Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  What Norman Rockwell and Currier & Ives are to pictorial nostalgia, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is to musical nostalgia. James Agee wrote his gentle reminiscence of childhood in 1938. Barber’s musical setting came a decade later. The two men, born within four months of each other, were five in 1915. Both the words and the music had almost spontaneous compositions, or at least both men worked with ease and relative speed. Agee said he wrote his piece in ninety minutes. Both the lulling words and music, the evocation of small-town America (a southern version of Grover’s Corners or Bedford Falls, even Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri), and the aura of safety, with a child falling to sleep and protected by warm weather and warm relatives, represent the quintessential American dream of a benign past. Barber composed his piece in 1947. The world had just come through a catastrophic decade.

  Scenes of childhood and adolescence invariably involve other people unless one grew up in unfriendly isolation. We think of those we shared our time with, especially as life itself becomes, chillingly, shorter with each passing day. We know what our end will be. We sense the sands moving more swiftly through the hourglass. If it was happy, the past offers at least the luxury of solace. In the past, we had a future. In the present, as we age, we have mostly a past. Remembering when we had a future gives any senior citizen a core for his nostalgia. The past will not abandon us. We can hold on to it. As Bogart says to Bergman in Casablanca, “We’ll always have Paris.”

  You can go home again, at least to a place—whether Ithaka or a childhood manse—but you cannot go back in time, except in memory, or accidental encounters with old friends, or those occasional moments of high-spirited jollity, planned but not imposed. I am thinking of class reunions. What impels people to go to them—high school, college—those famous “gaudies” celebrated by Dorothy Sayers and other clubbable Brits, or the more democratic, back-patting old-boy-old-girl networking of an American version? I count myself among the guilty. Or the lucky. At the tenth, old sores may still ooze, old animosities still simmer, and old flames may burn. At the twenty-fifth, one has, ideally, reached maturity with a judicious combination of contentment and compromise. One vivacious younger friend told me that she compelled her husband, tall, dark, handsome, and very successful, to come with her to her twenty-fifth high school reunion because, as she put it, “I had major scores to settle. I wanted to show them that I wasn’t just a brain.” This woman is a distinguished academic with impeccable feminist credentials, at least in theory if not entirely in practice. The trophy husband complied, not happily.

  At the fiftieth, no one cares or asks “What do you do?” They don’t even give your partner the once-over. “How are you?” replaces “What are you?” We are more interested in someone’s health than in his status and accomplishments. Voltaire wisely remarked that after eighty all contemporaries are friends. They know where they are going, and they are going there both alone and together.

  I was looking forward to my fiftieth high school reunion, but now I can’t quite figure out why. Like Updike, I had always thought long and hard, and with a smile, about classmates from early childhood and adolescence. I remembered most of them fondly, even the ones who might have scared or annoyed me when I was a know-it-all baby beatnik, a pesky intellectual who resisted football games, pep rallies, anything that smacked of mindless conformity. These kids gave me a good part of my education. I did not know this at the time it was happening. Looking back can be instructive.

  My friend Paula Marantz Cohen, ten years my junior, had a similar anxiety about her fortieth reunion in central New Jersey: “I got into the spirit myself, which I would never have done in high school, where not getting into the spirit of anything had been one of the salient aspects of my profile.” Her big event turned out to be more successful than mine. Or, rather, she had better results. Does this say something about her or about the event? About both, of course.

  My reunion, like hers, had been impeccably organized by a bunch of stalwart classmates with energy, goodwill, and hope. Vestigial school spirit and fellow feeling, as well as common courtesy, prevailed. There we were in suburban Philadelphia, 120 of the original 468 of us, plus an appropriate number of willing spouses and partners, those disposed to spend an evening with scores of people they had never met and would probably never see again. Wiser or less tolerant partners stayed home. (“Not tonight, dear; please go alone,” I can hear them pleading or asserting.) Fifteen percent of us had already died; another 10 percent were unreachable for more mundane reasons. A bit more than 25 percent made it to the country club. Some of the enthusiastic organizers assured me that this is a good percentage for big public high schools. Only private schools, or otherwise small and intimate ones, do better.

  Who were we? We had as our common bond age and a shared history. Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, the first postwar babies, we were the children of the ballyhooed “greatest generation,” the men and women who came to maturity during the Depression, who endured the “good war” and then settled down. Cultural historians used to condemn the Eisenhower years as the decade of complacent conformity. Those years are now undergoing an upward revaluation, as is Eisenhower himself, because America could boast both a solid middle class and a steady, growing economy. We grew up accompanied by television, the civil rights movement, early Elvis, and the incandescence of Kennedy’s Camelot before the date that changed everything—November 22, 1963—and before Vietnam, hippies, drugs, and the burning of American cities.

  “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote Wordsworth, looking back to a comparable period, before the idealism of the French Revolution turned bloody, “but to be young was very heaven.” We—middle-class, almost exclusively white, largely Jewish—could say the same thing. Even more than most young people, we had optimism on our side, in the water we drank and the air we breathed. This same optimism must have accounted for a disproportionate percentage of Jewish classmates who helped to plan, and who attended, the reunion. We were the inheritors of the label am ha-sefer, “the people of the book,” and in most cases we were only one to three generations removed from immigrant status. Our ancestors had made the trip from shtetl to suburb with amazing speed. Education—what it promised, what it meant, and what it delivered—was of the greatest importance to us, the secularized descendants of old-world forebears, most of whom were more religious than we. It is no false nostalgia to say that regardless of normal hormonal challenges and exertions, our coming-of-age was easy compared with what today’s high school students undergo. We had no metal detectors in the school doorways, because we had no guns, no knives. Violence did not exist except on the football field. We had neither cyber bullying nor too much of the old-fashioned physical kind. The biggest misdemeanors: cutting class and smoking cigarettes in the bathrooms. I look back accurately, not only with eyes dimmed by sentiment.

  Those who showed up would probably agree with my recollections and assessments. But what of the absentees? People stay away from imposed collective nostalgia for many reasons: shame, or at least embarrassment; fear of reopening the old wounds; pervasive lack of interest in the past. Not everyone shared my genial fondness for the whole, imagined group of us. Many classmates loomed large in my memory, in smile-inducing ways, just as Updike’s Shillington schoolmates did in his. I wrote notes, made phone calls. “I’m going to the reunion; will I see you there?” They demurred. They had no interest in the class soiree. “I hated high school,” said one, a class officer, an athlete, a golden boy. Another, a silver-tongued lawyer, confessed, “I’ll have nothing to say.” My invitation got me nowhere. They would be happy to see me, they said, but certainly not at the country club, not at this event. They maintained sangfroid invisibility. I shall have to schedule a private appointment.

  One friend made it in from London. She has spent most of her life abroad as a middle school teacher, and she took a characteristically clear-eyed view of the whole event: “The reunion taught me a lot. I learned that the people I disliked in
high school I still disliked, and the people I liked were still good. And I finally understood what happened in junior high, where I spent the rest of my life. And I learned that […] has not changed. And I missed […]. And I can’t imagine what life would have been like if we had stuck around the Philly burbs for the last fifty years.”

  Many of my classmates had in fact stuck around. No surprise: most people still live within a radius of several zip codes from where they have always lived. Some of my contemporaries have moved across the Delaware River to southern New Jersey, which is really another suburb of Philadelphia. A large number have relocated to Florida, which qualifies as an extension of the Northeast.

  I learned another lesson. Some people look back with disinterest or no interest; with nothing to feel ashamed of, they still put the past aside. And many people simply prefer not to look back. They are moving on to the next thing, whatever that may be. They don’t have to look back. They have something to look forward to. Perhaps the most daring of us, however happy our adolescence might have been, do not require the balm provided by nostalgia.

  We gathered—achievers, retirees, grandparents, the married, the widowed, the divorced, the always single—in a predictable array of bodies and outfits. We are doctors, lawyers, educators, businesspeople, scientists, bankers, engineers, health spa owners, air-conditioning repairmen, policemen, factory workers, and women who have never worked outside the home: a well-filled cornucopia of middle-class American success. Physical health, financial security, and ample preservation prevailed among the attendees, with some predictable exceptions: a cheerleader turned roly-poly, a star athlete confined to a wheelchair, another former Adonis walking with a cane in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Are they the same, or not the same, as they once were? How do you feel when you confront life’s depredations made visible? In the eye of the beholder, pity competes with schadenfreude.

  At the end of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s narrator, Marcel, attends a soiree at the home of the formidable princesse de Guermantes, where he finds the relics of his past, the characters of the whole novel, the beauties now wizened, the strong weakened, the upright bent, the raven-haired gone white or bald. Of a woman he remembers as a young girl, he observes, “This nose, this new nose of hers, opened up horizons of possibilities one would have never dared hope for. Kindness and tender affection, formerly out of the question, became possible with those cheeks. One could make clear to a person with that chin things one would never have thought attempting with the possessor of the previous one” (I’m using the old Frederick A. Blossom translation). Marcel is not referring to plastic surgery here. Today, he might very well be confronted with it. I certainly was at my reunion. Science and cosmetics had worked noticeable wonders. Some of the women looked finer, leaner, and more beautiful than they had been at eighteen. Time takes away, but it also sustains and, with a little help, improves us. What Marcel thought lost he has refound. And Proust’s tone—a little arch, a little wistful, a little hyperbolic—suggests different registers of feeling when one confronts the past.

  The question is, what does it mean to “recognize” someone? Marcel notices what he calls “the geology of a face,” with its creases, erosions, deposits, and layers: a series of selves like the pentimenti of a painting. Some people, instantly recognizable, “as though in harmonious agreement with the season, adopted gray hair as their personal adornment for the autumn.” Nature and artifice can work together with splendid results. Different kinds of surprises await us when we enter a room prepared for a renewal of scenes of childhood. The duc de Guermantes shows his age—eighty-three!—relatively little until he tries to stand up and totters “on trembling limbs.” And Marcel contemplates stasis and change, those two staples of every human life, and how we remain the same under or over, beyond or in spite of, the evidence of difference. He realizes that one starts out with the idea “that people have remained the same and one finds them old. But once one starts out with the idea that they are old, one finds them much as they used to be, not looking so badly after all.” In other words, change your focus, readjust the mental image, and the former person—the old friend—reappears now, when actually old, as the same as when you knew him. Marcel says of one such rediscovery, “For me, who had known him at the threshold of life, he was still my young companion, a youth whose age I calculated from the age which I consciously assigned to myself under the impression that I had not grown any older since that time.”

  Everyone has versions of these revelations. Several years ago, I made a breakfast date with a friend, unseen for forty years, when we both found ourselves in the same small New England town one summer weekend. Partners were not invited: it was to be the two of us, old high school cronies. As usual, I was early. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at the women passing by. Could this one be Sue? Unlikely. What about that one? Too tall. Another? Too blond. And so it went. I was about to approach one less unlikely candidate when suddenly I turned from my right to my left and my friend hove into view. “Hello, Sue,” I said, grateful for my patience and astuteness and even more for her unchangingness. She looked just like herself, even a bit more so.

  But the opposite also happens. Someone came up to me at the reunion and said, “Remember me?” He wore no name tag. How could I remember this man, who bore no resemblance to anyone I had ever seen? He had made an egregious faux pas that common sense should have prevented. Never assume that anyone knows who you are. The secret to polite inquiry, of course, is to make the first move and introduce, that is, reintroduce yourself: “Hello, Willard. I’m David Smith. Do you remember me?”

  To which the correct answer is, “David, of course. You haven’t changed. How are you?” Never give the other person a chance to embarrass both of you. Take the initiative. But do not assume that all is the same or that time has not passed. The addressee picks up the challenge and maintains the fiction that you are still hail-fellows-well-met, easily and cheerfully recognized. Let your viewer slowly examine your face, body, and voice, to attempt an act of archaeological recovery. Yes, there’s something about the mouth, or the jaw, or the cock of the head, the accent, or even the dimple: why, it’s David, of course. Proust was, again, right when he observed that “the beauty of an object is to be found behind the object—that of an idea, in front of it.”

  With age, some people seem to lose all of their bad qualities, others to heighten their good ones. These are the fortunate ones. This is true of both body and—more infrequently—temperament or soul. Some people become nicer. The edge wears off. Adolescent hormones evaporated decades before. At my party, some of the class clowns seemed less self-assertive. They had slowed down. Humanity often reasserts itself when and where we might least expect it to do so. People become more themselves, but they also transform themselves.

  At the age of twenty-one, young John Keats knew many truths, scientific, psychological, and emotional. Among them is this one, articulated in a letter:

  Our bodies every seven years are completely fresh-materiald—seven years ago it was not this hand that clench’d itself against Hammond—We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there’s not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St. Anthony’s shirt. This is the reason why men who had been bosom friends, on being separated for any number of years, afterwards meet coldly, neither of them knowing why—The fact is they are both altered—Men who live together have a silent moulding and influencing power over each other—They interassimulate. ’Tis an uneasy thought that in seven years the same hands cannot greet each other again. All this may be obviated by a willful and dramatic exercise of our Minds towards each other.

  But the same hands can and do greet each other. When we make that willful and dramatic exercise of the mind, when we direct it to others in a rush of bonhomie, we are acknowledging the steady constancy beneath the appearance of change. Had Keats lived more than his fully packed twent
y-five years, would he have accepted the truth of Yeats’s “Among School Children,” namely, that we change without knowing it? We all look at ourselves every day in the mirror, washing, shaving, combing hair, and putting on makeup, and every morning we always look the same. Then we see a photograph, or are trapped in the unflattering glare of a dressing room’s three-way mirror, and we are stopped in our tracks: “When did I become old?” We are the same, and not the same. We all had pretty plumage once, or, as an astute friend of mine once observed, you spend the first half of your life wishing you looked like someone else and the second half of your life wishing you looked like yourself in the first half of that life. We experience our life as continuity, not as separate steps; we confront radical change in others.