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Summers coming, relax

Saul Friedman | Gray Matters

1:04 PM EDT, June 13, 2008

The summer solstice, the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere, comes to us next week.

But it marks not only the longest day and shortest night of the year. It is that moment in the heavens when the sun reaches its zenith.

According to the astronomers, the word solstice comes from the Latin "sol" for the sun and "sistere," to cause to stand still. And it might be said it provides a template for our lives. As the sun reaches its greatest height, it begins its decline. Summer's beginning is also the beginning of its end. The days begin to grow shorter.

Nevertheless, for a few hours during the summer solstice, the sun and time seem to stand still, which should have special meaning for people of age. Perhaps that's why the pace of life moves more slowly in the still summer sun and, as Gershwin's song puts it, "the livin' is easy." It's certainly no time to be serious.

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There will be plenty of time in the fall. Until then, we'll watch and listen to politics with one eye and ear. It's time to relax and read a good book or even a bad one. Or to listen to music and the sounds of the season. It's also an excuse for a column about nothing in particular. Or to share some good things.

It's not often that one comes across a really good read about life in a nursing home.

But former New York Times reporter and editor Dudley Clendinen, who writes with Southern grace, has given us a sweet work, "A Place Called Canterbury," subtitled, "Tales of the New Old Age in America."

Beginning in 1998, Clendinen spent 400 days visiting with his mother and her neighbors (average age, 86) years after she moved into Canterbury Tower, a geriatric apartment building with services and a nursing wing on Tampa Bay. His mother's husband of 48 years, Jobie, Clendinen's father, died years earlier, and her body was giving way to illnesses of age.

She was 75 when her husband died, but, as Clendinen writes, she "had been falling apart, a piece here, a piece there." She could hold out no longer living alone in the family home. As Clendinen writes, "My mother was an artful and enormously stubborn person." He relates how he, friends and family maneuvered to get his mother to leave.

Clendinen writes with a good reporter's knowledge about the irrational lack of long-term care policies that drive too many into poverty to qualify for Medicaid and lousy nursing homes. But the book is not about this, rather about the human beings he and his mother encountered in Canterbury (and can be found in every such place): memorable, nutty, loving, funny and brave.

Another piece of nice news -- this New York Times headline, "Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain." I have never doubted that. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that, barring illness, our brain cells keep growing throughout life as we exercise our minds and stay active. And other research shows that we tend to be calmer, more settled and temperate as we age.

We now know that the earlier belief that senility was a sign of age is poppycock. So is the assumption that forgetting things, "senior moments," comes inevitably with aging.

According to the Times, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through the clutter for essentials. We forget or fail to digest what doesn't much matter.

For most aging adults, according to a technical book on neurology, "Progress in Brain Research," a gradually widening focus of interests and attention leaves little room for a name or a phone number, which can easily be looked up. While young people may speed-read a text, older people read more slowly, but learn more deeply. While younger people have short attention spans and are easily distracted, older adults have retained more and are better problem-solvers.

One conclusion, said Lynn Hasher, a University of Toronto psychologist and researcher, is "a broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation."

Finally, by way of acknowledging and explaining a possible conflict of interest, I've just returned from Maui, where I was a guest of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, at its 20th annual convention. I was a guest because the group gave me its "Elder Leadership Award" for columns on problems facing older people, and advocacy for the preservation and expansion of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The academy is, of course, a group of attorneys that represent, for fees, older Americans and their families on the problems confronted by aging people. And members of the organization have been criticized for their use of "Medicaid planning," to gain clients access to nursing care while preventing the impoverishment of the spouse who remains at home.

With help from prominent lawyers from New York to Florida, I've written about this, mostly defending the practice as the only way of getting long-term care for many families without leaving them penniless.

The award included $1,000 for a charity of my choice. The academy paid for the trip and hotel for me and my wife, who accompanied me because I am disabled. There was no other cash. We paid the rest of the bills.

Have a good and easy summer.