The following pages are reserved for articles on Aging. I write a monthly column for senior citizens and will include these columns here. I will also include any articles on aging that I find exceptionally helpful. Consequently, this page will be in a constant process of being updated. OUR LITANIES OF BECOMING GRAY by Richard Forrer [email protected] As we grow older, we become rememberers. Remembering becomes a favorite activity for us graying people. How many agree with me? We senior citizens need a public forum to do our remembering? How many agree with me? Those who do, please let me know. By phone, fax, e-mail, or snail-mail. WW II vet's stories. Vets's wives stories. Retirement stories. VA stories. Korean War Stories. Viet Nam War Stories. Desert Storm stories. Love stories. Stories of new life. Stories of loss. Stories of being alone. Stories of peace. Remembering–or better, re-membering--our past is a way of putting the pieces of our tattered lives together so that, as my favorite poet says, they "sit up and speak." Remembering is a way we put our lives together into short stories. "Every man's memory is his private literature," said Aldous Huxley. This private literature needs to become public literature. Strangely enough, a possible beginning for such public remembering of aging people occurs in the recent cinematic cultural event, "The Titanic." After immersing ourselves in "The Titanic," we leave the theater with youth's robust exuberance, overflowing energy, and passionate sexual attraction active in our hearts. We remember two beautiful young people deeply, loyally in love. So haunting is the cinematic beauty of their young love that they nearly assimilate us into the unscathed ties that bind these two raw soul mates together. We cry, for this is the kind of love we want for ourselves. Nevertheless, the presiding genius of this cinematic masterpiece is not youth. Well if they aren't, old guy, who in the heck is? Well, it is the old, wrinkled woman, Rose. The movie is Rose narrating her billowing love for Jack while aboard the Titanic. Rose is the young woman of the story, now an old, wrinkled woman who holds the treasured jewel everyone around her seeks. She is the matured woman who weighs the two treasures she possesses as she tells her story. Rose's story lies at the heart of "The Titanic." It's the story of an old woman re-membering what she once was. She makes sense of her life as she tells her story to the mercenary treasure seekers. Rose seeks to recover her own treasure by making sense of her lost youth, lost beauty, her lost lover. Most important, she seeks to recover her lost life with the man who still vibrantly lives in her heart and mind. The story she narrates becomes her joyous confrontation, even episodic dances, with death just before she dies at the movie's end. Every time the camera reminds us that Rose is telling this historic story, we see her groping to make sense of Jack's death. This aged woman is facing her present reality by narrating her impassioned love affair with Jack. "The Titanic" is an absorbing story of tragically, needlessly lost lives. Nevertheless, it is no less the moving story of an old woman's yet passionate love--of an old woman's long unresolved grief--for her young, dead lover. Her story is a mirror that helps her remember what made her spiritually survive as a guilty survivor of one of the century's most memorable historical disasters. She recalls with intense intimacy a freezing young man near death who ungrudgingly bequeaths her his own vigorous will to live. She is living testimony to his spirit of endurance in her life. Rose treasures his sacrifice for her life to the last moment of the movie. Rose refuses to taint this treasure she holds in her memory with the treasure she holds in her hand. In exaltation, she relinquishes the jewel to his burial sight at sea. That is what growing old is about: Surviving with the great remembered treasures from our heart's history intact, unsullied. Even when they are memories of tremendous loss and relinquishment. This also is what growing old is about: relinquishing, relinquishing, relinquishing. First, it's the body's youthful beauty and physical powers. "I was something, wasn't I," she says, looking at the picture of herself nude on the couch. Long has her youthful beauty faded from her life. Then our mental stamina diminishes, until we must rest our thinking with mental naps. The drawn-out litany of relinquishments is familiar to those of us in our mid-fifties onwards. We senior citizens love our litanies of becoming gray. These autobiographical litanies of becoming gray need their rightful place in our culture. I would like to think that "The Titanic" has started the cultural process of accepting the graying of the imagination. This column will be a repository for senior citizens who feel compelled to tell their stories to recover something that gives them pride and dignity. Here will be a place where you can make your lives "sit up and speak" truth that matters to all of us. One need not be a Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Lilian Hellman, or Virginia Wolf to submit your litany of becoming gray. Bear in mind what Albert Einstein said: "If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor." COME ONE, COME ALL, TO THE FEAST OF LITANIES!   SENIOR CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, UNITE: ARISE, TALK, AND DANCE! By Richard Forrer [email protected] You've repeatedly heard it from the younger generation. You know. We're sexless. You know. We're not horny. If lucky, we have less than one trillionth of a milliliter of lust for the opposite sex. Yet, we unerecting men and scraped dried women are having children in our sixties and seventies. It's known as freeze-dried abdominal osmosis. You've repeatedly heard it from the younger generation. You know. We've already sunk the Titanic of our lives, ambitions, desires, and souls against the cruel iceberg of old age. The cold, immersing waters have frozen us within our mental and bodily graves. You know. Our minds are mindless. Our bodies are bodiless. We've dissipated into an eternal vapor of doltishness somewhere in the nethermost regions of nowhere. Youthful geography relegates what is alien to them to mental leper colonies, to some isolated island of the imagination to be forever forgotten. To be kinder, the young view us as a caustic wisp of smoke to be swept aside with the wave of the hand. Why not? This is a demagogic culture of the young, by the young, for the young. I say: Senior Citizens of the World, Unite: Arise, Talk, and Dance! "Dance! Did you say Dance?" says the aging Zorba in "Zorba the Greek." He then out dances everyone in a whirling frenzy. Old age knows its stuff here. Yes, old age knows its stuff! It has the right to brag about it without apologizing to anyone. Michelangelo painted the famous "Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel between the ages of 60-66! Pablo Picasso was continuing to set the pace for modern art between the ages of 55-65. William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize at age 52, continued after that to write American classics! Yes, old age knows its stuff! The ancient Greek tradition had its Great Heroes in such senior citizens as Prometheus, Chiron, and Oedipus. Each suffered beyond all human boundaries. We remember each for his lasting endurance in the face of all odds. Yes, old age knows its stuff! Old age knows long suffering, long loves, long loss, long work, long obsessions, long addiction, long suffering. It also knows forgiveness, patience, and redemption when fortunate. None of these things are within a planet's throw of youth's grasp. They will grow to where we are long after we are gone to know such soul-satisfying gratification. In our senior years mortality is the name of the game. No flushing it down the drain. No talking it under the table. No ignoring the doctor's reports. No denying the varicose veins, the failing memory, the lack of sleep, the proneness to illnesses and to easily broken bones. Unlike young people, we accept each breath, each moment, each lovely day with a loved one as another gift added to other gifts. We experienced the end of youth. We know the beginnings of new life. We grow wiser, even if sometimes only by sheer dint of necessity. But we must always remember Rochefoucauld's famous maxim: "As one grows older, one becomes wiser, and more foolish." Yes, old age knows its stuff! Even foolishness. I say: Senior Citizens of the World, Unite: Arise, Talk, Dance! For foolishness, if necessary. Send me your stories, inquiries, ideas, help line requests, declarations of independence, tomfooleries, or what have you by phone, fax, e-mail, or snail mail. This column will mold–not conform–but shape itself to your varied ideas, points of view, and agendas. It will proclaim Senior Citizens of the World are United: Arising, Talking, and Dancing! On into each moment of each day. Our motto? It depends on your viewpoint and attitude. W. Somerset Maugham provides one motto for those focusing on life: "Death," he averred, "is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it." Those with an attitude will go along with the anonymous author who said: "So live that you can look any man in the eye and tell him [her] to go to hell." Seneca may reflect the sorrows of others when he intoned that death is "[a] punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor." Still others will adopt the equanimity of Joyce Carey: "I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain" Then there are the crusty incorrigibles who will proclaim with Winston Churchill: "I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." I propose another motto: I say: Senior Citizens of the World, Unite: Arise, Talk, and Dance without dullness, dreariness, and fear. Arise, Talk, Dance! Send me your WW II vet's stories. Vet's wives' stories. Retirement stories. VA stories. Korean War Stories. Viet Nam War Stories. Desert Storm stories. Love stories. Stories of new life. Stories of loss. Stories of being alone. Stories of peace. This column will be a repository for senior citizens who feel compelled to tell their stories to recover something that gives them pride and dignity. This will be a place where you can make your lives "sit up and speak" truth that matters to all of us. One need not be a Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Lilian Hellman, or Virginia Wolf to submit your litany of becoming gray. Bear in mind what Albert Einstein said: "If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor."