Esther Tuttle will not reach one hundred till next July, but she is bound and determined to get there. At ninety two she wrote her memoir and titled it No Rocking Chair for Me. She told the reporter her secret: “Being conscious of your body. Your body is your instrument. So I always did exercises, did a lot of yoga, stretching exercises, and walking. Eat in moderation and drink in moderation.”
One-hundred-year-old Travilla Demming of Tucson said: “I always put anything disagreeable or bad out of the way. That’s the secret of life. Don’t emphasize anything that is evil or bad, but just get rid of it or rise above it.” She concluded: “I’m having a fun old age, except I’m getting rustier and rustier by the day.”
Most longevity researchers agree that 20–30 percent of longevity is genetically determined. That leaves lifestyle (think Esther Tuttle) and attitude (think Mae Anderson and Travilla Demming) as dominant factors. Although not in control of our genes, we do control our lifestyle and attitude.
Maybe old Jonathan Swift had it right: “The best doctors are Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman.”
March 19
“All we have in life is what we notice.”
Leonard Pitts, columnist for the Miami Herald, tells about an eighteen-mile hike he took to raise money against breast cancer. That day he saw things on the hike that he drove by daily on his commute but had never seen—a lake not quite visible from the road; a sidewalk curving gracefully beneath an overhang of trees; a quaint little wooden footbridge over a hollow. He surmised: “We’re all going to the same destination. The only difference is in what we choose to see along the way.”
Victor Frankl saw Nazis strip concentration camp prisoners of everything that symbolized their previous lives. Families and friends got separated, clothing got ripped off and thrown away, possessions got taken away, and bodily hair got shorn. But Frankl noticed something else. He saw a few people, in the face of certain doom, walking through the huts comforting others, even giving away their last morsel of bread.
Frankl survived the Holocaust and went on to write one of the great books of the twentieth century, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he said of those he had noticed giving away their last piece of bread: “They offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 69
What we bring to life is more potent than what life brings to us. I believe Zen master Richard Baker Roshi was right when he said that all we have in life is what we notice. Or as Marcus Aurelius, the Roman philosopher-king put it over eighteen centuries ago: “The color of our thought dyes our world.”
March 20
I saw advertised on the internet a “eulogy pack” for the sudden death of a stepfather.
The company was running a half-price special: six speeches and six poems for only $24.99 (regularly $49.98). Each eulogy articulates the sadness and disbelief of a stepson or stepdaughter at the death of a beloved stepfather. It speaks of what your stepfather meant to you in your life, his many talents and skills, and how much he will be missed, especially because he had a sudden, unexpected death. The eulogy ends with a poem that the stepchild is instructed to read quietly and sincerely. A different pack, also half-price, is offered if the stepfather’s death followed a long illness. And there are other eulogy six-packs for sale, tailored to the death of a stepmother, grandfather, or almost any other relationship.
Emotionally-constipated people through the ages have hired others to do their mourning or cheering for them. Dickens’s Oliver Twist had a job as a professional mourner. The undertaker hired him to attend funerals and look sad, weep, and model grief, and so give permission to others attending the funeral to do the same. Today, for $49.98, he might be able to hire out as a reader of eulogies composed by professionals.
Late-night talk shows and political rallies and other entertainment venues have been known to place a “plant” in the audience to laugh at jokes or applaud, hoping the plant’s emoting will be contagious, in much the same way cheerleaders are planted at ballgames.
In the 1936 presidential campaign, Roosevelt defended any mistakes he might be making in his efforts to be a compassionate leader by quoting “the immortal Dante” who said that “divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-blooded on different scales.70
Fish swim, birds fly, flowers bloom, and humans emote. When all is said and done, may we be found among the warm-blooded ones who rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.
March 21
James Anthony, many years ago at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, conducted a study of “superkids”—kids who adapt to terrible circumstances with extraordinary coping skills and keep finding ways to overcome. One family he studied featured a schizophrenic mother who believed someone was poisoning their food. Her twelve-year-old shared the mother’s fears and would eat only restaurant food. The middle child, age ten, would eat at home but only when her father was there. The seven-year-old who ate at home every day explained, “Well, I ain’t dead yet.”
Anthony explained that children are like dolls. One is made of glass, another of plastic, another of steel. Hit by a hammer, the first one breaks, the second gets a dent, and the third gives off a fine, metallic sound.71
My reigning poster child for superkids is Jeannette Walls. Walls is a successful writer, author of bestseller The Glass Castle. She lived her childhood in cardboard boxes, broken cars, and abandoned houses, driven from pillar to post with eccentric parents, her father forever pursuing an imaginary glass castle.
One day in the Mojave Desert her mother pointed out to Jeannette a scraggly, freakish Joshua tree that had been so whipped by the wind over centuries that it existed in a permanent state of wind-blown-ness (like Jeannette and her family).
Months later, Jeannette saw a little Joshua tree sapling growing close to the old tree. She told her mother that she wanted to dig it up and replant it near the two-room house they were renting, promising to water it and care for it every day so it could grow straight and tall. Her mother frowned and said: “You would destroy what makes it special. It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”72
And thereby hangs a tale.
March 22
Recognizing his lifetime of service as a jungle doctor, Life magazine in October, 1947, titled an article about Albert Schweitzer “The Greatest Man in the World.”
Schweitzer, who earned doctorates in philosophy, theology, and medicine before he moved to Africa, came to America only once, in 1949. When he was to arrive by train in Chicago, where he would receive an honorary doctorate of laws, a committee of dignitaries from the university stood at the depot, waiting to greet him. They knew what he looked like—the whole world knew what Schweitzer looked like—but Schweitzer had never met or seen a picture of any of the welcoming committee. When Schweitzer disembarked, the committee observed something they could not forget.
Dr. Schweitzer noticed a bent old woman carrying her bags with great difficulty. Spontaneously dropping his grip to the depot floor, the seventy-four-year-old doctor picked up her bags and carried them to a cab. After helping her into the cab, he returned to his grip and began to look for someone to chauffeur him to his speaking engagement.
