Dan didn’t like surprise parties. He didn’t want one for his 30th, so a bunch of his work buddies convinced me to hire a belly dancer to come to the office for his 32nd. He still hasn’t forgiven me.

As his 40th approached, our lives had changed. We had two young children, I no longer worked, we now lived in a large, lovely home in suburban Newton and one of Dan’s sisters lived close by (after moving out of our basement, where she resided for a while). It was nice to have Carol in the neighborhood. She also worked with her brother at Index Systems.   

Carol and I plotted what to do to celebrate Dan’s milestone birthday. It fell on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, 1991. Our family would go about doing as we wished, but later, Carol would enter the basement through the garage door and set up for a large party. We had a refrigerator, long mahogany bar with sink behind it, couches and lots of area to set up seats. We had renovated it to the same level of finish as the rest of the house that year. In fact, Dan’s 40th birthday present from me was the surround sound system in that room. Carol could bring in the large sheet cake I’d ordered and greet all the guests through that basement door while we were occupied upstairs.

It was a picture-perfect day so we drove the hour to Newport, RI to picnic and fly kites in the state park. Jeffrey had turned two a few weeks earlier, David was almost six. After returning home, Dan went for a run and we celebrated his birthday with a family cake in the kitchen (I didn’t want to tip my hand). He refused to put his contact lenses back in despite my prodding, thinking he was done for the day, even though he knew that I would record his birthday with photos. I tried to think how I would manage to get him downstairs. He was still flushed from his run and I didn’t have a good idea. Finally, I told him the washing machine was making a terrible noise, would he please come down to take a look?

The steps to the basement are not behind a door, but are a graceful carpeted curve to a hallway below that leads to the “playroom” where our guests waited (except for a few stragglers who ran late). We have a full bathroom off of the hallway, then unfinished rooms behind doors that have the furnace, the laundry and other large storage rooms. Our house has a large footprint.

Finally, I got Dan downstairs and, much to his surprise, lots of people: friends and family did, indeed, yell, “SURPRISE!” And he was.

Carol helped enormously to pull it off. Adult friends of Dan’s parents from his childhood were there. At some point during the evening, Dan’s parents, who now lived in Upstate New York, strolled in with his youngest sister. His brother with his wife were there, so all his siblings were there except the oldest sister, the only married one at the time, living in the Washington, DC area, with a small child of her own. Lots of friends from work and other areas of our life were there. It was great fun that they all came out to celebrate this milestone and share in the delicious Rosie’s chocolate cake. Dan and John Goode, work friends forever (and the instigator of the belly dancer), had done consulting for Judy Rosenberg (the real Rosie) ages ago and I always bought my cakes from her. This one was divine.

Good sheet cake

I have video of my kids mingling with the crowd until bedtime. It is priceless.

Dan’s family stayed the weekend, so the celebration continued with a group family photo (though Carol wasn’t in it, as she no longer lived with us and hadn’t made it to the house yet). Grandchildren nestled on the grandparents’ laps, children and daughters-in-law surrounding them, Gladys and Erv look serene in our backyard, more than 28 years ago. Some surprises can be fun.

Family portrait

What happened to Melania’s anti-bullying campaign? Perhaps her husband bullied her into shelving it. He seems to have the market cornered as the biggest bully in the country right now. He certainly has the loudest megaphone.

A friend told me that he read a story written by an elementary school classmate of the Orange One’s. Guess he’s been doing this his whole life, as the classmate recounted that Little Donny would pull the girls’ pig tails, grab kids’ lunches and kick them across the room and other incorrigible things; all things that school yard bullies do. Even his father couldn’t handle him and sent him to a military school, which tapped into his worst compulsions, strengthening the need to dominate for this forlorn boy.

As an adult, his early mentor was Roy Cohen, the self-hating, closeted gay man (who died of an AIDS-related illness), lawyer to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the House Un-American Committee hearings, the 1950s Communist witch hunt that black-listed and destroyed so many lives in Hollywood and beyond. From Cohen, Trump learned to never back down and hit back hard, be the BULLY, and embrace the lie. If you tell it often enough, people will believe it. He learned those lessons well. Too bad too many of the US electorate have been taken in by this con man. They think he’s “telling it like it is!”

On Martha’s Vineyard, we have many friends from the New York/New Jersey area who did business with or know someone who did business with this compulsive liar. His idea of negotiating with a contractor after his building is done is to offer ten cents on the dollar and say, “Sue me”. Another form of bullying. Thanks to his father’s money, he thinks he can outlast anyone in a court case, so no reputable person will do business with him any longer. Once burned, twice learned. Hence the need to go to other sources to borrow money…like Russian oligarchs. So who knows what he owes across the world, both in money and influence.

Just yesterday, a trusted friend posted a story on Facebook telling of a wonderful tour of golf courses he took, with one of the preeminent designer of courses in the world today. The designer concluded by saying that he wouldn’t work with Trump. “Why not?” “He doesn’t pay his bills.” A direct quote from a man I’ve known and trusted 38 years, not a secondary news source.

Name calling on Twitter is just juvenile bullying; “Sleepy Joe”, “Low Energy Jeb”, “Crooked Hillary”. Do these work? He won in 2016. It is frightening to me how he uses his Twitter feed to fire Cabinet members, make foreign policy pronouncements, berate anyone who crosses him, and of course, lie out of his wazoo.

We have never seen anything like it. Warren Harding was corrupt, but he evaded public scrutiny and died in office just before the Great Recession. His weakness and corruption were revealed later. Nixon was a paranoid bigot (with some decent policy initiatives), but his secrets were revealed and he resigned just before he was impeached.

Trump does most things (not all – we haven’t seen his tax records and but for the whistle blower, we wouldn’t know about his relentless squeeze and crazed conspiracy theories, holding up Congress-approved military aid to Ukraine) out in the open. Is this country headed for a fall? Even great democracies don’t last forever. If we don’t tame this bully, he will bring us all down with him.

Trump, Warren, Biden and Sanders are all in their 70s. Bernie just had a heart attack but “feels fine”. My father did too after his first one, until the big one came that killed him at age 76. Jimmy Carter, still swinging a hammer for Habitat for Humanity while battling cancer, aged 95, says they are all too old to be president. It is too demanding a job and you start to lose a step as you age. But how do we know? Everyone ages differently.

Despite Sanders’ recent health issues, he can verbally joust with the best of them and is the oldest of the group. Warren, too, has no problem keeping up with the rigors of debate or being on the campaign trail, standing for selfies with all comers. Biden can barely keep track of what he’s talking about, but is that new? Trump’s recent letter to Erdogan sounded like something written by a middle schooler (“Don’t be a tough guy. I’ll call you later”). Puleeze! The man can barely spell. And this, from the leader of the free world. He is an embarrassment (on so many levels). But is that age-related, or just his normal state of being?

I had two uncles in very senior positions at General Motors; one joined when the company was two years old and became treasurer, one came into the Treasurer’s office as a young man, hired two future Chairmen and rose to be comptroller. GM forcibly retired at the age of 65. The treasurer of GM remained active in charitable pursuits, the comptroller played golf until his death at the age of 94. Could they have been productive for years more? Probably.

My husband was incentivized to retire from Accenture (after the Andersen Consulting IPO) when he was 51 with a five year non-compete clause and Accenture held their stock, so it was enforceable. He was way too young to be side-lined.

A recent front page article in the Boston Globe (from which I took my Featured photo) talked about two gerontology PhD candidates from U Mass Boston who staged an intergenerational Happy Hour in a neighborhood in Boston as part of a social experiment to bring these diverse groups together. The aging population feels lonely and isolated and millennials have much to offer in terms of companionship, news and tech information and sometimes, just a friendly face. The PhD candidates hope to run a series of these Happy Hours around Boston to see if they can’t take hold, self-perpetuate, and create lasting friendships, ” honorary grandparent” status in some cases.

I have experienced a few of these myself through two different outlets. In the years leading up to my older son’s bar mitzvah, he had to do a “mitzvah project”; that is: many hours of social service. He chose to go to the Hebrew Rehab Center (now part of Hebrew Senior Life) in Roslindale and help take the elder population from their rooms to services on Saturday morning. Many were wheel-chair bound. He and I would wheel these folks to the chapel so they could participate in the Sabbath service, then wheel them back to their rooms at the end of the service. David and I would sometimes attend the service, but not always. As the weeks passed, we came to know one man quite well. He was always in good spirits, though blind, and liked our company. He had another torah student who also visited him regularly, but on weekdays. He looked forward to those visits too. That student was a year older than David and closer to his bar mitzvah. Sam really wanted to thank the other boy for all the kindness he had been shown and wanted to get the boy a  bar mitzvah gift. He asked my son for shopping advise. David and I huddled. How much did Sam want to spend? Could he get out or would someone else do the shopping for him (Sam had family members who would make the purchase, so that wasn’t an issue). We finally decided that one of the hand-held gaming systems was just the ticket and told Sam that the next time we visited. His face lit up. He knew that was a great suggestion, asked us to write down all the specifics, which we did and he made the purchase. He couldn’t wait to tell us how the other boy LOVED his present the next time we visited. We knew we had done our good deed. David had long ago fulfilled his required hours for his social justice mission and Sam was weakening. We didn’t see Sam again, but we knew we had helped him on his way.

I moved my mother from the Detroit area to North Hill, a life-care community twenty minutes from me when she was 82 years old. She lived another 15 1/2 years. We did not have an easy relationship, but I took care of her for the remainder of her life. The last 2 1/2 years were spent in skilled nursing where she received terrific care. I developed a close relationship with the activities director and the music coordinator. I would come in a few times a year and sing Broadway show tunes for the residents, many of whom were beyond caring. We were trying to entertain and engage. Carolyn, the music coordinator, and I worked on a comfortable play list, practiced a bit and had our show set. The songs were familiar to everyone there. I would start with “Put on a Happy Face”, “Doe a Deer”, “I Feel Pretty”, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly”, “Edelweiss”, “I Enjoy Being a Girl” (I know…so unliberated; remember the audience), “I Can’t Say No”, “Oklahoma”, and always end with “Let Me Entertain You”. I would introduce each song, talk about the show it came from. if people were really engaged, some would sing along. I’d flit around and encourage them to join me. My mother just beamed with excitement. One man played bongos if he could. The point was engagement.

I also came in and explained Chanukkah, read from a few stories and helped the staff pass out latkes. My mother passed away in August, 2010, but I continued to come in for Chanukkah for the next five years. As Carolyn said, others say they will come back, but I did. The place took great care of my mother. I was happy to return the favor. They did a major renovation and reorganization the following year. Carolyn retired and with her, my link to the social fabric of North Hill, so I am no longer invited back, but offering a kind hand or a sympathetic ear to a senior (well, I’m a senior now, but not living like one) is something we all can do and would go a long way to making the world a less-alienated place in which to live.

Did my son’s social service, or my helping at North Hill relate to ageism? I think it did. Neither of us were hiring or firing our elders. We were making them feel comfortable and valued, no matter how old or enfeebled they were. Isn’t that what we ultimately all want from life?

In the womb of this arcane atmosphere, my imagination flourished...
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