ELDER MUSIC: Classical Part 2

Last week, our Australian musicologist, Peter Tibbles gave us Part One of a three-part Classical series for Sunday Elder Music. Today, Part Two.

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Mahler wrote one of my favorite symphonies. This is his number 4. This one doesn’t go on for about three days as some of his others do. It’s quiet and melodic and just beautiful. This is the fourth movement, Kiri Te Kanawa is singing.

Carlo Gesualdo is an interesting fellow. He murdered his wife and her lover when he caught them at it (so to speak). He left their mutilated bodies in front of the palace for all to see (Eeeuuuu yuck).

As he was a nobleman he was immune from prosecution. He did, however, flee to his castle in southern Italy to avoid revenge attacks. He pretty much spent the rest of his life cooped up writing music. He also hired servants to beat him each day.

Oh, he did marry again. This wife accused him of abuse and her family tried to obtain a divorce for her. It is reported that she must have been a virtuous wife though, as he didn’t attempt to murder her. Perhaps not as virtuous as he thought as there were rumors that she may have done him in.

Being a murderous nut-case doesn’t preclude one from producing fine music. Illumina faciem tuam for five voices.

There’s nothing I can add to the many libraries’ worth of stuff written about Mozart so I won’t. I’ll just play a movement from one of his sonatas for piano and violin. I played them all this weekend (when I wrote this), three CDs with Daniel Barenboim and Itzhak Perlman. I wanted to include them all, they are all so marvelous. It was an almost arbitrary decision on what to play. I chose the second movement from K296.

I’m a bit picky about the operas I like, and they tend to veer towards the famous and popular. I don’t want to hear them in English. The stories of most operas are so ridiculous they make Days of Our Lives seem like cutting edge drama. I’m not fond of German ones either, so bye-bye Wagner.

So it’s the Italians, particularly Verdi (Otello, Don Carlos), Puccini (Bohème, Butterfly) and Bellini (Norma). Also the French: Bizet, particularly The Pearl Fishers.

However, for this I’m going earlier. It was a toss up between Monteverdi and Handel. After listening to both of these I couldn’t decide between them so I’m including both. Monteverdi L’Orfeo, Emma Kirky singing.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Classical mp3 files are so large that only a few at a time can be posted. Next week's third Classical Elder Music will begin with Handel's Athalia.

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This Week in Elder News is taking off the holiday. It will return next Saturday. And, in a housekeeping announcement, due to a fire at a server farm in Seattle, I have been without email since Thursday evening. The outage continues, so if you have sent a note expecting an answer, I have no knowledge of it and so far, no estimate of when email service will be restored.]

For the past eight years, America's independence Day celebration has felt tarnished by the many assaults from the Bush administration on our Constitution. Now, however, even with our current difficulties – recession, greedy Wall Streeters, millions of foreclosures, unemployment, two continuing wars, a Congress as out of touch with its constituency as if they are on Mars, etc. - there is reason, to borrow President Obama's word, to hope for better days ahead as we celebrate today.

I looked at a lot of poorly shot and way-too-long videos of fireworks displays before finding this beautiful one from New York City. The background music, to which the fireworks are gorgeously edited, is the national anthem recorded many years ago by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Remember them? [1:55 minutes]

As Thomas Jefferson (and many others) counseled, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” In case you missed it yesterday, here is a repeat of Saul Friedman's Reflections column recounting the year President Nixon tried to cancel the Fourth of July.

* * *

Does anyone remember when a president and his cronies tried to take our Independence Day from us? It happened on July 4, 1970 and I was there.

That was the year when the era, the values and the spirit known as the Sixties reached its climax – for good and for ill. The Beatles broke up, but protest, the stuff of freedom and democracy, was in the air. So was caring, for lives, for the future, for peace and for the earth.

On April 21, with the sainted Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin leading the way, the nation celebrated its first Earth Day and the environmental movement came of age. But less than a month later, on May 4, four students were killed and others wounded at Kent State University, by the jittery members of the Ohio National Guard sent by Republican governor, James A. Rhodes, to quell a campus protest with loaded rifles. What happened was inevitable.

You must remember the photo of a young woman, Mary Vecchio, screaming over the body of a fallen student, Jeffrey Miller.

The kids at Kent State, as well as students on other campuses, were protesting Richard Nixon’s decision to widen the Vietnam conflict with the unauthorized bombing of Cambodia and an invasion of Laos, which revealed that U.S. forces had been secretly fighting – and dying – in Laos in violation of the law.

Following the Kent State massacre, campuses everywhere exploded with angry, shocked protest; even the kids at my daughter’s middle school walked out. And thousands descended on Washington in some of the largest protests ever seen in the capital. Richard Nixon, who couldn’t sleep came out of the White House in the early morning to talk to students camping near the Reflecting Pool.

The students reported that the president seemed high on drugs and spoke to several of the protesters not about why they were there, but about the surfing near the western White House in California.

Anyway, as July 4 neared, there was fear in the White House and among supporters of the war that Americans might mark Independence Day by protest or by petitioning their government to hear and pay mind to their grievances. Imagine! Free speech, dissent, on the day the nation celebrates a revolution? That could not be.

And so, the Rev. Billy Graham and comedian Bob Hope, two of the nation’s most eminent cheerleaders for the war and for Richard Nixon and his “silent majority,” agreed to co-sponsor their substitute for Independence Day. It was called “Honor America Day, ” as if it dishonored America to honor the First Amendment.

The same White House cabal that was already at work against the anti-war movement in an illegal effort that became Watergate, helped organize Honor America Day to give aid and comfort to Nixon, his thieving vice-president, Spiro Agnew, and to charge that the millions opposed to the war were subversive and un-American.

Veterans organizations, Republican groups, religious types, the Boy Scouts and other professional patriots called thousands to the Washington Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. I doubt if they knew much about the union Lincoln saved. Only a few visited the nearby memorial to Thomas Jefferson who gave us the right of revolution and whose words are inscribed above his statue: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Billy Graham gave the keynote address and noted that Nixon, from his White House window could see the crowd. “That’s the one nice thing about America, “ Graham said. ”You can get a crowd like this together without a football game and what a gathering.”

July 4 that year fell on a Saturday and I was pulling the weekend duty at the Knight Newspapers Washington bureau. It fell to me to do a story on the gathering, but I needed a fresh angle.

What I did was circulate a phony petition seeking signatures from people in the crowd. I told people I represented a group called The Sons of Liberty, and I showed them the petition which read something like this:

PETITION
“As the Declaration of Independence says, the people have certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. We believe that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and form a new government that will provide these rights. Please join in our appeal.”

I left spaces for people to sign, but couldn’t get more than two or three signatures. Most of the dozens of people I approached were suspicious that I was some kind of anti-war activist. I assured them that was not my purpose and still most refused on the grounds that, “it sounds subversive. I’m not for overthrowing the government.”

When I told them that the petition simply echoed the words of the Declaration of Independence, some were embarrassed, others just shrugged but still declined to sign; “I don’t sign petitions,”they said. On this Independence Day, people were afraid to sign a petition.

But I remember most clearly an encounter with a young civics teacher from the Midwest who had brought with him a number of his students. They were gathered about us when I asked the teacher if he would sign my petition. He read it carefully and refused, telling me, “I can’t agree with that.” I told him and his students, “The words and ideas come from the Declaration of Independence.”

I showed him the relevant passage from a copy of the Declaration. “You tricked me,” he said. His students laughed at his discomfort. But I think he learned something. And I had a story.

Fortunately, Honor America Day died with that day. From then on, Washington got back its Independence Day with all the bells, whistles, music and fireworks on the Mall, as John Adams intended. Unfortunately, the killing in southeast Asia went on for five more years.

REFLECTIONS: 1970

[EDITORIAL NOTE: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Saul Friedman (bio) writes the bi-weekly Reflections column for Time Goes By in which he comments on news, politics and social issues from his perspective as one of the younger members of the greatest generation. He also publishes a weekly column, Gray Matters, on aging for Newsday.

Does anyone remember when a president and his cronies tried to take our Independence Day from us? It happened on July 4, 1970 and I was there.

That was the year when the era, the values and the spirit known as the Sixties reached its climax – for good and for ill. The Beatles broke up, but protest, the stuff of freedom and democracy, was in the air. So was caring, for lives, for the future, for peace and for the earth.

On April 21, with the sainted Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin leading the way, the nation celebrated its first Earth Day and the environmental movement came of age. But less than a month later, on May 4, four students were killed and others wounded at Kent State University, by the jittery members of the Ohio National Guard sent by Republican governor, James A. Rhodes, to quell a campus protest with loaded rifles. What happened was inevitable.

You must remember the photo of a young woman, Mary Vecchio, screaming over the body of a fallen student, Jeffrey Miller.

The kids at Kent State, as well as students on other campuses, were protesting Richard Nixon’s decision to widen the Vietnam conflict with the unauthorized bombing of Cambodia and an invasion of Laos, which revealed that U.S. forces had been secretly fighting – and dying – in Laos in violation of the law.

Following the Kent State massacre, campuses everywhere exploded with angry, shocked protest; even the kids at my daughter’s middle school walked out. And thousands descended on Washington in some of the largest protests ever seen in the capital. Richard Nixon, who couldn’t sleep came out of the White House in the early morning to talk to students camping near the Reflecting Pool.

The students reported that the president seemed high on drugs and spoke to several of the protesters not about why they were there, but about the surfing near the western White House in California.

Anyway, as July 4 neared, there was fear in the White House and among supporters of the war that Americans might mark Independence Day by protest or by petitioning their government to hear and pay mind to their grievances. Imagine! Free speech, dissent, on the day the nation celebrates a revolution? That could not be.

And so, the Rev. Billy Graham and comedian Bob Hope, two of the nation’s most eminent cheerleaders for the war and for Richard Nixon and his “silent majority,” agreed to co-sponsor their substitute for Independence Day. It was called “Honor America Day, ” as if it dishonored America to honor the First Amendment.

The same White House cabal that was already at work against the anti-war movement in an illegal effort that became Watergate, helped organize Honor America Day to give aid and comfort to Nixon, his thieving vice-president, Spiro Agnew, and to charge that the millions opposed to the war were subversive and un-American.

Veterans organizations, Republican groups, religious types, the Boy Scouts and other professional patriots called thousands to the Washington Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. I doubt if they knew much about the union Lincoln saved. Only a few visited the nearby memorial to Thomas Jefferson who gave us the right of revolution and whose words are inscribed above his statue: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Billy Graham gave the keynote address and noted that Nixon, from his White House window could see the crowd. “That’s the one nice thing about America, “ Graham said. ”You can get a crowd like this together without a football game and what a gathering.”

July 4 that year fell on a Saturday and I was pulling the weekend duty at the Knight Newspapers Washington bureau. It fell to me to do a story on the gathering, but I needed a fresh angle.

What I did was circulate a phony petition seeking signatures from people in the crowd. I told people I represented a group called The Sons of Liberty, and I showed them the petition which read something like this:

PETITION
“As the Declaration of Independence says, the people have certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. We believe that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and form a new government that will provide these rights. Please join in our appeal.”

I left spaces for people to sign, but couldn’t get more than two or three signatures. Most of the dozens of people I approached were suspicious that I was some kind of anti-war activist. I assured them that was not my purpose and still most refused on the grounds that, “it sounds subversive. I’m not for overthrowing the government.”

When I told them that the petition simply echoed the words of the Declaration of Independence, some were embarrassed, others just shrugged but still declined to sign; “I don’t sign petitions,”they said. On this Independence Day, people were afraid to sign a petition.

But I remember most clearly an encounter with a young civics teacher from the Midwest who had brought with him a number of his students. They were gathered about us when I asked the teacher if he would sign my petition. He read it carefully and refused, telling me, “I can’t agree with that.” I told him and his students, “The words and ideas come from the Declaration of Independence.”

I showed him the relevant passage from a copy of the Declaration. “You tricked me,” he said. His students laughed at his discomfort. But I think he learned something. And I had a story.

Fortunately, Honor America Day died with that day. From then on, Washington got back its Independence Day with all the bells, whistles, music and fireworks on the Mall, as John Adams intended. Unfortunately, the killing in southeast Asia went on for five more years.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today: Nancy Leitz: The Ring.

Chez Bennett Deck Farm is Soaked

While the rest of the United States has apparently been wilting in excessive heat with its own kind of consequences, here in Portland, Maine, it has been persistently dark, dank, foggy and rainy. In the three weeks and two days I have been home from New York City, the sun has appeared just twice and then, only for parts of those two days.

Dampness pervades everything. Even the mail arrives soggy and the weather people say this will continue at least through the holiday weekend.

The farmers at the Wednesday farmer's market tell me their crops are suffering from too much rain and no sun. Indeed, so is my deck farm. My first foray this year into growing some of my own food is probably going to fail.

It is so wet on my roof-protected deck that the cushions on the chaise longue and wicker chair, placed in the back of the deck next to the exterior wall of the apartment, have become soaked. That never happened in three previous summers no matter how heavy and windy the occasional thunderstorm.

This tree, which grows in a neighbor's yard next to my building, has for the three years of my residency been upright with its branches spilling attractively into the side of my deck. Now it is bent halfway over - away from my deck, fortunately - presumably from so much rain loosening its roots.

Some mold or fungus in three colors – green, orange and dark red – has invaded part of the fence surrounding the deck. Should there ever be dry weather again, it will need scrubbing off.

Remember the hanging strawberry experiment I showed you a few weeks ago? Forget it. More than half were dead when I returned from New York so I transplanted the few remaining into a normal pot. They are so leggy now without a blossom anywhere that I doubt there will be any fruit.

This hanging fan flower plant (which took the place of the hanging strawberry bags) was once big, round, lush and full. It droops now, with broken stems and many of its flowers gone.

Generally, nothing grows. The plants just sit there in their pots being wet. The blueberry bush hasn't gained an inch in a month and what buds were present have fallen off.

Equally so, this poor little nasturtium, a special type with dark red flowers I was looking forward to, only sways to and fro in the rain. It does not grow.

The two pots of arugula sit side-by-side. The one in the back of this photo is shows some growth, trying its best considering the weather. The other is turning yellow. It is dying before it has had a chance to live.

The lettuce you see behind the arugula grows, but it is limp and tasteless.

Only the anise hyssop, which I grow for the aroma, not food although the leaves are edible, is thriving and there are even buds at the top of the stalks now. Perhaps it was originally a rain forest plant. (I doubt that's true.)

The best thing I can say about the deck farm is that the spiders are amazing to watch. They are tiny, little red things, their bodies no more than about an eighth of an inch in diameter, so their brains must be the size of a molecule. Nevertheless, they are clever at finding places for their webs that are protected from the rain.

I am not generally a sun person. I cross the street to walk on the shady side. I have never lain in the sun to tan, ever. And I am miserable in hot weather – humid or dry – so I'm better off with this anomaly than the heat the rest of you have. Still – it's enough now. Enough. Does anyone know what the opposite of a rain dance is?

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Judy Vaughn: Envisioning Cancer.

Sleep and Old Age

Sloppy language or not, I can't sleep for shit. I struggle to stay awake past 8PM; sometimes I win but more often the sandman prevails. When he has the upper hand, I awaken at 3AM ready for bear and unless you count more time on the computer as a good thing, there's not much to do in those wee hours.

Plus, since all my energy - physical and mental - is concentrated in the first half of my day, getting out of bed at 3AM doesn't leave much time to accomplish anything. By noon, I'm worn out and am sometimes sleepy enough at mid-afternoon for a nap – not that having one affects the sandman's arrival time.

Nor do I sleep soundly. On average, I wake once to pee and two or three more times for no good reason.

All this led me to grab two of the many pamphlets available to attendees at the recent Age Boom Academy – one a report on what researchers have learned about sleep and age, the other a how-to on improving quality of sleep. A few facts:

• More than half of all people aged 65 and older experience sleep problems

• Daytime sleepiness and napping increase with age

• Obesity, alcohol, smoking, nasal congestion and estrogen depletion in menopause increase the risk for sleeplessness

• Insomnia and disturbed sleep have a negative impact on mood, attention, cognitive function, memory and can cause balance problems leading to falls

Researchers have come late to studying sleep, particularly in elders, and it is not well understood. Geriatrician, Robert N. Butler, writes in the preface to one of the pamphlets:

”Quality of sleep is tied to quality of life and, indeed, to the genesis of disease. Sleep may play a salient role in increasing vulnerability to illness and disability. For example, sleep deprivation produces a prediabetic state, and evidence suggests that sleep is important in maintenance of immune function...

“While we do not fully understand its myriad functions, we know that sleep is both restorative and protective.”

Certain medications, diseases, breathing disorders, mental illness and hypnotics prescribed for sleeplessness can cause insomnia and sleep interruption, and should be handled with the help of a physician. Short-term sleep problems such as due to grieving, will take care of themselves in time.

Having none of those indications, I'm personally concerned with not being able to sleep well for no reason. I already follow most of the researchers' suggestions for a better night's sleep, but now I'm going to add these:

• Change my daily hour-long walk to the late afternoon (rather than the morning) but at least three hours before bed

• Eat my largest meal at midday rather than in the evening

• Use the bed only for sleep and sex; no more television or reading in bed (this will be the hard one to follow)

If the statistics are correct, half of you reading this have sleep problems. Here are links to three useful pamphlets about sleep from the International Longevity Center – USA which you can download in PDF format for free.

Sleep, Health and Aging
Getting Your Zzzzzzzz's
The Role of Sleep in Healthy Aging

At The Elder Storytelling Place today: liloldme: Autumn Adventure

Expectations of Aging: Young vs. Old

Fifty-seven percent of people aged 18 to 64 expect to be afflicted with memory loss in old age, but only 25 percent of people 65 and older report such a difficulty. Forty-two percent of the younger group say serious illness will be a problem; only 21 percent of the older group report experiencing such.

In nine negative markers of aging, younger people expect growing old to be worse than it is.

Yesterday, Pew Social Trends released a new survey titled Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality. Here is their chart on the difference between young and old on “The Challenges of Aging”:

Do you think this misperception by young people might have something to do with the incessant cultural drumbeat to remain young at any cost? The responses of the young to the positive markers of age are also at odds – to a slightly lesser degree - with the reality elders report.

Eight-seven percent of the young group expect more time for hobbies and interests; 65 percent of elders find this to be true. The gap between younger and older on more time for travel is 77 percent to 52 percent. Here's that chart:

In the past on this blog, we have discussed – even argued - at what age people can be labeled old. The Pew survey asked about this and as expected, the older you are, the older old age begins. But I was pleased to see that it doesn't vary all that much – 14 years – from age 18 to 65-plus:

Here is another way of looking at the same question: events that mark one as old, answered by all 2,969 respondents, but not separated into age groups:

As long-time readers of Time Goes By know, I get nuts when anyone says something like, “I'm 72, but I don't feel that old.” It's absurd; since no one has ever been as old as they are today, whatever they feel is how that age feels.

What is happening when people make that statement, I've come to see, is that they are reacting to misperceptions of old age from their youth when, as the younger people in this Pew survey, they believed old age is worse than it is. Here's the Pew chart on actual age versus perceived age:

This is an excellent and extensive survey comparing young and old beliefs about aging which helps explain some cultural ageism. There is much more than I have covered in this post and you can read the entire report here.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: Confessions of a Neurotic.

Featured Elderblogs

For a couple of years, it has bothered me that the Elderbloggers List, which was in the left sidebar, is so long there was hardly any way to choose what to click on except, perhaps, when a blog name happens to catch your fancy. No one, certainly not me, can read all these blogs, but they are carefully chosen for quality and should be – each and every one - spotlighted.

So today, a new Time Goes By section is being launched: Featured Elderblogs. Each Monday, links to five blogs from within the full list will be posted and remain until the following Monday when five different blogs will be featured for a week and so on.

Now don't panic. The full list - and your own blog link - has not disappeared. Instead, note the new graphic link just below the Featured Elderblogs that will take you to the complete list on another page.

The reason to do this is that the number of blogs – up to 377 today with the inclusion of 32 new ones – has become too unwieldy for a sidebar. Moving it to its own page frees up a lot of real estate for other items that will be added from time to time.

I assume you know the list does not contain all the elderbloggers online. It is only the ones I learn of in various ways and that meet certain criteria, among them: written by people who are at least 50 years old and who post new material once a week or more; are reasonably well-designed and well-written; are personal – that is, non-commercial, non-professional – blogs (which doesn't mean there can't be GoogleAds and their ilk).

There are a handful of blogs on the list written by people younger than 50 such as Advanced Age and ElderGuru who make elders their topic and do it well. But generally the list is for old people's blogs.

I once had the idea of organizing the blogs within categories, but was defeated when I realized there are nearly as many topics as there are elderblogs. So the list remains alphabetical.

There are probably a few abandoned blogs in the full list – I removed some, but there may be more. I will gradually delete them as I work my way through the weekly, five Featured Elderblogs.

You are welcome to suggest elderblogs – your own or someone else's - for the wait list. Do keep in mind, however, that they may not be included for various reasons and since I update the list only every few months, there may be a delay before they are added.

The new Featured Elderbloggers list should introduce readers to new blogs they haven't discovered before, reacquaint us with some we may have lost track of, and help spread the word about the many elders who keep excellent blogs. I hope you like the new system.

Here is a list of the newly-added elderblogs:

Birds on a Wire

Blethers

Boogie Street

Celia's Blue Cottage

cilesfineline

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie

dept. of nance

Eclectic World

ElderGuru

Friko's Musings

goldenrod's thoughts

Gooznews on Health

HinesSight

Jive Chalkin'

Kenyo of Pensacola

Kick It Up a Notch

Lewis Grossberger

MamaFlo's Place

Middle Age Ramblings

MiiiKee's-World

The New Sixty

Patient's Progress

Peevish Pen

Possumlady Place

Rambling Woods

Realizing Ordinary

Sixty and Single in Seattle

Small Change

The Stamp Collecting Roundup

The Tempered Optimist

Thrifty and Proud of It

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Syney Halet: Interview.

ELDER MUSIC: Classical Part 1

EDITORIAL NOTE: When I returned from New York City, I discovered that Peter Tibbles of Melbourne had been hard at work producing Sunday Elder Music posts for me – for which I am most grateful – he knows so much more than I do. This is Part One of a post on classical music which will continue next Sunday.

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When I’m at home alone I listen mainly to what’s generally called classical music. This may come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who’s read a few of my Sunday Music spots. It’s just that music from the fifties is so much more fun to write about.

What I have for you today is music from the 12th century to the present. That early music wasn’t very well recorded so we just have to use cover versions, but that’s okay.

I’ll start with Johann Sebastian Bach. I use his full name as there were a bunch of musicians called Bach. Old Jo, himself, had 20 kids, half a dozen of whom would normally be considered major composers if it weren’t for dad’s giant shadow. I’m rather keen on the music of Johann Christian, the “London Bach.” There were also his father and uncles and the like who twiddled away on the organ and such.

Back to Johann. Although I had a fair number of his CDs, a year or so back I indulged myself with a giant box set of the complete works. Some hundred and eighty or so CDs (I did the same with Mozart and Beethoven, self-indulgent little devil that I am).

I’m working my way through these. That sounds a bit planned and methodical when really, what I’m doing is opening the box and picking something at random to play. With Bach it’s usually a cantata because there are a lot of those. I know if I go up to the left I can grab a concerto and to the right it’s a passion or the like. Today it’s a cantata from the middle, Cantata BWV 192.

Bringing this right up to the present is Philip Glass. This is one to split the listening public. Love his music or hate it. There seems to be no in between. I really like it, especially his solo piano pieces. That’s not what I have though, as there will be a bit of piano later on. This is the second movement of his violin concerto.

Haydn, the most under-rated composer of them all. That sounds a bit like the intro to the Disneyland TV program: “and Haydn-land, the most under-rated…” Okay, that’s enough.

I’ve chosen a string quartet as he invented this genre. I could have chosen a symphony as he invented that as well. Okay nitpickers, I know there were symphonies before him but these were fiddly little things amounting to nothing much. I haven’t seen a box-set of Haydn’s works, but if such existed I’d need a truck to take it home. And there wouldn’t be any filler.

This is the first movement from the String Quartet No. 66 (Op. 77, No. 1)

Way back to the 12th century. Alas, besides having no recordings from then, there aren’t any photos either. What’s with these people?

This is Hildegard (von Bingen). She was a nun who composed in her spare time (or was a composer who nunned a bit now and then). Not only that, she was also an author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet and all-round polymath. Makes me feel inadequate.

This is O vis aeternitatis from “Canticles of Ecstasy”.

This Week in Elder News – 27 June 2009

In this regular weekend feature you will find links to news items from the preceding week related to elders and aging, along with whatever else catches my fancy that I think you might like to know. Suggestions are welcome with, however, no promises of publication.

Last weekend Pete Sampson, who lives here in Portland, Maine, and blogs at As I was Saying, sang the national anthem at Fenway Park in Boston with his group, the Grateful Dads.

“Although the expressions on our faces suggest we were standing in boiling oil (the wind was blowing rain straight at us)”, writes Pete in an email, “we had a great time. As with every Red Sox game, the stands were full despite the rain. Being cheered by 35,000+ people is an experience I won’t soon forget!”

That's Pete second from the left.

lilalia of Yum Yum Cafe emailed this week with a link to an extensive section at the Guardian UK titled Aging Britain. It's filled with stories ranging from dating tips for the 60-plus crowd to writing a will. Take a look here.

I want to mention too that lilalia and her 14-year-old daughter have launched a charming new blog, Short Short Stories (which reminds me a bit of Virginia DeBolt's First 50 Words). Here's a sample from a contributor named Kim:

how come when i paint my toe nails i feel:

• girlie
• dressed up
• more stylish
• shiny and bright
• happier
• sexier

how come i only paint my toe nails in the summer then?
how come it took me 52 years to start painting my toe nails?

I liked Advanced Style – a blog about fashionable elders caught in street photos – when it launched last year and it has only gotten better since then. And, the bloggers have expanded from New York to other locales including Seattle and Milan. Here are two women in giant, matching eyewear.

Here is another reason Congress should be writing a single-payer health care reform bill: in a poll from Thomson Reuters measuring the effect of the recession on people's health care spending, the silent generation – those older than the boomers - are least likely age group to postpone health care needs because they have their own single-payer system, Medicare. Congress, please take note.

This video of 89-year-old Rachel Veitch and her 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente from the Growing Bolder website is all the rage this week. About a dozen readers forwarded it. [3:48 minutes]

I've been a fan of The Beatles since they emerged in the 1960s – enough so that I replaced all their albums as technology changed going from from LPs to eight-track and then cassette. But I never caught up with replacing those with CDs and I'm lacking a lot of mp3s.

Now, along comes a new Beatles websitesite with links to videos of all the original songs from every album, including lyrics. You can find the album list here or, try this page where every Beatles song link is listed alphabetically.

As a sample, When I'm 64 seems appropriate for this blog. [2:37 minutes]

Some good health news: elders may be immune to the H1N1 flu virus. In a previous flu outbreak during the 1970s, few people older than 26 were affected in the U.S. and, speculates an infectious disease specialist, the current flu virus may be similar enough to the 1970s version to protect old people. Read more here.

For the finale today, a French television commercial for a European brand of rubber cement. Don't sneer. It is sweet and funny and delightful, and you would never be allowed to see it on American television.

The embed code doesn't work properly and I'm not smart enough to fix it, so I can't include the video on the page. Go here instead - and enjoy. You're gonna love it. (Hat tip to Marion Dent of And the Beat Goes On.

The Benefits of Growing Old

You don't need to look far to know that old age is abhorrent to most people. Or, as someone once said, "Everyone wants to live a long time, but nobody wants to be old."

You can't turn a page in a magazine, watch television for more than five minutes or click through more than two or three pages on the internet without bumping into an ad for something that promises to prevent aging. Some people – usually old ones – see it differently.

Earlier this week, The New Old Age blog at The New York Times reported on an April sermon by 90-year-old Rabbi Joshua Haberman of Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C. in which he lists six benefits of growing old. The abbreviated version:

• Tranquility

• The cooling of passion

• Submission to what you cannot control

• Willingness to be wrong

• Increased appreciation and gratitude

• The love of family

You can read the entire sermon with the rabbi's explanation of each benefit here. [pdf]

It's a good list and I wouldn't argue these conclusions with anyone - especially a learned rabbi - who has 22 years on me. Although I've not reached his level of attainment, I do feel progress. But wait: I think his list the too short.

Rabbi Haberman covers the big picture well. Still, there are other rewards for living a long life that may be less profound and, in other cases, more specific but are equally satisfying.

Two examples: I am lately more willing to forgive others and, no small matter, myself, for the kinds of transgressions that in youth seemed more baleful than they are. It is also a gift to be gaining a better perspective on my place in the scheme of things; self-centeredness wanes. I guess I mean that in age, we learn to get over ourselves.

And I am deeply thankful that I've overcome worrying about what others think of me that wasted so much energy for so long.

So, class, your assignment today, is to tell us something – choose just one – that you see as a benefit of growing old. Each stage of life has its advantages and disadvantages and too much emphasis is given to the disadvantages of age.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Brenda Henry: Bus, My Boogie to Wonderland.