Warming up for 50 years: The yeast of elderly innocence

Lasting

Lastingness or durability is a quality dear to the heart of New Englanders. "Use it up, wear it out" is a Yankee maxim often applied to old sweaters, jackets, windbreakers, britches and shoes, 1927 Cadillacs, beatup pickups, frying pans and many other hand-held tools. A Vermont lady we knew had what she called her "raspberry sweater," not because of its color, which was only vaguely red, but because she customarily wore it while picking raspberries in the cool of the morning. Shapeless, out at el frazzled back toward its constituent yarn by the claws of several hundred raspberry bushes, it was still useful enough to be used up and (eventually) worn out. She always maintained that the thorns grabbed the sweater and therefore missed her. There was probably a profound moral lesson somewhere in the picture.

CARLOS BAKER

Fifty Years in the Woods

WHEN the bell atop the 1845 farmhouse rang, a crew of eight men left the barn washroom to come in for

an eleven-thirty a.m. country dinner. Two regular teamsters and a haying crew of six woodsmen who had seen the log drive into the millpond made up the crew. The farm at the confluence of the Aroostook and Big Machias rivers had been home to me

since age three, when my mother was left with three sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She made the move and managed the farm thereafter.

GEORGE C. SAWYER

Private Lives, Public Events

values are, I think, an unconscious precipitate of the coming together of private lives and public events. We are thrown into the world, and its cataclysms take their toll. Descartes "I think, therefore I am" was the meditative outcome of a more peaceful age. Today it would be truer to say "I despair, therefore I am," or "I am appalled, therefore I am," or "I am outraged, therefore I am." Sartre and Heidegger and Jaspers the existentialist philosophers for all their histrionics and exaggeration expressed a central insight. Our age calls out the more extreme emotions, for we live our lives on the surface of a series of dreadful truths. We unwittingly define ourselves as we consider and respond to them.

ALBERT W. LEVI

Prospects

THE devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs was crucial to me, events that made a genuine difference in my life and outlook. The importance of the bomb grew on me slowly. It was at first only one of the large causes and small that have occupied many of my days. I once saw unions as the likely savior of the country and labored to strengthen their politic; clout. Intercollegiate football has for half a century seemed to me nonsensical and I besought successive presidents of Dartmouth to get rid of it. I still see racial integration as quite beyond the generosity of white people and a bad joke on blacks and other minorities; I consider racism an ineradicable failure of the American ethos. I complained and wrote about the transformation!: education.into vocationalism and job marketing. I distrust technology and secret police and have had a good deal to say about both.

I engaged in these disputes at a distance, so to speak, disinterestedly and often ironically. For me they were good and necessar;. arguments, not obsessive preoccupations. None was a dark ghost that walked with me on almost every errand, as does the prospect of nuclear war.

It is not because I fear death, which isn't far off in any event. Ii is that I feel an unending anger against the cosmic foolishness and self-righteousness that seem certain to doom the human enterprise.

I must not leave the impression that I am forever steeped in melancholy. I enjoy what I do, as others enjoy golf, playing in string quartets, fixing boats. The dark forces leading towaid war make exhilarating if terrifying adversaries.

W. H. FERRY

Like Yesterday Almost

IN my twenties and thirties some of my best friends were older men. The disadvantage of having friends is that they die.

ROBERT W. MITCHELL

My Father Is a Magpie

BFHOLD the magpie as he struts and frets his hour on the dumps of America. Yet he is a noble bird and Goya painted him as such. In years past the magpie, one of a family of jays and crows, was thought to have devil's blood on its tongue. Like raptors, magpies consume natural and manmade wastes. They art the garbage birds; they tidy up the world in which we live. . . Dare I then say that my father, a man of great spiritual strength, is a magpie? Many times my personal experiences have centered around magpies. My father, the magpie and therefore my disguised conscience, has been trying to tell me something for years. My father's principles have been the source of my moral discrimination on many occasions. The magpie, as you shall see, has emphasized the thrust of my father's clearly defined example. Sure my father beat hell out of me on occasion, but I deserved it.

CALVIN FISHER

Peregrinations

OF COURSE every respectable. school must have its science laboratories, and with the one hundred dollars available we were able to purchase two second-hand double office desks, a sink (which was installed between them), and a china closet for storage of chemicals and glassware. When noxious gases such as chlorine were generated in the laboratory, an open window served handily as a fume hood; on at least one occasion the system proved so grossly inadequate that the school Had to be dismissed for the rest of the day.

DONALD S. ALLEN

The Loyal Sons

I have had two lives. The first began in Buffalo, New York, on July 20, 1910. It included interesting and challenging jobs from boyhood onward, both here and abroad, and was blessed with good health, a loving wife, and two fine children.

The second began 61 years later in New York's Adirondack mountains at high noon on August 12, 1971. It has been far more exciting and deeply satisfying.

The transition from the first to the second life occurred simultaneously in both my wife Dorothy and me upon our prayerful self-commitment to Jesus Christ. At that moment we embarked on an adventurous course into a new world.

WHITMAN DANIELS

College Education

PROBABLY all will agree that good schooling and the proper education of our young people are vital to the well-being of our economic and democratic society. However, the very term "education" has now become almost sacrosanct, as was the term "motherhood" a few decades ago. One who in any way questions "education," the faculty that provides it, or the institution in which it takes place does so at his own risk.

ALEXANDER CHRISTIE

Words

WOOD. Fires. Words. Food. Bed. Parents. Grandparents. Sayings. Stories. You have heard me go on about my experiences with words and with reading, writing, and writers. But words have a way of referring to things other than themselves. I realized this in a certain way when I was seven, in the act of discovering, when I repeated a single word long enough for example, my first name that it seemed more and more to become mere sound and less and less to have confirmable meaning. This was frightening, yet when I put it back into a sentence, the entity that it referred to seemed gradually to come back to it. The cosmos was controllable again. So, in a sense, a word referred to itself and at the same time it stood for something other than itself. But how was it joined to the something that it stood for? Wood went with fire and-fire with wood as bed went with sleep and sleep with bed. Did "chair" go with chair and chair with "chair" in a similar way? Maybe so, maybe not. For me this problem persists. While I would prefer to relate my experiences exclusively to words, the things and persons they claim to refer to keep striking in. . . .

Reuel Denney

The class of 1932 had a different idea to mark its 50th reunion thisJune with a book of personal essays about "experiences that had madepowerful alterations in the author's life, or reflections on importantis or both." It was, said W. H. Ferry , the book's editor, to beking beyond "anecdntage and glossiola." Twenty-five members of19 32 contributed to Warming Up for Fifty Years among them aMaine woodsman, a university president. research scientists, a poet and aphilosopher, and more than one re-awakened Christian. As indicated inthe following excerpts (taken from essays that ranged to several thousandwords), they survey the worldly condition with testiness and reverence,joy and gloom but very little resignation. As editor Ferry points out."The yeast of elderly innocence rises differently in each of us."