NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes (and speaks) a tribute to Fred Stocking, a man who taught at Williams College for over forty years. Living and working here for the past twenty years, I came to know Fred mostly by reputation, and by sight: he was a common presence at College functions and around town. He clearly inspired Hagerty, and many, many other students over the years.
This part of Hagerty's lovely piece resonated with me most:
began painting at 80, taking lessons every Tuesday. At 91, he played
Gonzalo in The Tempest at the community theater. When his
body began to fail, he watched the process with a sort of bemused
detachment. "I've had a lot of horizontal time," he quipped in one
letter. At his 94th-birthday party, Fred demonstrated his new motorized
stair chair lift by waving like the Queen as he purred up and down the
stairs. Later, with far more gusto than any 94-year-old should have
possessed — and with uncanny timing — Fred belted out his trademark
song from Broadway, "Lulu's Back In Town."
That acceptance of aging, that "bemused detachment," has a Taoist ring to it, which becomes even more pronounced in the next paragraph:
sort of tit for tat with age. You take away my driver's license; I'll
read the new biography of Shakespeare. You dim my vision; I'll listen
to books on tape. He was ecstatic when his wife gave him a new
translation of War and Peace. He was 92 when I sent him an early draft of my book Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality.
A year later, he sent back a seven-page critique, musing on the limits
of scientific inquiry, the flaws of religious doctrine and the nature
of death.
The tit for tat response to changing circumstance, even in the face of demise and ultimately death, brings Zhuangzi to mind. When one character in that book is asked if he resented his own physical deterioration and impending death he replies:
replied Adept Cart. "If my left arm's transformed into a rooster, I'll
just go looking for night's end. If my right arm's transformed into a
crossbow, I'll just go looking for owls to roast. And if my butt's
transformed into a pair of wheels and my spirit's transformed into a
horse, I'll just ride away! I'd never need a cart again. (92)
Sounds rather like Fred, and like a good approach to growing old well…
The Useless Tree 
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