My son Brian forwarded me an article last Tuesday about the importance of staying hydrated.
Brian is forty-eight years old. He is an orthodontist in Cincinnati. He calls on Sundays and visits at Thanksgiving and Christmas and is, by any reasonable measure, a thoughtful and attentive son. He didn’t forward the article because he was worried about me specifically. He forwarded it because he has a mother who is seventy-three, and people who are seventy-three are, apparently, now understood to require regular reminders to drink water.
I have been drinking water since 1953. I survived an Ohio childhood, nine years in the classroom, and twenty-two years as a school principal, which is a job that requires constant hydration because you spend most of it talking. I know about water. I have a glass of it right now. But Brian forwarded the article, so now I know about water and I also know about the article about water.
He means well. That is the thing about the wisdom: it always comes from people who mean well.
This is the discovery I’ve made since turning seventy. Everybody wants to tell you something. The wisdom arrives from all directions and in forms I didn’t anticipate. Neighbors explain the weather. Strangers in checkout lines explain their medical procedures. Adult children forward articles. The general assumption, which nobody has stated but everyone seems to share, is that I have arrived at a stage in life where information I’ve had for decades is suddenly news.
Last Thursday I ran into a woman named Sandra at the grocery store. I don’t know Sandra well. We’ve nodded to each other for twelve years in the produce section, and that had been a perfectly satisfying arrangement. But Sandra had recently had a hip replacement, and she wanted to tell me about it. In detail. The specific surgical procedure. Her surgeon’s preference for a particular type of implant. The recovery timeline, which she described week by week with a thoroughness that would have satisfied any school administrator I’ve ever known.
I learned more about Sandra’s hip in eleven minutes than I know about my own. I wasn’t looking for this information. But I have it now, and there’s no giving it back.
My neighbor Roger has recently developed an interest in meteorology. Roger is sixty-six, retired last fall, and he has apparently decided that one of the benefits of retirement is having time to explain weather conditions to people who have been experiencing them independently for their entire lives. Last week we had a typical May Tuesday in central Ohio: warm in the morning, cooler by afternoon, a chance of rain that came to nothing. Roger stopped me on the sidewalk to tell me about all of this. He used the phrase “what we call a frontal boundary” with the confidence of a man who had recently learned it and was eager to find a use for it.
I have lived in central Ohio for fifty-five years. I have experienced the frontal boundary many times.
I thanked him. He nodded in the way of a man who has done something useful and went back inside.
Kevin, my younger son, teaches high school history in Columbus, which means he and I spent our careers in the same profession, and you might expect him to approach me differently. He doesn’t. Last month he forwarded four articles: one about sleep, one about Vitamin D, one about the relationship between posture and longevity, and one about a stretching routine that takes only seven minutes. I don’t know where he’s getting these articles. I don’t know who is sending them to him so that he can send them to me. There is an entire pipeline of concern that I’m apparently at the receiving end of.
I showed Don the posture article. Don said, “Hm.” Then he went back to the garage.
Here is what I find interesting about all of this. I am seventy-three years old. I have been accumulating observations about daily life since the Eisenhower administration. I have opinions about a large number of things. I’ve noticed, for example, that the self-checkout machine has never once made a transaction faster, and that the people who designed it didn’t consider what happens when the machine decides there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area. I’ve noticed that every restaurant in America plays music at a volume calibrated for a construction site. I’ve noticed that the phrase “just a quick question” is never followed by a quick question.
I have this wisdom. It is available. Nobody is forwarding it.
Brian sent a follow-up article this week. Vitamin D, as it turns out. He appears to be working his way through the vitamins in some order I can’t predict. I told him I take Vitamin D. He said he was glad to hear it.
I’m glad he cares. I am. And I have a glass of water right here, which I plan to drink without reading about it first.
