In Pennsylvania: The View from 80

By Gregory Jaynes

Once it was a farmhouse, a great Federal affair of brick and hand-hewn oak that majestically held a Pennsylvania knoll just west of Philadelphia. It was a very old house--any architecture major could tell that--for down beneath the basement was a chamber as dark as the grave. This had been a depot on the Underground Railroad, a hiding cellar for northbound slaves. The landholders, generation after generation, had given over their rolling soil and their Quaker time to corn and cows, and for a very long while there it would seem the clock stood still.

Then one day the ledger told the moderns the inevitable, and the farm went up for sale.

Handsome wood-and-brick bungalows describe an irregular horseshoe around the house now, and the people who live in them are older than the cliched older than the hills. The place has become a retirement community. The house, now employed as guest quarters for the residents' progeny--those who care to call--occupies the middle ground. It is a serene setup. What is more, the care is so fine that the death rate is remarkably low--so low the administrators reckon that today's applicant for admission will have to wait eight to ten years (by which time the point may have been lost).

The people who come here tend to be sharp and vibrant in the beginning, with past successes suspended from their belts like scalps. Getting on, they want to clear out of the way before anybody perceives them as holding up traffic. So they pay a generous sum to enter and a healthy monthly stipend to stay; these spent funds preserve dignity, purchase perpetual care. In their day, they had attended their own parents until the end came, usually in an upstairs bedroom. Their children are aware of that and are slightly ashamed. For their part, the parents are enormously relieved by the present arrangement.

It is hard to draw a bead on what such a removal--the last move, sequestering one's self with one's age group--does to a family, each family's emotional equation being so complex. The children all seem to oppose it at first, especially when the facility is new and looks gashed out and raw. They think of the meticulous garden left behind, and the house, the house! But over the years, as several lifetimes of gardening skills are applied to the grounds, the retirement community is brought to bursting with blooming things. The spare quarters, with their high toilet seats and their panic buttons, are fashioned into homes. Favorite art adorns some walls, wedding parties and grandchildren perch on the others. Acceptance is slow, but it arrives.

Since there is neither room nor occasion to put everybody up at once, pilgrimages to the old folks' place are made individually. Gone are the days when, say, over a turkey, the family had the chance to take the full measure of itself. Now each pilgrim takes back a piece of his heritage, something that was overlooked when the possessions were divided before the move took place. (Here is a yellowed card, signed on Feb. 12, 1911, confirming membership in the "Abstinence Department of the Anti-Saloon League." It pledges abstinence, saying further that intoxicating beverages are "productive of pauperism, degradation and crime.") Faded photographs are particularly difficult to reject (this one has them roller-skating in Central Park during the Depression), as are imperfect potteries, one's own juvenilia. Each visit becomes a sort of "This Was Our Life" program, and not uncomfortably so. Afterward, the wires sing between siblings.

"How were they?"

"One a little frail, the other quite hale actually."

"They turn 80 this year."

"Yeah."

"Are they up for a celebration?"

Travel plans are made on both coasts and down in the Deep South. A book, Malcolm Cowley's The View from 80, prefatory spade work, makes its way by post between these points. "The new octogenarian feels as strong as ever when he is sitting back in a comfortable chair," the author observed. "In a moment he will rise and go for a ramble in the woods, taking a gun along, or a fishing rod, if it is spring. Then he creaks to his feet, bending forward to keep his balance, and realizes he will do nothing of the sort."

No smart family matures in true harmony, Ozzie and Harriet and David and Ricky aside. How dull it would be anyway. Nonetheless, to pull off such a celebration with any degree of grace--to say nothing of respect for the 80-year-old--differences, deeply divisive differences, would have to be set aside for the duration. No one had put a voice to this consideration, yet everyone had thought it through. The insect-humming Pennsylvania countryside would not become an arena. At least this once, one could hold one's tongue.

The day came, the mob rolled up in waves and secured the old farmhouse, as well as surrounding environs. The little granddaughters with their little girls' peanut-shaped bodies gamboled half-naked on the lawn. Scatology being the stock and trade of little boys' humor, the littlest grandsons strategically maneuvered a plastic dog dropping everywhere they thought the thing's disgusting appearance might provoke a rise, giggling as they schemed. For the adults, the kitchen would be the free-fire zone; everyone would take his best shot, the vegetarians would sup alongside the carnivores.

It would not be going too far to say that at times the honorees beamed. Their job was to enjoy what they could, rest when they felt the need. Supervising croquet seemed to be just their speed.

Out came the video camera to serve posterity. Where did you first meet?

"The 125th Street Ferry, New Jersey side. I picked her up."

"He did not, of course. My uncle Maron thought he was a kind man and arranged to introduce us there."

"Where were you married?"

"In the study of a minister in Brooklyn. We only had one witness though, and it turned out the state required two. So for 53 years we've been living in sin."

"The minister's wife later signed our marriage certificate, so it is legal."

They had lived in Manhattan, had walked its every street in the '30s, savoring its specialness. She was an artist, he was a businessman. When they began a family, they moved to New Jersey. At night he would take the ferry to Hoboken and board the Erie-Lackawanna for the trip to their village. During the war, the war, when he had to walk home from the station because of gas rationing, he devised a lovely whistle that let the house know he approached. The family had a melodic response, also delivered with pursed lips. On the last night of the 80th birthday party, a six-year-old granddaughter, a violin tucked under her chin, her mother at the grand piano by her side, made a concert of the family whistle. They got it all down on video tape, including the tears.

The hour came to pack, to kiss, to seat buckle the next generation astern, and to say goodbye. The proof of the success of the enterprise is that it was entered into with trepidation and it was acquitted with reluctance. At the outset, the hugs were stiff and awkward; at the end, they were warm and natural, like beer at the beach. Fleetingly, the modern family had been connected .by the flesh rather than the long-distance telephone--and found it to its liking.

No one had spoken of mortality, there had been no eulogistic tone to the toasts, and a good thing too, as the photographs that came today attest. In them, they look as Ralph Waldo Emerson looked to Walt Whitman when Emerson was very old: "A good color in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old clear-peering aspect quite the same." --By Gregory Jaynes