The old men and women in Stacy Torres’s new book, At Home in the Big City: Growing Old in Urban America, (UC Press; $29.95), are not like the original members of the Grey Panthers, the organization founded by Maggie Kuhn in 1970, when Black Panthers defied racism and injustice and created role models for both the young and the old. Torres’ old folks, all of them New Yorkers, don’t stage dramatic protests against ageism and don’t lobby elected officials to protect social security.
But in their own quiet ways they’re fiercely committed to destigmatize the word and the concept of “old” and to expand the notion of what it means to be 65+ in the US today with a tattered safety net and a housing market unfriendly to anyone on a fixed income.
Torres herself isn’t old but she has been drawn, she says, to feisty old people and old places for most of her adult life. A professor of sociology and nursing at the University of California in San Francisco and a first-generation college graduate, she takes to heart the plight of the old people she meets, observes, listens to, watches carefully and befriends. Torres does not use the real names of the old people she meets, though many are no longer alive. From a legal perspective, the publication of names would not be an invasion of privacy, though Torres seems to be thinking more about the arc of human dignity than laws on the books.
To gather material for her book, she spent years in New York City at a bakery, a sandwich shop and a McDonald’s where old people gathered to create communities and to make nurturing connections. Not surprisingly, they aimed to maintain their own independence and preserve their autonomy even as they hungered for a sense of belonging.
At Home in the City probably isn’t a book for the kinds of old people that Torres profiles. Her target audience is likely college teachers and college students, social workers and “policy wonks” who might address the needs of the old. Still, her book will likely make the reading public aware that there is no stereotype of the “old person,” and that no one size fits all.
Torres shows that there are only individuals who struggle with infirmities, disabilities, memory loss and more and who want to survive and thrive with a sense of dignity. “The complexity of their social ties far exceeded sitcom simplicity,” Torres writes of her cohort. Anyone who reads At Home In the City and who watches the new sitcom, A Man on the Inside, is bound to find the Netflix characters, especially the protagonist, Charles Nieuwendyk (a white-haired Ted Danson), one-dimensional. Indeed, Nieuwendyk is rather unintentionally absurd in his role as an amateur private eye sleuthing in a senior living facility.
The characters who inhabit Netflix’s fictional “Pacific View Retirement Center” in San Francisco bear little resemblance to the real people who appear in the pages of At Home in the City. They also bear little resemblance to my own friends and neighbors in The Carlisle, a senior living facility in Japantown in San Francisco, which has been my home for the past five months and where the community has eroded the sense of isolation and loneliness that hit me when I moved from rural northern California to “The City,” as San Franciscans call it.
Unlike the residents of The Carlisle, many of whom, like me, are retired professionals with pensions and savings, Torres’ old people seem to be mostly retired blue collar and pink collar workers, though she doesn’t provide nearly enough information about their careers, jobs, education and training when they were young and middle aged. They live at home and want to “age in place.”
They’re far closer to the edge than the folk at The Carlisle, who can eat three meals a day in the dining room on the ground floor of a 12-story building, take part in group activities— yoga, bridge, scrabble, Mahjong, Bingo and more— and watch films (a different one every day) in a small movie theater with comfortable seats and popcorn. Political discussion is the life blood of The Carlisle, where most of the residents detest Trump and his cronies. If it was up to them he would not be in thr White House now creating havoc. For some of them life seems to begin at 90.
Torres’ old people can be snarkier than The Carlyle residents. One woman describes the group to which she belongs as “the dementia club.” Another interviewee insists that “the stress of others’ problems interfered with caring for themselves.” Those sentiments might be found at The Carlisle, though I have not heard them; as the editor of The Carlisle newsletter I keep my eyes and ears wide open, watching and listening for crucial bits of information. No one complains about aches, pains, and infirmities. There’s no point. Everyone is in the same boat
Torres says that the members of her cohort tended to “gossip,” and that “talking about others served as a counterintuitive form of connection.” At The Carlisle, residents talk about themselves and one another, but I wouldn’t call it “gossip” or “small talk,” a phrase that Torres also uses to describe the conversations that take place. To label it “gossip” demeans the exchange of information and opinion that takes place, though so-called “gossip” can convey more genuine news than “the news.”
Yes, The Carlisle residents differ significantly from the old people in At Home in the City, but like them they “juggle arthritis, diabetes, and high blood pressure.” They also struggle with “problems with hearing and eyesight.” As a friend on the ninth floor tells me and as others echo, “Getting old isn’t for sissies.”
Torres suggests that “urban areas may have distinct opportunities to assuage loneliness.” That may be so, though she offers no direct evidence or data to support that notion. What is certain is that loneliness doesn’t leave old people alone; indeed they share loneliness, which has reached epidemic proportions, with others of all ages.
At the end of her book Torres writes honestly about herself. From old people, she says, she learned “how to make a home in the world wherever I go.” She also says that she is “planning for a home where I can grow old and accommodate increasing disability, securing a pension and building retirement savings, accessing preventive health care, and advocating for myself in health-care settings.”
Planning helps, but aging has a way of knocking the elderly off course, sending them into hospitals and ending their lives before they’re ready to exit this world. At Home in the World offers practical suggestions about aging and reminds readers that old age like youth is a “social construction.” Make of it what you will and as Dylan Thomas exclaimed, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)
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