Growing older, gradually - Part 1

The following was submitted by The View staff reporter Jerry LaVaute:

Editor’s note: this is the first part of a two-part column.

I was visiting my in-laws in central New York last summer, and we were relaxing on their back porch in the summer sun.

My sister-in-law surprised me with the question: “Jer, you’re gonna be 60 next year, aren’t you?”

The answer was yes, but the significance of the actual age, 60, hadn’t hit me until that moment.

60. Wow.

A couple weeks ago, I talked with a friend. He had invited me to his house for a Super Bowl party, but neither my wife nor I were able to go because we were sick.

He and I began talking about age, and the way its myriad consequences sneak up on you.

And I was reminded of the parable about the frog in the pot of water.

If the water is cold, the frog doesn’t attempt to jump out. If you gradually increase the heat, he will fail to notice the problem until it’s too late.

If, however, you place the frog in a pot of boiling water, he will notice the problem immediately, and leap out of the water.

I’ve since reflected on this, and I’ve learned that growing older, and how it’s perceived by the person who is growing older, is a little like the frog in the pot of water that is slowly being warmed – it sneaks up on you. I am growing older.

The difference is, unlike the frog, the person growing older may not choose to jump out of the pot. It’s inevitable, but it sure as heck beats the alternative.

As I look back, I guess my perception of the inexorable aging process began when I was no longer able to read a book or a newspaper without optical assistance. I was around 40 years old at the time.

My eyesight to that point had been almost perfect, for viewing objects at a distance and for reading up close. In fact, at one point, my eyesight measured 20/15, better than the 20/20 vision that is the standard.

To correct my difficulty with reading as I aged, I opted for a single contact lens, which I wear in my right eye. And it has worked superbly well for me, although as I think back now, it was my first clear concession to my growing older.

The water in the proverbial pot was heating up, although I didn’t realize it full well at the time.

I had a complete physical the other day. When I was younger, I used to round up my height when asked, to 5’ 8’’, instead of the 5’ 7 ½” that I actually was.

The law of large numbers always has you rounding to the even number, right? I was within my statistical rights.

Now, surprisingly, I measure 5’ 6” even, allowing no more room for rounding up.

When I look in the mirror, I still see a relatively young person. My mind’s eye somehow drives past the wrinkles and the hair color, and sees a vital young (relatively speaking) person.

But photos don’t lie like your live reflection in the mirror does. And I am sometimes surprised at how I’ve begun to appear, well, just a bit older in these photos.

Regarding hair color, I was talking with my barber and my wife the other day. As I watched my freshly shorn hair fall on my lap, I was surprised by its silvery whiteness.

I said to both women that I had thought the shade of my hair was more a charcoal grey. Whereupon they had a good laugh about the gap between the perception in my mind’s eye, and reality. My hair is white, they said – period. Forget charcoal grey.

To be continued



Gerald LaVaute is a staff writer for Heritage Newspapers. He can be reached at glavaute@heritage.com or call 1-734-429-7380. Check out our staff blog at courierviewnews.blogspot.com

Queenan's "Closing Time" among my favorite memoirs

The following was submitted by The View staff reporter Jerry LaVaute:

Some of my best discoveries among good books have been others’ personal memoirs, relatively ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things, and write about it with grace, insight and humor.

From the time I learned to read, I’ve been a big fan of biographies. I remember returning from the library with a handful of books about people like Abraham Lincoln and others, reading them avidly, and returning in a short time for another batch.

I’ve since graduated to enjoying truly masterful biographical and history books like “Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

But the genre I discovered about a decade ago is the memoir, the personal reminiscences and reflections of someone’s life, often a struggle under difficult circumstances.

There are four memoirs that are my favorites. They have in common that they’re written by people who write for a living, who struggled with their family’s personalities and circumstances in their youth, and have survived and even prospered.

I cut my memoir-reading teeth on “The Liars’ Club,” by Mary Karr. Karr writes of her relationship with her father with grace and lyrical beauty. It’s no surprise that she’s also a published poet.

Another is ‘The Glass Castle,” by Jeannette Walls. Again, a time spent growing up in trying circumstances, with unconventional parents.

Perhaps the most memorable memoir for me is “The Tender Bar,” by J.R. Moehringer. He grew up with a father who was physically and emotionally distant and a consistent disappointment, but the friends of a relative, men and women who frequented a bar in town, informally adopted the young man.

Full disclosure: I had great parents and a great family as I was growing up. These stories don’t resonate with me because I’ve lived a life like that. They resonate with me because they’re great stories.

I speak about these because I just finished the fourth memoir that deserves entry into this pantheon.

Its title is “Closing Time,” and it was written by Joe Queenan, published in 2009. It tells the story of a boy’s life growing up in a family with an alcoholic father who beat his children, and a mother who retreated down the hall when the abuse began.

The many stories about which Queenan writes are sometimes poignant, often startling, and on occasion funny. Queenan reaches for the right language and wit in all instances, and doesn’t settle in his writing.

Here’s Queenan at his best, on several subjects:

The beatings by his father
“When the fancy struck him, and he was not too tired, he would take off his belt and beat us.”

“By beatings I refer not to generic spanking, but to the ritualistic act of stripping your offspring and whipping them across the buttocks and thighs with a thick leather belt, so that they scream and plead and bleed and stay marked for days, and wish both they and you were dead.”

Queenan goes on to describe the times when his father’s alcoholic stupor caused him to use the wrong end of the belt, the buckle end, inflicting even greater pain and scarring.

The role of books
“It is often said that children are the wealth of the poor. This was not my experience.”

“But books are without question the wealth of the poor’s children. Books are a guiding light out of the underworld, a secret passageway, an escape hatch.”

“To the affluent, books are ornaments. To the poor, books are siege weapons.”

The TV show Rin Tin Tin
In 1958, Queenan’s father lost his job, forcing the family’s move into a housing project in Philadelphia.

Queenan described the night where the TV was repossessed, even as he and his older sister watched a beloved show, and Queenan has a little fun with old Hollywood stereotypes:
“One Friday night, I was watching a popular television program called ‘The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,’ with my sister Agnes.”

“The central dramatic figure in the program was a diligent and resourceful German Shepherd stationed at a frontier outpost in the old west, who by dint of his prodigious tracking skills, quietly evolved into the nemesis of the depraved Apache, the bloodthirsty Kiowa and the inhospitable Comanche.”

The TV was unplugged during the show, and was taken away. The family’s move to the housing project followed shortly thereafter.

The role of the Nuns
“Laughable to some, dysfunctional to others, mysterious to virtually everyone, nuns are in reality exactly what they seem: angels of mercy who have sacrificed their lives in the service of God and humanity.”

“It was the nuns who taught us to read and write…It was the nuns, not the priests, who pointed the way out of the darkness, the nuns who made it clear that, if you were born poor and didn’t want to stay poor, you’d better know the principal export of Bolivia.”


In the end, Queenan reaches a reconciliation of sorts with his father, and has enjoyed a successful career as a writer. The writing in the memoir is so good, in fact, I’m likely to read something else he has written.