into the basement of the family on the other side of her alley.
“They’re building bedrooms down there for people they say are their cousins from Bosnia. I’m getting in touch with the Zoning Department.
“Irma,” I remind her, “your own father was an immigrant. He used to find room for boys from his village looking for jobs as carpenters’ helpers. What you are seeing are the practice rooms Mr. Himmelfarb made for his violin students years ago. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember no such thing,” is her answer. Indeed, she hadn’t approved of all those earnest young boys coming and going, violin cases in hand and wearing embroidered yarmulkes.
At the appointed hour I picked my way through the weeds in Irma’s yard, stumbling into holes where her father’s roses used to grow; long gone are the trellises he was so proud of, one slat after another rotted away.
Irma looked grave but also pleased with herself, dressed in a garment that fit better when she weighed less, and wearing the “curly chestnut wig with golden glints” she had bought for her 75th birthday.
She indicated without comment the young woman who stood there fiddling with recording equipment, clipboard and briefcase on the dining-room table. The tools of this trade were foreign to Irma. She was receiving confused signals from electronic devices; and what was she to make of the researcher herself, dressed in floor-length faded denim and argyle-knit socks rising out of peasant’s clogs, the kind Irma’s grandmother might have worn in the old country?
Slowly, as though addressing a child with a learning disability, the interview began: “Mrs. Weatherby, I hope you will talk freely about your life, your neighbors and your family. First, though, I do want to assure you of the value of your opinions. Senior citizens like yourself. . . .”
A look of disdain crossed Irma’s face. How often I have heard her say, “Sure, I’m an old lady, but don’t call me ‘senior citizen.’ “
She had cleared away some of the coffee cups and old copies of the Enquirer; emptied the orange plastic souvenir ashtray. But the table’s surface was still covered with a gray mottling of old Marlboros and spilled coffee.
Irma launched her own recital. “Well, I been living in this house all my life. After my folks died, I married Fletcher Weatherby, a building contractor. For seven years now I been a widow.”
Having promoted and disposed of Fletcher, Irma continued.
“I got this one daughter, Gloria, married to a fine man, and they got three lovely children. They say to me all the time that I should come and live with them, but I tell them, ‘You got your life and I got mine.’ I get a good meal at the church and meet some nice people. Sure they’re different from the ones who used to live around here, but live and let live, I say!”
As Irma hit this high-minded note, I knew she needed no help from me. Inventing a spaghetti sauce that needed attention, I turned to leave. The last thing I heard was a good word for Milo. In response to the question, “To whom would you turn for financial advice,” Irma answered, “My son-in-law, Milo, real good at handling money.”
The next time I dropped in, she tore into “Milo’s latest idiot scheme. He wants to buy a pistachio-nut farm and needs $4,000 from me-who else?-and he sure won’t get it.”
When she slowed down sufficiently, I asked, “Irma, what did you think about the research project?”
“You mean that odd-looking person who asked me all those questions? I didn’t mind talking to her. There’s no harm in it, I guess. You just have to be careful what you say to them. You never know what they might do with it.”
