A happy older face is worth ten sour younger ones

Many things (including all this nanny talk) conspired to make me pick up the phone and call an old friend today (he’s both old and I’ve known him for a long time). I suppose “friend” is not really the appropriate term. Technically he was my employer: he wrote the check that went into my pocket for my nanny work. And it was because he hired me that I traveled back to the States in the seventies, pretending that I knew how to care for his little girl. They had had several bad runs with American college kids acting as nannies in the summers (we’re talking the peak of pot-smoking years on campuses) and so they were stretching, thinking that perhaps Poland would offer up some talent in this area, or at least some sober not whacked-out alternatives.

This going back to people from the past can be so good for the soul! There I was today, in the same old Fifth Avenue apartment (obviously a person who hires nannies is going to have a nifty NY home), looking at the same old face of a man I knew when he was… my age. He has Parkinson’s disease now and it affects his speech. But not his mind and heart. So this would be good, I tell myself: to be as generous and warm thirty years from now, and to think crisply about matters of the world. Nor does he regard his age as an impediment to much of anything. Tomorrow he is heading out with his “brood” of kids and grandkids to Mexico. His sister, he tells me, has just finished writing her first novel. She’s eighty. He goes into the office each day, even though his son has completely taken over the family business. I can see going in just to open mail and respond to email. It takes me half the day to do that now.

I visited him because he asked me to come over, but surely I got more out of it than he did. I’m just the same old wild card. All I can do is amuse (if I’m having a good run of it). What he can do is act as a role model of how to age without putting the brakes on, even if you’re being pushed to do so by forces beyond your control. (It helps, I suppose, to have enough cash to fly to exotic places with your grown kids and their families during cold winter days.)