The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

Author:Wallace Stegner [Stegner, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101042595
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 1977-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

FOUR

1

Today, among other junk mail, there was a questionnaire from some research outfit, addressed apparently to a sampling of senior citizens and wishing to know intimate things about my self-esteem. It is their hypothesis that a decline in self-esteem is responsible for many of the overt symptoms of aging. God knows where they got my name. Ben Alexander, maybe; his finger is in all those pies, and always stirring.

I looked at some of the questions and threw the thing in the fireplace. Another of those socio-psycho-physiological studies suitable for computerizing conclusions already known to anyone over fifty. Who was ever in any doubt that the self-esteem of the elderly declines in this society which indicates in every possible way that it does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment, laughs at their experience, evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals and Sunshine Cities, and generally ignores them except when soliciting their votes or ripping off their handbags and their Social Security checks? And which has a chilling capacity to look straight at them and never see them. The poor old senior citizen has two choices, assuming he is well enough off to have any choices at all. He can retire from that hostile culture to the shore of some shuffleboard court in a balmy climate, or he can shrink in his self-esteem and gradually become the cipher he is constantly reminded he is.

What bothered me about Césare Rulli’s visit if not the lacerations it left on my self-esteem?

The responses that I feel more and more when we step out into the unsafe surrounding world are doubled and tripled every time we go down to the Stanford campus, as we did yesterday afternoon to hear the Guarneri Quartet. Inside. the hall, all’s well. Music is a great democratizer. There are as many white and gray heads in the audience as dark or blond ones. Attitudes are suspended in favor of appreciation, you see a few people you know, you are smiled and waved at, you feel the solidarity of common tastes and interests you have spent your life acquiring, and you participate, even though an outsider, in the community of the university.

But go outside after the concert and you step out of security into hazard, out of the culture into the counterculture. All around the terrace the young roam, or sprawl, or lounge. White Plaza has a sort of bazaar, a stretch of blankets and quilts and plastic groundcloths on which are displayed belts, handbags, macramé flowerpot hangers, and other kinds of the junk that Gertrude Stein called “ugly things all made by hand.” The wives, children, and dogs of the artists tend them and sleep among them. Students pour back and forth, or sit arguing at the union’s tables, or read propped against trees. They are not hostile and contemptuous as they were a few years ago; they just don’t see you. They will move their feet off a table if you sit down at it, or pull in their legs if you fall over them.

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