I would expect that precisely no one reading this email needs my opinion about last night's debate. (The 77 year-old bested the 81 year-old.) Opinions, they say, are like butts: we've all got one and no one wants to see yours. Besides, the good reading I find and send to you isn't often in punditry. The enjoyable part of my weekend paper isn't the opinion section, it's the review section.
Take, for example, the essay linked to below: it's a delightful piece about how it took most of his life for a son to finally understand and appreciate his father. The story is familiar. We start out and grow up in awe of our dads. Inevitably, by the time we're at their eye-level, we find reasons to become their antagonists. After we've won our independence, probably around the time we realize we're turning into our dads, we find reason to respect them once again. In the story below, the author thinks his dad is weak. His dad proves that to be true. But, in the end, the dad tells the story of his Bronze Star.
In my little circle, most of our parents are still getting around. They drive to see us more often than not. We're stepping into roles where we can help them out a little, but they're mostly in their golden years—playing enough golf that we're jealous. We can see the time coming when we'll need to do a bit more. Maybe travel to see them more often than they travel to see us, that kind of thing. One of my neighbors is adding on to her house to take in her mother. It's the natural cycle: if we're lucky, eventually we get to take care of our parents in a way a bit like the decades they spent taking care of us.
Eventually we'll need to take away our parents' car keys and start to drive them parents around. To make the obvious point: someone should take the 81 year-old's keys away. Part of honoring our elders is helping them know when to retire. They taught us to be adults; we need to help them gracefully become our elders.
In the category of elders, I haven't seen anything more inspiring than Father Malcom, a mid-seventies, semi-retired priest, who stepped in as our parish's interim priest in 2021. He did a very admirable job, leading the church for about 18 months. He was just the sage leader we needed to land on our feet after some chaos. I served on the committee whose job it was to find a new full-time priest. In one of our early meetings, Malcom pushed us hard: you've got to find a new priest, he said, because I'm not getting any younger. Exactly.
Actor and director Griffin Dunne was once embarrassed that his father, the writer Dominick Dunne, wasn't tough enough. Then he learned about his heroic past.