HENRY "GUS" BUCHTEL

Consider Geezerhood.

 I think about it a lot while doing cognitive assessments of patients being evaluated for possible dementia. Some 60-year-olds are already geezers – some 90-year-olds are not. What’s the difference? Not health status (some non-geezers are mentally energetic but walking medical disasters); not intactness of cognitive abilities (some patients with moderate Alzheimer’s disease look just fine - until you ask them what day it is). The main thing that distinguishes the geezers from the non-geezers is how they see their lives and their futures. Are they ready to die? Geezerhood is knocking on your door. Looking forward to years of decades of interesting life? You will barely recognize what geezerhood is, much less act the part. The Life Report touches on this, and I’m hoping my fellow classmates are going to focus on what we did well, even while acknowledging that there were some things (maybe a lot of things) we didn’t do so well, and that we have learned a lot along the way and are still lifetime learners. For my part, I’ll start with the last question - what have I learned along the way? I've learned the truth of the aphorism that we don't get wiser as we age, we just run out of stupid things to do. Well, in my case, I guess I still have a few stupid things I haven't done yet, but they are definitely fewer in number. I have learned that there are some behaviors that just don't have a good outcome. In personal relations, you just don't do something behind someone's back. You apologize if you are in the wrong, and sometimes even when you aren't - revenge is out (I like the Chinese expression that if you are planning revenge, dig two graves). Thank people who deserve it, especially those who helped you get where you are - even if it was in the remote past (I learned this from Positive Psychology, which is worth exploring). I've also learned that people who are nominally at the bottom of the hierarchy can be very powerful; they just might not know it (and of course there are times to express your power and times when it will backfire). In this context, I've learned that you have to choose your battles, and that you can't expect to win all of them. I've learned that you should ask your questions when they occur to you; don't wait - I frequently think of things I wish I had asked my parents and other relatives and friends before they died. Especially things that help define you, like half-remembered events from childhood - "What was that all about?"

My mother cautioned us more than once not to brag - she would tell us that people in high places fall the farthest. This was usually said in the context of a mildly self-praising statement uttered by my sister or me. Having absorbed this lesson means that saying what I did well goes against the grain. But I will say that I am content as I look back at my contributions to a healthy family (wife, two children and three grandchildren) and to a healthy science (contributing to the scientific literature working on the editorial boards of two journals). I think I have helped many students realize that communication is everything in both research and clinical work (I am a clinical neuropsychologist, formerly an experimental neuropsychologist). I have developed a good sense of how a reader might find a sentence hard to understand, and what questions might come to the clinician's mind while reading a report. I teach students how to avoid providing irrelevant information in a report, because this just makes more work for the reader who will tuck the useless information away for possible future reference, wasting energy and causing the report to be mentally and physically tiring. I think and hope I've been a good father and husband, though we aren't the best judges of that. My wife and I certainly have taken more interest in what our children are doing and thinking than my parents did; Margaret and I feel we understand their hopes and fears - we reward often and offer advice (often unsolicited) when we see something that's not going well.

I don't focus on things done badly, but I frequently become painfully reminded of a faux pas from years ago. I wish I had taken an active role in the civil rights movement (classmates went to Mississippi to help with voter registration - why didn't I?). I have mixed feelings about “our” war – I was lucky to be in graduate school and then too old to serve, so I survived but I can’t say I’m proud of having stayed out of harm’s way. I still think it was a war that shouldn’t have happened, and I see the damage done to bodies and minds every time I work with a veteran from the Vietnam War, but many of our classmates fulfilled their duty and I wish I had too. Those are the major lapses - the others are really minor but it’s amazing how I remember the mistakes even if the people present at the time don’t. I am reminded of Mark Twain’s observation that humans are the only animals that blush, and the only ones that need to! I guess I shouldn’t assume that we are all equally sensitive to past mistakes - this is probably one of those personality quirks that reflects birth order (I was the youngest, so I had to watch out or be put in my place by my older siblings). 

If I had to choose one pivotal period in my life after the four years at Dartmouth, it would be my living and working in Europe for nine years (bookended by five then two years in Montreal). This experience opened me up to worldviews different from my narrow Denver upbringing and made me more appreciative of diversity and definitely more wary of patriotic impulses that lead to death and destruction. 

Retire? Maybe some day. But not any time soon. Work is still too interesting and rewarding, and my impression is that retirement is dangerous - likely to open the door to geezerhood, and I'm not ready for that yet. My new projects are learning how to use the modern social media for family and science (blogging and Twitter, which almost count as new languages), and teaching my granddaughter to play the piano. I wish my classmates a mentally healthy 8th decade and look forward to renewing friendships at our 50th. So, consider geezerhood, but reject it.

Gus

PostScript: Gus writes that he did in fact partially retire in 2017 and completely in 2020. What it feels like now is that there is still a lot of work to be done (on the editorial board of two journals and lots of work curating two Web personal pages and one Alumnus Web page and one professional (International Neuropsychological Symposium); all without pay, of course!

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CONTEST ANSWER

CONTEST #1    Fictional Conversation between two people who never met; Choose A,  B, or C.

A.  Elon Musk conversing with Nikola Tesla [or Musk conversing with Thomas Edison];

B.  Two real or fictional characters of your choice; 

C.  You and a real or fictional character.

Your choice of conversation topic and length.

ENTRY 1   -Gus Buchtel   [Not eligible for a prize because he is a judge)

The Back Story: When Gus was in Scotland in early October, he looked left rather than right when crossing a busy street in Edinburgh and was flattened by a bus. He didn’t know what hit him and was surprised to find himself at the Pearly Gates, about to be interviewed by St. Peter. God happened to be doing his weekly visit to the gates and the following conversation occurred:

Gus: Whoa – Where am I?   What happened?

God: You are at the Pearly Gates and if you are approved by St. Peter, you will be admitted to Heaven. You had an unfortunate encounter with a bus while on holiday 2 minutes ago. You suffered an instant death, you will be happy to know.

Gus: But I don’t believe in Heaven – and as a matter of fact, I don’t (or at least I didn’t) believe in you either.

God: Oh, we get a lot of that up here. It doesn’t bother us in the least. Satan tells me that more than 80% of people who come down to his place also don’t believe there was any way they were going to suffer the consequences of their thieving and cheating lives.

Gus: What kinds of questions is St. Peter going to ask before letting me in? 

God: He makes up the questions and I never know what he has in store for today’s admissions (even if I am all-knowing, he sometimes surprises me).

Gus: OK, I guess I’m ready – wish me good luck.

God: You don’t seem to understand. I know everything that is going on and that will happen in the future until the end of time, so asking me to wish you good luck is kinda naïve. But looking into the future, I see you playing a harp on a cloud, so whatever St. Peter is about to ask you, you did OK.

Gus: Me playing a harp? No way. Don’t you have any pianos up here? [pretending to play the piano]. I was part of a cool combo in High School called…

   [in the original, there was an image of a business card here for "The Saints" 

      a combo Gus was part of in the late 1950s]

God: That’s enough! Don’t say it - I know the name and didn’t entirely approve of it. There was nothing saintly about you or John or Dennis – That said, Bob was a pretty good kid and he will get into Heaven without many questions when it’s his time.

Muffled voice off in the distance: I think I saw a twitch in his little finger.

Muffled voice #2: Are you sure?

THE END