Listen to the Old Songs

I was sitting by a window on the second floor of Valley Presbyterian Hospital one night watching the rain and thinking about the old songs.

It’s what a friend of mine in Oakland used to call old people, the old songs, because he didn’t like the phrase old man or old lady, and senior citizen was just too institutional for him.

I was thinking about them for a couple of reasons, the most important being that I had a grandson about to be born in a room not far away.

He’s here now, part of this world, Jeffery Allen, as sweet and pure as a morning in spring, but at the time I was sitting by the window he hadn’t arrived yet.

His mother and father were down the hall and around a corner in a room where mothers go to endure the labor that precedes birth. My wife Cinelli was with them.

They wouldn’t let me in because at the first sign of anybody’s pain I go bonkers and demand immediate help or immediate birth and start fluttering around the room like a moth in a light shop.

“You go out and stare into space somewhere,” Cinelli said, “and we’ll take care of things in here.”

So there I was watching raindrops cover a pane of glass like a screen of silver, thinking about new life and old songs.

The second reason old age was on my mind was because of some letters I’d been carrying around from people crying out about the pain of growing old.

One of them talked about the invisibility of old age and how younger people just seemed to walk or talk right through them as if they weren’t even there.

Another writer said he noticed one day that even though he was in reasonably good health, his family was talking about him in the past tense as though he’d died some time ago of too much whiskey or too little love.

“Can you beat it,” he wrote, “they were telling ‘old-John’ stories when old John was still sitting there among them scratching his behind and feeling like Banquo’s ghost.”

I laughed out loud as I read the letter, and an expectant father sitting across the hall looked up as though I’d just screamed in church.

He had that first-baby look on his face that said his wife, or girlfriend maybe, was in labor and they’d kicked him out of the room because of the fluttering-moth syndrome.

“How you doing?” I asked. He said he was doing OK, but it was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, so I went back to the letters.

There was nothing to laugh about in the next one, because it was about a growing fear among old people that the world around them that had once been so familiar had turned strange and mean.

There are almost a million people in L.A. County over 65 and it must seem that way to a lot of them.

“I don’t know my own neighborhood anymore,” one of them wrote. “Everything’s changed. I feel surrounded by urban terrorists who prey on the old. Everyone’s in a gang. Everyone’s armed and dangerous. . . .”

“It won’t be long now.”

I looked up and Cinelli was standing there. Behind her, down the hall, the expectant mother, whose name is Lisa, was walking around with my son Marty.

“Where’re they going?” I asked, amazed she was even up.

“They’re hurrying labor by walking around,” Cinelli said.

Lisa waved and Marty smiled. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were having her struggle down the corridor like a pregnant duck.

“They can’t do that,” I said, rising to my feet. The letters from the old people fell to the floor.

“He’s panicking,” Cinelli called to Lisa, who acknowledged with a gesture, turned a corner and was gone from sight.

Marty followed and so did Cinelli.

I picked up the letters and read through them again. A couple more talked about fear. Old songs in a new and frightening age.

One 87-year-old said she was crossing the street one day and a young, homeless guy asked her for money. All she had was $5 shopping money, but the way he asked made her afraid not to give it, so she did.

By then she was in the middle of the street and cars were coming. The homeless guy left without making any effort to help and she had to make her own way to the curb. A few cars slowed. None stopped.

“I felt like hell,” the letter said. I could hear her crying in helplessness and frustration.

I had just finished reading it when Cinelli came down the hall to say we had a new grandson. Pretty soon I was holding Jeffrey Allen in my arms and looking down at a brand new face. I kissed him on the forehead and said, “Never forget the old songs.”

Then I left the hospital thinking about new life and old obligations and the music that binds us together on a planet growing old.