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The Loneliness of Longevity
Nonagenarian Mentions the Loss of Peers

By John Troesser
I was standing behind a gray-haired man at the information desk of the public library in Corpus Christi, Texas one day. He was asking a young 20-something woman for some history of that city in the 1940s. His demeanor was pleasant enough – in fact I would call it “old school gentlemanly,” but it suddenly turned on a dime when the girl made a friendly suggestion. The change in his voice was startling and it took me a moment to process what had just happened.

Youth in general, has few answers for Age. The librarian impersonator had no answer to his question, so she did what most young people do when they have no answer – she passed the buck. I heard her say “…maybe if you asked some of your friends.” That was the line that set him off. In a loud and gruff tone, he shouted “All of my friends are dead! That’s why I’m asking you!”

I’m sure the young woman hadn’t given a thought to the effects of attrition on friendships. After all, most, if not all of her friends were alive to answer her questions.

The man apologized for raising his voice, but walked away, and whatever question he had is known only to him and the “librarian.”

I hadn’t thought about that incident for years until this week when I offered a ride to a 93-year old member of a club I belong to. True to his generation, when the meeting was over, he bid farewell to the departing members – but didn’t ask anyone for a ride. I remembered that I had seen him arrive by taxi the month before so I offered him a ride just as the restaurant owner was placing a call to the taxi company. He accepted my offer and we had a pleasant 20 minute trip where he surprised me by picking up a conversation we had had three weeks earlier at the club’s annual picnic.

Had it been open to the public, our talk might’ve been entitled: “Incurious people and how they got that way.” He remembered my wife had once been a librarian and he, a former State Librarian for Indiana, said (half-jokingly) that “only a curious person would marry a librarian.”

I asked if he thought curiosity was genetic and he said he supposed it was. He mentioned that a distant forebear had been an interpreter for Indians and settlers on the Ohio frontier in the early 1820s. We agreed that it takes a curious person to bridge two cultures.

He asked me if I remembered the last scene in All Quiet on the Western Front. Bob is not the type to assume things, but in this case he assumed I had seen the film. He did not ask me if I remembered the movie – he asked specifically if I remembered the last scene. I did.

“No, not the scene of him reaching for the butterfly before he was shot,” he said, reading my mind. “I mean that misty parade of faces of his friends that had fallen before him.”

Then he said “That’s the way it seems when you outlive your contemporaries. I can see my friends' faces now just like in that movie. It’s really quite lonely.”
All Quiet on the Western Front
Final scene from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
June 4, 2014 Column
© John Troesser
More Columns by John Troesser

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