Company after sixty is not a question of luck, or of being the sort of person people seek out. It is a question of whether you have a table where you turn up, week after week, whether anyone came last week or not. I learned that at the pharmacy counter, and I re-learned it every Tuesday at the senior centre on Elm Street. The ones who do well are not the lively ones. They are the regular ones.
How to keep your memory steadyWatch the video: what is usually behind the slips, and a way to improve it.
For thirty-two years I worked in the basement pharmacy of the county hospital, and the people I worried about were never the ones with the long medicine lists. They were the ones who picked up their prescriptions alone, answered in monosyllables, and had no one to remind them whether the blue pill was morning or evening. Memory and company are tangled together in ways we don’t say out loud. A person with somewhere to be on Thursday has a reason to remember Thursday. That’s the whole argument in one line, and I have watched it hold for years.
The Table by the Window
At the centre I run the brown-bag reviews at a table by the window. It is not glamorous. Two folding chairs, my brown paper bag for the bottles people bring, the paper calendar I keep by the phone at home so I can write down who is coming back. Some weeks eight people show. Some weeks it is Bev and me and a pot of coffee. The table does not move, and that is the whole trick of it. People find you when you stop moving.
Sixty Miles Each Way
A woman named Ruth started coming last year, and it turned out her grandfather had been a fireman on the sixty-milers — the little coal steamers that ran the New South Wales coast from the Hunter River mouth down to Sydney, about sixty-four nautical miles, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Small ships, mostly under a thousand gross tons, crews of ten to sixteen. A master, two mates, two engineers, a donkeyman, firemen, seamen, a cook and a steward. Ten to sixteen men, shoulder to shoulder, sixty miles each way, for years. She said he never made friends faster anywhere else in his life. Of course he didn’t. Put people in a small space with a shared job and company stops being a hobby. It becomes part of the work.
What the First Month Cost
Here is what my first month of deliberately going out cost, imperfect and rounded. Four Tuesdays at the centre: nothing but the petrol, call it a couple of coins a week. One Thursday I rode with Bev instead of driving, so that one was free. Coffee and a shared plate of shortbread after a review: about the cost of a small treat, twice. A notebook for names, because I write down every new name or it is gone by morning — the thing that holds the rest of my habits together — maybe the cost of a loaf of bread. A walking morning with the group, which costs nothing but the shoes, and there is more in what a walk does for recall than in anything I ever dispensed. Call it a modest outlay for the month, and the petrol was most of it.
What Carol Asked Me
My sister Carol called from Arizona in the middle of all this, and the exchange went almost exactly like this.
“You go all that way for a brown-bag thing?”
“It’s ten minutes, Carol.”
“But if nobody comes?”
“Then I sit by the window and drink the coffee. Somebody always comes eventually.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It would be lonelier at home waiting for the phone.”
She was quiet a moment. Then: “Put me on the calendar for Sunday.” That is what a table does. It gives people a place to land.
The Wreck Nobody Mentions
The thing that went wrong, the first year, is that I got eager. I said yes to three groups in one week, kept none of them straight, mixed up two women’s names in front of both, and had to cancel the Friday one entirely. It cost me a month of awkwardness and one woman who never came back. Adjust just one variable, then wait roughly six weeks to assess the outcome — it’s the counsel I hand out about prescriptions and ought to have heeded in my own case. Small ships, big weather. You don’t launch three at once.
The myth is that company after sixty means being invited. What actually happens, in my experience, is that you issue the standing invitation yourself, to nobody in particular, and keep showing up until somebody takes it. The myth is that you need to be interesting. What actually happens is you need to be there.
So go watch the video now, and then pick your table and put it on the calendar. Mine still has Ruth’s grandfather pencilled in the margin, which makes no sense at all, and I am leaving it there.